Understanding Asexuality

The content of humor is often sexual in nature. Why? It may partly have to do with our tendency to experience tension in relation to sexual matters, and this tension may serve as a readably accessible psychic “fuel” for driving the mechanics of laughter and humor. The philosopher/poet Herbert Spencer (1860) and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1960), along with more recent theorists (Zillmann & Bryant, 1980), have championed variations on “tension relief” models of humor, partly to help explain the sex/humor association, although these models can be applied to other tension-related content in humor too.

Sexual tension can come in two forms. First, there is what might be called a “natural” kind of sexual tension, as human sexual response is associated with a buildup of both physical arousal (e.g., vaginal lubrication, erections) and psychic arousal (feeling “turned on”). Yet even catching a glimpse of a hot-bodied passerby has the ability to arouse some titillating psychic tension. Thus sex is naturally associated with tension, both when actually engaging in it and when we are briefly reminded of it. Some sexual tension, however, is often more neurotic in nature. This is the kind of tension to which Freud and others largely referred. Neurotic sexual tension is created by most cultures in their tendency to limit and control sexual expression. Parents, teachers, lawmakers, police, and others are the primary agents of this control, as they act as socializers and enforcers of the rules and regulations of sex. In short, people have bottled-up neurotic sexual tension because they can’t always do what they want sexually. This is a fact of civilized life, at least if you believe Freud and similarly minded scholars. Moreover, even the most sexually liberated among us cannot entirely escape these repressive clutches of the agents of civilized society, and thus even the most sexually liberated people still retain some residual neurotic sexual tension. Some people, though, have more pent-up neurotic sexual tension than others, perhaps because of their sensitive dispositions or perhaps because of a particularly rigid and repressive childhood.

This tension or “psychic energy”—natural or neurotic in origin—may be diverted and used as the fuel that helps drive laughter and humor. When the best comedians, amateur and professional alike, tell a joke or an amusing story, they provide rich detail and aptly time their punch lines, because these devices aid in building and releasing tension for full comic effect. Sex is an easy subject matter through which comedians ply their trade. This is in part because the tension necessary for full comic effect is already there; it just needs the right details and some good timing to harness and release it in the right way.

Laughter is pleasurable for most people, and part of the pleasure has to do with a release of tension. The release of tension, whichever way it is achieved, is pleasurable. Interestingly, the physical mechanisms of tension relief involved with laughter are similar to that of an orgasm—spasmodic muscle contractions (myotonia). Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that energy created in one domain—sexuality—may be harnessed and effectively released through another—laughter/humor—with similar physical mechanisms. Or at least that is the theory behind tension-reduction models of humor. Indeed, some theorists have speculated that one of the adaptive functions of laughter in humans, the only species that laughs,{Some animals may have a form of rudimentary laughter (e.g., “proto-laughter” of chimps), or at least show some of the evolutionary physical precursors to laughter, such as excited and rhythmic physical behaviors (e.g., tail-wagging in dogs) (Eastman, 1936). There may also be some precursors of the often “rule-bending” element of humor in the play fighting of animals (Gervais & Wilson, 2005; see also later in this chapter).} is that it allows for the release of all kinds of psychic tension, which may be unhealthy if pent up too long. If we weren’t able to laugh, so the theory goes, we would all eventually explode, at least psychically.{It is popularly believed and has often been stated—in the Bible, in the popular media, and so on—that laughter is “good medicine.” The implication of this widespread belief is that it must have evolved because of its physical health benefits. However, some theorists suggest that laughter’s direct health benefits are minimal, or at least not yet sufficiently demonstrated. Instead, humor evolved because it had “social” benefits, easing social tension and allowing for smooth navigation among our fellow humans (Provine, 2000), and any health benefits are indirect and work through these social benefits (e.g., social support).}