What's the evolutionary reasoning behind humans having humor? I don't understand why it exists

Why the fuck would I have met a hermit

>Unvocalized panting occurs in response to surprise. This panting is part of a generalized increase in physiological arousal. Like the gaping mouth of the “surprised” face, panting prepares the animal for action.
>For highly social animals (like humans and great apes) the biggest dangers come from other members of our species (conspecifics).
>Threats from other conspecifics also evoke unvocalized panting. The threatening animal recognizes the panting as a successful provoking of a momentary state of fear in the threatened animal. The evoked fear means that the threatened animal has been successfully cowed. Panting becomes a signal of social deference. As an aside here, we might note that dogs exhibit “social panting” where submissive animals begin panting when a dominant animal (sometimes a human owner) appears.
>Being able to evoke panting in another animal reassures the dominant animal of its dominant status. Similarly, panting in the presence of another animal serves to communicate one’s submissiveness. For the submissive animal, this communication is valuable because it establishes the animal’s submissive status without having to engage in fighting.
>In order to enhance the communication of deference, panting becomes vocalized — that is, the vocal cords are activated. Vocalized panting becomes a specific signal of deference or submissiveness.
>Vocalized panting generalizes to most surprising circumstances.
>In some primates, “panting-laughter” is reserved specifically for surprise linked to nondangerous outcomes. In highly socialized animals, most dangers are social in origin, so panting-laughter is commonly associated with social interaction.

>In hominids, panting-laughter becomes explicitly social. Mutual panting-laughter within a group becomes an important signal of reciprocal alliance, social cohesion, and peaceful social relations.
>The contrast between negative reaction feelings and neutral/positive appraisal feelings evokes an especially pleasant state. Human culture expands on these agreeable feelings through the advent of “humor” as an intentional activity meant simply to evoke laughter.
>Laughter becomes commonplace in hominid social interaction. In order to reduce the energy cost of laughter, the inhaling-exhaling form is replaced by the more efficient vocalized exhaling (i.e., modern human laughter).

There isn't enough of a pattern to say this is the case definitively. Humans vary enormously from our closest species like Chimps although from very small changes overall.

Humor could have taken on any number of uses when you add in a reasoning animal that thinks like a human. It is definitely linked to surprise but say for instance the extremely dark humor of soldiers, it can be an immensely useful coping mechanism.

Meet a hermit = married bachelor
How can you generalize about hermits if you don't meet a sizable proportion of them?

There seem to be two aspects of the humor to be addressed here.
1) The person doing the humoring
2) The person being humored
Obviously, humoring would be selected for only after a population develops an appetite to be humored.
The real question is why did people develop the appetite to be humored to begin with?
Maybe the people that found joy in this pointless existence wanted to persist more than the people that didn't.

Lrn2meme fgt pls

Consider the following statement: Biological organisms are driven by the "Four Big F's": Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, Mating. Some subjective observers who read this for the first time think it is funny. Why? As the eyes are sequentially scanning the text the brain receives a complex visual input stream. The latter is subjectively partially compressible as it relates to the observer's previous knowledge about letters and words. Wikipedia says: Smiling can imply a sense of humour and a state of amusement, as in this painting of Falstaff by Eduard von Grützner. That is, given the reader's current knowledge and current compressor, the raw data can be encoded by fewer bits than required to store random data of the same size. But the punch line after the last comma is unexpected for those who expected another "F". Initially this failed expectation results in sub-optimal data compression - storage of expected events does not cost anything, but deviations from predictions require extra bits to encode them. The compressor, however, does not stay the same forever: within a short time interval its learning algorithm kicks in and improves its performance on the data seen so far, by discovering the non-random, non-arbitrary and therefore compressible pattern relating the punch line to previous text and previous elaborate predictive knowledge about the "Four Big F's." This saves a few bits of storage. The number of saved bits (or a similar measure of learning progress) becomes the observer's intrinsic reward, possibly strong enough to motivate him to read on in search for more reward through additional yet unknown patterns. While previous attempts at explaining humor (e. g., Raskin 1985) also focus on the element of surprise, they lack the essential concept of novel pattern detection measured by compression progress due to learning. This progress is zero whenever the unexpected is just random white noise, and thus no fun at all.

I heard that one in psyche 101 kek

do babies laugh?

do they laugh because something's funny? Or are they imitating others? Or for a comepletely different reason?

playing peek-a-boo with a baby makes it laugh something about the absurdity of it illicts the reaction and I don't believe that babies are capable enough to connect the dots that people laugh because of absurdity

elicit**
>inb4 brainlet

Is it possible to forget laughing? We seem to forget crying...

That's not relevant to the point which is explaining where the phenomenon came from in the first place. None of what you wrote contradicts that origin explanation.

Human conversation basically boils down to ball busting. If you like the person it's done playfuly and jokingly, if you hate the person then it's just done with anger

You don't forget crying. You condition yourself to suppress the urge, because you refuse to live to the fullest.

...

debugging
youtu.be/TzN-uIVkfjg?t=2m

Coping mechanism

>calvin & hobbes
how could one singular comic be so absolutely based?

The philosophical implications of humor and it's relationship to irony aren't something that you're to see given their due discussion by any individual in any particular field, outside of well, perhaps those who are more philosophically minded in the first place.

Asking a question like that, to me, is akin to asking the question of existence in the first place.

Humor arises from irony or the unexpected. In a way, our own existence is like that, it would seem. This is also intertwined with creativity. I believe that humor, at it's most basic level, is a human interpretation of the great mystery of existence, something that I feel has been inadequately explained by religion or science thus far.

It can also get you laid.

Bill Watterson is too pure and talented for this world to deserve him

I have no idea what this is about but I like it.

>tfw to smart for unfunny

Here's a thought. Maybe there is not an evolutionary reason. Maybe it just happened, and was not detrimental, so was retained. Maybe it's linked to something else that IS advantageous.

Or maybe the obvious social functions of humor the reason.

Or Niven --where humor is linked to an interrupted defense mechanism, which baffles the Puppeteers.

this and it's probably something of an artifact of higher intelligence. Nonsense and blatant mistakes can be funny, but it takes intelligence to be able to discern nonsense from sense. And it would be evolutionarily advantageous to be able to recognize nonsense reflexively and to enjoy doing so.

This. A lot of people seem to think that every trait humans possess is a byproduct of evolution. As far as we know, evolution is not sentient nor is it managed by some sentience, so traits come and go, and a lot of them are kept around just because they are simply not detrimental for the perpetuation of the species.

It's the limbic system's way of helping your brain cope with life's futility so you don't kill yourself.

It's a highly visible signal/proxy of verbal intelligence. This is useful in asserting authority in a social hierarchy and attracting mates.

I hate germans

This is wrong though. Take a geez at this jolly fucker.

youtube.com/watch?v=N6pcYTGezRw&t=1171s

What do you even mean? Explain yourself.

who wrote it?

It's a positively selected trait in female human mate selection. It doesn't seem obvious at first but it is likely correlated with some other favorable traits which overall improve chances of procreation.