ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to a good deal of attention to the theories of Sigmund Freud, whose book Jokes and Their Refotions to the Unconscious is a landmark study of humor. It deals with work by other psychologists and psychiatrists on humor; it is a subject that has fascinated them and attracted a good deal of interest in terms of what humor is, how it works, and how it might be used for therapeutic purposes. The chapter discusses a related cognitive-perceptual approach, as exemplified by the work of Gregory Bateson and William Fry on paradoxes and metacommunication, on communication and humor. In Motivation in Humor, a collection of articles on humor by psychologists, Jacob Levine suggests that there are three models commonly used to explain the motivational sources of humor, and psychoanalytic theory is one of them. The other two are cognitive-perceptual theories and drive-reduction theories of humor.
