Misattribution Theory
Misattribution is one theory of humor that describes an audience's inability to identify exactly why they find a joke to be funny. The formal theory is attributed to Zillmann & Bryant (1980) in their article, “Misattribution Theory of Tendentious Humor,” published in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. They derived the critical concepts of the theory from Sigmund Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (note: from a Freudian perspective, wit is separate from humor), originally published in 1905.
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