Benign Violation
I first remember hearing this term a few years ago.
It was first proposed as a paradigm for comedy by A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren at the Humor Research Team / Humor Research Lab (HuRT / HuRL).
The topic was raised in the last couple of days, when she asked "Why is a fart funny?" and I tried to explain how a fart is generally unable to hurt you (it's generally benign), but is a violation of the senses. Some people don't find them funny, and that may be because their do not consider the gaseous aroma to be benign at all and this they are left with the violation which simply offends them...or they may not consider it a violation because they regularly encounter far worse assaults on their senses as a part of their daily lives, thus leaving them with the benign and something which really doesn't make much impact on them at all (farts are just a part of everyday life).
We can similarly see how some people might perceive racist comments as funny (because they can see that such comments are a violation to others, but since the comments don't endanger themselves, the comments are generally benign from their perspective)...meanwhile others just see them as vicious because they consider the comments to be malign violations of other people's identities.
It's something I've tried to incorporate into gaming to various degrees of success, often by adding degrees of surrealism and strangeness, then revealing something about the violation which renders it harmless but still strange. I don't know the best way to describe this, and I know that a lot of RPGs that have aimed to produce "funny" sessions have often fallen flat for me. It's usually been a good GM and the right group of players who have known one another's boundaries and what might be considered violations where the humour has arisen organically in session.
Just one of those ideas I'd like to explore in more depth at some time.
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