I’m glad you bring up this topic. I think that explanation makes a lot of sense: behavior that is wrong, but wrong in subtle ways, is good for you to notice—you I.D. outsiders—and so you benefit from having a good feeling when you notice it. Further, laughter is contagious, so it propagates to others, reinforcing that benefit.
I want to present my theory now for comparison: A joke is funny when it finds a situation that has (at least) two valid “decodings”, or perhaps two valid “relevant aspects”.
The reason it’s advantageous in selection is that, it’s good for you to identify as many heuristics as possible that fit a particular problem. That is, if you know what to do when you see AB, and you know what to do when you see BC, it would help if you remember both rules when you see ABC. (ABC “decodes” as “situation where you do AB-things” and as “situation where you do BC-things).
Therefore, people who enjoy the feeling of seeking out and identifying these heuristics are at an advantage.
To apply it to your examples:
1) It requires you to access your heuristics for “displayed on a TV screen” and “on top of a TV set”.
2) It requires you to access your heuristics for “muffin as food” and “deficiencies of foods”, not to mention the applicability of the concept of “baldness” to food.
3) Recognizing different heuristics for interpreting a date specification.
4) I don’t know if this is a traditional joke: it became a traditional joke after the tradition of minister/priest/rabbi jokes. But anyway, its humor relies on recognizing that someone else can be using your own heuristics “minister/priest/rabbi = common form of joke”, itself a heuristic.
Sir, I wish you no offense, but I happen to find my own theory more pleasing to the ear, so it befits me to believe mine rather than yours.
And for some sentences that don’t imitate someone behaving wrongly:
I’d say that for the first three jokes, your theory works about as well as mine. Possibly worse, but maybe that’s just my pro-me bias. The last one again doesn’t fit the pattern. Recognizing that someone else can be using your own heuristics is not a type of being forced to interpret one thing in two different ways—is it?
I notice that in the first three jokes, of the two interpretations, one of them is proscribed: “on TV” as “atop a television”, a muffin as a non-cupcake, “next Wednesday” as the Wednesday of next week. In each case, the other interpretation is affirmed. Giving both an affirmed interpretation and a proscribed interpretation seems to violate the spirit of your theory.
And a false positive comes to mind: why isn’t the Necker cube inherently funny?
I want to present my theory now for comparison: A joke is funny when it finds a situation that has (at least) two valid “decodings”, or perhaps two valid “relevant aspects”.
I too have a proto-theory. My theory is that humor is when there is a connection between the joke & punchline which is obvious to the person in retrospect, but not initially.
Hence, a pun is funny because the connection is unpredictable in advance, but clear in retrospect; Eliezer’s joke about the motorist and the asylum inmate is funny because we were predicting some other response other than the logical one; similarly for ‘why did the duck cross the road? to get to the other side’ is not funny to someone who has never heard any of the road jokes, but to someone who has and is thinking of zany explanations, the reversion to normality is unpredicted.
Your theory doesn’t work with absurdist humor. There isn’t initially 1 valid decoding, much less 2.
“That isn’t how the joke goes”, said the cowboy hunched over in the corner of the saloon. The saloon was rundown, but lively. A piano played a jangly tune and the chorus was belted by a dozen drunken cattle runners, gold rushers, and ne’re-do-wells. The whiskey flowed. In the distance, a wolf howled at the moon as if to ask it “Please, let the night go on forever.” But over the horizon the sun objected like a stubborn bureaucrat. The bureaucrat slowly crossed the room, lighting everything at his feet as he moved. “Thank God I remembered to replace the batteries in this flashlight”, the bureaucrat thought. The light bulb in his office had gone out again and would need to be replaced. Unfortunately that required a visit to the Supply Request Department downstairs. As he walked past the other offices he heard out of one “Fish!” as if the punchline to a joke had been given. But the bureaucrat heard no laughter.
The Secretary of Supply Requests seemed friendly enough and she had even offered him something to drink. He took a swig and the continued: “the light bulb in my office has...”. Gulp. “It needs to be replace...” The bureaucrat looked around. Suddenly he was feeling dizzy. Something was wrong. He looked down at the drink and then at the Secretary. She smirked. Her plan had succeeded. He had been poisoned! The bureaucrat didn’t know what to do. He was terrified. He felt vertigo, as if he stood at the top of a tall ladder. The room started to spin. Counter-Clockwise. Then all of a sudden everything went black. A few seconds later he felt the room spinning again—strangely, in the opposite direction—and suddenly, he lit up.
Exactly. What are the 2 valid decodings of that? I struggle to come up with just 1 valid decoding involving giraffes and bathtubs; like the duck crossing the road, the joke is the frustration of our attempt to find the connection.
Well, surrealists like to clutter their apartments with random things like giraffes and clocks. One interpretation is just that they need to hold the giraffe so it doesn’t get in the way of the lightbulb. They also need to move a ladder to reach the bulb, but the ladder is in a closet, and the closet door is blocked by all those clocks. The bathtub is just a handy open space to put them in. And they are surrealists, so why not put the clocks in the bathtub?
Mm. This might work for some proofs—Lewis Carroll, as we all know, was a mathematician—but a proof for something you already believe that is conducted via tedious steps is not humorous by anyone’s lights. Proving P/=NP is not funny, but proving 2+2=3 is funny.
I’m glad you bring up this topic. I think that explanation makes a lot of sense: behavior that is wrong, but wrong in subtle ways, is good for you to notice—you I.D. outsiders—and so you benefit from having a good feeling when you notice it. Further, laughter is contagious, so it propagates to others, reinforcing that benefit.
I want to present my theory now for comparison: A joke is funny when it finds a situation that has (at least) two valid “decodings”, or perhaps two valid “relevant aspects”.
The reason it’s advantageous in selection is that, it’s good for you to identify as many heuristics as possible that fit a particular problem. That is, if you know what to do when you see AB, and you know what to do when you see BC, it would help if you remember both rules when you see ABC. (ABC “decodes” as “situation where you do AB-things” and as “situation where you do BC-things).
Therefore, people who enjoy the feeling of seeking out and identifying these heuristics are at an advantage.
To apply it to your examples:
1) It requires you to access your heuristics for “displayed on a TV screen” and “on top of a TV set”.
2) It requires you to access your heuristics for “muffin as food” and “deficiencies of foods”, not to mention the applicability of the concept of “baldness” to food.
3) Recognizing different heuristics for interpreting a date specification.
4) I don’t know if this is a traditional joke: it became a traditional joke after the tradition of minister/priest/rabbi jokes. But anyway, its humor relies on recognizing that someone else can be using your own heuristics “minister/priest/rabbi = common form of joke”, itself a heuristic.
Food for thought...
Sir, I wish you no offense, but I happen to find my own theory more pleasing to the ear, so it befits me to believe mine rather than yours.
And for some sentences that don’t imitate someone behaving wrongly:
I’d say that for the first three jokes, your theory works about as well as mine. Possibly worse, but maybe that’s just my pro-me bias. The last one again doesn’t fit the pattern. Recognizing that someone else can be using your own heuristics is not a type of being forced to interpret one thing in two different ways—is it?
I notice that in the first three jokes, of the two interpretations, one of them is proscribed: “on TV” as “atop a television”, a muffin as a non-cupcake, “next Wednesday” as the Wednesday of next week. In each case, the other interpretation is affirmed. Giving both an affirmed interpretation and a proscribed interpretation seems to violate the spirit of your theory.
And a false positive comes to mind: why isn’t the Necker cube inherently funny?
I too have a proto-theory. My theory is that humor is when there is a connection between the joke & punchline which is obvious to the person in retrospect, but not initially.
Hence, a pun is funny because the connection is unpredictable in advance, but clear in retrospect; Eliezer’s joke about the motorist and the asylum inmate is funny because we were predicting some other response other than the logical one; similarly for ‘why did the duck cross the road? to get to the other side’ is not funny to someone who has never heard any of the road jokes, but to someone who has and is thinking of zany explanations, the reversion to normality is unpredicted.
Your theory doesn’t work with absurdist humor. There isn’t initially 1 valid decoding, much less 2.
I love absurdist humor.
How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to hold the giraffe, and one to put the clocks in the bathtub.
“That isn’t how the joke goes”, said the cowboy hunched over in the corner of the saloon. The saloon was rundown, but lively. A piano played a jangly tune and the chorus was belted by a dozen drunken cattle runners, gold rushers, and ne’re-do-wells. The whiskey flowed. In the distance, a wolf howled at the moon as if to ask it “Please, let the night go on forever.” But over the horizon the sun objected like a stubborn bureaucrat. The bureaucrat slowly crossed the room, lighting everything at his feet as he moved. “Thank God I remembered to replace the batteries in this flashlight”, the bureaucrat thought. The light bulb in his office had gone out again and would need to be replaced. Unfortunately that required a visit to the Supply Request Department downstairs. As he walked past the other offices he heard out of one “Fish!” as if the punchline to a joke had been given. But the bureaucrat heard no laughter.
The Secretary of Supply Requests seemed friendly enough and she had even offered him something to drink. He took a swig and the continued: “the light bulb in my office has...”. Gulp. “It needs to be replace...” The bureaucrat looked around. Suddenly he was feeling dizzy. Something was wrong. He looked down at the drink and then at the Secretary. She smirked. Her plan had succeeded. He had been poisoned! The bureaucrat didn’t know what to do. He was terrified. He felt vertigo, as if he stood at the top of a tall ladder. The room started to spin. Counter-Clockwise. Then all of a sudden everything went black. A few seconds later he felt the room spinning again—strangely, in the opposite direction—and suddenly, he lit up.
How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
One. They call in two surrealists, thus reducing it to an already solved problem.
How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? Fish.
Exactly. What are the 2 valid decodings of that? I struggle to come up with just 1 valid decoding involving giraffes and bathtubs; like the duck crossing the road, the joke is the frustration of our attempt to find the connection.
Well, surrealists like to clutter their apartments with random things like giraffes and clocks. One interpretation is just that they need to hold the giraffe so it doesn’t get in the way of the lightbulb. They also need to move a ladder to reach the bulb, but the ladder is in a closet, and the closet door is blocked by all those clocks. The bathtub is just a handy open space to put them in. And they are surrealists, so why not put the clocks in the bathtub?
A man walks into a bar and says “Ow.”
Doesn’t that work for math proofs, too?
Could you enlarge?
Mathematical proofs are easy to verify but hard to generate. A proof is unpredictable in advance but clear in retrospect.
Mm. This might work for some proofs—Lewis Carroll, as we all know, was a mathematician—but a proof for something you already believe that is conducted via tedious steps is not humorous by anyone’s lights. Proving P/=NP is not funny, but proving 2+2=3 is funny.
It’s not funny if it’s wrong.
Not all proofs.