ABSTRACT
Couch and analyst jokes typically base themselves on the glaring incongruity between claim and performance, fact and fiction. The classic is the cartoon showing two analysts, one young and looking exhausted, the other old but spruce and fresh, emerging from a hospital building. The idiographic point of view lies at one extreme of a continuum at the other extreme of which lies what might be called a neo-behaviouristic point of view, represented explicitly by Skinner and his followers, but implicitly accepted by most experimentalists. It has often been said by philosophers and writers generally that there are two elements in humour, the formal and the emotional; on the formal side humour depends on incongruity, and the bringing together in some punch line of the incongruous elements in some surprising form of synthesis, while on the emotional side the joke may either serve to discharge hostile, aggressive or sexual feelings, or else may simply express good humour, happiness and contentment.
