ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud’s work provides a useful theoretical framework which allows one to form many eminently testable hypotheses concerning the dynamics of humor appreciation. Freud’s theoretical notions led to the hypothesis that cartoons depicting a high degree of interpersonal aggression, although selected to be the most humorous on the pretest, would on the posttest be rated significantly less funny than either low-aggressive or innocent cartoons. Perhaps the high-aggressive cartoons differed systematically from the low-aggressive and nonsense cartoons on some dimension other than amount of aggressiveness, and some process occurring along this dimension accounted for the results. If subjects’ “evaluation apprehension” was greater during the posttest it would be expected that the humor ratings of cartoons depicting highly aggressive, socially undesirable behaviors would decrease more than the ratings of cartoons depicting activities with a higher degree of social acceptability.
