I was going to try and define beauty and humor as part of the emotions article, but these two stand out from other emotions and have some similarities to each other as well. They’re different from other emotions because they’re also qualities that we tend to strongly attribute to the subjects that cause the emotions. We might say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but we also expect people to find similar things beautiful. This is different than emotions like sadness or joy that are often more about our response to an experience than some universal observable feature.
But humor and beauty also still seem like emotions. They come with the same experience of being a building block of our experiences. I can’t think of a way to break either of them down into simpler parts that can be defined in terms of other emotions or other kinds of cognition. If we want to define them as emotions, then it would make sense to see if they can be defined by a change in expectations or predictions.
The cause of beauty has to be something very general, something that can be applied to people, flowers, stars, buildings, and even mathematical proofs (if you believe the mathematicians). A good starting point is looking at studies on what makes a human face appear beautiful. Two findings stand out: one, symmetry is strongly associated with beauty. And two, if you take facial characteristics from a large population and generate an average face from those measurements, the average will often be judged to be beautiful, even more beautiful than the highest rated member of the group. These two results suggest that we find average things beautiful, but that clearly isn’t correct. But another characteristic of both an average face and a symmetric face is that they are easy to recognize, place, and process, and that seems like it could be an important factor. We experience beauty when something is easier to understand than expected.
For example, symmetry makes for patterns that are much simpler to match, store, and process. And it seems like this could extend beyond just faces or people. Take artwork, for example. It’s very rare to find very simple art that is widely considered beautiful. Which, if we think of beauty as something that’s unexpectedly easy to process or understand, would make sense. If there’s not much to understand, then it’s hard to be surprised by how easy it was to take in. The counterpoint would be some modern art that’s just a black canvas or a couple of stripes of paint. But those kinds of abstract pieces of art are often really only considered beautiful in context. They say something about the artist and the time and place they were being made and act as a commentary on the world at the time. If a simple piece of art could carry a lot of information about itself and the impact it had, I could see how people would find that beautiful. That seems like a lot of information, but a beautiful piece of art could convey it easily, more easily than we’d expect.
Besides art and people, other examples might be a mathematical proof or a line of code, both of which some people will say can be beautiful. And even if only an expert can experience the beauty of those things, everyone has an expectation of what kind of characteristics they would have. Beautiful code should be clear and simple (relative to the complexity of the problem it’s solving), and we’d probably expect it to be associated with an aha moment—a sudden realization that this solution allows someone to see the problem in a new light, in a way that’s cleaner, more elegant, and much easier to process.
Beauty – the feeling when an experience is unexpectedly easy to understand or process
Humor also feels like an aha moment, but it’s evoked for almost the opposite reason. Think about the punchline to a good joke or a hilarious scene from a movie. There’s probably some story or build up leading us in one direction, then a twist that goes against our preconceptions, and maybe something ridiculous or unusual. A joke leads us in one direction, along the lines of a typical story, and then we find ourselves somewhere unexpected. But it’s not the kind of unexpected surprise that would cause fear or even a pleasant surprise like a present—it’s something unpredictable, improbable, or even impossible. It’s the kind of thing that we wouldn’t expect to see ever again, and that’s the key. Something that’s funny is something that’s so unlikely, unusual or impossible that it wouldn’t cause us to change our expectations about the world because of it. The punchline to a joke is the point where we realize we’re not going to have to, or even be able to, learn a lesson from this story. Which is what stories usually do. They teach or strengthen some idea about how the world works. But jokes work differently. They make us think that we’re learning something, but then we find ourselves in some twist or surprise and realize we’re not learning anything.
Laughter is surprise, but it’s also relief. It’s triggered by realizing that we’re not going to have to make sense of the cause and effect we’ve observed. It can almost be thought of as a marker in our memory for information that is not useful for predicting the future or as a tool to help us avoid learning a lesson from something nonsensical or improbable.
Humor – the feeling of realizing that we’re not going to have to learn from an experience
Thinking about humor like this provides a lot of insight into some truths about comedy that have been repeated throughout the years. For example, explaining a joke kills the joke. This is true because an explanation is trying to get us to learn—we have to focus on the causes and effects and remember what’s important, and it requires some effort, thinking, and memory, all of which are the opposite of what a punchline should evoke. Or think of the saying that tragedy plus time equals comedy, in which we can see the same idea as well. A tragedy is overwhelming. It’s something that upsets our worldview and makes us reconsider what we thought we knew. But over time, we probably realize that a tragedy didn’t overturn everything we thought about the world. There are some aspects of it that were just dumb luck, terrible coincidences, or incredibly improbable. After enough time we can see that the world hasn’t completely changed, and there are some lessons we thought we’d have to learn that we can discard. When we look back, we will even laugh when thinking about how unpredictable or unlikely the tragedy was. We can separate the things we can understand and learn from the things that aren’t going to change our view of the world. There’s some relief in that, and that’s what humor is.
Of course, comedy is such an important part of our entertainment today that humor is almost never going to be that simple and clear-cut. It’s going to be built of layers and layers of expectations, counter expectations, and twists. But we can still see this key idea at work: we naturally expect to learn, to extract meaning from an observation, and we have this emotional response to mark the times when we don’t have to. Humor provides a welcome relief from the constant process of creating meaning and learning that we do constantly without even thinking about it.