By Joseph Castro, Live Science
Contributor | November 6, 2017 06:22am ET
Between verbal jokes, slapstick comedy and
tickling, there are numerous reasons we laugh. But are humans the only species
with a sense of humor?
The short answer is no, but it also depends
on how you define "humor."
For millennia, philosophers and psychologists
have struggled to come up with an exact definition for what
constitutes as humor. They've presented numerous theories over the years,
one of the most popular being the "incongruity theory" of humor. At
its basic level, this theory says that humor arises when there's an
inconsistency between what one expects to happen and what actually
happens — and this includes comedic tools like puns, irony and twists of
fate.
Under this definition, the vast majority of
animals probably don't have a sense of humor, as they lack the cognitive
mechanisms and networks that would allow them to identify such inconsistencies.
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