Have you ever tried wetting your trousers out of laughing too much? or had a hard time breathing because something was way too funny? Most people know the feeling, but maybe you too have tried cutting it short, when you had to explain what it actually was, that was so funny.
"What is humour really, and why do you laugh, when you hear something funny?"
What are we laughing at, what happens in the brain when we do, and why do we do it?
That is what we will dive into by consulting a rhetorican, a philosofer, and a neurobiologist.
The humour starts in our minds.
Humour starts with a funny thought in our minds. Therefore, the first thing we will do is look into the physiological explaination behind the humour - that means looking into what happens in our brain, when we are laughing.
Neurobioligist Albert Gjedde, tells us that the physiology behind the humour, has been looked into several times:
"There has been made brain scans of people laughing, and of people hearing others laugh," says Albert Gjedde.
"These scans have shown different areas of the brain, which are active, especially areas that become very active, when we experience emotional reactions."...
When we laugh, a number of different substances are activated in those areas of the brain, but as far as we know all of these substances can be traced back to one specific substance, the so-called "substance of happiness", Dopamine.
Dopamine works like a motivator for people, because it can release a sort of "expectational joy", and at the same time it's the cause of that reaction you get, when expectation is released.
What is it, we are laughing at?
Even though you thought something was funny, the first time you heard it, you may not find it funny the second time...
"Humor is very dependent on situation, and that's why it is so difficult to make norms for it.
Something that
