I really don't think you're engaging with the actual points here, which are (1) that puns and similar jokes can be funny simply by being clever, without any "misplacement" required; and (2) that even when a "misplacement" is involved, your theory doesn't appear to identify any reason why the pun should be funnier than a mere plausible mistake that no one would be amused by.

I feel that puns, when by themselves, all play off of our misplacement instinct. But not all puns are equally funny. Some things are more "out of place" then others. And the more "obscure" your pun, (the more out-of-place) the funnier it will be. (assuming of course that it's noticeable, low anxiety and the other requirements)

I think I know what you're saying though. The "flushing" example fits in BOTH places, and thus isn't "misplaced" by itself in the actual sentence where it's used.

That's probably an example of a pun which, by itself, would not be very funny. Something that could be out of place but not really...so you see it as potentially a small chuckle. But if "flushing" had less in common with where it was (rather than fitting in both places), I think it would be funnier.

That "double meaning" or "double placement" in flushing might earn a small chuckle, similar to how you might see a button on a computer that looks like candy and suddenly find yourself feeling a tiny bit hungry.

Obviously this is a subtle case we're discussing so we might need to speak more.

I'll take, in fact, one of your own examples, the "kidney beans" joke from your longer paper, which I shall modify a little further to bring out a point. Imagine that you are reading a scholarly article on a cannibalistic tribe in some faraway place, and you find this passage: "The Ougalou people consume human flesh only on special occasions such as a victory over another tribe. Their staple diet otherwise is a dish of kidney beans." I suggest that you might find this quite amusing, if you happened to notice it (I suspect it would be easy to pass over without noticing).

There is no "misplacement" here; the dish of kidney beans is (in my hypothetical scenario) perfectly correct. It's just funny that cannibals should turn out to eat kidney beans. There is no one here to lose status (the author hasn't made any kind of mistake; neither has the reader).

Yup, you're absolutely right, I would laugh at that. I think I did correctly see what you're putting across too. In addition to what I said above, I also feel this is likely the brain's misplacement instinct being triggered by something that looks VERY much like a misplacement. After the fact of course, you may realize that it's not misplaced, but laughter is a reflex that serves its purpose by triggering in the moment to allow others to potentially see the fail and adjust their opinion of the social order.

So it senses the potential misplacement and reacts, like how you might feel what you think is a bug on your arm, pull your arm away, then realize it was just a hair. It was the potential thing that caused the reflex.

This is a great thing to bring up.

But: "I make typos all the time. I see them all the time". Apparently typographical errors, even when noticed, don't constitute a serious enough loss of quality to be funny. So why would "copse" in place of "corpse" be suitable joke material, on your theory? It's no worse an error -- no more a sign of incompetence -- than my example of "validty" in place of "validity".

Typographical errors CAN produce funny, if they are very egregious, or if they get layered with some other fail. Think of the "Autocorrect Fails" that get sent around as memes. You see a correction that ends up making someone say something they really didn't mean to say and thus makes them look really bad. But a simple missing letter that doesn't lead to anything else, like "valdty" instead of "validity" is just run of the mill, generally not a surprise at all, and isn't even layered with any other failure.

If this doesn't cover it, let me know and I'll go through the rest of what you said. I don't want to bury you in too much text so I'll move on otherwise.

Clowns

Yes, indeed, clowns do more than just dress up in silly clothes. I didn't intend to suggest otherwise. My point is simply that their pies-to-the-face and comic pratfalls and absurd misunderstandings and whatnot are displays of conspicuous incompetence from people we expect to show conspicuous incompetence. So Qe-Qd in your equation can't be large because Qe is low to begin with. And yet clowns can be pretty funny.

Ah, people WE expect, and I agree that we do expect clowns to do those things. But we as adults don't laugh as much at clowns as kids do, right? Kids don't have the same thorough understanding and expectations of the world as adults, so they will buy into certain acts that adults don't...and clowns naturally perform more often for kids.

I would suggest that once kids have seen quite a few clowns and realize that they're doing an act, they find the outfit and most of the standard stuff less funny. (though they may still laugh at some of the jokes and so on) Just like how we might laugh at some of the clown's jokes if we haven't heard them before, but the outfit and the horn and so on are generally "ho-hum" and not funny. (at least to me).

(obviously some kids are terrified by clowns, etc etc but that's a separate issue)

Novelty

Of course there's no reason why you should be much concerned with novelty. The only reason I brought it up is that you were saying that your theory, if correct, would "redefine the field": I don't think it would.

I say that mainly because I think it provides a logical reason for both "superiority" and "incongruity" to be found in humor, which relates quite clearly to an evolutionary pressure and has some elegance and simplicity. I've found that "uniting theories" like this tend to quickly become the main theories in a field (from what I understand, M-Theory united the 5 or 6 competing forms of string theory and is now by far the main idea)

On top of that, the ability to study jokes using this system and adjust different things to (at least in my testing on myself) make them more and less funny in many different ways is unique enough that it's called "The Holy Grail of humor studies" in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article.

Uniting the previous theories under a single elegant umbrella and finding the "holy grail," in my opinion, would be a pretty major shift in a field of research.