Preface
Explaining humor is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.
– E. B. White
Humor is a universal human experience; it can be found in every culture throughout history (Apte, 1985; Davis, 2013; Jiang et al., 2020). Furthermore, people the world over have a ‘common sense’ understanding of what humor is. Like beauty and other esthetics, we know it when we see it (although we might disagree over what we find funny or not). As Berlyne (1972) pointed out, humor as an experience is unmistakable; the ‘average person on the street’ can say without hesitation whether something is funny to them or not. Scholars, on the other hand, have struggled ...
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