Humour

Humour (in Commonwealth English), or humor (in American English) is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humours (Latin: humor, "body fluid"), controlled human health and emotion.

People of all ages and cultures respond to humour. Most people are able to experience humour—be amused, smile or laugh at something funny—and thus are considered to have a sense of humour. The hypothetical person lacking a sense of humour would likely find the behaviour induced by humour to be inexplicable, strange, or even irrational. Though ultimately decided by personal taste, the extent to which a person finds something humorous depends on a host of variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, intelligence and context. For example, young children may favour slapstick such as Punch and Judy puppet shows or cartoons such as Tom and Jerry, whose physical nature makes it accessible to them. By contrast, sophisticated forms of humour such as satire require an understanding of its social meaning and context, and thus tend to appeal to the mature audience.

Humour (disambiguation)

Humour is what may amuse.

Humor or Humour also may refer to:

See also

Humor based on the September 11 attacks

9/11 humor is black comedy or off-color humor that aims to make light of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. A number of scholars have studied the ways in which humor has been used to deal with the trauma of the event.

Researcher Bill Ellis found jokes about the attacks from Americans the day afterwards, and Giselinde Kuipers found jokes on Dutch websites a day later. Kuipers had collected around 850 online jokes about 9/11, Osama Bin Laden, and the Afghanistan war by 2005. An infamous early public attempt at 9/11 humor was done by Gilbert Gottfried just a few weeks after the attacks. During a comedy roast for Hugh Hefner at the Friars Club his 9/11 gag did not go over well with the crowd. One audience member at the club yelled out "Too soon!", which has since become something of a meme for jokes told in the immediate wake of tragedies. Gottfried then improvised and performed "The Aristocrats" routine, which released a great deal of tension and got rousing applause from the crowd.