Factual Incongruity and Humor

I recently started reading Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought by John Lippitt. In the introduction he places SK in the incongruity tradition of humor. Lippit distinguishes logical from factual incongruity and explains Marie Collins Swabey’s fourfold division of the latter from Comic Laughter: A Philosophical Essay. I will explain this division and include some of Lippitt’s examples (this all comes from pages 8-10 of Lippitt).

1. Equivocation or ambiguity.

   1. Double entendres.

      1. “I was in Budapest last year, I tried to pick up a little Hungarian, but she slapped my face.” (Groucho Marx)

      2. “I woke up one morning and my girlfriend asked me if I slept good. I said, ‘No, I made a few mistakes.’” (Steven Wright)

   2. Jokes that trade on equivocation between literal meaning and figure of speech.

      1. “I said to my wife, ‘All things considered, I think I’d like to die in bed,’ and she said, ‘what, again?’” (Rodney Dangerfield)

   3. Comic stories with mistaken identity plots.

2. Fallacies of irrelevance or non sequitur.

   1. “In Mel Brooks’ film Young Frankenstein, when Dr. Frankenstein faces a major problem, his servant Igor makes a suggestion. ‘You know’, he says thoughtfully, ‘it’s at times like these that I remember what my old dad used to say to me.’ His hopes raised, the doctor asks eagerly what that was. Igor smiles nostalgically, then barks out his father’s words: ‘Hurry up and get out of that bathroom! You’re in there all day and all night; get a move on, and give someone else a chance!”

3. Humor arising from “disparities in subject matter, modes of operation, and conventions of two different worlds.”

   1. “Consider here a cartoon in which an insect exterminator explains his technique to a client: ‘their first reaction is one o fright and hysteria. Then a strange apathy seems to seize them, and then they lose the will to live.’”

4. Humor arising from “strikingly contrasting qualities at the farthest extremes of the scale from one another.”

   1. Laughter at the juxtaposition of an elephant and a mouse, for instance, stems from a perception of ‘the bizarre fertility of nature’; that two such distinct creatures are both members of the genus animal.

Lippitt thinks that the fourth category actually collapses into the third, which seems plausible. Anyway, I thought the division was interesting and am curious how successful it is in being exhaustive of factual incongruity. Let me know if you think of any examples that do not have a home in the division.