Humor as the Real-Time Detection of Safe Short Circuits: A Relational Perception Theory
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Humor research has long centered on content properties: joke structure, incongruity, superiority, and release. This paper proposes a different explanatory path. Humor is not an evaluation of object properties but a real-time cognitive detection. Humor has two legs: the first is the safe short circuit, in which two originally separate pathways are unexpectedly connected; the second is safe co-construction, in which a pathway that did not previously exist is written into being, either alone or together with others. In this paper, "detection" covers both discovering an already existing connection and confirming that a new connection has been successfully written. Laughter is the current release that occurs when either type of safe connection takes place. This framework explains humor's most distinctive properties: it lives only the first time and dies the second; it can belong only to oneself and requires no other; it requires a safe context; it occurs in moments without boundaries, hierarchy, or judgment; and it appears more often in people who are not at war with themselves. This paper starts from the phenomenology of humor, proposes a safe connection detection theory, explains why laughter is the specific feeling form of this detection, analyzes the social dimensions and internal conditions of humor, and offers testable predictions.
Author: Yu, Menggang
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204569923
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