Humour

By most accounts humour seems to be a characteristic particular to human beings.
A very curious thing if we carefully consider the full implications of this distinction.

It might be a bit presumptuous of me to assume things about our cousins in the animal kingdom but there does appear to be a correlative relationship between the sense of humour and the sense of self or the perception of the absurd and the intellectual quality of the mind.
It is indubitable that many ?'higher' life forms possess the propensity to play and to feel pleasure and perhaps even glee in rough-housing or in taunting their fellows, but do they have any sense of irony or can they find pleasure in laughing at the absurd or comical?
Do they have the ability to separate self from reason and see themselves with a humorous eye?

Perhaps a good place to begin answering this question is in trying to assess what exactly can be called comical and what in particular causes the explosion of laughter.

Fischer said on the matter:
"Our entire psychic world, the intellectual realm of our thoughts and conceptions, does not reveal itself to us on superficial consideration. It cannot be visualized directly either figuratively or intuitively, moreover it contains inhibitions, weak points, disfigurements, and an abundance of ludicrous and comical contrasts. In order to bring it out and to make it accessible to aesthetic examination, a force is necessary which is capable not only of reflecting upon these conceptions and elucidating them - namely, a force capable of clarifying thought. This force is nothing but judgment. The judgment which produces the comic contrast is wit. In caricature, wit has played its part unnoticed, but only in judgment does it attain its own individual form and the free domain of its evolution"

Lipps said:
"What we accept one moment as senseful, we later perceive as perfect nonsense. Thereby arises, in this case, the operation of the comic element."
And went on
"A saying appears witty when we ascribe to it a meaning through psychological necessity and, while doing so, retract it. It may thus have many meanings. We lend a meaning to an expression, knowing that logically it does not belong to it. We find in it a truth, however, which later we fail to find because it is foreign to our laws of experience or usual modes of thinking. We endow it with a logical or practical inference which transcends its true content, only to contradict this inference as soon as we finally grasp the nature of the expression itself. The psychological process evoked in us by the witty expression which gives rise to the sense of the comic, depends in every case on the immediate transition from the borrowed feeling of truth and conviction to the impression or consciousness of relative nullity."

And finally Freud said:
"We have heard that the release of painful emotions is the strongest hindrance to the comic effect. Just as aimless motion causes harm, stupidity mischief, and disappointment pain;-the possibility of a comic effect ends, at least for him who cannot defend himself against such pain, who is himself affected by it or must participate in it, whereas he who is unconcerned shows by his behaviour that the situation of the case in question contains everything necessary to produce a comic effect. Human is thus a means to gain pleasure despite, the painful affects which disturb it; it acts as a substitute for this affective development, and takes its place."

For me the comical is linked with the appreciation of the absurd and can be summed up as such:
When the self preserving structures of the internal is unexpectedly exposed to an external discordance, the sudden difference of psychic pressures can result in a release of stress energy through tears or laughter.

The process of ordering consists in the placing of barriers or limits between the internal and the external or, to be more precise, between what is under the direct influence of the Will and what requires an intervening tool.
Logic, morality, harmony are all damming mechanisms against chaos.
They enable the creation of an internal artificial safety zone, within which some form of order and harmony can take place.
We then project this internal sense of order, to whatever degree we feel it, upon the world at large and assume that it is there.

The absurd manifests itself when the psychic dam is surprised into developing fissures through which psychic energy is released to alleviate the pressures, in the form of physical energy.

Tragedy and comedy are inexorably linked.
Life is by its nature tragic, in that it is a stream of desiring, felt as need and suffering, ending in an unavoidable conclusion.
The comic becomes apparent when the unforeseeably tragic reveals itself at a distance.
It is when the tragic, that has been ordered and planned for, finds a way of surprising us and so results in an uncontrolled release of anxiety.

Much of humour is rooted in language and in word play.
Here the disjunction between our abstraction of reality and its actuality becomes the most obvious and the disparity between our conceptual understanding and the actual world becomes pronounced.

Perhaps, it is a fitting by-product of control and the attempt to encase reality within the boundaries of awareness, that absurdity makes itself noticed by reminding us that our logical constructs are tenuous, at best.
It is the mind being humbled by contradiction and chance and a way of venting oppressed energies back into the chaotic void.

Just like the earth consists of an outer crust covering a churning interior, compressed into a heated magma, so do our abstractions encase and compress a subconscious controlled energy making it pliable and liquid.
When we are exposed to the reality that out understanding and our structured awareness of the universe does not correspond precisely to what is actually there, the tragic springs froth in our subconscious.
When the tragic has the added characteristic of being removed from our immediate concerns or is also completely opposite from what we have gotten used to as commonplace, then it becomes comical and absurd.