Cultivate your Funny Bone?: The Case against Training Amusement

We value a sense of humor in people, and amusement is something that we enjoy. So why not enhance and train your ability to be amused? In this paper, I investigate whether our ability to be amused can be trained. I adopt the idea that training a capacity requires improving control. If we cannot improve the control of a capacity, then we cannot train that capacity. I show that we cannot improve the control of our capacity of amusement because of the cognitive process underlying amusement. Hence, you cannot train your funny bone!