Inside Humor: Exploring the Personal Experience of Comedy and Humor

What's All the Laughing About?



What makes a joke or a story funny? Inside Humor takes you on a journey through a wide range of forms of humor-from tickling and physical humor to irony and wisdom tales. Along the way, Dr. Gordon Atlas seeks to illuminate the meaning and function of each form.



Drawing on his experience, teaching a psychology of humor course on a consistent basis, Dr. Atlas explores the inner experience of humor at the moment it occurs. He explores questions such as: How does sarcasm or observational humor allow an individual to cope with and deal with the problems of life? Why are some people so entertained by physical humor whereas others are enamored with language humor (puns and word play)? For each form of humor, Dr. Atlas examines the type of personality that would be particularly attracted to and utilize the type of humor discussed.



Throughout the journey of this book, Atlas maintains a consistent focus on the central question: what is humor? The book is peppered with examples of jokes and humorous stories that are used to illustrate and illuminate key elements of humor and comedy. Atlas's conversational style is probing and analytical while also easygoing, fun, and entertaining.



Many original concepts and categories such as "the hilariously funny" (the subject of some of Atlas's own research) are utilized in the quest to construct a developmental and phenomenological model of humor. The book serves as an outline for this new approach to the study of humor and provides the basis for a deeper understanding of humor as both wisdom and transcendence.