Okay, what we can do is compare the predictions of the two theories in relation to these. If they both have similar results (since they both mention pattern-breaking/misplacement), I think we can look instead for places where they might differ, or look for examples that might apply to one and not the other.
Should we start with one? The first joke is unclear because "QALY" isn't explained, but I think I can fill it in well enough. We'll use a Hippie, Gandhi, and Justin Bieber for the butt of the joke. (apologies if you're a Beiber fan).
Plane breaks, pilot runs out, says there's only three parachutes and grabs one. Beiber then says "I have 10,000,000 twitter followers! And grabs another parachute and jumps." Gandhi then tells the Hippie, "you are young, so you can create more happiness," and tries to give him the last parachute. And the Hippie simply shows him two more parachutes and says "It's okay dude, Beiber took my backpack."
According to the theory I've posted, this is a layered joke with multiple detectable errors (quality gaps)...in both Beiber turning out to be fatally wrong, and in the listener expecting the Hippy to give an argument back to Gandhi.
The reference to the listener having to jump through the hoops is probably nearly the same as saying that the listener has to have the expectation that Beiber didn't make a mistake and that the joke was going elsewhere.
In this theory (my theory, the posted theory, whatever), I may be able to say that we get additional information about what makes the joke work. Since it states also that the listener must, for example, not be worried about Beiber (or the butt of the joke) dying. So if you used for example, the listener's child as the butt, they're a lot less likely to laugh.
Okay. This seems to be a distinction between the two theories where one could potentially give more accurate information about what makes the joke funny/unfunny then the other. What does this alternate theory say about this particular part? How causing anxiety (in this case using someone who the listener would worry about dying), would screw up the humor?
Oi, maybe I shouldn't have led with that one. It touches on put-down humor, which is what yours is best at and this is weakest at.
(btw, QALY = quality-adjusted life years, a measure often used for comparing the effectiveness of interventions, especially medical or rescue interventions. Basically, 'you have more life left to live')
Try the third one. We know it's a joke, so the reason is going to be dumb. This is about middle-of-the-road in just how dumb it might be, so there's no real difference in quality, just content. It went in an unexpected direction -...
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.