Laughter

Laughter has two functions in the first sentence, sharing and reacting, and the second of those splits again since a person may be reacting to euphoria or to awareness of endoreality. That second case covers most of what humour is, since a joke usually works by making a law of endoreality briefly visible. The seven types run from healthy to harmful and the same sound serves all of them, which is why Marsh enumerates rather than generalizes. Experience of euphoria is the direct case. Self affirmation and self destruction are laughter turned inward in opposite directions. Social affirmation and social exclusion are the group forms, and exclusion covers the enormous genre of jokes based on ridicule of groups by negative image attributes, along with online trolling and workplace ribbing that only ever targets the same people. Endogroup domination and submission complete the set and describe laughter used to enforce or accept a position. The exosocial and endosocial distinction cuts across the seven. Exosocial laughter is a means of sharing euphoria and endosocial laughter is a means of strengthening the endosocial membranes containing a group's euphoria, and both sound identical from outside. Shared humour is consequential rather than trivial in her account, since globally shared jokes create exosocial bonds which can then support empathic bonds capable of carrying sorrow and fear. Marsh also said laughter at the negative image does not weaken endoreality but strengthens it.

Humour theory has three classical families. Superiority theory, from Hobbes, makes laughter an expression of triumph over others. Relief theory, developed by Freud, treats it as discharge of tension. Incongruity theory, the dominant position now, locates humour in the violation of expectation. Robert Provine's field research found most laughter occurs in conversation rather than in response to jokes and serves social bonding. Marsh's taxonomy absorbs several of these as types rather than choosing between them, since superiority is her social exclusion and domination, and bonding is her social affirmation, and what she adds is the endoreality condition, which grounds incongruity by identifying what the expectation being violated actually is.