Is that incongruent enough for you? Did it catch you by surprise? Or was it too clownish for your standards of complexity? Research regarding the very topic of why we laugh, uncovered a variety of refined theories to answer the aforementioned questions. Buijzen & Valkenburg (2004) went into considerable lengths of measuring humorous behavior and noticed that several components such as exaggeration, ridicule, coincidence, repetition and misunderstanding are powerful tools to elicit humor. Van Mulken, Le Pair & Forceville (2010) characterized humor within detailed categories, because some advertisements contain rhetorical figures that are too artfully deviant from perceived expectations. Indeed, the process of understanding humor is so complex that Scott & Batra (2003) revealed a metaphorical inverted u-curve! Not only did it demonstrate the psychological relation between the complexity of humor and its appreciation, it set groundwork for future research…
Today, we are here and we stand before you. We are the future. We are the new generation of researchers who will build upon the wisdom of that what was before. If we could only comprehend a glimpse of what the aforementioned authors throughout this paper declared, we would ask ourselves the same question that Oscar Wilde once asked himself: “Is it not a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously?”
C. B., on behalf of group 4.1, I thank you for the time to read and evaluate our research report.