Section_ⅠWarming_Up_&_Reading_-_Pre­reading

　　1．A sense of humour is really one of the keys to happiness. It brings much fun to people's life. Do you know any humour?

　　2．Do you want to be a humourous joke­teller? If so, please read the following passage to know about it.

　　What is it that makes people laugh?

　　More than two thousand years ago the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle looked on jokes as the pleasure from a feeling of winning by showing we're better than someone else in a certain way.

　　According to Aristotle，all jokes depend mainly on showing some shortcomings in another person or group of persons - that is, putting it clearly, on showing that they are worse off than ourselves. Jokes raise our good opinion of ourselves at someone else's expense.

　　Showing how much better than other people we are is only one reason we like jokes. Someone may also use a joke to express their anger or their coldness or any other kind of action that is not acceptable to us. We feel free to laugh when we hear about someone sliding on a banana skin.

　　The joke lets us express those attitudes which are not usually acceptable to society. This is probably the reason why some of the jokes are so popular with certain people.

　　Besides, all jokes depend on our enjoyment of laughing at something that is strange and out of place because it's different from things which are happening around it. The same situation can be either sad or pleasant, depending entirely on how strange it is.

If a girl in a bathing suit falls into a swimming pool, we don't laugh because nothing unusual has happened. But if a man in a smart suit falls in, the situation is at once unusual in a pleasant way and we laugh.