Humor as a Minimal-Structure Threshold into Presence: Shared Tolerance Window, Structural Cost, and Conditions of Collapse

This paper proposes a structural–temporal theory of humor, arguing that humor is neither a psychological response nor an effect to be evaluated by success or failure, but a specific kind of structural event. Humor is analyzed as a minimal structural threshold through which a state of presence can be entered. Presence, in this account, is not a subjective feeling or behavioral involvement, but a structural–temporal condition in which an experiential configuration has not yet been handed over to established interpretive or evaluative mechanisms for finalization, rendering a pure spectator position structurally unavailable. The paper argues that humor operates by opening a shared tolerance window, within which unfinished transformational structures can be temporarily sustained without requiring commitment, completed understanding, consistency, or responsibility for consequences. This tolerance window is not a stable space or social agreement, but a short-lived structural interval that delays abstraction and evaluation. The minimality of humor does not imply low risk or ease of control; rather, it designates a structurally non-binding mode of entry whose operation is accompanied by high structural cost and inherent instability. Within this framework, the dissipation or collapse of humor is not treated as failure, but as a natural structural exit that occurs when transformational markers disappear, abstraction stabilizes, or structural misalignment prevents the window from holding. Humor is thereby distinguished from rhetoric, metaphor, and irony, not by affective tone or communicative intention, but by its position relative to finalization and the locking of understanding positions. By introducing presence as an independent analytical axis and by describing humor in terms of entry, tolerance, and collapse, the paper repositions humor as a transient structural phase rather than a stable taxonomic category. The analysis deliberately brackets psychological, behavioral, and normative explanations, offering instead a set of structural terms for describing how humor emerges, holds, and exits as a temporal configuration.