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Humor is a uniquely overdetermined phenomenon. Much of the behavior involved in the active stimulation of others with humor and in being passively stimulated by humor has an automatic, stereotyped quality. The one who is actively humorous must take care that his timing fits with the content of his joke or story in a very specific way so as to maximize the comical effect. His bearing during the telling of a joke is shaped by expectations and intuitions concerning the relationship between himself and his audience. To “put over” a joke successfully he needs to gauge the momentary intrapsychic vectors in his listener. The participation of the passive member of any humor exchange is even more restricted in his responses with respect to laughter, speech, smile and gesture.
It is therefore striking that the thematic content which may find humorous expression is extremely varied. Jokes expressing sexual motives, aggressive impulses or delight in incongruity all demonstrate the same automatic interactional patterns between the person doing the joking and the one receiving it.
This essay will inquire into the active and passive determinants of humor; its stereotypic forms and its contextual range. The psychoanalytic theory of sexual development is the most unified approach to the problem of sex differences. Nevertheless, even within analytic theory, varying opinions prevail about what might be called the temperaments of the sexes. In order to discuss sex differences in the sense of humor it will be helpful first to summarize the theories of Freud and Klein on the development of boys and girls.