ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that humor can best be viewed as a subset of the broader category of play. It suggests that the child's information-processing frame of mind plays the key role in determining whether humor or some other form of enjoyment is experienced when incongruous relationships are entertained in fantasy play. The new play activity reflects the child's new symbolic capacity that initially consists of mere manipulation of images of objects in the absence of those objects and constitutes the beginning of imaginative or make-believe play. Imaginative play offers an ideal means of doing the child has complete control over the nature of the stimulation produced. Regardless of the position taken on the issue of whether all humor relies at some level on incongruity, theorists and investigators studying humor appear to agree that incongruous events can be humorous.
