ABSTRACT
What offends us or demoralizes us does not make us laugh. Or at least, so run the oldest ideas in the theory of humor. The comic mask is “ugly and distorted,” Aristotle said in the Poetics, but not painfully ugly or distorted. The incongruities that “violate” our expectations stand a chance at being funny, argued the psychologists A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren back in 2010, only if we take these violations to be “benign.” In other words, something cannot be funny if we perceive it to be, ultimately, harmful—to ourselves as much as to another, to someone’s person as much as to their dignity. 1
