The motives for humor are as manifold as those for murder. Among them are the raucous physical misfortunes of others (slapstick), grotesque incongruities (between reality and appearance), ethnic abuse (Polish, Irish, anti-Semitic, and other), subtlety elegantly deployed (through irony and understatement), release of inhibition (blue jokes), witnessing the mighty fallen (the revered made to look ridiculous). Laughter itself comes in multiple forms: smiles, sniggers, grins, giggles, belly laughs, falling-off-the-couch laughs, and what Mel Brooks once called heart-attack laughter. The realm of jokes encompasses the entire world in its subject matter and appears in such varying forms as puns, one-liners, epigrams, witty ripostes, practical jokes, comic commercials, and elaborate narratives requiring foreign, often Jewish-greenhorn, accents.

Various, often contradictory theories about humor have been devised—from the notion that humor is little more than a form of hidden aggression to those that hold humor is a cure for all sorts of illnesses. Given the range of motives for humor, its varying kinds and occasions and forms, can it be usefully studied and codified in the way of other phenomena?