Well, we can take situations where the "equation" is clearly minimized, like if you just found out your Mother died tragically and are crying (meaning extreme anxiety), and see that basically no one is going to laugh at that time. Or that something happens that you simply never even know happened (so noticeability is 0), and obviously you won't laugh at that. If you have no quality-expectation related to something (like if, for some reason, you're trying to talk to a rock, unless you're somehow insane you won't laugh at the rock when it doesn't answer, you would only laugh at yourself if you could picture yourself being so exhausted that you'd expect the rock to answer in the first place), so we can see immediately that the theory can class those situations as "definitely not funny."
From there, when we start pushing those variables up from 0, we can see how things would thus enter into the funny zone. For example, a few days or weeks AFTER your Mom dies, if your anxiety starts to go down, and someone reminds you of something funny she did, THEN you would probably start to laugh. This is why, according to this theory, we say "too soon" when someone jokes after a tragedy. The anxiety level hasn't gone down enough yet.
Likewise, when you start being able to see the funny thing that previously was out of your vision, then you start getting to the point where you can laugh at it. Or when you start talking to something that you might have a reasonable expectation would react, like your dog ignoring you calling his name, that is where laughter could begin to come in.
I tried to present examples that were "far-end" and isolated with the various variables in the equation, to hopefully demonstrate in a clear way how this can function to predict what will or won't be funny. There are of course examples that involve multiple variables or where it's more subtle and depends on our own individual opinions and things and moods that we could also do.
On page 15 of the second paper, under "bad jokes," I tried to do exactly this...taking a joke that won a "bad joke" contest, analyzing it within the theory, and adjusting multiple things about it, including improving the pun, to the point that it gave me some urge to laugh at it.
Oh, lastly, in regards to surprisingly funny, something that violates a very deeply held expectation (with the other variables being within an acceptable range) would be an example of something that's surprisingly funny, like if your boss who you've known for years suddenly has an epic fail. I have this on page 19 of the second paper under "I didn't see that coming."
Hopefully this decently addresses the concern.
Alrighty, with the mass downvoters gone, I can make the leap to posting some ideas. Here's the Humor Theory I've been developing over the last few months and have discussed at Meet-Ups, and have written two SSRN papers about, in one page. I've taken the document I posted on the Facebook group and retyped and formatted it here.
I strongly suspect that it's the correct solution to this unsolved problem. There was even a new neurology study released in the last few days that confirms one of the predictions I drew from this theory about the evolution of human intelligence.
Note that I tried to fit as much info as I could on the page, but obviously it's not enough space to cover everything, and the other papers are devoted to that. Any constructive questions, discussion etc are welcome.
A "Holy Grail" Humor Theory in One Page.
Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and hundreds of other philosophers have tried to understand humor. No one has ever found a single idea that explains it in all its forms, or shows what's sufficient to create it. Thus, it's been called a "Holy Grail" of social science. Consider this...
In small groups without language, where we evolved, social orders were needed for efficiency. But fighting for leadership would hurt them. So a peaceful, nonverbal method was extremely beneficial. Thus, the "gasp" we make when seeing someone fall evolved into a rapid-fire version at seeing certain failures, which allowed us to signal others to see what happened, and know who not to follow. The reaction, naturally, would feel good and make us smile, to lower our aggression and show no threat. This reaction is called laughter. The instinct that controls it is called humor. It's triggered by the brain weighing things it observes in the proportion:
Humor = ((Qualityexpected - Qualitydisplayed) * Noticeability * Validity) / Anxiety
Or H=((Qe-Qd)NV)/A. When the results of this ratio are greater than 0, we find the thing funny and will laugh, in the smallest amounts with slight smiles, small feelings of pleasure or small diaphragm spasms. The numerator terms simply state that something has to be significantly lower in quality than what we assumed, and we must notice it and feel it's real, and the denominator states that anxiety lowers the reaction. This is because laughter is a noisy reflex that threatens someone else's status, so if there is a chance of violence from the person, a danger to threatening a loved one's status, or a predator or other threat from making noise, the reflex will be mitigated. The common feeling amongst those situations, anxiety, has come to cause this.
This may appear to be an ad hoc hypothesis, but unlike those, this can clearly unite and explain everything we've observed about humor, including our cultural sayings and the scientific observations of the previous incomplete theories. Some noticed that it involves surprise, some noticed that it involves things being incorrect, all noticed the pleasure without seeing the reason. This covers all of it, naturally, and with a core concept simple enough to explain to a child. Our sayings, like "it's too soon" for a joke after a tragedy, can all be covered as well ("too soon" indicates that we still have anxiety associated with the event).
The previous confusion about humor came from a few things. For one, there are at least 4 types of laughter: At ourselves, at others we know, at others we don't know (who have an average expectation), and directly at the person with whom we're speaking. We often laugh for one reason instead of the other, like "bad jokes" making us laugh at the teller. In addition, besides physical failure, like slipping, we also have a basic laugh instinct for mental failure, through misplacement. We sense attempts to order things that have gone wrong. Puns and similar references trigger this. Furthermore, we laugh loudest when we notice multiple errors (quality-gaps) at once, like a person dressed foolishly (such as a court jester), exposing errors by others.
We call this the "Status Loss Theory," and we've written two papers on it. The first is 6 pages, offers a chart of old theories and explains this more, with 7 examples. The second is 27 pages and goes through 40 more examples, applying this concept to sayings, comedians, shows, memes, and other comedy types, and even drawing predictions from the theory that have been verified by very recent neurology studies, to hopefully exhaustively demonstrate the idea's explanatory power. If it's not complete, it should still make enough progress to greatly advance humor study. If it is, it should redefine the field. Thanks for your time.