Hwæt. I’ve been thinking about humor, why humor exists, and what things we find humorous. I’ve come up with a proto-theory that seems to work more often than not, and a somewhat reasonable evolutionary justification. This makes it better than any theory you can find on Wikipedia, as none of those theories work even half the time, and their evolutionary justifications are all weak or absent. I think.
So here are four model jokes that are kind of representative of the space of all funny things:
“Why did Jeremy sit on the television? He wanted to be on TV.” (from a children’s joke book)
“Muffins? Who falls for those? A muffin is a bald cupcake!” (from Jim Gaffigan)
“It’s next Wednesday.” “The day after tomorrow?” “No, NEXT Wednesday.” “The day after tomorrow IS next Wednesday!” “Well, if I meant that, I would have said THIS Wednesday!” (from Seinfeld)
“A minister, a priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Is this some kind of joke?’” (a traditional joke)
It may be noting that this “sample” lacks any overtly political jokes; I couldn’t think of any.
The proto-theory I have is that a joke is something that points out reasonable behavior and then lets the audience conclude that it’s the wrong behavior. This seems to explain the first three perfectly, but it doesn’t explain the last one at all; the only thing special about the last joke is that the bartender has impossible insight into the nature of the situation (that it’s a joke).
The supposed evolutionary utility of this is that it lets members of a tribe know what behavior is wrong within the tribe, thereby helping it recognize outsiders. The problem with this is that outsiders’ behavior isn’t always funny. If the new student asks for both cream and lemon in their tea, that’s funny. If the new employee swears and makes racist comments all the time, that’s offensive. If the guy sitting behind you starts moaning and grunting, that’s worrying. What’s the difference? Why is this difference useful?
Juergen Schmidhuber writes about humor as information compression and that plus decompression seems about right to me. Being on TV is decompression from a phrase-as-concept to the component words, a pun, a switch to a lower level analysis than that which adults favor (a situation children constantly have to deal with). Muffin and cupcake is a proposal for a new lossy compression of two concepts to a new concept with a “topping” variable, which would be useful if you wanted to invent, for instance, the dreadful sounding “muffin-roll sushi”, “next Wednesday” is a commentary on the inadequacy of current cultural norms for translating concepts and words into one another even for commonly used concepts. The last one is a successful compression from sense data to the fact that a common joke pattern is happening and inference that one is in a joke.
I wish that we had a “Less Wrong Community” blog for off-topic but fun comments like the above to be top level posts, as well as an “instrumental rationality” blog for “self help” subject matter.
I wish that we had a “Less Wrong Community” blog for off-topic but fun comments like the above to be top level posts, as well as an “instrumental rationality” blog for “self help” subject matter.
I believe that humor requires harmless surprise, Harmlessness and surprise are both highly contextual, so what people find funny can vary quite a bit.
One category of humor (or possibly an element for building humor) is things which are obviously members of a class, but which are very far from the prototype. Thus, an ostrich is funny while a robin isn’t. This may not apply if you live in ostrich country—see above about context.
Endless YouTube nutshot videos, Anonymous hacking#Epilepsy_Foundation_forum_invasion) an epilepsy support forum with flashing GIFs, the infamous banana peel on the sidewalk… Not particularly high-brow humour but many people find such things amusing.
The harmless surprise hypothesis fits my data pretty well. But are you sure repetition-based humor isn’t just conditioning people to laugh at a certain thing (catch-phrase or a situation)?
On the other hand, butt-of-a-joke hypothesis also sounds plausible.
I have spent a great deal of time thinking about humor, and I’ve arrived at a place somewhat close to yours. Humor is how we pass on lessons about status and fitness, and we do that using pattern recognition. I heard a comedian describe comedy by saying, “It’s always funny when someone falls down. The question is, is it still funny if you push them?” He said for a smaller group of the population, it is. Every joke has a person being displayed as not fit—even if we have to take an object, or an abstraction, and anthropomorphize it. This is the butt of the joke. The more butts of a joke there are, the funnier the joke is—i.e., a single butt will not be that funny, but if there are several butts of a joke, or if a single person is the butt of several layers of the joke, it will be seen as funnier. The most common form of this is when the goals of the butt of a joke is divorced from their results.
Joke 1: This is funny because Jeremy displays a lack of fitness by not being able to properly process the phrase “on TV.” This has one butt—Jeremy.
Joke 2: This joke has two butts. One is the muffin, which is being declared unfit for being bald. The other is the comedian’s character, who is being displayed as needlessly paranoid toward a benign object (a muffin).
Joke 3: This joke isn’t that funny when displayed in text form—the comedy is in the performances, where both conversation participants are butts of the joke for arguing so intensely over something so petty.
Joke 4: The butt of this joke is the traditional joke it’s mocking.
As for your outsiders’ behavior:
New student asks for both cream and lemon: Displays he is unfit by not understanding the purpose of what he’s asking for.
New employee swears and makes racist comments: This isn’t funny in person, but it is funny if a few conditions are met. The first condition is that you’re sufficiently removed from it (i.e., watching it on TV): Imminent threats aren’t funny because this isn’t a status lesson, but a status competition. The second condition is that it must be demonstrated how this makes the person unfit. For example, if the new employee is making these comments because she thinks they demonstrate her social savvy, that starts becoming more funny again (notice Michael Scott in The Office). Or, imagine the new employee has Tourette syndrome and is actually a very sweet girl, who constantly apologizes after making obscene statements. This also would elicit laughs.
If the guy sitting behind you starts grunting and moaning: The threat is too imminent, but if you remove the worrying aspect of it, this is ripe for a punchline. Once again, you have to demonstrate how he is unfit. Perhaps he says, “I’m trying to communicate secretly in Morse Code—grunts are dots, moans are dashes.”
EDIT / ADDENDUM: This also explains why humor is so tied up in culture—you don’t know the purpose of certain cultural habits. Until you intuitively grasp their purpose, you will have a hard time understanding why certain violations of them are funny.
For example, take the Simpsons episode where Homer’s pet lobster dies and he’s weeping as he eats it. In between bouts of loud, wailing grief, he sobs out comments like, “Pass the salt.” This would be hard to understand for cultures that don’t express grief like Western culture does.
Puns are a hard fit, I admit. I especially have a hard time with them because they don’t produce laughter in me; I have a hard time recognizing them as humor unless they’re presented in the same way as other jokes, or pre-identified as jokes.
But that joke has status built into it, as well—for example, it’s not funny to say “star-mangled spanner sounds like star-spangled banner.”
Personally, I call these “Bob Hope Humor,” which is when people laugh to demonstrate that they “get” the joke, not because it actually tickles them.
Puns are pretty much “the formula” for making jokes. Though they can get old, they’re always recognizable as jokes, which suggests that a theory based on “multiple meaning/decoding/framing” is probably on track. Hm, I wonder who suggested such a theory… ;-)
Slight variant: Humour is a form of teaching, in which interesting errors are pointed out.
It doesn’t need to involve an outsider, and there’s no particular class of error, other than that the participants should find the error important. If the guy sitting behind you starts moaning and grunting, if it’s a mistake (e.g. he’s watching porn on his screen and has forgotten he’s not alone) then it’s funny, whereas if it’s not a mistake, and there’s something wrong with him, then it isn’t. Humour as teaching may explain why a joke isn’t funny twice—you can only learn a thing once.
Evolutionarily, it may have started as some kind of warning, that a person was making a dangerous mistake, and then getting generalised.
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.
Yeah, humor-as-status-shift doesn’t fit into Warrigal’s or SilasBarta’s explanations very well. Then again, since evolution tends to reuse things already made, there’s little reason to expect there to be only one use for humor.
Humor doesn’t make much sense to me, and neither does music. I have no conscious understanding of what distinguishes things that are funny from things that aren’t. I simply recognize some things as funny and others as “not funny”, and I can even set out to write funny things and succeed, but I have no theory of humor.
I saw somewhere an article, though I unfortunately forget where exactly, about research noting that humor is also tied to social status. Jokes are funnier when told by a superior than someone below your own position.
As a personal observation, jokes are also more fun when there are lots of others who also laugh at them. They’re also a great way to break the tension in a group situation. Humor has a very important social function, though obviously it might also have a function like the one you’re describing, as “it’s a social glue” doesn’t explain why some things are funny and why others aren’t. (Though I do think the social function is much greater.)
A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.
Nice. I always find humor to be one of the most intuitively baffling things for my consideration. Maybe that’s because my sense of humor is just too f*....
Hwæt. I’ve been thinking about humor, why humor exists, and what things we find humorous. I’ve come up with a proto-theory that seems to work more often than not, and a somewhat reasonable evolutionary justification. This makes it better than any theory you can find on Wikipedia, as none of those theories work even half the time, and their evolutionary justifications are all weak or absent. I think.
So here are four model jokes that are kind of representative of the space of all funny things:
“Why did Jeremy sit on the television? He wanted to be on TV.” (from a children’s joke book)
“Muffins? Who falls for those? A muffin is a bald cupcake!” (from Jim Gaffigan)
“It’s next Wednesday.” “The day after tomorrow?” “No, NEXT Wednesday.” “The day after tomorrow IS next Wednesday!” “Well, if I meant that, I would have said THIS Wednesday!” (from Seinfeld)
“A minister, a priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Is this some kind of joke?’” (a traditional joke)
It may be noting that this “sample” lacks any overtly political jokes; I couldn’t think of any.
The proto-theory I have is that a joke is something that points out reasonable behavior and then lets the audience conclude that it’s the wrong behavior. This seems to explain the first three perfectly, but it doesn’t explain the last one at all; the only thing special about the last joke is that the bartender has impossible insight into the nature of the situation (that it’s a joke).
The supposed evolutionary utility of this is that it lets members of a tribe know what behavior is wrong within the tribe, thereby helping it recognize outsiders. The problem with this is that outsiders’ behavior isn’t always funny. If the new student asks for both cream and lemon in their tea, that’s funny. If the new employee swears and makes racist comments all the time, that’s offensive. If the guy sitting behind you starts moaning and grunting, that’s worrying. What’s the difference? Why is this difference useful?
Juergen Schmidhuber writes about humor as information compression and that plus decompression seems about right to me. Being on TV is decompression from a phrase-as-concept to the component words, a pun, a switch to a lower level analysis than that which adults favor (a situation children constantly have to deal with). Muffin and cupcake is a proposal for a new lossy compression of two concepts to a new concept with a “topping” variable, which would be useful if you wanted to invent, for instance, the dreadful sounding “muffin-roll sushi”, “next Wednesday” is a commentary on the inadequacy of current cultural norms for translating concepts and words into one another even for commonly used concepts. The last one is a successful compression from sense data to the fact that a common joke pattern is happening and inference that one is in a joke.
I wish that we had a “Less Wrong Community” blog for off-topic but fun comments like the above to be top level posts, as well as an “instrumental rationality” blog for “self help” subject matter.
Yes and yes.
I would very much like to see arbitrary sub-blog creation in the style of subreddits, but an off-topic subreddit would be a good start.
I believe that humor requires harmless surprise, Harmlessness and surprise are both highly contextual, so what people find funny can vary quite a bit.
One category of humor (or possibly an element for building humor) is things which are obviously members of a class, but which are very far from the prototype. Thus, an ostrich is funny while a robin isn’t. This may not apply if you live in ostrich country—see above about context.
It varies even more based on personality. There are darker forms of humor for which harmlessness and surprise are both dampeners.
Now that I think about it, there’s humor that’s based on repetition—the catch phrase that gets funnier each time you hear it.
I’m pretty sure about harmlessness—the lack of harm may only apply to the person who’s laughing.
What sort of humor are you thinking of?
Endless YouTube nutshot videos, Anonymous hacking#Epilepsy_Foundation_forum_invasion) an epilepsy support forum with flashing GIFs, the infamous banana peel on the sidewalk… Not particularly high-brow humour but many people find such things amusing.
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
- Mel Brooks
There was a sinister touch of amusement buried under my experience of outrage when I read that.
The harmless surprise hypothesis fits my data pretty well. But are you sure repetition-based humor isn’t just conditioning people to laugh at a certain thing (catch-phrase or a situation)?
On the other hand, butt-of-a-joke hypothesis also sounds plausible.
I have spent a great deal of time thinking about humor, and I’ve arrived at a place somewhat close to yours. Humor is how we pass on lessons about status and fitness, and we do that using pattern recognition. I heard a comedian describe comedy by saying, “It’s always funny when someone falls down. The question is, is it still funny if you push them?” He said for a smaller group of the population, it is. Every joke has a person being displayed as not fit—even if we have to take an object, or an abstraction, and anthropomorphize it. This is the butt of the joke. The more butts of a joke there are, the funnier the joke is—i.e., a single butt will not be that funny, but if there are several butts of a joke, or if a single person is the butt of several layers of the joke, it will be seen as funnier. The most common form of this is when the goals of the butt of a joke is divorced from their results.
Joke 1: This is funny because Jeremy displays a lack of fitness by not being able to properly process the phrase “on TV.” This has one butt—Jeremy.
Joke 2: This joke has two butts. One is the muffin, which is being declared unfit for being bald. The other is the comedian’s character, who is being displayed as needlessly paranoid toward a benign object (a muffin).
Joke 3: This joke isn’t that funny when displayed in text form—the comedy is in the performances, where both conversation participants are butts of the joke for arguing so intensely over something so petty.
Joke 4: The butt of this joke is the traditional joke it’s mocking.
As for your outsiders’ behavior:
New student asks for both cream and lemon: Displays he is unfit by not understanding the purpose of what he’s asking for.
New employee swears and makes racist comments: This isn’t funny in person, but it is funny if a few conditions are met. The first condition is that you’re sufficiently removed from it (i.e., watching it on TV): Imminent threats aren’t funny because this isn’t a status lesson, but a status competition. The second condition is that it must be demonstrated how this makes the person unfit. For example, if the new employee is making these comments because she thinks they demonstrate her social savvy, that starts becoming more funny again (notice Michael Scott in The Office). Or, imagine the new employee has Tourette syndrome and is actually a very sweet girl, who constantly apologizes after making obscene statements. This also would elicit laughs.
If the guy sitting behind you starts grunting and moaning: The threat is too imminent, but if you remove the worrying aspect of it, this is ripe for a punchline. Once again, you have to demonstrate how he is unfit. Perhaps he says, “I’m trying to communicate secretly in Morse Code—grunts are dots, moans are dashes.”
EDIT / ADDENDUM: This also explains why humor is so tied up in culture—you don’t know the purpose of certain cultural habits. Until you intuitively grasp their purpose, you will have a hard time understanding why certain violations of them are funny.
For example, take the Simpsons episode where Homer’s pet lobster dies and he’s weeping as he eats it. In between bouts of loud, wailing grief, he sobs out comments like, “Pass the salt.” This would be hard to understand for cultures that don’t express grief like Western culture does.
How do puns fit in?
Puns are a hard fit, I admit. I especially have a hard time with them because they don’t produce laughter in me; I have a hard time recognizing them as humor unless they’re presented in the same way as other jokes, or pre-identified as jokes.
But that joke has status built into it, as well—for example, it’s not funny to say “star-mangled spanner sounds like star-spangled banner.”
Personally, I call these “Bob Hope Humor,” which is when people laugh to demonstrate that they “get” the joke, not because it actually tickles them.
Sometimes puns are funny, and sometimes they’re just punishing. And a lot of people really, really hate puns.
Go crawl in a hole and die. :-)
My response: http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/954.html
I prefer this one.
Well, what do you expect from a Forum poster? ;)
And this one is a worse pun.
Puns are pretty much “the formula” for making jokes. Though they can get old, they’re always recognizable as jokes, which suggests that a theory based on “multiple meaning/decoding/framing” is probably on track. Hm, I wonder who suggested such a theory… ;-)
You really think puns are “the formula” for making jokes? You think hunter-gatherers were making puns before they were telling funny stories?
I mean “the formula” (like I said) in the sense that it’s guaranteed to produce a recognizable (though not good) joke, not that all jokes are puns.
Slight variant: Humour is a form of teaching, in which interesting errors are pointed out. It doesn’t need to involve an outsider, and there’s no particular class of error, other than that the participants should find the error important.
If the guy sitting behind you starts moaning and grunting, if it’s a mistake (e.g. he’s watching porn on his screen and has forgotten he’s not alone) then it’s funny, whereas if it’s not a mistake, and there’s something wrong with him, then it isn’t.
Humour as teaching may explain why a joke isn’t funny twice—you can only learn a thing once. Evolutionarily, it may have started as some kind of warning, that a person was making a dangerous mistake, and then getting generalised.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527451.400-the-comedy-circuit-when-your-brain-gets-the-joke.html?full=true&print=true
New findings in the neurology of humor, and who finds what sort of jokes 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.
You missed this category of funny things.
Yeah, humor-as-status-shift doesn’t fit into Warrigal’s or SilasBarta’s explanations very well. Then again, since evolution tends to reuse things already made, there’s little reason to expect there to be only one use for humor.
Humor doesn’t make much sense to me, and neither does music. I have no conscious understanding of what distinguishes things that are funny from things that aren’t. I simply recognize some things as funny and others as “not funny”, and I can even set out to write funny things and succeed, but I have no theory of humor.
Indeed, it’s likely that the best theory of humor is a short list.
I’ve always liked Isaac Asimov’s theory of where humor comes from. It’s not actually true, but it should be!
I saw somewhere an article, though I unfortunately forget where exactly, about research noting that humor is also tied to social status. Jokes are funnier when told by a superior than someone below your own position.
As a personal observation, jokes are also more fun when there are lots of others who also laugh at them. They’re also a great way to break the tension in a group situation. Humor has a very important social function, though obviously it might also have a function like the one you’re describing, as “it’s a social glue” doesn’t explain why some things are funny and why others aren’t. (Though I do think the social function is much greater.)
—Dave Barry
Nice. I always find humor to be one of the most intuitively baffling things for my consideration. Maybe that’s because my sense of humor is just too f*....