ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with only one aspect of joking, namely, what to make of it when a joke does not work. There are, no doubt, many reasons why one might tell a joke, but a basic, central reason must be in order to induce laughter in the joke's audience. The audience did understand the joke, and found the fun in it, but was somehow constrained not to laugh; that is, something overwhelmed what might otherwise have been a laughing response. The chapter shows that a great deal of humour, especially of joking humour, in fact portrays people responding eccentrically, having inappropriate or somehow skewed responses. David Hume says there is a sense in which a feeling is never right or wrong, it just is; but Hume goes on to say that feelings can be appropriate or not, or, as he says, they can be the 'natural' responses to things.
