on morreall: a failure to distinguish between play and humor

On Morreall: A Failure to Distinguish Between Playand Humor

Robin Tapley

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

In his most recent book John Morreall, arguably the father of modern philosophy of

humor, tells the reasonably familiar tale of the origins, both evolutionary and

developmental, of humor.1 While it is clear that the intention of the telling and the

details of the stories are meant to be explanatory and not polemical, there is much to

take issue with. The largest problem is that while humor begins in play, Morreall

seems to think it stays as play. By insisting that mature and present day humor and

play have the same relationship as their evolutionary and developmental origins he

is committing a conceptual version of the etymological fallacy. The etymological

fallacy proper points out a mistake in reasoning whereby the current meaning of a

word is confused or equivocated with an historical or earlier form of the word. The

suggestion here is that instead of a word, the concept is at issue but the same sort of

error is committed as in the original form of the etymological fallacy: the present

understanding of humor as funny is being confused with the origins of the concept

understood as humor as fun or play.

That Morreall is guilty of committing the conceptual version of the etymological

fallacy will be evident through a discussion of four areas of Morreall’s exposition on

play and humor. First, play and humor are derived from the same evolutionary

origins and have structures which resemble each other and are therefore evo-

developmentally linked. This claim will be debunked with a close look at the evo-

developmentary paths of both play and humor. Second, Morreall contends that both

humor and play take place in a sort of disengaged, non-serious state of mind. He

sees play and humor as fitting the same definition – something akin to playful – that

encompasses both play and humor. Unfortunately his own descriptions of humor

R. Tapley (&)

Department of Philosophy, Thompson Rivers University, 900 McGill Road, Kamloops,

BC V2C 0C8, Canada

e-mail: [email protected]

1 John Morreall, Comic Relief (Malden, Mass.: John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

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J Value Inquiry

DOI 10.1007/s10790-013-9365-1

and the presented definition of play do not support this line of reasoning. Third,

Morreall links play and humor by showing that both humor and play produce

amusement, and amusement produces laughter. Again, problems arise. Most

importantly play does not seem to produce what Morreall is calling amusement.

Play appears to produce enjoyment and fun. Enjoyment and fun seem to be different

in significant ways from amusement. If this is true, then only humor and not play are

amusing, and once again humor and play are distinguished from each other. Fourth

and finally, Morreall discusses play and the acquisition of language. In this

discussion Morreall suggests that anyone who can acquire language, including

signing primates, can acquire humor. Play then, through language, becomes humor.

This extension of play is challenged. Taken together these four areas of

disagreement with Morreall not only outline problems with his argument, but point

toward a different understanding of humor.

Before beginning on the four areas of disagreement with Morreall it is necessary

to provide a reasonably neutral briefing on the origins of humor and to provide

neutral definitions on key terms such as play and humor. Morreall has not been left

out. Where he has relevant information or research he has been included without

commentary.

1 The Origin of Humor

Any informed researcher on the origin of humor would see clearly that humor has

the same origin as play. Both play and humor express themselves in laughter and

laughter is the first, or one of the first social communications humans make.

Laughing and crying vocalizations communicate to others two very basic things: a

state of safety, often expressed as enjoyment by laughing, or a state of fear, often

expressed as distress or pain by crying. One thing of special note is that when we go

from a state of fear to safety, especially if this happens quickly, the relief and elation

we feel is notably heightened. The laughter emanating will be particularly pleasant.

We can see how both play and humor emerge from this model. A baby thrown a

short way into the air will laugh with joy when the playmate is known to the baby,

but cry with fear, lacking the feeling of safety, if the playmate is a stranger. Gervais

and Wilson explain that, ‘‘The same stimuli that elicit laughter in infants can evoke

crying if the situation is not perceived as safe or if the incongruity is too intense.’’2

Children being chased in play will squeal with delight and laugh when caught

knowing that there is no real danger in the activity. Morreall, telling the

evolutionary story of humor, gives examples of the first joke taken from

Ramachandran’s false alarm theory. Ramachandran theorizes that it is this fast

drop from fear to safety that underlies our laughter. We feel a threat, this causes

tension, that tension is released in a way that neutralizes the threat, and we laugh. In

Ramachandran’s words:

2 Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson, ‘‘The Evolution and Functions of Laughter and Humor:

A Synthetic Approach,’’ Vol. 80, No. 4 (Dec 2005), p. 398.

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When a person strolls up along a garden path of expectation and then there is a

sudden twist at the end that entails a complete reinterpretation of the same

facts and the reinterpretation has trivial rather that (sic) ominous implications,

then laughter ensues.3

Ramachandran also agrees with Morreall that laughter is a social call which means

that its function is to inform others of something, that is, laughter is communicative.

I suggest that the main purpose of laughter is for the individual to alert others

in the social group…that the anomaly detected by that individual is of trivialconsequence. The laughing person is, in effect announcing his discovery that

there has been a false alarm; that ‘the rest of you chaps need not waste your

precious energy and resources responding to the spurious anomaly.’4 (Italics

original)

If the origin of play (fun) and humor (funny) come out of the safe versus fear

response, and if play and humor both elicit the same communicative social call,

namely laughter, and if both occur in non-serious conditions it is hardly a giant step

to say they are intimately linked not just evolutionarily or developmentally, but

linked intimately in their function and purpose; that they are but two facets of the

same state that Morreall calls amusement. This step however, would be a wrong

one. Fun play and funny humor are homologous certainly; they share origin and

even a very basic structure, but they do not share purpose nor function and are in

fact quite different in terms of their roles in our lives.

2 Play and Humor Defined

There seems to be reasonable agreement between the prolific publishers in

developmental psychology, social psychology and philosophers that play is defined

by at least these following core characteristics: 1) nonliterality, 2) positive affect, 3)

intrinsic motivation, 4) flexibility.5 Nonliterality refers to the play being pretend,

while positive affect has to do with the child enjoying the pretend activity. Intrinsic

motivation means that the child began and continues the activity without prompting

or out of social pressure but presumably because of the fun derived. Finally,

flexibility has to do with the ‘‘variation in form or context’’ of the play.6 When

children play, as we know, they enjoy themselves. That is the payoff for play: fun.

When fun occurs, laughter accompanies this fun. It is the social call that encourages

others to play and encourages the play to continue. Laughter also signals that what is

happening is not serious, but is pretend and safe. Certainly fun may occur without

laughter. But when laughter occurs during play the stimulus for the laughter is fun.

3 V. S. Ramachandran, ‘‘The Neurology and Evolution of Humor, Laughter, and Smiling: The False

Alarm Theory,’’ Medical Hypotheses, Vol. 51 (1998), p. 352.4 Ibid., p. 352.5 Peter K. Smith and Ralph V. Vollstedt, ‘‘On Defining Play: An Empirical Study of the Relationship

Between Play and Various Play Criteria,’’ Child Development, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Aug 1985), p. 1566.6 Ibid., p. 1566.

On Morreall: A Failure to Distinguish Between Play and Humor

123

Rough and tumble play is a variant of this basic model, and its characteristics are

well described by Blurton Jones:

The distinctive movements are: running, chasing and fleeing; wrestling;

jumping up and down with both feet together; beating at each other with an

open hand without actually hitting; beating at each other with an object but not

hitting; laughing.7

We see some gender differences once we include rough and tumble play. Far more

boys than girls engage in this type of play. This may be explained in what we think

might be the evolutionary role of play, but then again it could simply be another

measure of early conditioning. Special note should be taken that laughter is

described as one of the characteristics of play. Of course laughter is not always

included as an actual characteristic, but it is common enough in play that it ought to

be listed. Whether play is quiet or rough and tumble, the enjoyment of play, the fun

aspect of play is expressed in laughter.

It is not just human children who play. According to Brian Boyd, ‘‘play has been

observed in many animal species, including all mammals in which it has been

looked for, and especially in rats, canids (dogs and wolves), primates and cetaceans

(dolphins and whales).’’8 Because play is so prevalent in so many animals, most

who study play believe there must be an adaptive value to play. Contenders include

that play with its vigorous physical feature is preparing players for future hunts and

activities, priming the players to expect the unexpected. How do we get children and

young animals to do all this practice? We make it fun. If it is enjoyable, then the

young will do it. We know it is fun because they laugh, and laughter is the social

communicative call of enjoyment.

We can easily see how child’s play can be adapted to adult play, to sports, to even

sometimes solitary activities like snow-boarding or hiking. The whoop of elation of

making a great shot, the chest bump of basketball players, the huddle of hockey

players after a goal, all of these things come with laughter of a sort; all come with

noises of enjoyment and fun. Both rolling double sixes in backgammon, or coming

upon a sublime vista while hiking is the adult’s enjoyment similar to that of a child’s

fun frolic. Why do we do these things, play these games, or sports? We play because

it is fun.

Defining humor, as opposed to play, is a challenge. It may well be impossible to

describe exactly what makes something funny. What might well be possible

however, is to describe the conditions under which the possibility for finding

something funny is the greatest. The theory that seems to do this the best is the

incongruity theory. This theory is at least currently the front runner of popular

theories of humor. There are many versions of the incongruity theory, which may

account for its popularity, but all varieties will have at least these two features: 1)

comic distance, and 2) incongruity.

7 As cited in Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, ‘‘Child’s Play: A Multidisciplinary Perspective,’’ Human Studies,

Vol. 26, No. 4 (2003), p. 410.8 Brian Boyd, ‘‘Laughter and Literature: A Play Theory of Humor,’’ Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 28,

No. 1 (April 2004), p. 6.

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Comic distance has to do with your point of view vis a vis the joke or comic

material. To be distanced is to have a point of view that is uninvolved elsewhere,

that is easily moved to an objective rather than subjective view. Your focus then is

outward and not inward. If you are deeply engaged in something important to you,

you are less likely to be able to remove that close-up focus and attend to other things

around you, beyond that focus. If you are not deeply involved or engaged, if you

have a wide and objective view of the world, you are at liberty to attend to things

that do not directly concern you. For example, if you are running on a tight deadline,

concentrating deeply, fighting off a headache and looking for that very important

article you just had in your hand a moment ago and a colleague runs in and out of

your office in a unitard you are not likely to find that funny. You are more likely to

be annoyed and irritated. If however, you are sitting at your desk daydreaming and

relaxed, and the same thing happens, it is likely to be hilarious. LaFollette and

Shanks describe comic distance, which they call psychic distance, this way:

While standing at the appropriate psychic distance from an event, we have a

perspective distance from an event, we have a perspective that we cannot have

while standing ‘‘close’’ to it. From the distant perspective we can ‘‘see’’

contrasting belief sets unnoticeable if we are too close.9

Morreall takes a different tack in describing distance and it involves his use of the

concept of amusement. In his account amusement is not an emotion. Emotions,

according to Morreall are described as the following:

Emotions typically have four components: (1) Beliefs and Desires cause (2)

physiological changes, which together motivate (3) adaptive actions. The

person’s (4) sensations of those physiological changes are the ‘‘feelings’’ in

emotions. Suppose that as I am walking past a fence, a Doberman Pinscher

runs up to the fence, barking, snarling, and trying to climb over. Instant fear! I

believe that the dog is about to attack me, and I desire to avoid being attacked.

My belief and desire cause the secretion of epinephrine…, and with it

increased alertness and muscle tension, the release of blood sugar…and other

bodily changes. While I don’t have sensations of all of these changes, I sense

many of them. And my feelings of fear are those sensations.10 (Italics original)

Obviously you are not distant from your emotions. You cannot be distant from fear,

love, anger and so on. If you feel it right down to your endocrine system there is no

distance to be had. In fact we often get so immersed in our feelings that it is difficult

to back away. But if amusement is not an emotion, then we are not bound by the

rules of emotion. And indeed, this is what Morreall claims:

Amusement and standard emotions, I conclude, involve different orientations

to the world. Emotions involve cognitive and practical engagement with what

is going on around us. We are serious, focused on dangers and opportunities,

and prepared to act to further our interests. What is happening matters to us.

9 Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks, ‘‘Belief and the Basis of Humor,’’ American PhilosophicalQuarterly, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Oct 1993), p. 333.10 See Morreall, op. cit., p. 28.


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The mental framework is Real/Here/Now/Me/Practical. Amusement, by

contrast, involves cognitive and practical disengagement [distance] from

what is going on around us. We are not serious, not concerned about dangers

and opportunities, and not prepared to act.11

Morreall makes a compelling case for amusement being a different orientation to

the world than emotion. Amusement is, or at least involves, comic distance. Comic

distance is a standpoint or a point of view. This explains why sometimes people are

not in the mood, so to speak, for joking around, or why fatigue, tragedy, or pain can

effect a person’s ability to engage in humor; they simply cannot adopt the

standpoint necessary to find things funny. Lafollette and Shanks provide an

example:

One of the authors of this essay is 60300 tall. He lived briefly in a house with a

six foot entrance into the bath room. Thus, it is not surprising that on more

than one occasion his expectations of clear passage were thwarted. At the time

it was not humorous. Not then. But it is now. While the victim of the midnight

lobotomies this author was ‘‘too close’’ to see any humor in the event. The

throbbing pain prevented any other perception. Now he can ‘‘see’’ the event

differently. It vividly exemplifies his lack of coordination and his inability to

navigate an ordinary doorway. That’s why the event is humorous in retrospect

but was not in prospect.12

Distance as a standpoint or point of view can have to do with getting some distance

through time as well as distance through perspective.

The other element of any incongruity theory is the incongruity itself. It is not

enough for a comment, joke or situation to just have two incongruous elements in it.

What makes for potential humor is the sudden and pleasant shift, flicker, snap, or

resolution between the two elements. Whether you get a shift, flicker, snap, or

resolution, will depend on which incongruity theory to which you subscribe. In

Morreall’s theory for example, you get a pleasant sudden cognitive shift, or jolt

between ideas and that produces amusement or laughter. In some theories, such as

Ramachandran’s False Alarm Theory, the incongruity is between the building

tension of a threat, which is resolved in a snap as we realize the threat is a trivial

thing. In LaFollette and Shanks you flicker between two idea sets which are

incongruous, and it is this rapid oscillation between the ideas that generates the

humor.

Humor then, at a minimum, requires comic distance and a pleasant sudden

cognitive shift. The fact that this shift is cognitive is no accident. Comedy in all its

guises, is a complicated cognitive adventure, whether it be conversation with

friends, one-up-man ship, classic stand-up, or slapstick. Finding something funny

depends on all sorts of social and contextual indicators. Something as simple as

slipping on a banana peel is fraught with potential social signals. If we see a

pompous self important buffoon slip and fall, then get up and try to resume the

11 See Morreall, op. cit., p. 32.12 Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks, ‘‘Belief and the Basis of Humor,’’ American PhilosophicalQuarterly, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Oct 1993), pp. 330–331.

R. Tapley

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aforementioned attitude, it is funny. If the same person slips and cracks his head

seriously injuring himself, that is not funny. We make judgements about what is

funny based on the context, the social situation, our perspective and any number of

other factors. In fact, it seems that cognitively speaking joking is quite an

achievement. Polimeni and Reiss state, ‘‘Given that a simple joke can utilize

language skills, theory-of-mind, symbolism, abstract thinking, and social percep-

tion, humor may arguably be humankind’s most complex cognitive attribute.’’13 A

bold statement but it is nonetheless true that understanding humor requires some

measure of cognitive maturity. Exactly how mature you have to be shall be

discussed shortly.

It is worth noting that for the entire discussion of play we used fun to describe the

stimulus for laughter. Funny was the word denoting the stimulus for laughter in the

discussion of humor. In what follows it will be maintained that there is a distinct

difference between fun and funny. Both may be part of a positive affect and both

may make us laugh, but they are nonetheless distinct. A joke is funny, not fun.

Playing tag is fun, not funny. Certainly there are penumbral cases, but in the main

we can distinguish between what is play, that is, what is fun, and what is humor, that

is, what is funny.

3 Distinguishing Between: Adaptive Functions of Play and Humor

Morreall links the development of humor in children to the evolution of humor in

the species:

As children develop humor, then, they play in progressively more sophisti-

cated ways with mental images, words, and concepts. They think in a way that

is disengaged from conceptual and practical concerns – for fun rather than to

orient themselves or to accomplish anything. They hold ideas in their heads,

but in a way that makes no demands on them. The medium for most of this

activity is language, especially language about what the child knows is not

real…For early humans to develop humor, I suggest, they had to acquire this

ability to play with thoughts. Playing requires security, as we have said, and

life in the Pleistocene era was more dangerous than the lives of babies

today…A more likely candidate for the first humor would be a sudden

reinterpretation of some perceptual experience, such as what the neuroscientist

V. S. Ramachandran calls ‘‘False Alarm’’ laughter.14

This passage illustrates several points key to Morreall’s argument. First, humor

develops out of play both developmentally and evolutionarily. Second, development

of humor out of play is continuous and not discrete which would make

distinguishing between them difficult, rather like drawing an arbitrary line through

a continuum. Third, humor relies largely on the acquisition of language which

13 Joseph Polimeni and Jeffrey P. Reiss, ‘‘The First Joke: Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Humor,’’

Evolutionary Psychology, Vol. 4 (2006), p. 348.14 See Morreall, op. cit., pp. 43–44.


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appears to be the primary object of play in humans. Fourth and finally, play and

humor are both disengaged or distanced activities that are entered into from the

point of view of the non-serious, the point of view easily moved to the objective

standpoint. You are detached enough where you are able to experience amusement.

These four points suggest that Morreall is correct in assuming that play and humor

are but two sides to an evo-developmental coin. Each of these points, and more, will

be discussed in the sections to come.

In this section we will deal with the problem that play, and humor, take different

evo-developmental paths. While it is all but certain that play and humor are born

from the same wellspring of laughter and crying, and their attendant meanings of

safety and danger or discomfort, somewhere along the evo-developmental path they

split and take on different meanings and adaptive roles.

In an interesting paper by Pam Jarvis she discusses her research on rough and

tumble play and gender.15 We already know that young males of many primate

species, including human, engage in more rough and tumble play than do young

females. Jarvis’s research theorizes that this gender difference may have to do with

language development. Or rather, that boys and girls make stories about their worlds

as they experience them and because they are different we get different linguistic

development. Jarvis’s ethnological study of children aged three to four during free

play, in fact confirmed this theory that boys’ active play revolved around ‘‘issues of

dominance and status, while girls [preferred] more sedentary play exploring more

symmetrical, co-operative relationships.’’16

Jarvis found that:

In summary, there appeared to be an intricate web of inter and intra gender

cooperation and competition unfolding within such mixed gender chasing, the

boys forming a hunting party that might engage in protection of its members,

but with underlying competitive purpose of individual recognition as a ‘‘good

chaser’’ by peers of both gender and possibly supervising adults. The girls

usually initiated the chasing games and subsequently competed to be ‘‘most

chased,’’ while collaborating to protect one another from the boy’s attention

when it became too energetic, marshaling adult assistance when necessary.

This observational evidence provides a clear example of children constructing

and practicing complex social skills, simultaneously competing and colluding

within a highly gendered, independently directed activity.17

She concludes, saying the following about the evolutionary role of play:

R&T play is the developmental activity in which we can most clearly discern

culture and biology interacting in the play of juvenile, evolved human

primates growing up within human social environments that are highly

dependent upon original linguistic constructions. R&T motor behaviors can be

very effectively traced back to earlier mammalian species, but the uniquely

15 Pam Jarvis, ‘‘‘Rough and Tumble’’ Play: Lessons in Life,’’ Evolutionary Psychology, Vol. 4 (2006),

pp. 268–284.16 Ibid., p. 271.17 Ibid., pp. 279–280.

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human narratives that children invent to underpin and explain their R&T

activities clearly mark the differences between the R&T activity of human and

non-human animals.18

What Jarvis says is important. We have surmised in the past that rough and tumble

play was practice for hunting or escaping predators. Play was simply learning and

honing motor skill. Clearly that is not the case for human animals. Our environment

is more complex and we have to adapt to it. Play clearly has a role in that adaption.

Play has a role not only in our linguistic development, but in our social and cultural

development as well. The adaptive function of play seems to be to orient children

towards learning cooperation, language, gender stories, negotiation, competition

and collusion. None of these things has anything to do with humor. While it can be

assumed that these children laughed during play, it was most likely that they were

enjoying themselves. None of these games had anything to do with word play, puns

etc. While it may very well be the case that children need cognitive development

before they are mature jokers, it seems that play is not the cause of this

development, but perhaps only its corollary. Play seems to be made for other things.

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone would agree that play has a very important adaptive

role for us.19 The denial of play is one of the common features shared by all the

murderers studied in research mentioned by Sheets-Johnstone right at the beginning

of her paper.20 As suggestive as this is Sheets-Johnstone relies on other evidence to

come to her conclusion that play is our first moral lesson. We learn kinetically. In

play we may be inadvertently slapped or kicked, and we learn that we are

vulnerable.21 We learn that others are vulnerable too. This she says is a ‘‘self-

teaching exercise in corporeal care and survival, not only corporeal care of

ourselves and our own survival, but corporeal care of others and their survival.’’22

This kind of kinetic learning teaches us empathy. She says:

The most basic form of social knowledge is thus from this perspective

empathic in character and its foundations lie in intercorporeal understandings

generated in and by corporeal-kinetic knowledge of one’s own body. …In

phenomenological terms, we can come to understand how a repertoire of ‘I

cans’ and ‘I cannots’ comes literally into play in the constitution of our own

bodies in experiences of play and, in turn, in the constitution of the bodies of

others in our experiences of play with them.23

It seems then that with what has been researched by Jarvis and Sheets-Johnstone

that play has very little to do with humor development and very much to do with

social, moral, cultural, and linguistic development. Play, underneath all the fun and

frivolity, appears to have a powerful role in the shaping and modeling of our youth.

18 Ibid., p. 281.19 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, ‘‘Child’s Play: A Multidisciplinary Perspective,’’ Human Studies, Vol. 26,

No. 4 (2003), pp. 409–430.20 Ibid., p. 409.21 Ibid., p. 412.22 Ibid., p. 413.23 See Sheets-Johnstone, op. cit., p. 418.


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Let us check on the potential adaptive functions for humor before drawing any

hard and fast conclusions. Polimeni and Reiss set out to trace the evolutionary

origins of humor.24 They take a wide view considering animal models, genetics,

children’s humor, humor in pathological conditions, neurobiology, anthropology,

cognitive archeology and more. Polimeni and Reiss walk us through several

candidates for an evolutionary understanding of humor including children’s humor.

Their sense was that:

It is certainly conceivable that the various stages of humor development seen

in children mimics humor’s evolutionary path. In the 1970’s a number of

pioneering studies on children’s humor were conducted; however, the pace of

the research has appeared to slacken – perhaps because these early attempts

produced few firm conclusions to build further research on.25

Again, it appears that there may be a coinciding development between humor and

play, or rather that the development of humor correlates with the evolution of

humor, but that there is no causal link, and no reason to think that play continues to

be linked to humor.

Polimeni and Reiss do have a positive theory of humanoids and the evo-

development of humor which comes out of their section on Cognitive Archeology.

As humans acquire language it replaces grooming as the social activity, and as the

social binder of the group. Add to the acquisition of language the idea that the

bigger the social group the bigger the neocortical size. It could mean then, that

‘‘laughter could have been the affirming social ‘bonding agent’ which replaced the

positive reinforcing experience of physical touch.’’26 Laughter would also have

been an attractant for new members to the group. There is also some thought given

to the idea that humor can be used to mitigate disagreements and to mute

aggression. In fact this does not seem so far fetched when we consider how often we

do this today. Polimeni and Reiss discuss:

Laughter is preferentially shared by lesser related individuals and non-kin.

Humor is not deceptive in nature - in face, it is just the opposite. Although

humor can be used to probe social issues or advance personal agendas, the

bulk of the information revealed by humor is shared by the community and

therefore can be considered altruistic.27

The evolutionary route for humor then appears to be a social binder and also

functions to mitigate aggression and disputes. Certainly the positive affect that

humor generates can distract people from angry feelings. If Morreall is right and

amusement is not an emotion, then once someone is amused they can no longer be

invested in their angry emotions. To be amused is to have that comic distance; to be

angry is to be bound by that emotional feeling. If you are laughing, you can not be

experiencing feelings of anger.

24 See Polimeni and Reiss, op. cit., p. 347.25 See Polimeni and Reiss, op. cit., pp. 353–354.26 See Polimeni and Reiss, op. cit., p. 361.27 See Polimeni and Reiss, op. cit., p. 361.

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So now we must compare the two. Play and humor certainly seem similar in

some respects. They both depend on language either evolutionarily or develop-

mentally. They both involve a positive affect. They are both themselves an activity.

Play and humor are homologous, which means having the same evolutionary origin

but different functions. For example the wing of a bird and the flipper of a seal are

homologous. This would explain why their structures may seem so similar and yet

their ultimate function seem so different. Both play and humor include a positive

affect. Both appear to be intrinsically motivated. Both appear to involve

nonliterality. Flexibility could also be attributed to both.

Even if we grant all of these similarities, it still only suggests that play and humor

are constructed in a similar way. Both are constructed as methods of propulsion, so

to speak, but one is for a bird and one is for a seal. Play, it has been reasonably

argued, is designed to further linguistic, social, moral, and cultural development.

Humor, it has been reasonably argued, is designed to act as a social bonding agent,

and as a mitigator to aggression. They both are structured to move us forward, but

play is a bird’s wing and humor is a seal’s flipper. In other words, while it looks like

play and humor are related, it is not because they are the same nor because they

follow one from the other. It is because they are homologous.

4 Distinguishing Between: Distance and the Cognitive Shift

The critic might point out that in play children learn social development and that in

humor we learn about social bonding and that this correlation is enough to tie play

and humor together. It is not. There is one fundamental component that separates

play and humor: distance. No matter what their similarities, the two concepts are

diametrically opposed on this one issue. If we consider again Jarvis’s research there

is no doubt that this play was engrossing for these children. During the course of her

research the children were so absorbed in their play that she could get close enough

to hear what they were saying without them even noticing her. This speaks of a deep

involvement in play. Rarely a child might notice her and if that happened play for

that child would cease for a moment. Jarvis would move away to let the child

re-engage with the play. The point is that it took no time at all for a child to become

reabsorbed into play, and the play itself was so engrossing an adult watcher could

observe closely enough to hear them speaking.28 Children concentrating on their

play, game, or toy that they have to be called more than once to get their attention. It

is certainly not a rare occurrence that children become engrossed in their play.

Morreall however, seems to think that children at play are in the same state of

affairs as adults ready for comedy. They are comically distanced. Uninvolved with

anything, ‘‘[t]hey think in a way that is disengaged from conceptual and practical

concerns…’’29 But if what Jarvis is telling us is true, then Morreall must be wrong.

Children are not disengaged, but are in fact, engaged, in which case they are having

fun, and not fun-ny. If it is true that children are engaged in their conceptual

28 See Jarvis, op. cit., p. 276.29 See Moreall, op. cit., p. 43.


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concerns, and Jarvis says they are, then this is a substantial difference from the way

humor works. Humor works on the ideas of distance and incongruity. If you do not

have one of these elements, you do not have humor. Play, with its lack of distance,

is not humor. Play is fun, not funny.

Even in discussions of the developmental stages of humor, Morreall is reluctant

to say that the examples of children’s proto humor are actually humor. Morreall

takes us through Paul McGhee’s four stages of humor development in children. The

first stage of humor is called ‘‘Incongruous Actions toward Objects’’ and involves

the child knowingly, but playfully using an object inappropriately.30 Morreall cites

an example of a child lifting a leaf to her ear, pretending it was a phone and

laughing. The second stage of humor is called ‘‘Incongruous Labeling of Objects

and Events.’’31 This stage is marked by a child’s play with words. A child at this

stage would know the names of things and be able to correctly describe actions and

so on. Here the example that Morreall gives us is of a child pointing to a rock and

saying it is a dog. Stage three is ‘‘Conceptual Incongruity’’ where children have not

just named objects and actions, but have developed concepts of them.32 So if a child

declares that the dog is meowing it is evidence of a joke of conceptual incongruity.

Meowing is incongruous with a dog and thus demonstrates a child’s play with

concepts of both cats and dogs.

Stage four, ‘‘Multiple Meanings’’ seems to be quite advanced both in time and

sophistication from stage three.33 The reported joke in stage three about the

meowing dog came from a 23 month old child, where as the age for stage four is

reported to be about age seven. At stage four kids are able to process puns, word

play, and other language manipulation. The joke offered for this stage is: ‘‘Why

won’t you ever be hungry in the desert? Because of the sand which is there’’34

What the children are doing in the first three stages is playing and laughing from

enjoyment, either from their parents’ reaction or the cognitive fun. What is not

happening here is any sort of sudden cognitive shift that would result in humor.

There may indeed be a cognitive shift, but it is not sudden. Our evidence tells us

then a few things. First Jarvis’s research tells us that children are engrossed in play.

Second McGhee tells us that children do indeed play with concepts that are

incongruous, however they do so at their leisure. Certainly we do not blame them

for that, they are children and will come to humor in their own time. Now humor

requires both distance and a sudden pleasant shift. We have neither of these things

with children. They cannot be distanced since they are engrossed, and while they

may be playing with incongruities they are not making sudden shifts with them.

Children are in fact playing, and not engaging in humor.

30 Ibid., p. 42.31 Ibid.32 Ibid., p. 43.33 Ibid.34 Ibid.

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5 Distinguishing Between: Amusement and Enjoyment

What is even more poignant is that even Morreall seems to follow a linguistic

convention in discussing play and humor without seemingly recognizing what it

means. Not only do play and humor have different definitions, but when we talk

about play we talk about the enjoyment of play and when we talk about humor we

talk about amusement. Although we might think enjoyment and amusement seem

related, they are definitely different states, and different descriptors. Enjoyment

denotes fun while amusement denotes funny. We might well enjoy a toboggan ride,

but we rarely think it is funny. If someone falls off of the toboggan in an amusing

way, this could be funny, but we would not describe it as fun. Similarly when a child

puts a leaf to her ear and pretends that it is a phone, she does so for fun. When Dolly

Parton was asked if her breasts were hers and she replied ‘‘Well I hope so, I bought

and paid for ‘em!’’ she did so to be funny.

In all of the articles used here for research on play, there was only one mention of

the word amusement, and that was in reference to a specific joke used as an

example.35 Enjoyment and positive affect were used almost exclusively as the

descriptors for the child’s or children’s attitudes or feelings. Since amusement is

never used to describe play it seems reasonable to assume that it is not an

appropriate descriptor of the activity. Indeed amusement not only denotes but

connotes something funny or at least risible or comic. If two things consistently

have two different descriptors the understandable assumption is that they are two

different things. Play and humor then, are two different things. It is not justifiable to

assume that something that is fun is also funny, or that something that is funny is

also fun. Fun and funny are simply not part and parcel of the same experience. Play,

which is fun, and humor which is funny, are not then the same thing.

Should it be thought that too fine a hair is being split too finely, Morreall himself

takes a moment to provide an etymological lesson on amusement during which he

mentions nothing about enjoyment or a similar attitude that would accompany play.

It is clear from his description of amusement that it is meant to apply to humor:

Before the late seventeenth century, when ‘‘humor’’ and ‘‘amuse’’ acquired

their current meanings, there was only one word ‘‘laughter’’ for what are now

called ‘‘humor,’’ ‘‘amusement,’’ and ‘‘laughter.’’ Some languages still do not

distinguish amusement as mental from laughter as physical. Of those that do,

many have simply imported the English word ‘‘humor.’’ Lin Yutang, for

example, introduced it into Chinese in 1923, and it is now transliterated as

‘‘youmo.’’ The new concept of amusement was based on laughter. Amusemeant ‘‘to make someone laugh or smile with pleasure’’; amusement meant

‘‘the state of being caused to laugh or smile with pleasure.’’36 (Italics in

original)

We know that laughing accompanies many stimuli from being startled, extreme

nervousness, being tickled and so on, so laughing by itself does not mean much.

35 See Jarvis, op. cit., See Sheets-Johnstone, op. cit., See Boyd, op. cit., See Smith and Vollstedt.36 See Morreall, op. cit., p. 58.


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However, the idea that amusement and humor once meant the same thing is very

intriguing. What we have is strong evidence, from Morreall himself, that

amusement indicates the presence of humor whereas enjoyment indicates the

presence of play, or at least something else that is not humor. The evidence appears

to show that we do not use the word amusement to describe play, nor do we use

enjoyment to describe humor. This is highly suggestive of the fact that play and

humor are indeed two different things with two different nomenclatures. The

significance of these two different nomenclatures of descriptors is that with no

commonalities in the ways we talk about play and humor it is difficult if not

impossible to see play and humor as existing hand in glove. Humor is not simply a

grown up extension of play; it is not the case, as Morreall repeats, that humor is

merely the play of thought.37 If there is any sense in which humor is indeed the play

of thought, play is being used metaphorically and not literally. Morreall is either

contradicting himself or he must be using play in a metaphorical sense despite all

our evidence to the contrary.

6 Distinguishing Between: Play and Its Over Extension

If there is still any lingering doubt about Morreall’s intentions to mix in play with

modern humor let us put them to rest. In the first place while Morreall is establishing

the primacy of language in humor, particularly in humor’s evo-development he says:

Given the centrality of language in the development of humor, both in our

species and in children today, it’s reasonable to think that if other primates

developed language, they might develop humor too. In the last few decades,

this hypothesis has been borne out by the gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and

orangutans who have learned various languages. The most famous, Koko the

gorilla, has over a thousand signs in American Sign Language. …But once

Koko had a basic competence in using signs, she began to do what young

children do when they have mastered words – she played with them.

According to Francine ‘‘Penny’’ Patterson, Koko’s trainer and friend, on

December 10, 1985, Koko took a folder that she had been working with and

put it on her head, signing ‘‘hat.’’ Similarly, Moja, a chimpanzee trained to

sign by Roger Fouts, called a purse ‘‘shoe’’ and put the purse on her foot to

wear. Like Piaget’s daughter pretending a leaf was a telephone, this fits into

McGeeh’s stage 1 of humor development, ‘‘incongruous Actions toward

Objects.’’ ….Now sometimes Koko’s incongruous labeling of things and

people seems to arise simply from annoyance with her trainers, as when she

calls them ‘‘dirty toilet,’’ but other times it is accompanied by a play face, and

she seems to enjoy misnaming things for its own sake. While she is no Lucille

Ball, she seems to show a sense of humor that at least approaches that of

kindergartners.38

37 See Morreall citing Kant, op. cit., pp. 41, 56, 66.38 See Morreall, op. cit., pp. 48, 49.

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In the whole excerpt from Morreall we understand that he is talking about how the

acquisition of language means the acquisition of humor. Even when primates

acquire language they can acquire humor. It seems incredible to think of gorillas and

chimps making jokes. A close look however and we see that what these amazing

animals are doing is playing. Except for the last sentence where Morreall talks about

a sense of humor nowhere else in the passage does he use humor nomenclature or

descriptors. What he uses is the language of play. The animals did what children do

with words – they played with them. Koko, when making a comment to her trainers

used a play face to show she was not serious. What Morreall is describing here is not

humor, it is play. It is incredible play, but it is play. Given what Polimeni and Reiss

have said about humor being perhaps our crowning cognitive achievement, it is

unlikely that Koko is really joking, but there is no doubt that she is playing.

What is critical however is that Morreall thinks that this primate play is humor, or

at the very least proto-humor, and cannot see that play and humor differ in

significant ways. While it is true that language acquisition plays a role in both

humor and play, that does not mean that humor and play are the same. What

Morreall is missing here is that humor requires the ability to distance, which itself

requires the ability to take different standpoints relative to not only yourself, but

your surroundings. Distancing also requires the ability to put the self in the

background. This is why it is difficult for children and probably gorillas to take a

joke. With those who are not yet mature jokers it is difficult to see themselves in the

third person. This is of course assuming that the joke is not a cruel one – no one is

expected to take a cruel joke with equanimity. Joking also requires a sudden

cognitive shift. Immature jokers are not yet cognitively ready for this. Either

because language acquisition is not complete or is limited (as in the case of Koko)

or because of cognitive development issues jokes are not understood. Morreall

seems to think that gorillas and kindergartners are on the cusp of joking greatness. It

is not so. Children and gorillas have mastered the skills of play. This is not to be

under esteemed. Play is a complicated social, cultural, linguistic feat. It develops the

skills of negotiation, articulation, and social organization. We cannot be without

these skills. These skills however, do not translate into joking. What Morreall sees

as a springboard to humor is really play, and a springboard to the skills play is

designed to confer.

7 Conclusion

We have accumulated ample evidence to show that play and humor are homologous

and therefore do not grow one from the other or work hand in glove or have an

intimate relationship in modern humor. In the course of amassing this evidence we

have challenged at least four key areas of Morreall’s discussion of the evo-

development of humor and play. These areas were chosen because in each one

Morreall has in some way indicated that play is intimately linked to present day

humor. The accusation that Morreall has committed a conceptual version of the

etymological fallacy has been borne out. In every case we found that what looked

like a connection between play and humor was illusory. In every case what looked


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like a marriage between play and humor was delusive. What actually seemed to be

the case was that play and humor were homologous, having the same origin and

similar structures, but different functions.

Instead of being intimately linked we found that play was adaptively oriented

towards social negotiation, and linguistic and moral development, where humor was

adaptively suited to social cohesion and the mitigation of aggression. Contrary to

the idea that both play and humor were relaxed and playful activities we found

evidence suggesting that while humor took a distanced or disengaged standpoint,

play required engagement. While it was carefully and repeatedly pointed out that

laughter accompanied both play and humor, what we found is that the laughter

caused by play was stimulated from enjoyment and the laughter caused by humor

was stimulated from amusement. None of the literature used to research play used

the word amusement when talking about play; conversely amusement was the

descriptor used almost exclusively for talking about humor. This is highly

suggestive of the fact that play is enjoyable and humor is amusing. Furthermore,

enjoyable denotes fun while amusement denotes funny. Finally we addressed the

issue of how far we might extend the idea of play-equals-humor. Morreall suggested

that signing primates are attempting, in a childish way, to make jokes. While signing

primates are extraordinary creatures, what they are doing is playing. We can

determine this simply by the definitions of play and humor.

In the end it appears that the common origin, and the similarities in structure such

as positive affect, production of laughter, flexibility, and so on, make a compelling

but ultimately erroneous case for humor and play being analogous as in

corresponding in function, but not evolved from corresponding organs, as the

wings of a fly and those of a woodpecker. It would be easy enough to mistake play

and humor in this way, especially given that both result in the flight of laughter. But

in reality, we have shown that play and humor are instead homologous.

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on morreall: a failure to distinguish between play and humor

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