Editing Joke (section)

=== Psychology ===
[[File:Sigmund Freud, by Max Halberstadt (cropped).jpg|thumb|Sigmund Freud]]
Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation.{{sfn|Carrell|2008|p=304}} In his 1905 study ''[[Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious]]''{{sfn|Freud|1905}} Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes.{{sfn|Oring|1984}} His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic.{{sfn|Morreall|2008|p=224}} These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion.

Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine ''[[Psychology Today]]'' lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the [[Values in Action Inventory of Strengths|Values in Action Inventory]] developed by the American psychologists [[Christopher Peterson (psychologist)|Christopher Peterson]] and [[Martin Seligman]] includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction.{{sfn|Ruch|2008|p=47}} For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased.

A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments.{{sfn|Ruch|2008|p=58}} These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their [[smile]]; the [[Facial Action Coding System]] (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles.{{sfn|Furnham|2014}} Or the [[laugh]] can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple [[Laughter#Types|types of laughter]] have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem,{{sfn|Ruch|2008|pp=40–45}} it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions.

The psychologist {{Interlanguage link|Willibald Ruch|de}} has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools.