Clean Humor: A perspective on what merits laughter

I was reminded the other day about something quite startling. Youth culture (from my own subjective experience) is focused on using additional vocabulary to make something more laughable for an audience. I remember witnessing much of this go on in my early adolescent years, and unfortunately had been caught into the trend at some point in my life. Using words like “fu**”, “sh**”, “mother***”, “son-of-a-***”, or “bi***” are used in this trend as a way to “catch” the audience’s ears and make sentences more entertaining. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not intolerant of individuals who cuss, but the initial argument I present focuses on how this usage of vocabulary isn’t necessary and sufficient to merit something said as something humorous. Humor in essence is to be something comical, something not only comical, but also purpose.

This purpose aspect of humor is intertwined with comicality and ranges across many common topics: geographical location, culture, maturity level, education, intelligence to even context. Cuss words don’t necessarily fit within any of these categories. An argument may be made that it may fit into the category of purposing the audience’s maturity, but my question to this is: “when has maturity truly been defined as being able to handle a minute amount of words that are used to express certain negative emotions of contempt, bitterness, to even hatred?” Even if cuss words are fit to be placed within the purpose of directing an idea to a mature audience, that is a minority of the majority of other purposes that humor serves, and cuss words per se lack. A viable solution to understanding what is truly humor and how we identify it in the real world may be that humor is based on concepts in real life, and these concepts are generally enjoyed by the audience as well as relatable.

The emotions of enjoyability or gratitude focus more on the positive effects of humor. I believe it is safe to state that joking, or humor in its entirety, is mainly purposed for audiences to experience positive emotions that will cause a response of laughter. Enjoyability is generally experienced in an audience when there is a minute amount of offenses intended toward a possible faction of individuals in the audience. Cuss words aren’t able to accomplish this since a sufficient amount of the time this vocabulary focuses on offending individuals or an object. This is likely to result in a display of mockery on someone/something, display an exaltation of oneself over another thing/person, as well as largely demonstrating a disregard for something significant or detrimental if not properly addressed. Gratitude should be experienced after a joke is told since it increases the emotional state of one’s happiness and therefore would more likely cause someone to laugh. I find very little implications of using cuss words in order to have someone think to themselves afterward: “Wow, I really loved how Mr./Miss So-and-so told me that I’m a bleep-blop/other so-and-so is bleep-blop/or that an idea that I’m open to/hold to is bleep-blop. This made me feel better as a person and thankful for having this experience in my life.” Of course, this example is general and vague, but it demonstrates the limitations that cuss words in jokes/humorous assertions or gestures may bring in a person experiencing gratitude and thus limiting the fulfillment of laughter, which constitutes what humor is.

“Any additional thoughts on this?”