Is sense of humour learned or innate?

Comic skill is acquired by imitation and practice like any other skill

Question: Is sense of humour learned or innate?
Position1 of 2›: A sense of humor is learned
Argument‹2 of 2: Comic skill is acquired by imitation and practice like any other skill

The argument

Proponents of this position point to how comic ability is actually acquired. Children copy the people around them, repeating what drew a laugh and dropping what did not, and in doing so learn timing, delivery and the reading of an audience. The feedback is immediate and unambiguous, which makes laughter an unusually efficient teacher. What emerges is a repertoire built by trial, not an endowment present from the start. The same pattern holds in adulthood. Comedians describe their craft as something worked at: material is tested, revised and retested, pauses are adjusted, and an act that fails is rebuilt. People known among friends as funny are typically those who have had years of practice in a setting that rewarded it. Someone who grows up in a family where joking is constant arrives at adulthood fluent in it; someone who grows up where it was discouraged often reports learning it later, deliberately and with effort, which would be impossible if humour were fixed at birth. Proponents also note that a sense of humour can change over a life, and in a direction that tracks exposure. Tastes widen as a person encounters new comedy; forms once found tedious become funny once understood. Humour, on this view, behaves exactly as skills behave — improving with use, atrophying with neglect, and transmitted from those who have it to those who spend time with them — and nothing like a trait handed over intact. Because comic ability is built by imitation, feedback and practice in the way other skills are, this argument concludes, a sense of humour is learned.

Premises

[P1]Children acquire comic timing and delivery by imitating others and adjusting to whether the attempt drew a laugh. [P2] Comedians and ordinary people alike improve at humour through deliberate practice, and lose fluency without it. [P3] A person's sense of humour widens as they encounter unfamiliar comedy, tracking exposure rather than staying fixed. [C] Therefore a sense of humour is an acquired skill rather than an innate endowment.

Counter-arguments

Those who hold humour to be innate reply that practice produces polish rather than possession. A person can learn the structure of a joke, the value of a pause and the mechanics of delivery and still not be funny, because what draws people is apparent effortlessness, and effort shows. They add that siblings raised in the same household with the same comic influences still differ markedly, which practice cannot explain, and that comic talent is recognised as talent precisely because it resists teaching.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Imitation and feedback explain how comic technique is refined; they do not show where the underlying responsiveness came from. A child who adjusts to whether a joke landed already finds things funny, and that capacity is what is in dispute. [Rejecting P2] Improvement through deliberate practice is consistent with an innate endowment that practice develops, as it is for musical or athletic ability. The premise treats trainability as evidence against innateness when the two are compatible. [Rejecting P3] Widening with exposure describes the content a person finds funny rather than the sense of humour itself, and the premise needs the second. People given the same unfamiliar comedy do not converge on finding it funny.