Humor. It is not a difficult concept. It is most logical.

Humor is a particular type of cognitive dissonance which arises from the unexpected simultaneous appearance of logic and illogic within a single statement. This statement is typically referred to as a "punch line", the "punch" being the sudden and strong sensation of the aforementioned cognitive dissonance.

You're funny!

I know.

I'm glad my post last week seemed to resonate with you.

To the vomitarium for a gutbath with your post from last week. The line of dialogue that was the basis of the title to this thread has always bugged me.

Given your humancentric perspective, not surprising.

Given the fact that you're inhuman, I find your antipathy toward a humancentric perspective wholly unsurprising.

Like most attempts to define humour, this is way, way too broad. The vast majority of possible combination of logic and illogic won't make anyone laugh. (Besides, the concept of logic that allows it to be combined with illogic and yet remain recognizable is not well defined in itself.)

Personally, I think this is one of the very few things that Freud got absolutely right: Jokes combine a surface that pretends to be more complicated than it turns out to be, with a semantics of aggression (or, more rarely, something else that is repressed, but demands expression). The surface allows for the actual content to be voiced, both leading to excess bound energy being relased. Jokes thus need three people: A making B laugh at C; while the merely comical reduces this to A laughing at B; and humour is all about A laughing at themselves. The instances not realised within the humourous constellation are represented elsewhere, internalized, or itself repressed, creating various subtypes.

While true, that doesn't address the fact that all of the things that make people laugh are superimpositions of logic and illogic. (Not all cars that are in working condition are moving under their own power; but all cars that are moving under their own power are in working condition.)

Two particularly fine examples are comedic irony and puns.

Actually I think Castle is partly right. As a concept, humor is not difficult at all. It's in the application of the theory that things get complicated and subjective.

Maybe Ad-mee-ral Kirk just wasn't that damned funny.

He didn't get funny until he started practicing law.

Tickling?

Tickling is to humor what pepper spray is to poignancy.

It makes people laugh though, meaning you can't say that all laughter comes from humor.

If not all laughter needs to come from humor, how can it be established that all humor is caused by the same relation of factors you propose? There could be different forms of humor of which the model you described is only one.

That isn't what I said. I see no reason to defend a claim I didn't make.

You ascribe emotion to an intellectual observation. Curious.

What's curious about that?

DENNY CRANE!!

No, and it doesn't need to, for three reasons: One, that wouldn't make it a definition of humour. Two, "superimposition of logic and illog" doesn't actually mean anything precise. And three, it isn't true anyway:

On a tour through the Kreml, the guide points out a large painting of a man and a woman in a well-furnished room, about to go to bed. "And this is Brechiznev's famous masterpiece, 'Lenin in Warsaw'."

A tourist asks, "So who's the woman?"

"That's Mrs Lenin."

"So she's going to bed with her husband --"

"No, that Trotzki."

"Then where is Lenin?"

"Well, on this particular night, Lenin is in Warsaw."

See, that's funny. But nothing about it is illogical in the least.

I never meant it as saying you did, read it in the context of the next sentence of that post.

You have vitiated your first premise without any awareness that you have done so.

Irony is what makes a joke funny. I've lately been enjoying a number of ANTI-JOKES, anecdotes with UN-ironic conclusions, often patterned on popular jokes. Of course, a joke with an unironic punchline is itself ironic and can still be quite funny.

Some examples...

How do you make a plumber cry?

Why is four black people in a car going off a cliff a tragedy?

What's green and fuzzy and can hurt you when it falls out of a tree?

I like my coffee like I like my women:

A man walks into a bar...

A horse walks into a bar and the bartender asks "Why the long face?"

What did the poor kid get for Christmas?

Then why are farts funny?

Well, I think you folks have managed to completely destroy skinofjohnrazer's notion of humour.

There's a surprise.

I find it humorous how John Castle wants to distance himself from the Visionrazer username, but fails.

Actually, it just wasn't funny.

Because farts are illogical.

I certainly have not! That would be obscene and probably violate the laws in several Bible Belt states.

Vulcans are vegetarians. I bet farts are considered eminently logical.