Playfulness and Humor:

"One can say that both playfulness and humor transform situations and environments, making them more enjoyable and bearable."

G.C. Mireault & V. Reddy, Playfulness

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"At its broadest, humor is playfulness (although unlike play, which can sometimes be serious, humor and playfulness are the antithesis of seriousness)."

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"The absence of spontaneity, of exuberance, of doing more than the necessary, and the attitude of wanting to do something, an attitude that precisely characterises play and playfulness, is what is missing in ..."

"This view of play is not a million miles from the notion of excess energy as a characterization of play (without necessarily accepting this as the motive for play as Spencer does)."

"joy in the midst of tragedy and indeed darkness in the midst of joy. It is precisely its precarious violation of norms, of walking on the edge of the tolerable, of seeing rules as things that can be invented, played with and broken for fun[.]"

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Rod Martin, Ph.D., is a University of Western Ontario psychology professor and one of the foremost thinkers in this field [the psychology of humor]. Author of The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach, he analyzed thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles and other scholarly works, looking for answers.

The American Psychological Association sums up his findings:

What these studies are adding up to is the idea that incongruity—when an idea or an object is out of place—is the heart of humor, Martin says. Truth plays an important role as well: The juxtaposition of the two things often gives people a new insight into a familiar situation, he notes. In fact, much of the enjoyment of humor may come from seeing familiar situations with new eyes.