Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

so that there are parts which are not incongruous, because ‘very few people really break
up laughing at pure incongruities’, 25 in fact it could be confusing, because we are
familiar with a regular narrative having a specific order and content. An example is a
famous sketch from Monty Python, the fish slapping dance, in which two men dressed
as British colonial military officers dance and slap each other with fish. It is hard to find
a logic that links soldiers, dancing, slapping and fish, and this lack of coherence is what
produces laughter.
Nevertheless, incongruity is not the only element producing laughter, although it
is a very popular one. Freud points out how scholars have considered incongruity as an
essential feature of jokes. 26 McGhee considers that incongruity is the core of any act of
humour. 27 But Freud adds that incongruities are only a way to intensify the comic
effect. 28 He considers that the most relevant characteristic of jokes is the pleasure that it
produces. 29
Too much is not enough. The mechanism of exaggeration
There once was a man who was so ugly that his wife had twenty children with him just
so she could lose him in the crowd.
Humour must be understood in order to succeed. Once the incongruity is understood,
we are in the language of humour. We saw how the alteration of a frame or stereotypical
situation causes laughter, but incongruity is not limited to actions or events; characters
themselves may be incongruent, such as in our clown example. A clown not only acts
illogically, but also looks illogical. The big hair and giant shoes, the red nose, the fancy
25 McGhee, Humor, Its Origin… p. 9.
26 Freud, El chiste y su relación… p. 153-154.
27 McGhee, Humor, Its Origin… p. 9-10.
28 Freud, El chiste y su relación… p. 27.
29 Freud suggests a difference between jokes and humour. In jokes we obtain pleasure without expecting
it, while in humour, we inhibit our distress and transform it into pleasure. Ibid, p. 180, 235.
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