Humor is a phenomenon that involves at least the following:

      a) something unusual/incongruous, and

      b) our perception of it as "funny"

It is more complex than that, of course. First, consider the stimulus

   1) Not every unusual thing or situation will be found funny.
        It needs to be unusual enough to get our attention
        but not so unusual as to confuse or frighten us

   2) It is generally unusual in a specific way:
        Two seemingly disparate things or perspectives
        are tied together in a surprising way

The response is also more complex than it may seem at first.

   1) We must notice that something (potentially) funny has occured

   2) We must understand why or how it could be seen as funny, and

   3) We must enjoy it; i.e., we must actually find it funny

As illustrated here, many different folks are looking at humor from many different angles. They are like the blind people in the old story about the elephant, in that each one is investigating a different aspect of the phenomenon. And, like those classic blind investigators, they tend to believe that they have discovered The Truth and want to compete amongst themselves to decide who is "right."

To further confuse the investigation, many of them are not even looking at the elephant. They are looking around it at vaguely related things like laughter, social context, and fun in general. They are just as blind, just as argumentative and, of course, just as wrong.

This will be an ongoing effort to sort through what is actually known. Carefully transcending terminology, it may be possible to set aside the investigations into peripheral phenomena, at least for now. It may be possible to identify aspects of humor on which the various investigators agree. These are presumptively on the right track. It may be possible to specify the areas of controversy and debate. These will merit further discussion, comparison, testing and re-framing to move closer to resolution.

I want to begin with a long list of statements that seem clearly wrong, many of which begin with "Humor is nothing other than ... " It may be possible to systematically set these aside and bracket them from the scholarly discussion of humor, so we can make progress.