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?
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?