Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind

by Matthew Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, Reginald B. Adams Jr.

This evolutionary and cognitive theory of humor seeks to reveal the complex science behind why we crack up.“A sophisticated analysis  . . . written with clarity, good cheer, and, of course, wit.” ―Steven Pinker, author of How The Mind Works Some things are funny—jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed—but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature—aka natural selection—cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.

Genres: Psychology, Humor, Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Comedy, Neuroscience

359 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

- Good morning, sir!

- Good morning, young fellows!

- Sir, will you tell us about last night's reception at the Qrzyrfian Embassy? Did you meet the beautiful new Ambassadress, of whom we have heard so much?

- Indeed, I had the honor of accompanying her in to dinner.

- Oh gosh sir. Are her ovipositors as large and pleasantly proportioned as the holovids suggest? Please excuse my vulgar curiosity.

- Young Kzzorf, I fear your curiosity will get you into trouble one day. But, since you ask, Her Sufficiency's ovipositors are even more bountiful and well-formed than popular reports suggest, and her cilia are arranged in a bewitchingly symmetrical and artistic fashion.

- Sir, humble thanks for answering my impertinent question. I -

- Enough chit-chat! We must get to work. Does the Earth Monitoring Team have the overnight reports?

- We do, sir. I have them in front of me.

- When I left last night, I recall there was some concern about a shaman or mage called... ah... "Aristotle"... who was conducting research in the Forbidden Area. Can you give us an update?

- Yes sir. We were briefly worried about Aristotle's investigations into the nature of humor, but I can confidently say that the threat has now been neutralized.

- Good work, Xxark. Please continue.

- There were two more reports during the early hours of the morning. A certain "Kant" and "Schopenhauer"...

- What outlandish names these Earthlings have! Colleagues of "Aristotle"?

- Not exactly sir. They -

- Students?

- Ah, more or less sir. They were conducting similar researches. We were particularly concerned by "Kant"'s suggestion that the nature of humor resides in the resolution of incongruity.

- I quite agree. You have him under close observation?

- No need sir, he has also been neutralized.

- Excellent, Xxark! In that case, can we move to the next -

- Wait sir! A new report just in from the field office. Here are the data sheets. A thaumaturge called "Dennett" and two of his acolytes...

- Well?

- Sir, I really don't like this. I don't understand how they could have moved so fast. They have built on "Kant"'s work and made substantial inroads into the Area... hm, hm... purpose of humor to resolve false beliefs... dynamic nature of reasoning... essential to sentient thought...

- Holy Jarx!

- ... contrast between first-person and third-person humor... modeling of mental spaces...

- But... but this is a Grade A emergency! Oh, why did I trust you fools? Why did I go to that reception? Curse the Ambassadress and her ovipositors! Make ready the hyperspace transmitter for an urgent broadcast to the Imperial Court...

- Wait sir, there's one more sheet. I don't know how I missed it. "Dennett" and his disciples have used their insights to develop a theory based on, ah, "just-in-time spreading activation networks". They have written a book about it.

- "Just-in-time spreading activation networks"??

- Here's a note from the Professor of Medieval Theology. She says it is roughly equivalent to the third of the Eight Misconceptions of Mind ascribed to Hrrrf the Heresiarch. So it's probably not quite as dangerous as we thought.

- !!!!

- And, ah, sir, you may have forgotten that today is the first day of the Spring Mating Season.

- You heartless imps! You scoundrels! You young scallywags! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha! Ha! HA!! You all deserve... you deserve...

- Sir?

- ... you deserve to be taken down to the most exclusive and decadent bar in town and plied with superior-quality dilute sulphuric acid until you are too intoxicated to stand. That's the best Spring Mating Season prank I've seen since the one we pulled on my superior officer a quarter-rotation ago. Did I ever tell you the story?

- You may have alluded to it sir.

- I shall recount all the details over lunch. Ah, I can see I've trained you well.

- Thank you sir.

- Not at all. But tell the field team to keep an eye on "Dennett". I still don't trust him.

- I've already contacted them sir.

- Good lad. Now get your coats. We have some serious drinking to do.

[Trevor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t really find biological explanations for complex social phenomena all that convincing. And so, I was inevitably going to struggle with this book. And then I also find evolutionary psychology, even when the story sounds convincing, to be trapped by the problem of having to work backwards from the punchline to the set up – in a kind of inversion of the joke format. While I was reading this book, I kept thinking a couple of things. One was ‘so what?’ – which is always a useful question to keep in mind, I guess. The other was the difference between humans farting and of dogs farting. You see, dogs don’t have a sense of humour, and so when they fart it generally makes no noise at all. However, very few things are as funny as the sound of a fart – and so we humans have evolved in a way to ensure that expelling methane and hydrogen sulphide, which would otherwise be purely offensive and likely to be treated as a form of assault, are accompanied by an amusing sound that ensures the person who might otherwise hurt you, is too busy laughing.

Okay – so maybe the evolutionary explanation of why we laugh is slightly more complex than my the ‘benefits of the sound of farts’ theory, but I can’t help noticing the ‘just-so-ness’ of these things.

And what about the ‘so what?’ question? Well, that is defended here more than the just so one, I think – they provide an explanation that we need humour as part of our mental armoury and they then ask people to fight with them on their ground to either defeat or support that argument. They also say, at one point, that human reason is more emotional than logical, and I wish they had spent more time on that.

The most important idea here is that we laugh when we notice a flaw in our reasoning, and since our mental models are ‘models’ (and therefore simplified) and the world is always more complex than these models, contradictions are inevitable. This makes humour a kind of pay-off for spotting stuff-ups in our reasoning, but, like pornography, humour has been hijacked by our culture and has been used to hyper-stimulate what had otherwise been a useful evolutionary system, and is thereby undermining its usefulness.

According to this model the base joke is one where we experience a sudden shift from one perspective to another – “a man walks into a bar and says, ‘Aww’. It was an iron bar.”

This makes sense of what is the nearly universal opinion about jokes – something repeated perhaps half a dozen times here – that nothing kills a joke quite like having it explained to you. To which the most obvious answer is Stewart Lee.

My main problem is that there are things about humour that I’m not sure are accounted for in this model. For example, I’m not too proud to say that I will judge you by what you find funny. In fact, I’m much more likely to judge you on what you find funny than I am to judge you on just about anything else you do – well, other than how you treat the waitress or if you speak down to someone ethnically different to you.

Much is made of the use of humour for sexual selection in this book. Gendered tropes are used as facts in ways you would expect in a book based on evolutionary psychology – that women find men funnier than men find women, that men use humour as a display to attract mates and also to enter into mock battles with other males. That said, I think I’ve heard at least half a dozen comedians (from Billy Connelly and Dave Allen down) say that being a comedian doesn’t in the least surround you with women, rather it surrounds you with men saying, “wait, wait, have you heard the one about…” So, there’s a bit of the old Dr John Gray in all of this, if transformed to ‘Women are after the penis of men who get them to laugh in bars.’ I’m really not sure how well sex and funny go together. Although, that said, if you are female and you want to have sex with a man, laughing at his jokes (funny or not) is probably a quicker way to his heart than through his stomach. All the same, one under-estimates the humour of women at their own peril. I say that because I do connect humour with intelligence, and if my experience in life has taught me anything at all, it is that on the whole women are much more intelligent than men. Click though your friends of friends here on Good Reads and do a quick gender count if you don’t believe me.

I don’t know if my ‘humour helps me find my tribe’ or my ‘humour helps me judge you and your likely intelligence’ are really alternative models to what is presented here – or if I really want a consistent model for humour – but I do know that your sense of humour isn’t really something you can fake. People think they can, of course. They pretend to laugh at stuff they don’t find the least bit funny. But years ago someone decided, my family being Irish, to buy us a copy of a Hal Roach record, and, as we like to say in Belfast, ‘for fuck sake…’ And as I was suffering the sorts of agonies I generally only experience when stuck in the middle of a group of men who start comparing the benefits of an XLMCS7 with those of a GVL287, a woman in the room took a fit of laughing and could not contain herself until the record had finally finished. It could not have escaped her notice that she was the only one in the room laughing, but even this was not enough to stop her. She could no more stop herself laughing at the jokes than I could start. We are our tribes.

[Stephen M]

Inside jokes are the pinnacle of pretension and signify an author that aspires to the lowest of the low in comedic quips. They are the type of joke that says that any person who doesn’t happen to be in a select group of a few people are not a part of the joke and wouldn’t “get it” anyway. What is this? What is this abstaining from the hard work of making a good joke? To make a joke with mass appeal and universality is one of the most challenging aspects of the medium of comedy. The onus of the efficacy of a joke is on the comedian and not who happens to understand an arbitrary set of limited known references. How many times has someone made a reference that only two people in the room get? They all smirk while everyone else squirms in the awkward waft of unknowing that follows. I can personally attest to the people who aspire to this type of joking and it never turns out well for them. In fact, it leads to a further marginalization of their inclusive group. Groups that aspire to buttress their own views and opinions behind a wall of esoteric allusions only further the superior-than-thou mentality that informs their jokes in the first place. The jokers come under the impression that no one else is allowed in on the joke they create, given that others would never “get it” and therefore they abstain from even trying to make the jokes accessible. Perhaps this is routed in personal experience when they were made to look foolish for trying to explicate their high-minded personal interests in mixed company. Perhaps they even took personal offense for the fact that their closely felt interests were not accepted, and were even met with derision (obviously, the less people involved in said interest or in-group the more personal it becomes). So it is quite plausible that they react by hiding behind this wall of obscurity which only those deemed worthy may enter, protecting them from the open court of majority opinion. And this would obviously shed light upon why they make such jokes but it is to faulty ends. It will only further the derision and disapproval that drove them away from including others on their jokes. Just listen to what Jay Rubin says about it:

“ bit ya! you fickers don’t make those jokes anymore! I'll get my payback on you batches! Then you’ll give me penky panic that I haven’t read enough literary pulp. Don’t make me get DD! He’ll tell you what’s up. I’ll throw cabbage at your faces! And then you’ll think Mark iz gawhjus! The Steve’s will come by and get you. Stephen M is wearing his blue IJ speedo. They all be going to penkfest and yell at Jus-tin for haitin’ on all the D. Mitch they’re reading and sign up for the J N-M booklist when he says Don’t Fucking Wonder because he’s been drinking and typing at 5 in the morning in Korea. And then Ian’ll turnip and write a bunch of Haiku’s that beet you across the face thyme after thyme. What music are you listening to while reading/reviewing this, eh? eh! Go write more interviews then. What, do I need to write a 100 word précis now? Or I’ll just come beat you over the head with Women and Men! Penis, bananas. And rockets coming out of penises in everyone’s books! I’m being conditioned by ya’ll and the dogs won’t shut up. No, wait that’s the cats, they’re talking to me again while naked Japanese women want to have sex with me. IFFER/ELAINE’s POSTING NAUGHTY PICS. I hope this makes BB’s reviewing hall of fame. And then we can have celebrity death matches with all our books. We can do it all night long! My books can beat up your books! I’ll just record this on the Big Audio Project anyway. Yeah, yeah this has nothing to do with the book! Flag it! Just don’t tie this to a chair and beat it with a hose! LGM. Karen reads soooo many fracking books! Oh well, we’ll just start up another group read anyway."

[Kamakana · Rating 3 out of 5]

if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

240507: ideas on jokes: computers may beat me at chess but no match for me at kick-boxing. very abstract paining: no paint, no brush, no canvas. just think about it. two kinds of people: those who need closure...

funding cuts at university, who needs what to do work? football, basketball, hockey etc. pays for itself and more. engineers need computer etc. business risk for future returns from graduates etc. art, we can get rid of them etc. least amount: theoreticians, paper, pencil, wastepaper basket? no, philosophers: paper, pencil...

the 'theory' aspect of this book is at best 'unconvincing'- the sociobiological arguments, the anticipation reversal just-in-time, but it does have (some) good jokes...

250217: sartre joke: j-p sartre. cafe left bank. working on draft of 'being and nothingness'. calls server. ms, may I have coffee with no milk? response, sorry monsieur, we do not have no milk, would you like coffee with no cream?

[Stephie Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book the authors try to elucidate humor and how it may be implement in the brain and a machine. They also think that it speaks to the workings of the mind in more general terms. To start the book they take a stab at what humor is for and how it may have evolved. They then go into the phenomenology of humor (i.e. what it is like, what elicits it, how it is expressed, etc.). After this dissection they go through the various theories of humor that have been proposed and attempt to show how they are all wanting in some manner. Then there is a chapter asking twenty questions that they think any theory of humor would have to successfully answer. They then move on to their own theory, which is dependent on emotion and which maybe foundational (i.e. there would be no humor without it). They also think that all cognition involves emotion, but not only that, they think emotion is necessary for cognition. They claim such emotions as curiosity, puzzlement, surprise, and insight are key components for cognition. They then go into what kind of mind is necessary for humor to be appreciated and generated. Their next key ingredient is their claim that is the emotion of mirth that is the centerpiece emotion in humor. They then introduce the intentional stance, which has been most fully developed by one author, Daniel Dennett. The next thing they tackle is the possible objections to their theory. They then look at humors’ closer relations and what is the purpose of laughter. They wrap it up by giving the bare bones of what is needed to program a machine to express and appreciate humor with a necessary component being programming in emotions.

Here are a few comments on specific parts of the text. Kindle locations are in brackets [].

[2565] “While a description of a situation contains a series of concepts that refer to, or imply, possible beliefs in the situation, events translated into language are always a vast underspecification of reality, and some of the relevant issues are not made obvious from the surface form.” This lends support to my thinking that we do not actually think in language. I do not know if any of the authors would go this far.

[3599] “There may be some justification, then, in old quip that ‘laughter is the best medicine’—humor just may play a role in healing depressive cycles.” It may improve the mood, and probably temporary at that, of the mildly depressed person. For the seriously depressed I doubt it even accomplishes this.

[3781] They end on: “If we ever set out to produce a robot that has epistemic capacities strong enough to perform the kind of reasoning we do, we must endow it with something like humor and the other epistemic emotions.” This hardly amounts to a practical program of research. They do not even give an outline of what such a program would look like.

I would agree with the authors’ premise that cognition, including cognition of humor, is dependent on the, what they call, the cognitive emotions. Their theory behind humor seems very plausible, but I suppose there are objections that they did not address in the book; although, they covered a lot of them. I do think they are guilty of a bit of oversell at the beginning promising a program to produce humor in a machine or robot in the last chapter. They admitted that it would not be an actual coded program, but still what they did in the last chapter could hardly be even considered a general program except in the sense of a broad plan of attack. I did enjoy the book, and it did include a lot of good jokes; although, not all were that funny by any means.

If you are interested in what humor is, how it is produced, how it is received, why we have it at all, and why we find things funny, than I would recommend the book. Just do not expect a coded program for a computer or robot to generate and appreciate humor any where in the book.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like I should give this a one-star review, but also a three-star review. Ergo, the compromise.

One stars for its personal appeal: I found it boring. Considering I love pop cog in general, I found this a little surprising. On reflection, I realized this book's appeal (except, perhaps, to comedians and professionals in the cog biz) is theoretical. It is unlikely that any disease will be cured if someone nails the theory of funniness, and the only profound change foreseeable in society at large will be when someone creates a humorbot, which appears to be some ways off. I've read plenty of books that only have theoretical applications, but they help me understand social problems that I find important (such as how the cognition of morality heightens partisanship and reduces the likelihood of our civilization solving some pressing problems).

Three stars for those that do find the theory of humor appealing. Even for them, this is a pretty dry book, I think.

For someone who wants to create jokes or humor, there is plenty of material here that will provoke thought as to where to experiment, and why those approaches are likely to work.

Oh, there is some humor interspersed, of course. There are plenty of examples of what the authors are dissecting, and some of them are good.

Here's a sample from the exploration of one-liners: "Dog for sale: Eats anything and is fond of children." If you get bored of the actual content and skim for the jokes, you'll find better and worse.

So here is the joke I transposed and updated from one of theirs:

An engineering team was demonstrating their voice-synthesis software to their executives, and decided to have some fun. So they built a cardboard robot on stage, hiding the computer within, programmed with a series of jokes making fun of management. On the day of the presentation they watched and enjoyed the mixture of discomfort and ironic amusement among the audience when, to their surprise, someone in a back row seat stood up and started complaining. "Managers play an important role in business! Just because engineers and their managers see the world from a different perspective isn't evidence that managers are stupid — I'm sick and tired of being treated like an idiot just because I've taken a job that isn't as hands-on as the people I'm managing".

The engineering team nervously glanced at each other, until the team manager stood up and apologized: "Uhm, we meant this in good fun, and certainly didn't intend any" —

The manager cut him off: "Quiet — shut up! I'm talking to the robot, not you."

This was actually a blonde joke in the book; I thought I would update it to a group that is more a politically correct target for scorn.

[Alexand · Rating 3 out of 5]

اعتقد الموضوع صعب على قولت الكتاب وضع قانون او قاعدة عامة عن الفكاهة لكن اعتقده او استفد منه هو بناء الفضاءة الصحيح يجعلك تبني النكتة الصحيحة
لهذا من الأشياء غلط تعمله و منهم انا انك تجي تنكت على الرايح و الجاي صحيح راح تبني نوع من الضحك و المزح لكن راح يكون
سطحي قوة النكتة الحقيقة يوم نكون مشتركين جدا في الثقافة و النكتة قيمته في تجاوز الواقع و التعالي عليه و قهر الظروف او ذكرى تريح النفس
من المشاكل هي لا متوقع حدوثه لكن داخل حدود الراحة من عدم حدوث الخطر للامانة يصعب تكوين نظرية لكن اشوفه هي مزج بين الربكة في السؤال و الحل
لا متوقع و تتفيه الموضوع حق السؤال او شيء تغى تعمله

في نكتة ضحكتني بالكتاب ما المشترك بين الكسندر المقدوني اعتقد و الدب الكرتوني نسيت اسمه
هناء نخلق نوع من الحيرة و الربكة الصعبة
لو كان الجواب مثلا كلهم قتلة راح تكون جوابك لتغطية الخلل او الربكة واضح و منطقي جدا
لكن لو كان جوابك تشابه ال التعريف , جوابك خلق فضاء جديد تماما عن الفضاء القديم فجعل النكتة داخل هل الفضاء الجديد اتفه شيء
ممكن نقول ان النكتة سحب قضية مركبة خلقه الفضاء و وضعه في فضاء جديد في هل الفضاء تصبح تافهة جدا مثل قضية دينية بنسبة للفضاء او العقل المسلم كبيرة و لكن بنسبة للعقل لا ديني تافهة جدا و نكتة او وضع شخصية الرب من شخصية له قداسة الي حياتنا اليومية راح نضحك
لهذا النكتة مثل قول نيتشه يعجبني مرة و ممكن صار علامة عندي
تبدا القضة بتراجيديا من ثمة تتحول الي نكتة ايت قضية في الغالب وقت القوع فيه تشعر يا هيا يا العالم راح ينهار و ممكن تنتحر
من تكبر قد تصبح ذكرة مضحكة جدا و كل يوم تتذكره فتجاوز كل قضية و الخروج من الفضاء مثلا و انت طفل الي الرشد
و ارجاع الموضوع من جديد يخلق النكتة

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting analysis: humor is a reward for the brain’s detecting and fixing incorrect assumptions in its thinking. It’s easy to see how such a mechanism is useful.

[Tiago Filipe Clariano · Rating 5 out of 5]

O título não diz tanto respeito ao assunto de um dos subcapítulos (as piadas construídas para serem entendidas apenas entre pessoas com determinada quantidade de informação), como pretende apresentar aquilo que está por dentro e, como tal, uma fenomenologia do humor na cognição (o que está por dentro da piada e dentro do processador da piada). A teoria de Hurley, Dennett e etc. capitaliza nas teorias da surpresa e do alívio, propondo que o humor é um aspecto evolutivo, cuja finalidade é a detecção de erros de interpretação causados por padrões que nem sempre se mantém, ou que são deliberadamente falseados.

O livro constitui um take completo, complexo e minucioso que colige várias teorias do humor ao longo dos tempos, apresenta pontos fortes e fracos a cada uma e não pretende uma teoria unificante que cubra todos os pontos cegos (apesar da assertividade com que os autores apresentam a sua teoria). A leitura torna-se fácil por via de curtos capítulos claros, concisos e inteligentemente introduzidos por uma piada, anedota ou episódio epigráfico, que aponta a direcção em que o capítulo seguirá ou o objecto da sua exploração. O mais interessante surge quase no final, quando se explora o cómico e o trágico e se rende, ironicamente, aos mecanismos dos estudos literários, especificamente, das teorias da recepção pós-Jauss.

[uosɯɐS · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...we propose that Mother Nature [bribes us with candies, metaphorically,] to get our brains to do all the tedious debugging that they must do if they are to live dangerously with the unruly piles of discoveries and mistakes that we generate in our incessant heuristic search. She cannot just order the brain to do all the necessary garbage collection and debugging (the way a computer programmer can simply install subroutines that slavishly take care of this). She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. That is why we experience mirthful delight when we catch ourselves wrong-footed by a concealed inference error. Finding and fixing these time-pressured misleaps would be constantly annoying hard work, if [nature] hadn’t arranged for it to be fun."

"The picture that emerges is a time-pressured, involuntary heuristic search for valid expectations, which generates mental spaces in which elements are constantly being tested. According to this model, then, basic humor occurs when

1. an active element in a mental space that has
2. covertly entered that space (for one reason or another), and is
3. taken to be true (i.e., epistemically committed) within that space,
4. is diagnosed to be false in that space - simply in the sense that it is the loser in an epistemic reconciliation process;
5. and (trivially) the discovery is not accompanied by any (strong) negative emotional valence"

An interesting book for people who are into cognitive science, philosophy, etc. If you have only the layperson's interest, I suppose it could seem too academic, but I liked it. If you are easily offended by dirty jokes, you will probably be offended by this book, since it includes many dirty jokes. However, the authors make the point that an objective survey of humor must admit that much of humor is "dirty" and any realistic theory of humor cannot ignore such a large percentage of the phenomena it seeks to explain. For example, would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who gets squeamish around blood?

[Frederic · Rating 2 out of 5]

E.B. White is said to have remarked: "Analyzing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." I am one of those people who started out very interested, but I couldn't wade through the academic prose of this book. I had to skim most of it, having lost interest and the will to live.

The title implies some kind of great leap in neurology that doesn't arrive. The authors speculate why humour exists, suggesting that it must have some evolutionary function to have survived to the present day. There are many references to other research in the field and to various models of humour, including surprise, superiority, incongruity, etc.

To save you the time of reading this book: It is hard, and probably pointless, to create a unifying theory that explains all humour. The authors claim to have created one, but I was too numb by that point in the book to recall it.

As a performer of standup comedy, I was more interested in the various ways by which humour can be created. There was some discussion of this, much of it drowned in a swamp of psychological jargon.

Here are a few things I remember: Laughter has a social element that is not always related to humour. For example, a desire to relieve tension or achieve social solidarity can lead to laughter that is not related to humour.

Hearing in a punchline the false assumption created by the setup of a joke, can lead to laughter. This is the goal of standup comedy. Women laugh more often than men, but men are far more likely to perform standup comedy. Women claim to seek men who are funny, perhaps because humour is a proxy for intelligence.

I knew most of that already and you probably did , too. The two stars I gave this book are mostly for the rigour of the author's research and for prose that was at least grammatically correct, if not captivating. I have read several books on comedy that offered neither rigour nor grammar.

[Nabeel · Rating 4 out of 5]

جميل أن نفكر بالأصل العلمي للضحك...
أفنى الكتاب أكثر من 300 صفحة للإجابة عن هذا التساؤل، الأمر الذي وجدته متعباً ومسهباً بعيداً عن بيت القصيد المباشر. الترجمة جيدة عدا بعد الأخطاء الإملائية والمتعلقة بترجمة المصطلحات الطبية أحيانا.
ربما البدء بالفصل السادس لمن كان على عجلة

[Jessica Zu · Rating 2 out of 5]

it raises interesting questions ... but somehow I'm not convinced.

[جُمان · Rating 2 out of 5]

فكرة الكتاب جميلة وتفسيراته ممتعة ومنطقية باستثناء انهم كل خمس كلمات حاشرين موضوع التطور ☺️
فعلاً صعب تسكّت ملحد 🏃🏻

[Boris Limpopo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hurley, Matthew M., Daniel C. Dennett, Reginald B. Adams Jr. (2011). Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. 2011. ISBN 9780262015820. Pagine 359. 29.95$

Un libro serissimo, naturalmente, anche se spesso capitoli e paragrafi sono introdotti da una barzelletta (ma joke è un po’ più polisemico di barzelletta).

All’origine del libro c’è la tesi di dottorato completata nel 2006 da Matthew Hurley, che può dunque essere considerato l’autore principale del volume. Adams e Dennett sono stati i suoi supervisors alla Tufts University. Inoltre, Dennett si era impegnato, nel suo Consciousness Explained del 1991, a fornire “a proper account of laughter” che andasse al di là della pura fenomenologia: sotto questo profilo si tratta dunque anche di una promessa tardivamente mantenuta.

Gli stessi autori introducono la loro tesi a partire da una nota nursery rhyme e anch’io seguirò le loro tracce:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do;
She gave them some broth without any bread;
Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
[The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes]

Old Woman in a Shoe

wikipedia.org

Soltanto che la storiella raccontata dai 3 autori prende una piega diversa:

(Their rooms where piled high with the playthings of boys:
comic books, fishing rods, discarded t6oys,
model planes, model trains and the dirt that goes with them
and huge piles of laundry that flowed out to the kitchen.
And try as she may to get them to sweep –
she’d scold them, and threaten, implore them, and weep;
she’d given them dust-cloths, and vacuums and brooms –
she just could not get them to clean up their rooms.)

… and, then, one night the old woman got a new idea:

She made them pajamas and bed socks of Swiffer cloth, and the next night while they slept she hid lots of candies around in their rooms, under the beds, under the piles of toys and clothes. In the morning when the children discovered the first of these candies, they went on a gleeful rampage, piling and sorting their belongings in the hunt for all the candies. By noon they were stuffed with candy-and their rooms were as orderly and clean as Martha Stewart’s front parlor. [59-64: il riferimento è come di consueto alle posizioni sul Kindle]

La tesi di fondo del libro è ben illustrata da questa metafora o parabola o filastrocca riveduta e corretta: la selezione naturale (impersonata da quella vecchia signora di Madre Natura) usa un trucco simile per indurre il nostro cervello a occuparsi del noioso debugging assolutamente necessario per sopravvivere (ancorché pericolosamente) all’accumularsi di scoperte ed errori accumulati dai nostri processi euristici. Non potendo semplicemente “comandare” al cervello di mettere in atto subroutine di pulizia (l’evoluzione non funziona così!), ha dovuto “corrompere” il cervello con il piacere: rendendo piacevole un dovere (o meglio una necessità). L’allegrezza che ci dà la scoperta di un errore d’inferenza è il senso dell’umorismo, che – una volta evolutosi – può essere “sfruttato” dagli stimoli supernormali inventati dai comici nel corso dei millenni. Come accade per il nostro gusto smodato per i dolci (e la pornografia).

Humor, we will try to show, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking.

Il volume sviluppa questa idea di fondo in modo molto articolato, ponendo e dando risposta a 20 domande sulla “teoria cognitiva ed evoluzionistica dell’umorismo” proposta dagli autori. Ma per avere tutte le risposte dovete per forza leggere il libro.

Resta il dubbio – ma mi potrete dare una mano a scioglierlo soltanto dopo avere letto l’opera – se una teoria così ingegnosa sarebbe potuta venire in mente ad autori non anglosassoni di madrelingua, per i quali l’aggettivo funny ha due accezioni principali (cito dal Merriam-Webster online):

a : affording light mirth and laughter : amusing
b : seeking or intended to amuse : facetious
: differing from the ordinary in a suspicious, perplexing, quaint, or eccentric way : peculiar — often used as a sentence modifier «funny, things didn’t turn out the way we planned»

Questi gli esempi (sempre dal Merriam-Webster):

He told a funny story.
He’s a very funny guy.
What are you laughing at? There’s nothing funny about it.
There’s something funny going on here.
She has some funny ideas about how to run a company.
“I can’t find my keys.” “That’s funny — they were here a minute ago.”
My car has been making a funny noise lately.
A funny thing happened to me the other day.
It feels funny to be back here again.
It’s funny that you should say that — I was just thinking the same thing myself.

* * *

Pignolerie: a un certo punto [1687] si dice che Being There (Oltre il giardino), del 1979, è l’ultimo film di Peter Sellars:

il nome del grandissimo attore è Peter (oddio, Richard Henry detto Peter) Sellers!
il suo ultimo film è il (peraltro non memorabile) Diabolico complotto del Dr. Fu Manchu (The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu), di cui sarebbe anche il regista (uncredited), anche se poi compare anche in Sulle orme della pantera rosa (Trail of the Pink Panther).

Trascuratezza imperdonabile per una casa editrice così importante. E dire che l’agente di Dennett è il leggendario John Brockman. In un libro sull’umorismo, poi!
Clouseau

wikipedia.org

* * *

Come al solito, vi propongo anche una selezione di citazioni – meno noiosa del solito, mi auguro, perché molte sono storielle e barzellette raccontate nel testo.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny….” – Isaac Asimov [98]

Q: How do you tell the sex of a chromosome?
A: Pull down its genes. [189]

Circular definition: see Definition, circular.[358]

There are only 10 kinds of people in the world – those who read binary and those who don’t. [483: una delle mie preferite]

Email is the happy medium between male and female. (Hofstadter 2007) [621]

Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic. [621]

The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face. [622]

An atheist explorer in the deepest Amazon suddenly finds himself surrounded by a bloodthirsty group of natives. Upon surveying the situation, he says quietly to himself “Oh God, I’m screwed!”
There is a ray of light from heaven and a voice booms out: “No, you are not screwed. Pick up that stone at your feet and bash in the head of the chief standing in front of you.”
So the explorer picks up the stone and proceeds to bash the living heck out of the chief.
As he stands above the lifeless body, breathing heavily and surrounded by a hundred natives with a look of shock on their faces, God’s voice booms out again: “Okay … Now you’re screwed.” [730]

We know why we are born curious: We are, as George Miller once said, informavores. Our hunger for novelty drives us to fill our heads with facts we might need some day [...] [895: questa è una cosa seria, e un argomento su cui avrei molto da dire. Non qui e non ora: vi prego di avere pazienza ...]

If insight is like orgasm as Gopnik’s metaphor declares, then, likewise, curiosity might be the analogue of lust. The epistemic hunger of curiosity – a burning desire to find reason and order – prompts us to fervently advance upon situations that require explanatory exertion (often to exhaustion) that ultimately leads to that religiously adored moment of insight. And just as lust suddenly dissolves into triviality with orgasm, so does the hungry feeling of curiosity hastily retreat upon the achievement of insight. Though it may have killed the cat, curiosity more than compensates for its cost: Without it we mightn’t seek answers or theories at all. [1037]

Epistemic uncertainty – the lack of a persuasive answer to a pressing question – has its own emotional accompaniment, also called uncertainty [...] [1048]

Love is like pi – natural, irrational, and very important.
– Lisa Hoffman [1052]

To say that you believe something is to say that that information successfully passed through your mind without triggering the emotions of confusion or humor, but quite possibly having triggered the sense of insight. [1190]

A mental space is a region of working memory where activated concepts and percepts are semantically connected into a holistic situational comprehension model. [1249]

People do generate – ceaselessly – a bounty of pertinent anticipations about the world, but such anticipations are not created through effortful enumeration of all possibilities followed by the comparisons of individual assessments of likelihoods for each possible future. Rather, the expectations we have at hand each are the result of current situation-pertinent thought or recollections of other pertinent-at-the-time thoughts [...] [1315]

The answer “I don’t know” is a perfectly reasonable one, though perhaps less likely, empirically, given the social pressure to provide an answer when confronted with an interrogation. [1338]

A belief is a commitment to a fact about the world. [1345]

What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know; it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.
– Mark Twain [1410]

Our brains are for “producing future” (as the poet Valery once put it) [...] [1541: non sono riuscito a trovare la citazione esatta. Qualcuno mi può aiutare?]

One might even venture the maxim: The more arduous and even dangerous the job, the more intense the reward system must be to ensure its completion. [1631]

Did you hear about the fellow whose whole left side was cut off? He’s all right now. [1709]

Gravity makes a big difference. [1735: qui è rilevante la nota, ma non sono capace di citare le note con il Kindle. Geoffrey Hinton ha proposto un interessante puzzle sull'argomento. Supponete di prendere una manciata di bastoncini di Shanghai, di lanciarli in aria e di fotografarli mentre cadono. Quanti, grosso modo – decidete voi il grado di approssimazione – sono orizzontali e quanti verticali? più o meno lo stesso numero, vero? No, falso! Ci sono infiniti modi di essere orientati orizzontalmente, N E S W NE SE SW NW eccetera, ma un solo modo di essere verticali. Rifate l'esperimento con una paccata di CD: la risposta è invertita]

We see some traces of an analytic mode of construction in the deliberate editing of jokes, making them more streamlined, punching up the punchline by changing the word order, adding a beat here, a sly misdirecting digression there; but this is, in effect, “postproduction” [...] [2010]

[...] in hearing a fiction, we enjoy it for its storytelling value, but we never commit to it as being reality and subsequently discover that it is not [...] [2495]

What did the 0 say to the 8?
“Nice belt.” [2626]

When you look at the picture that has no woman in it (in fig. 11.1), you cannot stop yourself from seeing a woman there even if you are told ahead that she is not there. The only power the high-level belief has is in telling you that it’s not really true, after you’ve already seen her. [2944]
Sandro Del Prete. Sunrise in the Nature Reserve

© Sandro Del Prete. Sunrise in the Nature Reserve

Huron (2006) argues persuasively that most if not all excellence in music involves the artful alternation of fulfilled expectations and unexpected (not entirely predictable) variations. [3039: Huron, David (2006). Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Bradgord Books. 2008]

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
I am not young enough to know everything.
Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace. [3119. Tutte e 4 di Oscar Wilde]

People often make the mistake of thinking that “humorous” and “serious” are antonyms. They are wrong. “Humorous” and “solemn” are antonyms. I am never more serious than when I am being humorous. [3151. È una citazione di Bertrand Russell]

“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” [3154. È una citazione di Gore Vidal]

Everybody anticipates, in mental spaces, as much of the relevant future as possible, to the best of their ability given the specific knowledge they have already collected. We aspire to decide on the basis of “all things considered,” but of course we must always truncate our considerations in order to meet the deadlines of effective action. So each of us is engaged in a never-ending round of heuristic search, building partial, and risky, structures-mental spaces-that depend on jumping to conclusions-as deftly as possible. [3329]

Both knowledge and ignorance are valuable strategic secrets. [3339]

(A “quidnunc” – from the Latin for “what now?” – is a person obsessed with the very latest news. We all have-and should have-quidnunc tendencies, since the latest news creates an information gradient that may be exploited by others at our expense.) [3343]

The pastime of permeating casual conversation with witticisms not only serves the simple selfish goal of flaunting one’s wit, but is also a method of trade in the currency of social capital. [3401]

[...] “Skinnerian” as opposed to “Darwinian” hard-wired organisms [...] [3651: subito dopo introduce i concetti di creature "Popperiane" e "Gregoriane"]

To be precise, you can’t give yourself gargalesis – the laughter-inducing kind of tickling we usually think of as related to humor. But, you can self-induce knismesis, which is the kind of uncomfortable tickling sensation felt when an insect crawls on your skin or even when you drag a feather lightly across your skin (Hall and Allin 1897). [4754]

[Christopher Gontar · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book presents an original theory of humor, while also arguing that classic theories and other more recent ones are deficient. That critique is good though it could be better, for example in the case of benign violation. The book's own theory, that humor is covertly entered belief, is easily disproved.

But two short initial criticisms are useful. First, it does not seem maladaptive to be amused at one's own error, as this book claims. Self-directed humor is not maladaptive, even if one of humor's benefits is a positive signal of failure in others (that positive signal, anyway, need not have been the product of evolution). Other-directed and self-directed humor are compatible and conceptually identical. Another reason the maladaptation thesis doesn't hold is that, like dishonesty and lapses of attention, some amount of masking of pain is harmless.

The authors' evolutionary theory, that humorous amusement is the byproduct of a bribing of the brain to avoid error, is obviously false. The pain of error has served that function for any sentient life prior to humans, and the complexity of humans makes no difference in their case. The authors do not seem to think that perception would acquire a sensation of reward just because it became second nature. But humor is inherently social in origin, not merely instrumental as this book insists. There is no need for humor as a reward of basic perception. Humor makes much more sense in this way--by presenting oneself as regarding self-deception as an object, one distances oneself from this idea in the view of others. This is the reason--by far the dominant one--that humor is so attractive socially, and the lack of it ranks so low in such attraction.

Covertly entered belief is often possible in jokes, because many of them do one of the following:

1. Make a false assertion or elicit a false assumption, the truth or falsehood of which is unknown to the audience, then correct it.

Or in a more juvenile form,
2. Try to sneak in a spoken assertion that the audience knows is not true. An example of type 2. will refer to some falsehood such as a rooster laying an egg, with the unrealistic idea that some listener might miss this. It's basically a sort of bullying in joke form.

Only in case 2., however, is covertly entered belief necessary for humor, because the listener would have to overlook a stated falsehood. There is no way covertly entered belief is necessary for humor in type one above. And since the theory purports to say something necessary about jokes, it only applies correctly to type #2.

In the joke about a man fishing at a skating rink, our belief that he is fishing at a pond could be covertly entered, but it need not be. The man's lapse could be covertly entered belief, but is not so necessarily. What is funny about this joke? Only that the pond/rink difference is like a misinterpretation, and an allusion to a social error or to illusion more generally.

Apart from jokes, the role of covertly entered belief is quite marginal. Humor can arise from overt careless false beliefs, for the believer if he is corrected or for others if he remains deceived. So if my glasses are lost and on my head, it is likely that I'm not thinking about that location though I surely could be. What's funny about the glasses being hidden on the head is not covertly entered belief, per se, but what makes that theme significant: that the situation resembles a self-deception of superiority. That proposition is as solid as a rock. Instead of self-deception, some prefer the phrase illusory superiority, or the so-called "Dunning-Kruger effect." But the one essence of humor is not illusory superiority because that allows for imposed deceptions, whereas those deceptions are funny because they allude to self-deception. The concept from which all humor ultimately derives is not passive deception, because it does not imply necessarily that some object is desired. Self-deception meets that criterion, so that all humor ultimately derives from it. And humor or no humor, the covertness of belief is not a necessary feature.

A mistake is funny only if we see in it a reminder of culpable self-deception. We can do that even for a person who is passively fooled. Any lack of attention alludes to this idea. Even covertly entered belief does, and it describes accurately one aspect of the experience of falling or stumbling, as on an unexpected object. But the reverse can't be happening; selfish self-delusion can't be the reminder of covertly entered belief. Humor always derives from the image of self-deception represented anywhere (the response, amusement, copies this image). It is impossible that this view of humor could be overturned or improved, and it certainly ought to be accepted as the authoritative view in this field. It is true of jokes as well, although, as this essay reveals, the primary effect of jokes is not to cause and correct audience error. But the essence of humor has to be a blameworthy or "selfish" self-deception, because self-deception can be non-blameworthy. To deceive oneself about one's overall situation, for example, to take a bright view of life, is not reproachable.

Hurley, Dennett and Adams rightly debunk the incongruity theory, despite its being the most accepted view. The following comments on this dominant theory are my own. This is not from the book.

Incongruity does apply to a pratfall, yet this requires explanation. The humor actually derives from pretension, absentmindedness and death. Dangerous falls provide a crude amusement, just as every slight fall alludes to the potentially fatal. In all such cases, humor arises because small concerns appear excessively important when life is sacrificed for them (in this case not in a noble sense).

The other version of the theory, "resolution," completely misuses the word "incongruity." The erroneous authoritative view of jokes is that they present some double meaning, or some puzzling remark to be reinterpreted or understood, and the humor is nothing but our comprehension of the change or the puzzle. This view is false. In the simplest jokes, double meaning is a sign of self-deception, because it generally has the power to deceive. These jokes are glorified witticisms. In the other class of jokes, by contrast, humor is a sort of irony. Something obscure or ambiguous subtly points to some unexpected fact.

In other words, in the irony joke a foible or complaint is mentioned, linked to another idea by the double meaning. If one needs an example, note the entire joke about the piano player and containing the line "do you know your monkey just dipped his balls in my martini?" In an example like that, something painful or foolish is exposed obliquely using double meaning as a screen, in the same manner in which we whisper to someone sarcastically. The standard appropriate incongruity theory claims that the humor here consists in our understanding the joke, our getting it and resolving an incongruity. This only identifies a small part of the humor, a supplement and not the main humor. The true theory assimilates the old "incongruity resolution" theory. Every kind of humor possible falls under the theme of self-interested self-deception. For example, the real reason isolated puns or groaners are funny is their association with the possibility of misinterpretation.

This book's theory of humor fails completely. The authors claim that humor happens if and only if "an assumption is epistemically committed to in a mental space, and then discovered to have been a mistake." That does not necessarily imply covertly entered belief, but either way, it doesn't define humor. This view is a development of the erroneous tradition that the humor in jokes consists, at bottom, in the experience of solving them. That is a repetition of the humor, but not the idea itself. Covertly entered belief is a failed illustration of that aspect, which jokes do exhibit. The view that the essence of jokes is to solve them is widely accepted, and informed Freud, Krichtafovich and many others.

The authors hold that when the correction of a committed belief is funny it is because the believer lacked a certain degree of awareness of the belief. The awareness that they have in mind is as much as would be necessary for direct consideration of the belief. And they hold that when such correction is not funny, the believer was more conscious of the belief and could at least consider it directly. These assertions look very doubtful, since many conscious mistakes are funny and many non-conscious ones are not. But the reference to commitment is equivocal, as one kind of commitment requires awareness and another does not.

The first way of disproving the theory is to show that it is not a good description of jokes. The following is from the book.

(A) Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you've got a mile head start, and they're barefoot.
(B) Before you criticize someone, you should (as we say metaphorically) walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you've got a mile head start, and they're barefoot.

The idea in this example is that a covertly entered belief in (A) becomes overt in (B), which should kill the humor. Here is why that argument doesn't support the theory.

The audience still does not know what belief will be corrected, while this belief correction is humorless anyway. Even if covertly entered belief was funny, in (A), the figurative use could have been consciously considered, without being written in as in (B), but with no significant loss of humor. The parenthetical, "as we say metaphorically" is not necessary to make the belief overt. The theory thus seems to confuse the first and third person--it tries to write our response into the joke.

But once the joke is understood, the unnecessary phrase is seen as an explanation. The joke now seems to analyze itself, only after one gets it.

Covertly entered belief is not funny. It is minor. The main humor (here the authors are right to focus on language) is in the shift to literal from figurative--and all kinds of meaning-based humor work by referring vaguely to an abstract personality that loses a quest for social acceptance (or hospitality). That's why puns are funny; all other explanations in history have failed. In the lesser aspect, the joke isinuates that there is something pompous about the figurative saying. This joke does not appear to be another "sarcastic" appropriate incongruity, but only fits that theory in the sense of being a puzzle.

Consider this example of the authors.

A man and a woman who have never met before find themselves in the same sleeping carriage of a train.
After the initial embarrassment they both go to sleep, the woman on the top bunk, the man on the lower.
In the middle of the night the woman leans over, wakes the man and says, "I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm awfully cold and I was wondering if you could possibly get me another blanket."
The man leans out and, with a glint in his eye, says, "I've got a better idea... just for tonight, let's pretend we're married."
The woman thinks for a moment. "Why not," she giggles.
"Great," he replies, "Get your own damn blanket!"

On the Hurley-Dennett-Adams theory, what is funny here is that one moment both the woman and the audience think the man means by "married" to keep the woman warm by sharing his bunk with her, and then both she and we discover that his meaning is different. But such a correction itself, inert and strictly about meaning, is not funny. It is funny that the woman is fooled and mistaken about the man's intention. That is a different belief, motivated and desire-laden, which is allusive and unexplained by the Hurley-Dennett-Adams theory. Though the woman's experience is not stereotypically comical it alludes to that condition.

There's no humor in the correction of the meaning-belief either in our case or for a character in the joke. That would only be the direct source of humor if the initial use of "married" was a conventional meaning that another character failed to understand. Thus the verbal humor too is allusive. This example, also, does not seem to fall under "appropriate incongruity." There is a delay in this joke before a word is reinterpreted. Like the example of "a mile in their shoes" this ambiguity signifies a classic type of gaffe. It alludes to a truly comical situation in which meaning is in fact misconstrued in a way that is self-centered. When double meaning is funny on its face, it signifies the misappropriation of a society or other social member, in an act that alienates the one who does the misreading.

That there is also a reference to marriage being a pleasurable experience that turns out to be unpleasant is only further proof of my interpretation. Heaven that turns out to be hell is just a repetition here or echo of the same theme of selfish self-deception.

The authors try to apply their theory of "covertly entered belief" to the way jokes thinly conceal what is going on, but also to the audience's awareness of some clear false belief (not of its falsehood, but that it is believed). These are two different things which this book does not well distinguish. The former topic is relevant with respect to how jokes either succeed or are spoiled. But this does not explain jokes, and what the book mainly presents is the latter (viewer's false assumptions). The book first mentions covert entry as a first-person perspective, such that it means not vocal entry, but mental (Hurley, 121). But it is supported by the argument that revealing any concealed feature of humor would "telegraph the punch line" (Hurley, 118, 134, 230).

The authors are dishonest where they arbitrarily designate a hasty false assumption as committed or not (see p. 199-200). It is not "commitment" that they truly have in mind (which is ruled out for careless assumptions by definition) but rather a confidence expressed merely by not thinking about one's belief.

In the joke about a patient and hospital administrator, the humor does not require any covertness in the beliefs, "the nurse is talking to the patient" or even "the doctor is competent."

(63) Do you mind telling me why you ran away from the operating room?" the hospital administrator asked the patient. "Because the nurse said, `Don't be afraid! An appendectomy is quite simple.'" "So..." "So?" exclaimed the man, "She was talking to the surgeon!" (Hurley, 168)

The book says: We tacitly go back and insert "to me" after "the nurse said," but only because of the content that follows.... (Hurley, 168)

But if we consciously assume that "the nurse was talking to the patient," the joke does not die. The jokes turns on "An appendectomy is quite simple." No belief about who is addressed matters, when this phrase can be treated as ambiguous. It is revealed that "X is simple" can mean "It is easy to perform this operation," and also, a meaning that fits no better or worse, "it is safe to receive this operation."

[Adam Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dan Dennett wrote proudly of this book in his biography "I've Been Thinking" so I thought I'd give it a read. I thought the book was great. It provides a naturalistic explanation for humour. It explains humour as what happens when an assumption is taken to be true and then uncovered to have been a mistake.

The authors use this theory to explain why we find it funny when we find our sunglasses on our head after searching the house. It also explains a variety of jokes. Take the joke attributed to Steven Wright: "Some people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of width." We find this funny because we take for granted that one can be afraid of heights but had probably never considered that we treat height differently to other spatial dimensions in this context.

The mistaken assumption doesn't have to be ours. This is why the explanation of humour above is framed in terms of "an assumption" rather than "my assumption". Take slapstick. When a pompous man slips on a banana peel, his assumption that the world cares about him is corrected. We project this updated assumption on him in our mind.

And humour can also go "meta"! Take a form of humour often deployed by Rowan Atkinson. We are drawn into expecting that Mr Bean will realise he has made a mistaken assumption. We laugh when we discover that it is us who made the mistake. Mr Bean’s luck is inverted. This means we end up underestimating his luck in some contexts and overestimating it in others: “of course we should have known that Mr Bean would glide through this otherwise awkward situation!”

The book is scattered with hilarious jokes which make reading about cognitive science and human evolution really enjoyable.

[mavromou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este libro es un muy bueno, al igual que «La psicología del humor» que leí anteriormente, este también tiene un enfoque integral del Humor y repasa las teorías mas reconocidas que intentan definirlo.

Tomando la analogía de los cinco ciegos, los autores construyen un modelo que pretende representar el fenómeno del humor, ayudándose con las teorías ya conocidas pero dejando en claro en que fallan y en que aciertan cada una de ellas.

Los autores definieron un conjunto de 20 preguntas que cualquier modelo que pretenda representar el humor debe responder. Tomando una gran variedad de ejemplos humorísticos se pone a prueba su modelo usando también algunos casos difíciles y contra ejemplos tomados de una gran revisión bibliográfica que ostenta el libro. No obstante, me estoy poniendo al tanto de una de las revisiones de un usuario de Goodreads en donde hace una critica muy específica a esta teoría. Todavía no tengo el conocimiento para comprender de buenas a primeras estas especificidades pero voy a tenerlas muy en cuenta para mi estudio.

Sin perjuicio de lo dicho me parece una lectura interesante para los que les interesa estudiar el tema en profundidad ya que toma de referencia la teoría de la incongruencia (una de las mas aceptadas) y la profundiza con mas nivel de detalle.

[Anne Libera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots to think about here- the base idea is that humor evolved from a "debugging mechanism" in the human brain that made it pleasurable to discover that using a heuristic had resulted in a commitment to a false mental picture or script.

I appreciate the distinction between first person and third person humor (this is one that I think is particularly useful to comedians) as well as awareness of the relativity of humor and the effects of complex/thick humor. They also dig into the social aspects of humor in a way that makes sense to me as a comedy theorist and that I don't think I've seen expressed previously.

I should say that this is not a pop science book, it's a bit of a slog to read.

[Anuj Apte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book that sketches a neuroscience based theory of humor and explains the emotional underpinning of cognitive processing that gives rise to mirth. It also addresses various evolutionary questions that arise along the way and in particular why mirth and laughter arose in the first place and how cultural developments have shaped the form they take today. Along the way are various interesting discussion, in particular of how humor might arise in an Artificial general intelligence system and how emotions and dispositions are shaped by the evolutionary pressures facing the gene which are not always transparent to the individual carrying the gene.

[Ridhima · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of funny - huh moments and in them scattered were some funny - haha moments too
Informative in a humourous way. .. a good comprehensive study of almost all contemporary theories how cognitive science understands humour.
.. Still very early it seems for science to riddle out the teasing smile ..

[Jorrel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started off really strong, but the last third of the book became really jargon filled and difficult to comprehend. I really like what the book was going for, but I think the tone shift made the book much harder to finish. Overall, I still thought it was a fascinating book, but I can’t completely recommend this book unless you’re trying to approach it as an academic.

[Shellie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book if you like sexist interpretations of humor.

[Saunaguy · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://digitalsauna.wordpress.com/20...

[Spencer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have been done in 100 pgs. Really interesting topic though. It's always fun to read something that makes you think about things in a different way.

[Divya Pathak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for the initial study on Humour research.

[Michel Ortega · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is the best theory of humor that I've ever read. Really liked the book and everything is explained.

[Clivemichael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Academically pedantic, but peppered with jokes some better than others. A challenging read.

[Jerry Wall]

Overdone academic thesis with many jokes and jokes within jokes.
A bit overdone, for me, in places

[Tapasya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reconstruct of humour

There are two possibilities once you read this book. Either you become very clear about your knowledge or you realise that I don't know what is number two