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The Encyclopedia of Humor: A Social History explores the concept of humor in history and modern society in the United States and internationally. This work’s scope encompasses the humor of children, adults, and even nonhuman primates throughout the ages, from crude jokes and simple slapstick to sophisticated word play and ironic parody and satire. As an academic social history, it includes the perspectives of a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, child development, social psychology, life style history, communication, and entertainment media. Readers will develop an understanding of the importance of humor as it has developed globally throughout history and appreciate its effects on child and adult development, especially in the areas of health, creativity, social development, and imagination. This two-volume set is available in both print and electronic formats.
Features & Benefits:
- The General Editor also serves as Editor-in-Chief of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research for The International Society for Humor Studies.
- The book’s 335 articles are organized in A-to-Z fashion in two volumes (approximately 1,000 pages).
- This work is enhanced by an introduction by the General Editor, a Foreword, a list of the articles and contributors, and a Reader’s Guide that groups related entries thematically.
- A Chronology of Humor, a Resource Guide, and a detailed Index are included.
- Each entry concludes with References/Further Readings and cross references to related entries.
- The Index, Reader’s Guide themes, and cross references between and among related entries combine to provide robust search-and-browse features in the electronic version.
This two-volume, A-to-Z set provides a general, non-technical resource for students and researchers in such diverse fields as communication and media studies, sociology and anthropology, social and cognitive psychology, history, literature and linguistics, and popular culture and folklore.
- Sales Rank: #2030243 in Books
- Published on: 2014-03-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 11.25" h x 8.75" w x 3.25" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 984 pages
Review
“Organized along the same clean lines as a number of other SAGE encyclopedias published recently and edited by a scholar of the linguistic theories of humor, this set is clearly most suited to academic libraries, but could also be useful for larger public libraries” (M. Schumacher American Reference Books Annual 2016-05-01)
General editor Attardo (Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce; former editor in chief, HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research) offers this two-volume set to address the lack of a comprehensive overview of the field for students, researchers, and laypeople. Members of the general public will appreciate browsing an authoritative introduction to the history and range of humor and its impact on individual and culture development. However, the main audience for this encyclopedia will be students and researchers who are exploring the diverse theories and extensive research of the developing interdisciplinary field of humor studies. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers. (A. I. Piper CHOICE 2015-01-01)
As a print book converted to an electronic incarnation, the product succeeds very well. The extensive, interrelated e-searching of subjects makes it easier to use, in a much more sophisticated way, than the print. And for this price it is a tremendous bargain. This reference will serve social science scholars who are serious about humor. (Cheryl LaGuardia Library Journal 2014-12-02)
"A thorough survey of humor, Attardo's two-volume text defines and examines the far reaches of comedy. ...As a reference base, the work maintains multinational, multiethnic awareness ... A well-balanced study of the subject, Attardo's encyclopedia belongs in most academic and public libraries." (Mary Ellen Snodgrass Booklist 2014-09-01)
"Mark Twain famously said, "The truth is the funniest joke ever told." But this raises an important question: What the heck is so humorous about humor, anyway? Among the 300-plus signed entries in the far-ranging work are a triad of articles that attempt to answer that very query. ...Entries are uniformly well written and researched, each concluding with cross-references and a further reading list. ...VERDICT: Laughter is the best medicine, and there is a good deal present here, as examples abound. Entertaining as well as informative, this is one of those rare reference books that warrants reading from cover to cover. Strongly recommended for purchase by public and academic libraries." (Michael Bemis Library Journal-Starred Review 2014-09-05)
About the Author
Salvatore Attardo was trained as a linguist at the Catholic University of Milan, Italy, where he graduated in foreign languages and literature (French), with a dissertation on the linguistics of humor, in 1986. In 1988, he moved to the United States to attend Purdue University. In 1991, together with Victor Raskin, Attardo published a long article that developed Raskin’s own semantic theory of humor into the general theory of verbal humor (GTVH). Later that year he received a PhD in English from Purdue University, with a specialization in linguistics and a dissertation on the linguistics of humor, which was published in 1994 as his first book, Linguistic Theories of Humor. Attardo was professor of linguistics at Youngstown State University from 1992 to 2007. He coauthored, with Steven Brown, a sociolinguistics textbook, Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation (2000) and authored Humorous Texts (2001). He served as editor-in-chief of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research from 2001 to 2011. With Diana Elena Popa, he coedited the book New Approaches to the Linguistics of Humor (2007), and with Manuela Maria Wagner and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, he coedited Prosody and Humor (2013). In 2007, he became chair of the Department of Literature and Languages at Texas A&M University–Commerce. In 2010, he became dean of the College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts at Texas A&M University– Commerce, where he is also professor of linguistics. Attardo’s research is focused primarily on humor studies and pragmatics. He has published more than 100 articles and book reviews in scholarly journals. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Pragmatics and other journals. In the past decade, his interests have broadened to include the prosody and gestures accompanying humor, mainly working in collaboration with his wife, Lucy Pickering. In non-humor-related topics, Attardo has published in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, Italian studies, grammar, the pedagogy of linguistics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, and computational linguistics.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Love the cover picture!
By JohnnyLingo
As a budding researcher in the field of humor studies (my dissertation will begin in less than a year), this has proven to be a tremendous resource to me. Sadly, as a student I cannot afford my own copies of the books so I keep renewing from the library. They are a valuable and scholarly contribution to this field of study. An example which reinforces this is from showing a few friends the volumes who aptly pointed out that how dense the volume appeared to the outside reader (LOTS of words and very few pictures). However for someone who loves the nuances of humor and its implications, these volumes are a treasure. Great work Prof. Attardo!
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
The true global theory of humor is self-deception of superiority
By Christopher Gontar
In 1991, the editor of this book published an idea known as the General Theory of Verbal Humor. Based in part on Victor Raskin's Semantic Scripts Theory of jokes, the new work went further and analyzed all types of humorous discourse.
But the theory of the concept of humor in both those versions is the familiar incongruity theory. That notion in the case of jokes applies directly only to one narrow class (namely bathos), while to others it applies indirectly. In those two cases, and also where incongruity applies to more direct stimuli of humor than jokes it is uninformative. The so-called incongruity theory refers to a duality or conflict of arrangement obvious to common sense. It is a theory of the bare structure of incongruity, not what that image signifies, and thus the doctrine is not in any way a substantial theory of humor. In fact, incongruity in humor signifies self-deception. The incongruity-resolution theory (Suls, 1972, 1983), by contrast, is not merely uninformative but false. All previous attempts to improve upon these theories have been ineffective. The arguments expressed here are clearly the most important that have ever been advanced in this topic.
The old method of attacking the incongruity theory is to produce counterexamples, unfunny cases of incongruity. This is attempted in response to the earlier version and not the resolution-based. Yet the adjustments meant to rule out these counterexamples tend to make the theory worse, because they are secondary descriptions posing as the primary and origin. Incongruity is left unexplained so that the adjustments can never arrive at necessary and sufficient conditions. The search for a counterexample to incongruity is not completely misguided and could conceivably lead to the correct character. But it will not likely yield such truth, namely the terms diminutive and self-deception. There are other concepts very loosely related to the former, play and pleasure, which are erroneously applied as solutions in the following way.
It is in rebuttal to counterexamples--such as that incongruity can be terrifying-- that play and pleasure are proposed to supplement it. While oddity and disorder can be dangerous, another counterexample is "serious" incongruity, as between a great hero and what stands above them, namely the gods. Of course the diminutive can be called "play" in relation to the serious and great. But play is a particular case and an effect of humor, as pleasure is only an effect of humor. Thus they are not superior substitutes to the truly explanatory theme of self-deception. Theorists attempt to rule out a counterexample like the "abusive parent" idea of Alexander Bain (1818-1903) often by pointing to an intrusive element of immorality or pain. But the role of parent is not a desideratum of power, or only appears as such in some form of mental instability or illness. Thus it is a question of absence--self-deception is lacking. Yet we find "play" touted triumphantly in the first of these encyclopedia volumes in the entry on incongruity by Mr. Attardo (p.384). Nor does the solution consist in the context and purpose of humor as factors predicting its occurrence. Such external factors may indeed predict humor but they do not illuminate its essence.
Few would attempt to take counterexamples like Bain's "decrepit man under a heavy burden" or "instrument out of tune" and turn these into humor by the inclusion of some missing element, and no one should do that. Nor is it wise to do as theorists have, trying to explain away such examples by saying they have too much that is undesirable, incongruous, or "unresolved." A vastly oversized pair of shoes, they say, is humorous because more sense can be made of it than the instrument out of tune which makes music unbearable. Yet while the giant shoes are funny, they have less sense because they are not routine like the instrument out of tune. Incidentally, it was Plato who first noted extraneous emotions that potentially disrupt the comical.
It is never said that the instrument out of tune is too normal to be an ideal juxtaposition. Although the sound it produces is funny, the instrument itself being out of tune is a routine problem to be solved. A single wrong note in a longer work is famously used as humor by P.D.Q. Bach. Bain's "weak man under a heavy burden," too, is not a good candidate or true counterexample, because "burden" is equivocal. Burden has always connoted work as a mere weight rather than something to be strived for. Consequently the phrase is biased and doesn't have the more plain sense of an inequality between objects or persons and objects. When an arrangement has that quality it is seen as humorous because it signifies something rejected or a self-deceived ambition. There need not be, moreover, any personal figure or character in which we can more independently insinuate self-deception.
If some person or animal is near that which is desired but not merited, or an inanimate object represents the personal lowly quality, such relations are not merely seen as juxtaposition that magically has its effect. They need only signify misappropriation which finally signifies self-deception. All that remains in the following is to outline the categories of these juxtapositions.
The incongruity theory, therefore, as it has been applied to a humorous object (and which does not apply in the same way to jokes) is not false but it is uninformative. This is the case even if counterexamples are ruled out. The theory only indicates (without explaining) the humor in various irregularities and in the juxtaposition of a diminutive being with some background or role of grandeur. Note that the "diminutive" here means not just any being that falls short of what it presumes to be. To be literally comical, the protagonist is in some significant sense lesser than other human beings. The essential comical presumption is not something common to everyone or to human nature. In A Confederacy of Dunces, the size of the comic hero Ignatius is at times admired and feared, yet is often seen as morbid obesity. The incongruity theory explains neither of those two ideas, of eccentricity and comical dual juxtaposition. They are both images of self-deception or a small-scale, moderate ambition that is very unlikely to succeed.
Humorous surprises could be included in the same class with incongruities or irregularities. Incongruity is perhaps the best name for what it denotes in humor, but there are other similar concepts. It is a better word for dual juxtapositions, but "irregular" has much the same reference, and it may better describe situations where it is a rule or norm that is violated rather than a physical background. But this large class can be divided into two, namely, the display of an object that is to be rejected, such as something that resembles the unfashionable, and the imposition of reality on the deceived or unaware. For example, stumbling upon a stash of gold fits better in the latter category, if there is something that ruins the discovery. In Shakespeare's comedy Timon of Athens, Timon finds gold too late, which is funny. There is no anomalous case, nothing problematic. The same aforementioned idea of what is rejected can be divided into two further sub-classes, the eccentric and the usurpation of power. These are both comical as signs of pretension. Any surprise that is unpleasant in the sense of being awoken to reality, by contrast, signifies the shattering of self-deception. The only exception to the two classes of surprise as awakening or as the irregular (or incongruous), seems to be a purely playful surprise. But in that mode, humor is not in the playfulness of the surprise, so much as, that it resembles the awakening to reality.
Schopenhauer had in mind only linguistic humor when he defined humor as the “sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation.” What he was describing was only equivocation as the basis of typical linguistic humor. He never applied his own lengthy formulation to any direct incongruity such as juxtaposition or usurpation. For this madman, the particular of ambiguity passed for the theory of all humor! But that very quality makes all his examples conform to joke classes herein defined, of indirect communication and glorified witticism. (If Schopenhauer had thought that equivocation in wit was really analogous to direct incongruity, then his theory would have been a close parallel to that of Bergson).
In linguistic humor, incongruities such as those noted above are not explicit but implicit. The incongruity theory mistakenly tries to apply incongruity in the same way to jokes as to risible objects, producing the erroneous "resolution theories." A number of types of counterexample can lay this idea to rest. For instance, if any falsehood is uttered in jest, the main, or any very significant humor or amusement never consists in the discovery that what is said is indeed false or a piece of indirect communication. Those theorists of various disciplines are wrong who hold that any primary humor consists in the act of one's recovery, so to speak, from the falsehood and regaining one's balance having been fooled or nearly fooled by the false utterance. In being fooled or lied to in this general way, of which one typical version occurs on "April Fool's Day," the event or experience of disclosure is funny because it signifies the state of deception and the tendency to fall into that state. This is sufficient to disprove the "incongruity resolution theory" of jokes or humorous utterances of any kind.
Jokes themselves too are explainable in the same thematic sense as more direct humor. The response to jokes does not reduce to a positive feeling based in the fact of understanding them, as a resolution theory always claims. In the case of the briefest kinds such as "when is a door not a door?" even with the punchline "when it's ajar" included, there is merely a presentation of a sort of pun in question form. This does not belong with a class of more complex, longer jokes, that are irony-based. These latter include different versions that use ambiguity or other kinds of indirectness to communicate a sort of hinted information. There is only one other major class of jokes if we omit bathos, which is just a kind of direct incongruity in joke form. Aside from bathos, there is a comic episode or antic such as Freud's joke about a confused cafe customer.
In the punchline to the joke "when is a door not a door?" the word "ajar" signifies the power of ambiguity to deceive. And that is why every pun carries an implicit amount of humor. For evidence, one has only to remember the story of Odysseus as "nobody," by which he deceived the Cyclops. Or, take the popular misconception that John F. Kennedy's "Berliner" speech exhibited an actual blunder that remains funny nevertheless, or malapropisms. The resolution theory turns our attention away from this, the main substance of a major class of jokes. In place of the main idea, it focuses on the process of tension and release, that of transition, and the like. It is in these processes that a meaning is "reframed." This reframing, however, is itself only the overall "frame" of the ambiguity or irony in the joke, like the frame of a picture. There is a difference between the reframing, and the way in which that serves as a complete frame in which an ambiguity or irony is presented. The joke form is used because it presents the pun in a way that mimics deception, imperfectly.
The abrupt shift in a joke is actually an enhancement that creates an additional reference to deception. It is certainly not the main substance of the humor. Furthermore, even if it was an equally important part of the humor, only a theory based on self-deception would explain it. But the resolution theories and other conventional approaches treat the total frame of a joke as if it is more important than the main content. This is like regarding the frame of a painting as more important than the painting.
Experts seem prepared to go on forever puzzling over what kind of puzzle-solution or satisfaction jokes represent. But the truth is, the response to humor consists in a mental focus on the state of self-deception. This is fairly well represented in the experience of deception and comprehension in jokes that are merely expanded or glorified witticisms, like the one shown above. Those simple jokes sometimes literally puzzle their audience, but their meaning is to signify more elaborate deceptions. But self-deception is more perfectly represented in the kind of jokes that use double meaning as a form of irony, or even ironic sarcasm. The meaning or funniness of irony more generally does not consist in the very fact of its being deciphered. And therefore the essence of irony-based jokes does not consist in that fact of comprehension, either.
The incongruity theory thus uses the term either trivially (in juxtapositions), or else in cases where it does not apply (jokes). It does apply to a pratfall yet this requires explanation. "Dignified versus lowly" may allow the fall to be seen as thematic. But its humorous quality derives from more specific ideas of delusion, absentmindedness, and death. The humor of death is that small concerns can appear excessively important when life is sacrificed for them (in this case not in a noble sense). Similarly, people view very dangerous falls for a crude amusement, while every fall can derive some humor by alluding to those dangerous ones.
The "incongruity theory of humor" is a thoroughly refuted doctrine, and must not be further respected. Alastair Clarke, included in this encyclopedia, writes gibberish about humor. His idea of "recognition of a pattern" is meaningless and unexplained. This encyclopedia approvingly compiles several such botched attempts, creating a catastrophe in the world of theory and ideas.
The incongruity theory has been repeatedly reworded without any new development or insight. In its original form it consists of only a pair of incongruous terms, often with the further claim that the feeling of amusement is a state of non-comprehension. Arthur Koestler took this non-understanding view (as did Freud, as further explained below). Koestler argued that we laugh because our minds cannot process a leap between "habitually incompatible frames of reference." This is to ignore the actual meaning of jokes and humor, and to hold that the most important feature of jokes is that we don't understand and respond rationally to them at all. It is to pretend that the "incompatible frames" are merely distant and radically different. Jokes and humor clearly have far more meaning than that.
With the scripts theory it was the same story. To outline any humor in terms of "scripts," as Salvatore Attardo or Victor Raskin did in the 1980s, explains nothing of the significance of its object but only gives it a new name.
In the place of mere incongruity those last two theorists adopted incongruity resolution. Others had introduced this as an improvement on the incongruity theory, and "appropriate incongruity" is the main version of this new view. Here we return to the critique of incongruity resolution and illustrate by examples.
1) Incongruity resolution is only significant in this one case, that of "appropriate incongruity." Incongruity resolution would have a further sense, only if a fool corrected, or a cruel miser reduced to rags, were "resolution" and not "incongruity." Incongruity and resolution apply to both those examples, providing further evidence that the two concepts don't explain humor. 2) Appropriate incongruity (or resolution) have two meanings, the one currently put forth by scholars, and a more thematic and significant one.
What the "self-deception" theory explains, then, is how there are two effects of the content of a joke. One, allusions to self-deception, looks more at the content, while the other tries to derive humor from the process of understanding. The latter view is very old and still pervasive in philosophy and common sense. And the view is correct insofar as the act of getting the meaning is at least a fragment of the humor in a given joke but it is no more than that.
The type of comprehension-centered theory, moreover, varies where resolution is considered only partial, and is in fact denied. Freud fits that view since he saw jokes as essentially an embedding of nonsense within sense and their force as a sudden bursting of strained effort. He thus favored a kind of directness in that he believed the audience of a joke to be the main character. But he favored indirectness in the sense that humor expressed a childish rebellion against reason.
But the typical resolution-based theories claim that in jokes where double meaning renders an incongruity more appropriate, we laugh mainly at a feeling of discovery or "resolution." This plainly mistakes the force of humor. It drives a wedge between the content of the joke and the humor response that it might induce. It is saying, or implying, that the joke has no independent value at all or special allusion to anything.
The best remedy here is not to completely abandon this general idea, that understanding jokes is part of their humor. The "joke-understanding" process may form a secondary self-deception in the audience. Yet as indirect-communication (or irony) and glorified witticims, such jokes allude to self-deception more directly.
Hugh Basil Hall's example joke in which a crocodile reveals that it is deaf by saying, "eh?" is one kind of irony joke. In the most common kind of irony joke, an incongruity which is some complaint or foible is entered obliquely using the double meaning as a sort of soft-pedal, or screen. Thus the appropriate incongruity is funny in a more relevant sense, in that it signifies a deluded stereotype. Something undesirable, offensive or embarrassing is exposed obliquely. But the double meaning also has a prima facie humorous quality; by itself it already alludes to a kind of gaffe that involves only meaning. A self-deceived superiority theory of humor accounts for all the descriptions involved, and explains their meaning.
One of Elliott Oring's example jokes, originally cited by Freud, is an indirect communication or irony joke like Hugh Basil Hall's.
This is Oring's example:
A doctor, as he left a woman's bedside, said to her husband with a shake of his head, "I don't like her looks." "I've not liked her looks for a long time," the husband agreed.
Oring's view is that humor consists in an "inappropriate" response being made "appropriate" because of the shared linguistic sound or phrase. Again, there is humor in this element, or aspect of the joke, but merely to call it appropriate incongruity does not explain why such a configuration produces humor. The theory also mistakes the significance of what is "inappropriate." For example, in the doctor joke above, the thing that is obliquely and humorously presented by the double meaning is not the man's dissatisfaction with his old wife, but rather her age and its allusion to presumption.
It is not difficult to show that humor can be absent in almost the same joke, where conditions of resolution are present.
A doctor, as he left a woman's bedside, said to her husband with a shake of his head, "I like her looks today." "I liked her looks a long time ago," the husband recalled. Although this version contains the same double meaning, it lacks the disparagement of the actual joke. The result is an inane distortion of the original, yet it has all the properties of the incongruity-resolution theory. This is sufficient to show the falsehood of the theory.
The following passage from a recent academic article reflects the way in which any example of humor is treated in this tradition. In fact the passage even includes an old example used by the editor or his colleague which I discredited years ago, in 2006 to be exact.
The passage is from "Humor in Translation" by Jeroen Vandaele:
Incongruity theories often note that there is a special, alternative logic to the incongruity of humor (cf. Deacon's observation that insight is also a critical aspect of humor). Besides a setting-up of expectations and a flouting, there is a "solution" to the unexpected situation or message. This means that, despite its perceived incongruity, the humor is also congruous (understandable) in a different way. An example taken from Antonopoulou (2002) may illustrate this. In Trouble is my Business (1939), Raymond Chandler's first sentence is "Anna Halsey was about two hundred and forty pounds of middle-aged putty-faced woman". As Antonopoulou (2002) notes, there resides an obvious incongruity in this funny "count-mass noun reversal," that is, in the expression "x pounds of woman." There is a cognitive rule which says that x pounds of is not usually combined with a count noun such as woman. Yet the incongruity obviously has a meaningful solution: readers are invited to conceptualize the woman as a mass. As another example illustrates, the solution to the incongruity is often cognitively farfetched (yet locally relevant in a given discourse): "Is the doctor home?" the patient asked in his bronchial whisper. "No," the doctor's young and pretty wife whispered in reply. "Come right in." (quoted by Raskin 1985: 100). In the context of a doctor's visit (the set-up), the behavior of the wife is farfetched yet understandable via a radical reframing of the action situation.
That is the material, by Vandaele and representative of this empty, pedestrian treatment of humor, that does not offer insight but only the surface features that every casual observer could provide himself.
First, as to the latter example, it is obvious that the very word "incongruity" is inadequate to explain the significance of many things in the intended jokes or material that it purports to explain. The use, for example, of "incongruity" trivially describes the difference in intention or context between the doctor visit and a sexual encounter.
Worse, merely calling the shift from innocent praxis to sex "incongruity" is not only empty verbiage, in that the idea of incongruity never meaningfully describes any relation within humor. But here, in the example of "sex/non-sex" it is also not consistently applied if one compares this example with many others. Thus not only does a triviality result from the use of this idea no matter how it is used, but because the many examples of humor are different, there is a simple error in applying it to all of them without qualification.
Incongruity as a description of humor is inherited from Francis Hutcheson, who, if he had been questioned, might have conceded that his idea of incongruity implied a relation of power or a difference of magnitude. Hutcheson might have been persuaded that to point out such a difference doesn't explain anything significant about humor. He might have agreed that what he had contributed was only a surface description, though universal and abstract, that was obvious to everyone.
Second, also as to the latter example of the whisper, the editors who analyzed that example many years ago failed to understand or even to emphasize the element of double meaning in the whisper being reinterpreted, and thus appearing as a double meaning. No effort is made to account for that element as something contributing to this rather lame, dry and obscure joke.
As to the former example, just look at this sentence: "As Antonopoulou (2002) notes, there resides an obvious incongruity in this funny 'count-mass noun reversal.'" The example being explained is: "In Trouble is my Business (1939), Raymond Chandler's first sentence is "'Anna Halsey was about two hundred and forty pounds of middle-aged putty-faced woman.'"
Well...let's compare this example, for the sake of argument, to a popular phrase, namely a "can of whoop-ass," or even in a more similar form, "240 pounds of whoop-ass." There's also another one, "a big glass of shut the h%## up." These are phrases popular among marines, soldiers or similar demographics. It may be true that one of the things funny about this Anna Halsey sentence is that a verbal technique similar to the military one is here being applied. To describe it, let's say that it either applies units of material measure to abstractions or to people, or else (as Vandaele suggests) it juxtaposes "count and mass."
That shift between count and mass, though it is present in the Anna Halsey example, is a minor feature. To focus on it alone is thus a mistake. It is error to say that the main humor in this example is the juxtaposition of the plural, or count-description of "240" with the singular mass-description of "putty-faced woman." It is to overlook much of the humor content.
Therefore the interpretation is wrong on two important counts. It is factually in error, because other so-called "incongruities" in the example are funnier than the count-mass difference--for example, the juxtaposition or near-expectation of a reference to athletic or physical prowess that collapses in an image of weakness or obesity. But the explanation is not only false, it is also trivial. "Incongruity" is only a description of humor that should be self-evident, and doesn't explain the phenomenon. The only sensible alternative theory is the one here presented.
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