Humour or humor is the ability or quality of people, objects, or situations to evoke feelings of amusement in other people. The term encompasses a form of entertainment or human communication which evokes such feelings, or which makes people laugh or feel happy. The origin of the term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which stated that a mix of fluids known as humours (Greek: χυμός, chymos, literally: juice or sap, metaphorically: flavour) controlled human health and emotion.
A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, a quality which all people share, although the extent to which an individual will personally find something humorous depends on a host of absolute and relative variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, and context. For example, young children (of any background) may possibly favour slapstick, such as Punch and Judy puppet shows or cartoons e.g. Tom and Jerry. Satire may rely more on understanding the target of the humour, and thus tends to appeal to more mature audiences.

Styles of humour

Black comedy
Caustic humour
Droll humour
Deadpan
Non-sequitur
Obscenity
Parody
Mockery, such as the Darwin Awards
Sarcasm
Satire
Self-irony / Self-deprecation
Wit, as in many one-liner jokes
Meta-humour
Abuse
Demented
Racial Verbal

Anti-humour
Deadpan
Form-versus-content humour
Slapstick
Surreal humour or absurdity
Practical joke: luring someone into a humorous position or situation and then laughing at their expense Non-verbal
Humour is a branch of rhetoric, there are about 200 tropes that can be used to make jokes.

Techniques for composing humour

Figure of speech

• Humorous triple and paraprosdokian
  Enthymeme
  Syllepsis (zeugma)
  Hyperbole
  Understatement
  Inherently funny words with sounds that make them amusing in the language of delivery
  Irony, where a statement or situation implies both a superficial and a concealed meaning which are at odds with each other.
  Joke
  
  
  
  • Adages, often in the form of paradox "laws" of nature, such as Murphy's law or lemon law
    Stereotyping, such as blonde jokes, lawyer jokes, racial jokes, viola jokes.
    Sick Jokes, arousing humour through grotesque, violent or exceptionally cruel scenarios. Soldiers in the field of battle often use 'trench humour' to keep morale up in appalling circumstances.
    Riddle
    Word play
    
    
    
    • Oxymoron
      Pun Verbal
      
      Bathos
      
      
      
      • Exaggerated or unexpected gestures and movements
        Character driven, deriving humour from the way characters act in specific situations, without punchlines. Exemplified by The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
        Clash of context humour, such "fish out of water"
        Comic sounds
        Deliberate ambiguity and confusion with reality, often performed by Andy Kaufman
        Unintentional humour, that is, making people laugh without intending to (as with Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space)
        Funny pictures: Photos or drawings/caricatures that are intentionally or unintentionally humorous.
        Sight gags
        Visual humour: Similar to the sight gag, but encompassing narrative in theatre or comics, or on film or video. Non-verbal
        Some claim that humour cannot or should not be explained. Author E. B. White once said that "Humour can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." However, attempts to do just that have been made.
        The term "humour" as formerly applied in comedy, referred to the interpretation of the sublime and the ridiculous. In this context, humour is often a subjective experience as it depends on a special mood or perspective from its audience to be effective. Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse of the term (the German loanword from English) to mean any type of comedy.
        Language is an approximation of thoughts through symbolic manipulation, and the gap between the expectations inherent in those symbols and the breaking of those expectations leads to emotions such as laughter., using inspiration from Koestler as well as from Dedre Gentner´s theory of structure-mapping, George Lakoff´s and Mark Johnson´s theory of conceptual metaphor and Mark Turner´s and Gilles Fauconnier´s theory of conceptual blending.
        
        Evolution of humor
        Sight gags and language-based humor activate the two regions in the human brain known to have von Economo neurons, a specialization in neuron form that has evolved in the last 15 million years. This suggests that humor may have coevolved with the ability of great apes and humans to navigate through a shifting and complex social space.
        
        Evolution and humor
        Root components:
        Methods:
        Rowan Atkinson explains in his lecture in the documentary Funny Business"..
        
        some surprise/misdirection, contradiction, ambiguity or paradox.
        appealing to feelings or to emotions.
        similar to reality, but not real
        metaphor
        hyperbole
        reframing
        timing
        By being in an unusual place
        By behaving in an unusual way
        By being the wrong size See also