"All kinds of incongruity can get us laughing" I first heard from a talk or interview by John Cleese (and impossible to find, with his serious stuff on the scie

"All kinds of incongruity can get us laughing" I first heard from a talk or interview by John Cleese (and impossible to find, with his serious stuff on the science behind humor lost in all the results of him being funny). And it ties into evolutionary biology. We find the unexpected "funny", which chemically reinforces our memory of the unexpected, so we learn and next time it might not be unexpected and we react faster. And laughter signals others, so they can learn from it too. We even learned to reenact and verbalize, allowing others not even present to learn. So we laugh at pratfalls and are later morally aghast at ourselves thinking the lucky escape from serious or fatal injury was funny.