“And now for something completely different”: Why do surprises provoke laughter?

The Minefield

Immanuel Kant called laughter a form of the disappointment of the understanding — which is to say, surprise — for which the body then compensates: “Whatever is to arouse lively, convulsive laughter must contain something absurd … Laughter is an affect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into a nothing.”

But surprises, it turns out, come in many shapes and sizes — from a slip or a fall, to a near-miss when you expected an accident, to an uncanny coincidence where you expected randomness. Does our laughter, then, express delight at the surprise, or a desire to set things straight?