“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The equating of jokes and comedy here is an affront for anyone who has explored different avenues of comedy in any way. The analysis is fine and even interesting for (as others have pointed out) one specific type of joke but just flippantly calling that all of comedy is very jarring as it is obviously wrong.
I just completed a clown workshop this weekend where I was in tears laughing from an exercise of simply playing peekaboo, my improvised musical team has gotten laughs and applause from our piano man simply starting to play music and from us rhyming two words, I've seen TJ & Dave erupt a room from being as realistic and truthful as possible in their improv, one of my Edinburgh Fringe highlights was a performer crashing a live podcast recording multiple times and falling over, spilling many pints in the process.
That is all just to say that comedy is much more than just jokes, and especially much more than jokes that fit this theory. To be clear though, I am not against attempting such formalisms and theories (I have many myself and do think this kind of thinking is great for generating ideas), I've just yet to see a good comprehensive one.
Heard Adrian Edmondson on Desert Island Discs and one of the interesting things he said about comedy was that there were a limited number of jokes all of which he believed are contained in the recorded works of Laurel and Hardy and that he would be able to enumerate and show all of them from those works.
He also said he was tired of comedy as he knew all of the jokes. Later he sort of contradicted himself by saying that Waiting For Godot is a very funny play and that he felt he had not yet understood it all.
So that's kind of an interesting counterpoint...he does essentially conflate comedy and jokes.
I think the word "joke" in the context of his interview was more or less intended to mean "bit" or "skit" or "humour-incitement type" -- rather than literally joke as in "knock knock."
I believe he actually said that all humour is passed on, i.e. that all the comic acts that have come along after Laurel and Hardy were in essence re-enacting scenes that they had performed, in another form, prior.
Of course, Laurel and Hardy were brilliant, but it would actually be naive to think that the chain began there. Performed comedy is as old as civilisation itself, and always fluctuates in sophistication/depth relative to the target audience.
Laurel and Hardy represent a talented comedic duo, heavy on physical humour (though not without wit) captured on film so that the physicality of their performance was not up for debate or a supposition, and was available to be absorbed and drawn upon by later comedic performers, and I think this physicality is why Adrian calls back to them. For him, they offer a textbook approach to a broad category of humour.
As for the finitude of humour, I think it would be rather more bizarre if the contrary was true and humour was infinite. Then everything could be funny. Maybe there are a lot of permutations for humour -- if you think about it, the audience (and by extension the time they live in) somewhat dictate what is and isn't funny, and there are considerations as well for cultural context (i.e. JP and CN are going to have a lot of material that will seem nonsensical to a Western audience and vice versa) some humour is obviously universal.
But even to include all topical, regional humour, the number of phrases and physical movements of bodies that can trigger genuine amusement is very likely to be a finite subset of the possible permutations, especially given that all permutations themselves will be finite in total number (there are not an infinite number of words or possible physical occurrences...)
Perhaps indeed there is even a small number of types of humour-incitement, of which all topical, regional jokes are simply manifestations. To group humour-incitement types in this way, Adrian's assertion seems even more acceptable.
He doesn't say Laurel and Hardy invented humour or anything that we could immediately refute. I think he considers their work to be the textbook. Everything you should see before coming up with your own material can be found in their catalogue.
Like all art, grasp the fundaments and figure out which rules you want to subvert to get your message across, for the sake of doing so rather than empty rebellion or feeding reviewers from a marketing perspective.
Sometimes there's no reason to break a rule, and sometimes there's every reason.
As for his fatigue, whether the man has had exposure to humour from other cultures is not clear, but certainly in the context of his own culture I would be inclined to agree. The vast majority of comedy in the West is very obviously recycled material with different packaging. That's not to say that sometimes the later recyclings aren't better than the "originals" —- a lot of it is in the delivery, and if you watch them all without bias (nostalgia) you can probably pick out some cases where a comedy from 2007 is funnier than something conceptually similar from 1987.
A lot of people grew up with comedy shows that were the best of their time and thus become the best for those people, and they watch stuff 20 years later after having rewatched their favourites a dozen times as well and it all seems less novel. Perhaps the same effect occurs for the performers as well as the audience.
Adrian also lost his partner in comedy, the infamous Rik Mayall, and this perhaps soured him on comedy without that second half to bounce off of. They used to tour live and they would often break character and break the fourth wall —- while their long collaboration and friendship would lend a good deal of weight to it, as well as topical spice depending on the region, I think they were keen to do it anyway to keep their material a little fresher and keep things interesting for themselves while doing it. Touring the same act up and down the country would surely be enough to convince anyone it's all been done before. Losing that certainly confines one's repertoire to only the rehearsed material.
I think he's married to Jennifer Saunders (of Absolutely Fabulous and French and Saunders fame) but I don't think they ever collaborated much.
Schadenfreude to the extent of humour. That is a difficulty isn't it, the audience can find whatever it wants funny if that's how it's wired. Perhaps you're right.
It's definitely contextual. As an example, military or veterans, first responders, doctors, lawyers, and others like that will usually have a much greater appreciation for dark humor than people who haven't had to deal with tragic circumstances in their day jobs.
Yes, the article mistakes punchlines for comedy. Watch some of Norm MacDonald's stuff on Conan (troubled moth, Jacques de Gatineaux, drunk dart thrower, Andy the Swedish-German)... sure, the punchlines fit the model in the article, but the real humor comes from his delivery and the weird worlds he creates leading up to the punchlines.
With all of these, there's an element of absurdity. It's not about the world Norm is creating, it's the fact that the words aren't the joke, the joke is on you. The joke is that it's a long, boring story to set up a shitty punchline. You wait, and wait, and wait for the catharsis, but it never comes from the joke itself, it comes only a beat or two after when you realize what just happened.
Matt Berry gets mileage out of responding to everything with a sort of bombastic over-seriousness. He is a character that does nothing small.
Observational comedy is the pointing out of absurdity in everyday life.
This is worth googling for anybody who’s not urgently meant to be doing something for the next ten minutes. Also on Conan, for anyone looking for an amazing example of humour without a punchline is “conan nathan fielder susan”
Comedy is a complex superstructure. I think the site has a probably-correct description of the ground-floor basis of that superstructure. But the rest of the structure is where the magic is.
I describe this "ground-floor basis" not as "comedy is search" but "comedy is learning." One of the first things babies laugh at is object permanence. But you quickly get into forms of comedy that are much more than the formula discussed into the article. Consider sarcasm. Consider crass humor derived from blatant invocation of socially inappropriate subjects. Consider "inside jokes" which are often purely social, having lost all connection to the "relating two concepts."
With search, I understand it as a process of learning, where diff search strategies create different learnings. Maybe laughter is a strategy of search, or what the algorithm feels like from the inside attention head...?
And search feels like moving around a tree or maybe graph (moving thru graph from known origin to unknown extremities, this is maybe tree-like in any meaningful local sense). Anyhow, searches being depth-first vs breadth-first with attention feels related.
Thinking through your comment has me reflecting on the distinction between depth-first vs breadth-first comedy, and if that even makes sense :)
> I was in tears laughing from an exercise of simply playing peekaboo
My wife and I have a 15 month old and one of our favourite games is for one of us to sit with him on the stairs looking through the bannisters at the other one dancing and singing. Sometimes we are all in absolute hysterics. Humour is very much about a collective will to engage in the shared enjoyment, and I reckon most parents would agree with me.
But yes, OP's article does not really cover satire, parody, toilet humour, slapstick, deadpan, cringe humour etc...
I feel like I've read this comment before, except the topic was music theory and the focus was on harmony and someone who valued rhythm, texture, and timbre felt left out.
Related to what you're saying, there's a whole essay by Mark Twain where he explains the difference between comedy (and comedic storytelling) and simply "telling a joke". He didn't think much of the "punchline" type of jokes, he was all about the storytelling... as you can tell by "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and his many other stories.
> There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.
> The humorous story is strictly a work of art—high and delicate art—and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story—understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print—was created in America, and has remained at home.
I'm not sure I agree the humorous story is purely American, though doubtless Mark Twain was one of its masters.
Mark Twain wrote a book called "Roughing It", and I can't put my finger on it and tell you exactly what it is about this book, but there's some essence of Mark Twain dictating this story to you, the reader, that has persisted all of these many years since it was written that imbues it with a special kind of comedy magic the likes of which you are unlikely to find anywhere else.
I have tried to read it 3 times and ended up laughing so hard my stomach hurt until I had to stop reading.
I can't finish it, it's too funny.
100% worth an attempt to read at least 3 times so far.
What a wondrous book. So many hilarious anecdotes. Tom Quartz the mining cat. The escaped tarantulas. The retired Admiral. But it's not just the little stories. His characters, the comical exaggerations, his poking fun at his younger and ridiculously naive self, the description of the places, the little observations serious and humorous, the very language are all just a pleasure.
I have a theory that everything is search. Protein folding? Search for minimal energy. DNA evolution - search for ecological niche fit. Cognition? attention is search, memory is search, imagination is also search, problem solving - of course is search. Scientific progress? It is (re)search. Optimizing an AI model? Search for optimal parameters to fit the data. Reinforcement learning? Search for optimal behavior to maximize rewards. Even speaking is search - we output words in sequence, searching the next word like LLMs. Now I can add comedy to the list.
<rant>Search is a nice concept, it defines everything clearly - search space, goal space, action space. Compare it with fuzzy concepts like understanding, intelligence and consciousness. We can never define them, precisely because they gloss over their input-output domains and try to present a distributed process as centralized in the brain.
Search has a bunch of properties - it is compositional, hierarchical, recurrent (iterative in time) and recursive. This pattern holds across many fields, I think it is based on the fundamental properties of space-time which are also compositional, hierarchical and recurrent (object state at time t+1 depends on its state at time t)
Search can be personal, inter-personal, physical or information based. It can explain away much of the mystery of the three fuzzy concepts I mentioned. I describe cognition as two search loops - search externally by applying known behavior to collect experience, and search internally to compress experience and update behavior.</>
I think a more specific denominator you might wanna look into is free energy minimization as you mention in your first example. I really liked reading Active Inference and What Is Life? on the subject.
Strong agree. I'm on a similar path as you, travelling through related thoughts
I think this hypothesis goes a long way to explaining why the math of transformers (doing mathematical operations on language) create something that rhymes so much with intelligent thought. Though I should clarify that LLMs do not share the same processes or verbs of our intelligence, only the snapshot moment-in-time of a mind-like object ;)
We have a dual search loop - outside, we act using our experience to gain new data. Inside, we compress this data and update our experience. We search for experience and search for understanding. Acting is search for new insights, learning is search for error minimization.
I think the way we encode our experiences is relationally, like neural networks. We relate new experiences against past experiences, this creates a semantic space that is highly dimensional. Any concept is a point or a region in this space. It has consistent semantics, which leads to the unified experience. We can relate anything to anything in this space without having a central understander. Encoding your own experiences creates a first person perspective from 3rd person data, which was always a "hard" problem to explain in philosophy.
The serial action bottleneck adds to the illusion of centralization. But it's still a distributed process, no neuron is conscious or understands by itself. And even in society, no human can recreate even a 1% of human culture individually. We are not that smart on our own. We should always look for the larger context where we develop, not just the brain.
Search has the virtue of not hiding the environment, it is social and distributed, unlike more personal concepts like consciousness, intelligence and understanding. But as I said above, even inside the brain there is nothing but distributed processing, no homunculus.
I think the core of my argument is "there is no centralized consciousness, understanding or intelligence, they are distributed processes, they act across neurons in the brain and across people in society". It seems like a hard pill to swallow, if that is true then there is also no centralized understanding or truth.
I commend your diligence, your theory may even be internally consistent, but I don't see why I should believe this rather than the comparatively simple and intuitively true (to me, anyway) notion that there is a genuine soul, it has its own volition, and it certainly interacts with the physical body and brain through a link that is currently (and may always be) mysterious.
What you say that the soul acts like a homunculus, "interacts with the physical body and brain through a link that is currently mysterious". It is a "center" thing that has volition, and semantics, and is genuine.
And it is understandable to do so. It certainly feels unified, and genuine. And it is simple and nice to be so. But intuition fails us hard when it comes to introspection. We feel alive, and conscious, but we are a few billion neurons connected by trillion branches, all wrapped in a bio-robot, put inside a complex environment full of living things in a state of cooperation and competition.
Again, that is your theory. Just because you've created it using the primitives of materialist science doesn't mean it's true or that it's more likely than another theory. The fact is there's no scientific basis for believing what you've said. There just isn't.
If it feels like there's a scientific basis for what you're saying, that's because you're invoking the metaphysical principle of strict materialism, which is a common (though not inherently valid) way of thinking about science, and if that were true then yes, something like your theory would have to be true.
But be clear - that is not something proven by science, it is an axiom that is far from obviously true or universally accepted.
It may also feel that your theory should be true because so much about how the body and brain works is, I agree, materialist in nature, so why not hypothesize that everything is materialist? But that is very much a hypothesis and an intuition, not something that is scientifically proven or logically forced. And, as you say, intuition can be flawed.
Consciousness is just the result of a search for "a more or less linear story that makes sense of the way I act and react"
We're good at predicting states of minds of others (helpful when trying to exploit limited resources, and very helpful for either predator or prey), and we can cheaply gather a lot of data on ourselves, so why should the capability for inferring states of mind not, as a side effect, also provide us with our own inferred state of mind: our own "I"?
This is a theory that would work, except for the fact that I know I exist. Why does materialism so desperately want to ignore that knowledge? Is that really simpler than the idea that we have a soul that interacts with the body and brain, but which also has its own nature that is separate from biology and evolution? Do we have to go 100% and say things that start with "consciousness is just"?
I'm passionate about this because I know -- from personal experience -- that this type of philosophy can really go along with denying ones own existence in a deep way. It feels great to know you're a soul that exists. I don't know why it's supposed to be "rational" to convince yourself against a simple truth that we all know intuitively. And I say that as someone who used to feel that way.
The quality of consciousness and the existence of a non-body non-brain soul seem to me like two completely orthogonal issues (I can easily imagine creatures without conscious awareness but with a soul; I can certainly imagine creatures with brain-driven consciousness but without a soul; a rock has neither; in your model people have both) so it seems unlikely that answering your two questions would move the conversation forward.
For what it's worth, I know I exist as well; can we agree that we both exist, but we have differing models for what the necessary constituents of that existence are?
> Can we agree that we both exist, but we have differing models for what the necessary constituents of that existence are?
Of course, yes.
> I can certainly imagine creatures with brain-driven consciousness but without a soul
This would probably be the heart of the disagreement. I don't believe this is possible. Such a creature would not have qualia.
And, as a species, I don't think we're any closer to resolving this question "objectively" than we ever were. fMRIs say where blood is flowing in the brain, but that's hardly enough to explain the phenomenon of subjective experience.
By the nature of the question, we won't be able to attack it from the outside, and I don't think I could generally convince another person that they have a soul that exists, if they're inclined to explain themselves using materialism, which at this point has become flexible enough to be unfalsifiable, with the everlasting faith that someday science will fill in all the gaps.
That's why my approach now is just to poke holes in the seemingly impenetrable confidence that materialism is the only "rational" way to think.
(By the way, I'm not saying you hold that position.)
> fMRIs say where blood is flowing in the brain, but that's hardly enough to explain the phenomenon of subjective experience.
fMRI scans correlate well with neural net embeddings. That is a great hint. We just need to look at the semantic spaces developed in these models, by a purely mechanistic process, to see how it goes from data to semantics.
Making up nonsense will always be easier than actually understanding reality.
Just because we can’t explain something right now does not mean you can insert whatever you want into that hole and assert it’s just as valid as any other explanation.
It's funny how much I agree with your whole comment ;)
Also, "making up nonsense" is a very disrespectful, and intellectually dishonest, way to approach someone's understanding of life which is hard-earned through experience and thousands of hours of introspection and study. Consider that people who disagree with you on this may still be just as educated and smart as you are.
Not if they think making up supernatural explanations is valid.
It’s the same logic as God of the gaps. Science doesn’t understand something yet so better fill it up with feel-good made up stuff and pretend it’s just as valid as actual science.
> This would probably be the heart of the disagreement
OK, sounds like we're agreed there.
If souls are required for consciousness, then I guess we could try to decide which creatures are conscious by first deciding which have souls? Would that question be any easier to answer that way around?
I thought we were talking about "what is consciousness" rather than "which creatures are conscious." The conversation started with "consciousness is just [a series of material processes resulting in an illusion of interiority, rather than a genuine phenomenon of -- for lack of a better word -- personhood]"
I would probably say "consciousness is the soul" rather than "souls are required for consciousness," but either way I don't see how that helps the fundamental issue that it's impossible to physically prove another creature's interiority, including humans.
What I said was that it's all search. We search and learn, search and learn. This feels like consciousness because it is a recurrent process that feeds on itself. We create relational representations from data, and these representations encode the structure of our experiences. In other words embeddings explain away the qualitative aspects of qualia.
Just declaring that they explain it away doesn't make it so. You've come up with a theory that, from 10,000 feet up, could correspond with certain observations of consciousness. Why should it be true?
We were talking about "what is consciousness" but rapidly hit an end.
Sorry for the lack of clarity: "which creatures are conscious" was my attempt to switch topics to a line which I had hoped might be mutually interesting.
Before we stop, if you don't mind, could you answer why you are dissatisfied with the idea that there's a soul, and why we need to do away with it 100%?
To be clear, I really do take issue with the 100% aspect. There are many psychological functions that are clearly at least mediated if not outright caused by the brain and body.
But I think some people say "there's so many functions that are physical, that probably 100% are and we just don't know it yet." But that doesn't seem logically any more forced than "there's a soul that's mediated by the brain," so I don't know why people are so willing to give up the soul.
You might get a kick out of this paper (though some may find it's proposal a bit bleak, I think there's a way to integrate it without losing any of the sense of wonder of the experience of being alive :) )
It analogizes conscious experience to the a rainbow "which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them".
> Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself.
I find these types of arguments very odd, though at one point in my life I would certainly have endorsed them.
What is it about the modern scientific mindset that makes people say "actually, the ubiquitous experience of being alive, having thoughts, feelings, and making choices, is actually 100% an illusion."
Don't get me wrong, obviously there is interaction between evolutionary functions, the brain, etc - I mean, there's anesthesia, there's being drunk, horny, fight or flight.. there's all sorts of ways that it's obvious there's a link.
But why do so many theorists want to go from "there's a link" to "this is 100% an illusion?" I just don't get it. Is it that uncomfortable to have something that is outside the reach of physical systems theorizing, or something that is unexplainable (i.e., the link) that we'd rather fit reality into the theory than the other way around?
We have to have the courage to live with something that is inexplicable, at least for now (and, honestly, maybe forever), rather than lose faith in our own existence.
You're spot on that all problems can be interpreted as a search problem. Similarly, all problems can be interpreted as a compression problem. Or parsing, boolean satisfiability, or halting, etc. It's helpful to keep them all in mind because sometimes a different problem domain has a tool that your preferred one doesn't, or just the mindset shift can be useful to unblock.
Lately I’ve come to think of science as a large-scale search algorithm so I think there’s truth to what you’re saying and it’s interesting to think about.
I've yet to see a theory of comedy which actually addresses that there are multiple kinds of comedy:
- Bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny, but instead relies on attacking someone's status in front of a crowd. The crowd laughs in recognition of the successful attack, not because the joke is clever.
- Epiphany humor -- the joke relies on some new thought, connection, or idea, and the "joke" is the leap your mind needs to make in order to comprehend the novel idea. eg. "Otis Elevators: They'll never let you down!" In this case, you must take the familiar phrase "let you down [emotionally]" and realize the second meaning "elevators move up and down [physically]."
- Story-based humor, which probably needs a better name, but is mostly what stand-up comedy is. Other kinds of humor can be mixed in here, but often the "joke" relies on something of a straw man -- setting up a character in the story where the audience can readily recognize that at least one character being related is a fool, and worthy to be laughed at. Often this is perspective-based, and is based around relating to the characters in the stand-up comedian's story. For instance, take Bill Burr's joke about women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1GY-yr-BM -- the "joke" here is mostly whether or not you agree with Bill's characterization of the situation. The joke is not universally funny, but relies on the audience's perspective. If you've never seen the world from the same perspective as Bill, the joke may not hit the mark, or might even seem rude.
- Tone-of-voice humor. This is a joke where there's no real joke, but the tone of voice is really doing 90% of the work. It's just retelling a relatively benign event, except the tone of voice exaggerates the emotions attached to the words. I don't have an example ready for this one because I really dislike this "style" of humor, but imagine some of the less creative or talented stand-up artists.
I think "incongruity theory", that the article is alluding to, does actually apply to most of these. You're focusing on the context rather than the actual underlying mechanism driving the joke. e.g. the first one "bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny..." Consider that the incongruity of a comedian laying into someone verbally, compared to the way we're primed for them to talk in polite-society interactions, may be part of the reason why this works. Similarly example two - "Otis Elevators: They'll never let you down!" - there is an incongruity in the usual usage of the expression 'they'll never let you down' to here, that could be what makes this work as a joke.
I agree there are examples that incongruity doesn't cover, e.g. slapstick I personally believe is something a bit different, but generally I do think it's a pretty compelling explanation for a lot of modern comedy.
One gift of my flavor of ADHD - the instant branching to a multitude of interpretations of some series of inputs and multiple degrees of related ideas - is always being primed to make stupid jokes where I intentionally misinterpret or make you misinterpret something obvious.
Like the other day my friend read "shrimp cargot" off a menu. I said "They taught a shrimp how to drive??" The other friend present thought it was the funniest thing ever while the first friend was in pain from it, which just made it funnier. We had the same 50% split relaying it to two more people later.
(It also relies a bit on knowing the "a shrimp fried this rice?" joke to be funniest but it's not required)
There was an italian phrase book I once ran across and have never seen since: its schtick was that all of the phrases were things one might find in a normal phrase book ("the lobster makes a good salad"), but the accompanying illustrations were of abnormal interpretations (in this case, the lobster in a toque tossing a salad).
Yeah I can relate! I've also heard Conan O'Brien say this before, he thinks that a big source of his comedy is just his brain outright not understanding things correctly.
YES. This is how I explain my brain. It doesn't understand correctly, and so it gets really great at exploring and making legible all the hidden dimensions and edges of thought. And from there, creativity is just taking those discovered dimensions and applying rote transformations: inversions or attenuations or extrapolations to absurd extremes ;)
The most comprehensive theory I have seen is that laughter, and therefore humor, is primarily a fear response.
It starts as an infant when you laugh by having your surface nerves rapidly engaged through tickling. Even peakaboo is a fear game due to the child’s lack of object permanence.
When you examine all funny things through the lens of fear, it becomes an interesting logic exercise to draw a connection between the humor you see and how it may or may not be connected to fear.
> The most comprehensive theory I have seen is that laughter, and therefore humor, is primarily a fear response.
I’ve been practicing / performing improv comedy for about 5 years now. Keith Johnson style, not UCB style.
Newbies always try to be clever, but being clever is a total trap. The moments that always get the biggest laughs are when you acknowledge something that was already in the room. The audience had a thought - or a proto thought - “where did the umbrella go?” “I thought his name was Fred?” “But why is the duck talking?”. When you acknowledge it on stage, with lightness and connection, you get mad laughter.
I think you’re right about the fear thing. I think doing this acknowledges some deep fear of being alone, or stupid, or something. As a performer, when we make you whole, and do it in a way that feels easy and comfortable, I think, just for a moment, it makes that fear go away. And that’s what the audience is responding to when they laugh. There’s an old line from clowning: “When the performer breathes, the audience breathes.” I think it’s deeper than that. When the performer demonstrates being deeply ok with themselves, the audience believes it might be possible for them too.
I thought about it for jokes, as the reaction is quick (just system 1 and very maybe for more complex jokes it’s system 2 understanding the joke and then system 1 laughing… but then it might not spontenous enough to lough out loud), didn’t though about that for “all funny things”.
Oh I couldn’t tell you the original source, it was well over a decade ago that I first heard it. Briefly searching though gave some interesting results.
Here’s a study that identified an unintended consequence of an antismoking fear campaign:
Really love your thoughts here. Very thought-provoking to someone like myself who has spent quite a bit of time thinking about and researching the evolutionary origins of laughter and its relation to surprise/play
To respond to just one part:
> Bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny, but instead relies on attacking someone's status in front of a crowd. The crowd laughs in recognition of the successful attack, not because the joke is clever
I think you might have it inverted. The crowd doesn't laugh bc it's a successful attack. It's a successful attack bc they laugh.
The audience is largely voting with their choice of where they deploy their "social" laugh. Laughter used to be an involuntary hardwired animal sound (like a "moo"), that signaled a space of learning and safety, to explore and play. It attracted other primates to join on that merit. but along the way it became rewired into the software level of social context. Humans started deploying laughter to shape their social context: to flatter, to flirt, to charm, and yes, to hurt. This is why we laugh more and differently around other humans. (Some of this was discovered via dissecting muscles around the eyes, that activate most readily in more "true" involuntary Duchenne laughter, but not the contrived social laughter.)
So the laughing audience is complicit in the bullying. They are creating the weapon, and the attack. If it's actually funny, it just takes less work to get the audience on your side. That's the performance of bullying -- whether you can carry either a willing or unwilling audience along for the weaponising of the laughter.
That's a great distinction, and I definitely think it's the better characterization. Similarly, the class clown will often fare _worse_ from the teacher if the joke doesn't land. The whole class laughing really turns the tide against the teacher. (although sometimes that just yields a more aggressive response)
> Tone-of-voice humor. This is a joke where there's no real joke, but the tone of voice is really doing 90% of the work. It's just retelling a relatively benign event, except the tone of voice exaggerates the emotions attached to the words. I don't have an example ready for this one because I really dislike this "style" of humor, but imagine some of the less creative or talented stand-up artists.
Glad you mentioned this. Watched stand up specials in groups where the set up for a story joke used mostly tone-of-voice and my friends laughed and I wondered why they found it funny. Maybe the anticipation of a joke combined with the tone-of-voice make people laugh? I struggle to get it.
An exception that comes to mind is SNL's REALLY segment. Pohler and Meyers beat the joke so deep into the dirt it comes back around as funny
I agree but i'd go even fruther and say the categories of comedy seem so damned plentify that almost any theory, or even set of theories, fails to capture all cases. Some people say it's about a twist in what one would expect, but in which case why is something happening repeatedly sometimes more funny, even when it begins to annoy you? And why is the buildup to an obvious punchline somehow funny (say a character you just know will fall off a ladder but waiting for it somehow is funny in and of itself). If it's about making witty connections then why is it genuinely just funny if someone shits themselves in a serious moment or just has a weird accent. Why are impressions funny? I laugh because part of me is saying "oh yeah, George Bush does squint his eyes like that a lot". it's funny to see... but why? Then you have anti-comedy: why is being unfunny funny? People say comedy comes from others pain: like cringe comedy or slapstick but there's times where someone really enjoying something obsessively is funny.
Also, if there are any universal theory then how come my grandad just doesn't understand why comedy i like is funny and vice-versa? It's not that i don't get "his comedy". It's just I find it hard to believe anyone would ever really laugh at it like mine. Then there's jokes from acient times that you wouldn't even think of as jokes now, but we know people laughted. If there is a universal theory of comedy i suspect it would be flexible to the point of being usless as it'd covers almost all human activity.
Agreed! I remember Jerry Louis (really!) playing a waiter just walking across an empty ballroom floor, a fifteen-twenty second take, and it was funnier the longer it lasted! He just did that on the spot, knew he could draw it out, knew how a walk could communicate everything about his mood, his attitude, what he thought of the person he was walking away from. Still don't understand how he did it.
I might bucket them in with the bulling humor, since that seems to be very bandwagon-y. I would definitely also say that I've arranged (what I believe to be) useful descriptions, but they're by no means hard scientific fact, nor the only types of humor possible. I actually forgot one of my favorite styles of humor: slapstick!
For sure! Nothing _prevents_ a bully from being funny, it's just that often this is not the point. And most people do not strictly try to stay in any of the lanes I've defined -- they combine and interweave the different styles. I think the purest example of "bullying humor" might come from kids in the 90s. You're minding your own business, really not doing anything out of the ordinary, and some other kid yells in from of a group "Look how gay he is!" The group laughs, but there's no "joke," and the insult has been wholly invented out of thin air; there's no epiphany for the mind to connect because the insult isn't actually based on anything. That same scenario could easily play out with an actual clever joke attached. It just often is not the case, and the laughter does not depend on the the joke existing, but is related to the attack on status.
Where does something like this fall into (story-based?):
> I don't stop eating when I'm full. The meal isn't over when I'm full. It's over when I hate myself. (Louis C.K.)
I think the best jokes of the greatest comedians that ever lived were jokes that don't even work when you write them down, its all in the greater context, delivery and timing. One of my favorite types of jokes are references to earlier parts of a show, it feels like more work for the setup intensifies the punch line.
Yes, I think that's what I was intending with regard to the story-based jokes. This joke probably lands best if you can relate to Louis C.K., and in this scenario, Louis is the (self-effacing, charming, relatable) fool. He's the target of his own joke, but he's sharing a common and relatable story, and delivering it well. He could have easily told the same joke, but with another person as the target. The example I gave uses another person as the target, but some of the best comics makes themselves the target, which often plays better with the audience. I guess I think there are at least two notable points here:
- In this case, Louis' delivery is part of what makes it clear that this is a joke. I guess I might say it's an intermixture of tonal and story-telling delivery. It would be possibly to tell the same story, but it would only be depressing and not funny. Part of the delivery is how the humor is conveyed. ie, "I don't really hate myself, I'm being hyperbolic for the sake of humor."
- Separately, I think his joke would be much less relatable if he didn't make himself the target of the joke. He's volunteering himself as the target of the humor, and so not punching down at anyone. It's much harder to be offended when the speaker volunteers the topic and the target.
I'm not sure if I'm missing something (perhaps the joke, as it were) but the Calvin & Hobbes strip seems to be entirely about having a sense of humour, rather than a theory of comedy.
The C&H explanation has two parts, what triggers the humor response (perception of things that don't make sense) and why we have the humor response (evolutionary fitness). A theory of the humor mechanism should be congruent to a theory of comedy.
The physiological manifestation of the humor response is also explained by evolutionary fitness when you consider it as countering the physiological reaction to the perception of stressful ambiguity.
It's an interesting thought and a question "why did sense of humor develop through evolution?". I don't think this comic applies to the author's post though. Which is more about how to produce comedy, and seemingly quite one dimensionally?
Also I don't think the comics final answer is satisfactory, because you could definitely respond to absurdity, by calling out why something is absurd, you don't have to laugh at it.
So why do we have a sense of humor in the first place?
The point is exactly that you _can't_ just analyze every single situation that ever happens and then know what to do. That there's a huge amount of life experience for which there is no analytical solution. So you can't "just analyze" every single thing. What do you do then? Dispair? Or laugh.
The ancients eventually came up with the whole God thing to explain all confusion away but i have a feeling that happened after the evolutionary push to not kill yourself the first time you see lightening
Shared beliefs, when they start complaining about things the audience relates to. Or completely obvious things we haven't noticed. A really funny monologue I saw once was a European comedian remarking how many different meanings can be carried by the word 'ass' and how often they are contradictory. Very clever observation.
Comedy is a complex, living, writhing thing. With rules.
This article feels like the author has taken the concept of one-liner (arguably the densest form of standup comedy) and extended that to be comedy at large. I feel like you could take the Comedian's Comedian podcast episode with Gary Delaney, and get a much more effective lesson with the same content.
Disclosure: I've done standup. It is frightening. It's also a lot of fun.
It's really annoying and deadening, not to mention foolish, when people try to reduce every activity of the soul to a mechanical, comprehensible process.
This. I've seen so much of this on Hacker News that it's almost like a game now to discover the variant of the archetype post in today's feed.
People with a "nerdy" mindset want to find the structure behind everything. That's not a bad thing, but it's so annoying to people who actually do comedy...or music...or art.
Not everything in life can be reduced and programmed. But they'll keep on trying.
I like how they highlighted a commonality between two disparate things. When I recognized the pattern, my neurons lit up, eliciting a pleasurable response.
How deadening would it be to imagine that our consciousness and agency is just an illusion created by firing synapses and hormones and that everything we think and do has been predetermined.
If the activities of the soul are so beyond mortal comprehension, then the futile attempt at understanding them should widen the soul in appreciation of the infinite depth of human creativity.
Failure at comprehension does not deaden, any more than only seeing a minute fraction of the cosmos deadens the soul. All that remains beyond our understanding should inspire awe.
Its not that the soul is completely beyond mortal comprehension - art, philosophy, etc do a good job of exploring it. But this (philosophically) materialist way of viewing the world, where everything is caused by evolution and so everything is mechanical to the point where you can almost feed it to a computer -- that doesnt inspire awe to me at all. That makes me feel that my actual existence is being denied, because I'm "really just" this simple process. It's blatantly false but for some reason as tech people we like to put ourselves into a box rather than admit some things are beyond mechanical formalization.
The theory presented in this article was articulated in Arthur Koestler's "The Act of Creation", where he goes on to speculate that all creativity works in this way. It's well worth a read.
Ran into this today. From doing comedy for about 7 years now, this basically correct. Although most comedians approach joke writing organically rather than with this approach
This is exclusively the most primitive joke category base on double meanings. The jokes listed are boring and maybe suited for fillers in a standup routine.
Due to the title I presume that this is another pro-"AI" article that devalues human ingenuity. Well, enjoy the non-funny jokes. I'll stick to pre-2022 material.
The jokes in the article are just there to demonstrate the pattern. There are lots of more sophisticated jokes which clearly follow the same pattern. For example Milton Jones' classic (which won "best joke" at the edinburgh comedy festival I believe)
I come from a long line of police marksmen. Apart from my grandfather, who was a bank robber. But he died recently..... surrounded by his family.
But these are really not that funny. Specifically because you imagine that this is what you get if you bruteforce those combinations. If someone comes up on the spot with this and wants to share, sure it might be funny and clever, but if a professional comedian does jokes likes this, it seems plain and irrelevant. Just something that was bruteforced together.
But this is not truly funny comedy. These seem quite clearly made up and depend on this very specific scenario. I think truly funny jokes are ones that are plausible real life scenarios, that spot some sort of unexpected social circumstance or a phenomena with a clever take or perspective that people do not frequently consider and that many in the audience can relate with. Usually you would expect it to be something that actually happened or could have happened to the comedy teller, and you want to imagine them actually be in that situation. Or it can also be a common real life scenario, but an original, yet clever insightful take on it combined with the character of the teller.
Well as E.B. White put it, explaining a joke is a like disecting a frog. You learn a lot but the thing dies in the process. People do find Milton Jones funny - he won the Perrier "Best Newcomer" Award which is a pretty big deal in UK comedy.
Words with two meanings are just one type of shared aspect in their system. The "hunting cakes" joke was an example of using a shared aspect that isn't a word. (And while it didn't wow me on the page, I think it's the type of joke that a talented comic could make much funnier through their delivery.)
I agree that most of the jokes were weak, but they basically have to use one-liners in order to give many quick examples, and nearly all one-liners I meet are bad. That said, I genuinely enjoyed the "step ladder" one.
A man swears he discovered the secret formula to satire. Turns out, it’s just one cup of irony and a lack of self-awareness, baked at 350 for 20 minutes.
> If your string of symbols constitutes a passage of English text, then you could just count the number of words it contains. But this is silly: it would give the sentence "The Sun will rise tomorrow" the same information value as he sentence "The world will end tomorrow" when the second is clearly much more significant than the first. Whether or not we find a message informative depends on whether it's news to us and what this news means to us.
> [Claude] Shannon stayed clear of the slippery concept of meaning, declaring it "irrelevant to the engineering problem", but he did take on board the idea that information is related to what's new: it's related to surprise. Thought of in emotional terms surprise is hard to measure, but you can get to grips with it by imagining yourself watching words come out of a ticker tape, like they used to have in news agencies. Some words, like "the" or "a" are pretty unsurprising; in fact they are redundant since you could probably understand the message without them. The real essence of the message lies in words that aren't as common, such as "alien" or "invasion".
One joke category is something like "getting away with it". A comedian can say anything, and if it's funny they can get away with it. A ton of modern comedians fail at this, but instead of grinding harder to find the funny angles and adapt to the new meta they act like losers and start to blame the audience. 100% skill issue.
I've noticed there's some people who just say mean things while trying to be funny, but I haven't cracked the details on what makes these jokes land or flop.
I've come to think of most everything as a search. It works far better as a metaphor than makes sense. Learning, Optimization, Modeling, etc. For many, it is clearly a multivariable search. ML, as an easy example, is both searching for a good model and searching for the optimal parameters to it.
I think it comes down to delivery. This premise in this format sets up a groan reaction.
But essentially the same elements used by a good standup, telling a story, saying something like “so I was playing super Mario with my cat, and of course he is wiping the floor with me, because… you know… nine lives” could get a solid laugh. Or a far side like cartoon of a cat playing a video game with a dog, and the dog looking upset while the cat looks smug…
The elements of a joke are there, but you still have to construct it into a delivery vehicle that lands it.
Steve Allen's "How to be funny" presents a compelling model of humor as a deliberate misinterpretation of the setup, which is delivered in the punchline. So you have initial context, pivot, and misinterpretation.
The most powerful versions of that reveal universal, strong and suppressed emotions as well as our basic human fallibility.
Urinal cakes?! I'll never fall for that one again...
Freud has a book on jokes called "The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious" which I thought was pretty interesting (although I mostly read the first section which analyzed the technique of the joke and the tendencies of the joke.)
If you are going to make a video about how comedy works you have to begin it with a joke and then use your theory to explain that joke. I don't want to hear your theory unless you give me something to think about first.
There is some connection between music and comedy (or at least joke punchlines, like many, I'm not convinced this theory explains how all comedy works): Musical structure almost always relies on establishing a pattern (repetition) and breaking it (contrast).
This analysis is pretty good, and I liked the presentation style.
He lets himself down by saying "all comedy" when he doesn't need to. He's analysing a specific type of joke structure, and that's fine. He doesn't need to overreach like this.
Art isn’t search, nor is it an algorithm to be optimized. Unfortunately, the modern human experience is so utterly commoditized that the incentive to cram everything possible into an algorithmic, quantitative box is enormous and almost overpowering or seemingly inevitable. Maybe I’m overreacting a little to this particular instance, but I do think that in general we need to be willing to resist this cultural phenomenon and put some things behind a line that we’re willing to defend.
I think theories of humour have to explain why some jokes/stories are less funny the second time you hear them, while others remain funny forever. Does the "violation" go away after you hear the joke and your brain adapts? That seems plausible to me, but if so, why doesn't that always happen?
There's a Seinfeld episode where George gets fired -- and then decides to go back to work anyway, believing that he's teaching them a lesson. I've seen it many times, so I know exactly what's coming, but my brain still can't seem to prepare itself for the deep, character-consistent idiocy of it. I will never not laugh while watching this. The question is: Why?
Yeah, to me, comedy is only actually funny if it's based on something that plausibly happened to the person in real life and it's an interesting, original or clever take on this situation. Not bruteforcing plays on words unless they also come up organically or tie absolutely well to the plausible real life situation. But then it's more like a cherry on top rather than the main funny part. I think a good comedy should also be able to work through multiple languages. It shouldn't be dependent on having those specific words in that specific language.
"Us humans are so limited in our capabilities. I'm willing to admit, in many ways, I run slower than Windows 95. God, I'm awful at jogging."
Running is the connection here, that's clear. But it seems to me that jogging should be the punchline, not Windows 95. Win95 works as the setup. Maybe I prefer that because Win95 is a much more specific thing than jogging. The punchline "I was talking about Windows 95 all along!" just feels so arbitrary compared to "I was talking about jogging all along!"
There's also a bit much lifting done in your punchline (double meaning of run + bringing in Win95), but even when you disjoint the two a little more, it doesn't work that well:
"I'm awful at jogging. I run slow... I'm not even the Windows 95 of joggers."
Windows 95's start menu was drastically faster than Windows 10's with its default settings. Things like that mean the joke just results in thoughts like "By what metric?" and "Was Windows 95 ever considered famously slow?"
Or is the point that the reference doesn't need to be accurate but just has to catch a general vibe of "old = slow"
The column heading just says "mix ideas", I don't think they're supposed to be taken as finished, stand-alone jokes. I think some of them have potential if framed correctly or rephrased a bit (foraging for wild cake, in particular).
> The column heading just says "mix ideas", I don't think they're supposed to be taken as finished, stand-alone jokes.
Right above the table there’s a title that says “Joke Ideas”, and the text introducing the table is “And here are a few jokes that were created using this method”.
Everything indicates they are intended as jokes.
> Take the not entirely dissimilar Windows Vista joke from the IT Crowd
That joke doesn’t use the “mix ideas” concept at all. It’s straightforward in not deviating from the theme.
> It's not especially funny if taken in isolation, but in the context of the scene and the show as a whole
The idea of that joke could’ve worked in any context. It’s just:
This feels like a manual for a completely humorless person to trying and understand why people laugh. I appreciate the effort, but it's quite naive, and honestly most of the example jokes are just bad puns.
Some activities are highly theoretical: you learn the principles of operation, and maybe how they break down into elements, practice briefly, and then execute at a high level.
Other activities are highly practical: you can learn the theory via a brief rundown, but executing at a high level takes years to decades of practice.
My theory of theory of humour is that humour is in the latter category.
It's kinda like music theory - if you're already a talented composer, music theory helps clarify a few technical mysteries and sheds light on other composers' work. But it tells you nothing about creating interesting music, and it's typically apparent when a composer writes according to theory rather than according to their own ears.
Likewise I think some sophisticated humorists would benefit from reading philosophies of satire, psychology of slapstick, etc, to help hone their craft. But those are not how-to guides.
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The equating of jokes and comedy here is an affront for anyone who has explored different avenues of comedy in any way. The analysis is fine and even interesting for (as others have pointed out) one specific type of joke but just flippantly calling that all of comedy is very jarring as it is obviously wrong.
I just completed a clown workshop this weekend where I was in tears laughing from an exercise of simply playing peekaboo, my improvised musical team has gotten laughs and applause from our piano man simply starting to play music and from us rhyming two words, I've seen TJ & Dave erupt a room from being as realistic and truthful as possible in their improv, one of my Edinburgh Fringe highlights was a performer crashing a live podcast recording multiple times and falling over, spilling many pints in the process.
That is all just to say that comedy is much more than just jokes, and especially much more than jokes that fit this theory. To be clear though, I am not against attempting such formalisms and theories (I have many myself and do think this kind of thinking is great for generating ideas), I've just yet to see a good comprehensive one.
Heard Adrian Edmondson on Desert Island Discs and one of the interesting things he said about comedy was that there were a limited number of jokes all of which he believed are contained in the recorded works of Laurel and Hardy and that he would be able to enumerate and show all of them from those works.
He also said he was tired of comedy as he knew all of the jokes. Later he sort of contradicted himself by saying that Waiting For Godot is a very funny play and that he felt he had not yet understood it all.
So that's kind of an interesting counterpoint...he does essentially conflate comedy and jokes.
I think the word "joke" in the context of his interview was more or less intended to mean "bit" or "skit" or "humour-incitement type" -- rather than literally joke as in "knock knock."
I believe he actually said that all humour is passed on, i.e. that all the comic acts that have come along after Laurel and Hardy were in essence re-enacting scenes that they had performed, in another form, prior.
Of course, Laurel and Hardy were brilliant, but it would actually be naive to think that the chain began there. Performed comedy is as old as civilisation itself, and always fluctuates in sophistication/depth relative to the target audience.
Laurel and Hardy represent a talented comedic duo, heavy on physical humour (though not without wit) captured on film so that the physicality of their performance was not up for debate or a supposition, and was available to be absorbed and drawn upon by later comedic performers, and I think this physicality is why Adrian calls back to them. For him, they offer a textbook approach to a broad category of humour.
As for the finitude of humour, I think it would be rather more bizarre if the contrary was true and humour was infinite. Then everything could be funny. Maybe there are a lot of permutations for humour -- if you think about it, the audience (and by extension the time they live in) somewhat dictate what is and isn't funny, and there are considerations as well for cultural context (i.e. JP and CN are going to have a lot of material that will seem nonsensical to a Western audience and vice versa) some humour is obviously universal.
But even to include all topical, regional humour, the number of phrases and physical movements of bodies that can trigger genuine amusement is very likely to be a finite subset of the possible permutations, especially given that all permutations themselves will be finite in total number (there are not an infinite number of words or possible physical occurrences...)
Perhaps indeed there is even a small number of types of humour-incitement, of which all topical, regional jokes are simply manifestations. To group humour-incitement types in this way, Adrian's assertion seems even more acceptable.
He doesn't say Laurel and Hardy invented humour or anything that we could immediately refute. I think he considers their work to be the textbook. Everything you should see before coming up with your own material can be found in their catalogue.
Like all art, grasp the fundaments and figure out which rules you want to subvert to get your message across, for the sake of doing so rather than empty rebellion or feeding reviewers from a marketing perspective.
Sometimes there's no reason to break a rule, and sometimes there's every reason.
As for his fatigue, whether the man has had exposure to humour from other cultures is not clear, but certainly in the context of his own culture I would be inclined to agree. The vast majority of comedy in the West is very obviously recycled material with different packaging. That's not to say that sometimes the later recyclings aren't better than the "originals" —- a lot of it is in the delivery, and if you watch them all without bias (nostalgia) you can probably pick out some cases where a comedy from 2007 is funnier than something conceptually similar from 1987.
A lot of people grew up with comedy shows that were the best of their time and thus become the best for those people, and they watch stuff 20 years later after having rewatched their favourites a dozen times as well and it all seems less novel. Perhaps the same effect occurs for the performers as well as the audience.
Adrian also lost his partner in comedy, the infamous Rik Mayall, and this perhaps soured him on comedy without that second half to bounce off of. They used to tour live and they would often break character and break the fourth wall —- while their long collaboration and friendship would lend a good deal of weight to it, as well as topical spice depending on the region, I think they were keen to do it anyway to keep their material a little fresher and keep things interesting for themselves while doing it. Touring the same act up and down the country would surely be enough to convince anyone it's all been done before. Losing that certainly confines one's repertoire to only the rehearsed material.
I think he's married to Jennifer Saunders (of Absolutely Fabulous and French and Saunders fame) but I don't think they ever collaborated much.
> if the contrary was true and humour was infinite. Then everything could be funny.
I don't think that necessarily follows. Some infinities are greater than others.
(Even though I happen to think anything could be funny with sufficient effort. Even tragedy)
Schadenfreude to the extent of humour. That is a difficulty isn't it, the audience can find whatever it wants funny if that's how it's wired. Perhaps you're right.
It's definitely contextual. As an example, military or veterans, first responders, doctors, lawyers, and others like that will usually have a much greater appreciation for dark humor than people who haven't had to deal with tragic circumstances in their day jobs.
Mike Birbiglia IMHO is a master of turning terrible things into hilarious ones
Yes, the article mistakes punchlines for comedy. Watch some of Norm MacDonald's stuff on Conan (troubled moth, Jacques de Gatineaux, drunk dart thrower, Andy the Swedish-German)... sure, the punchlines fit the model in the article, but the real humor comes from his delivery and the weird worlds he creates leading up to the punchlines.
Same with Phil Hartman and Matt Berry, they can make the most boring lines instantly funny through sheer power of charisma and vocal inflections.
You and he were buddies, weren't you?
I'm a one track lover...
With all of these, there's an element of absurdity. It's not about the world Norm is creating, it's the fact that the words aren't the joke, the joke is on you. The joke is that it's a long, boring story to set up a shitty punchline. You wait, and wait, and wait for the catharsis, but it never comes from the joke itself, it comes only a beat or two after when you realize what just happened.
Matt Berry gets mileage out of responding to everything with a sort of bombastic over-seriousness. He is a character that does nothing small.
Observational comedy is the pointing out of absurdity in everyday life.
“Some say funny things.
Others say things funny.”
Something like that.
> troubled moth
This is worth googling for anybody who’s not urgently meant to be doing something for the next ten minutes. Also on Conan, for anyone looking for an amazing example of humour without a punchline is “conan nathan fielder susan”
I’m a big fan of his dirty Johnny joke on stern, https://youtu.be/4gshCmZVAV8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJN9mBRX3uo
That is comedy gold
Thank g-d for the hatchery.
Comedy is a complex superstructure. I think the site has a probably-correct description of the ground-floor basis of that superstructure. But the rest of the structure is where the magic is.
I describe this "ground-floor basis" not as "comedy is search" but "comedy is learning." One of the first things babies laugh at is object permanence. But you quickly get into forms of comedy that are much more than the formula discussed into the article. Consider sarcasm. Consider crass humor derived from blatant invocation of socially inappropriate subjects. Consider "inside jokes" which are often purely social, having lost all connection to the "relating two concepts."
Interesting. Re: search vs learning.
With search, I understand it as a process of learning, where diff search strategies create different learnings. Maybe laughter is a strategy of search, or what the algorithm feels like from the inside attention head...?
And search feels like moving around a tree or maybe graph (moving thru graph from known origin to unknown extremities, this is maybe tree-like in any meaningful local sense). Anyhow, searches being depth-first vs breadth-first with attention feels related.
Thinking through your comment has me reflecting on the distinction between depth-first vs breadth-first comedy, and if that even makes sense :)
> I was in tears laughing from an exercise of simply playing peekaboo
My wife and I have a 15 month old and one of our favourite games is for one of us to sit with him on the stairs looking through the bannisters at the other one dancing and singing. Sometimes we are all in absolute hysterics. Humour is very much about a collective will to engage in the shared enjoyment, and I reckon most parents would agree with me.
But yes, OP's article does not really cover satire, parody, toilet humour, slapstick, deadpan, cringe humour etc...
I feel like I've read this comment before, except the topic was music theory and the focus was on harmony and someone who valued rhythm, texture, and timbre felt left out.
Related to what you're saying, there's a whole essay by Mark Twain where he explains the difference between comedy (and comedic storytelling) and simply "telling a joke". He didn't think much of the "punchline" type of jokes, he was all about the storytelling... as you can tell by "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and his many other stories.
I'm interested in reading that essay — is this the one? https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3250/3250-h/3250-h.htm
Yes! Good find.
> There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.
> The humorous story is strictly a work of art—high and delicate art—and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story—understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print—was created in America, and has remained at home.
I'm not sure I agree the humorous story is purely American, though doubtless Mark Twain was one of its masters.
Mark Twain wrote a book called "Roughing It", and I can't put my finger on it and tell you exactly what it is about this book, but there's some essence of Mark Twain dictating this story to you, the reader, that has persisted all of these many years since it was written that imbues it with a special kind of comedy magic the likes of which you are unlikely to find anywhere else.
I have tried to read it 3 times and ended up laughing so hard my stomach hurt until I had to stop reading.
I can't finish it, it's too funny.
100% worth an attempt to read at least 3 times so far.
What a wondrous book. So many hilarious anecdotes. Tom Quartz the mining cat. The escaped tarantulas. The retired Admiral. But it's not just the little stories. His characters, the comical exaggerations, his poking fun at his younger and ridiculously naive self, the description of the places, the little observations serious and humorous, the very language are all just a pleasure.
I have a theory that everything is search. Protein folding? Search for minimal energy. DNA evolution - search for ecological niche fit. Cognition? attention is search, memory is search, imagination is also search, problem solving - of course is search. Scientific progress? It is (re)search. Optimizing an AI model? Search for optimal parameters to fit the data. Reinforcement learning? Search for optimal behavior to maximize rewards. Even speaking is search - we output words in sequence, searching the next word like LLMs. Now I can add comedy to the list.
<rant>Search is a nice concept, it defines everything clearly - search space, goal space, action space. Compare it with fuzzy concepts like understanding, intelligence and consciousness. We can never define them, precisely because they gloss over their input-output domains and try to present a distributed process as centralized in the brain.
Search has a bunch of properties - it is compositional, hierarchical, recurrent (iterative in time) and recursive. This pattern holds across many fields, I think it is based on the fundamental properties of space-time which are also compositional, hierarchical and recurrent (object state at time t+1 depends on its state at time t)
Search can be personal, inter-personal, physical or information based. It can explain away much of the mystery of the three fuzzy concepts I mentioned. I describe cognition as two search loops - search externally by applying known behavior to collect experience, and search internally to compress experience and update behavior.</>
I think a more specific denominator you might wanna look into is free energy minimization as you mention in your first example. I really liked reading Active Inference and What Is Life? on the subject.
Strong agree. I'm on a similar path as you, travelling through related thoughts
I think this hypothesis goes a long way to explaining why the math of transformers (doing mathematical operations on language) create something that rhymes so much with intelligent thought. Though I should clarify that LLMs do not share the same processes or verbs of our intelligence, only the snapshot moment-in-time of a mind-like object ;)
I think another way to put that really good idea is simply to say that humans are innately wired to explore and discover!
Not surprising I guess, since our survival literally depended on that capability for tens of thousands of years (and still does, to a lesser extent)
How does this explain away the mystery of consciousness?
We have a dual search loop - outside, we act using our experience to gain new data. Inside, we compress this data and update our experience. We search for experience and search for understanding. Acting is search for new insights, learning is search for error minimization.
I think the way we encode our experiences is relationally, like neural networks. We relate new experiences against past experiences, this creates a semantic space that is highly dimensional. Any concept is a point or a region in this space. It has consistent semantics, which leads to the unified experience. We can relate anything to anything in this space without having a central understander. Encoding your own experiences creates a first person perspective from 3rd person data, which was always a "hard" problem to explain in philosophy.
The serial action bottleneck adds to the illusion of centralization. But it's still a distributed process, no neuron is conscious or understands by itself. And even in society, no human can recreate even a 1% of human culture individually. We are not that smart on our own. We should always look for the larger context where we develop, not just the brain.
Search has the virtue of not hiding the environment, it is social and distributed, unlike more personal concepts like consciousness, intelligence and understanding. But as I said above, even inside the brain there is nothing but distributed processing, no homunculus.
I think the core of my argument is "there is no centralized consciousness, understanding or intelligence, they are distributed processes, they act across neurons in the brain and across people in society". It seems like a hard pill to swallow, if that is true then there is also no centralized understanding or truth.
I commend your diligence, your theory may even be internally consistent, but I don't see why I should believe this rather than the comparatively simple and intuitively true (to me, anyway) notion that there is a genuine soul, it has its own volition, and it certainly interacts with the physical body and brain through a link that is currently (and may always be) mysterious.
What you say that the soul acts like a homunculus, "interacts with the physical body and brain through a link that is currently mysterious". It is a "center" thing that has volition, and semantics, and is genuine.
And it is understandable to do so. It certainly feels unified, and genuine. And it is simple and nice to be so. But intuition fails us hard when it comes to introspection. We feel alive, and conscious, but we are a few billion neurons connected by trillion branches, all wrapped in a bio-robot, put inside a complex environment full of living things in a state of cooperation and competition.
Again, that is your theory. Just because you've created it using the primitives of materialist science doesn't mean it's true or that it's more likely than another theory. The fact is there's no scientific basis for believing what you've said. There just isn't.
If it feels like there's a scientific basis for what you're saying, that's because you're invoking the metaphysical principle of strict materialism, which is a common (though not inherently valid) way of thinking about science, and if that were true then yes, something like your theory would have to be true.
But be clear - that is not something proven by science, it is an axiom that is far from obviously true or universally accepted.
It may also feel that your theory should be true because so much about how the body and brain works is, I agree, materialist in nature, so why not hypothesize that everything is materialist? But that is very much a hypothesis and an intuition, not something that is scientifically proven or logically forced. And, as you say, intuition can be flawed.
Consciousness is just the result of a search for "a more or less linear story that makes sense of the way I act and react"
We're good at predicting states of minds of others (helpful when trying to exploit limited resources, and very helpful for either predator or prey), and we can cheaply gather a lot of data on ourselves, so why should the capability for inferring states of mind not, as a side effect, also provide us with our own inferred state of mind: our own "I"?
This is a theory that would work, except for the fact that I know I exist. Why does materialism so desperately want to ignore that knowledge? Is that really simpler than the idea that we have a soul that interacts with the body and brain, but which also has its own nature that is separate from biology and evolution? Do we have to go 100% and say things that start with "consciousness is just"?
I'm passionate about this because I know -- from personal experience -- that this type of philosophy can really go along with denying ones own existence in a deep way. It feels great to know you're a soul that exists. I don't know why it's supposed to be "rational" to convince yourself against a simple truth that we all know intuitively. And I say that as someone who used to feel that way.
The quality of consciousness and the existence of a non-body non-brain soul seem to me like two completely orthogonal issues (I can easily imagine creatures without conscious awareness but with a soul; I can certainly imagine creatures with brain-driven consciousness but without a soul; a rock has neither; in your model people have both) so it seems unlikely that answering your two questions would move the conversation forward.
For what it's worth, I know I exist as well; can we agree that we both exist, but we have differing models for what the necessary constituents of that existence are?
> Can we agree that we both exist, but we have differing models for what the necessary constituents of that existence are?
Of course, yes.
> I can certainly imagine creatures with brain-driven consciousness but without a soul
This would probably be the heart of the disagreement. I don't believe this is possible. Such a creature would not have qualia.
And, as a species, I don't think we're any closer to resolving this question "objectively" than we ever were. fMRIs say where blood is flowing in the brain, but that's hardly enough to explain the phenomenon of subjective experience.
By the nature of the question, we won't be able to attack it from the outside, and I don't think I could generally convince another person that they have a soul that exists, if they're inclined to explain themselves using materialism, which at this point has become flexible enough to be unfalsifiable, with the everlasting faith that someday science will fill in all the gaps.
That's why my approach now is just to poke holes in the seemingly impenetrable confidence that materialism is the only "rational" way to think.
(By the way, I'm not saying you hold that position.)
> fMRIs say where blood is flowing in the brain, but that's hardly enough to explain the phenomenon of subjective experience.
fMRI scans correlate well with neural net embeddings. That is a great hint. We just need to look at the semantic spaces developed in these models, by a purely mechanistic process, to see how it goes from data to semantics.
The idea that we will just need to do that is a form of faith, no more rational (in my opinion, less so) than belief in a soul.
Making up nonsense will always be easier than actually understanding reality.
Just because we can’t explain something right now does not mean you can insert whatever you want into that hole and assert it’s just as valid as any other explanation.
It's funny how much I agree with your whole comment ;)
Also, "making up nonsense" is a very disrespectful, and intellectually dishonest, way to approach someone's understanding of life which is hard-earned through experience and thousands of hours of introspection and study. Consider that people who disagree with you on this may still be just as educated and smart as you are.
Not if they think making up supernatural explanations is valid.
It’s the same logic as God of the gaps. Science doesn’t understand something yet so better fill it up with feel-good made up stuff and pretend it’s just as valid as actual science.
To me, this theory is Science of the gaps. "Science can't prove it yet, but it will." :shrug: That's faith, not logic.
One of the stupidest things I’ve read on here. Science has an incredible track record. Faith doesn’t.
> This would probably be the heart of the disagreement
OK, sounds like we're agreed there.
If souls are required for consciousness, then I guess we could try to decide which creatures are conscious by first deciding which have souls? Would that question be any easier to answer that way around?
I thought we were talking about "what is consciousness" rather than "which creatures are conscious." The conversation started with "consciousness is just [a series of material processes resulting in an illusion of interiority, rather than a genuine phenomenon of -- for lack of a better word -- personhood]"
I would probably say "consciousness is the soul" rather than "souls are required for consciousness," but either way I don't see how that helps the fundamental issue that it's impossible to physically prove another creature's interiority, including humans.
What I said was that it's all search. We search and learn, search and learn. This feels like consciousness because it is a recurrent process that feeds on itself. We create relational representations from data, and these representations encode the structure of our experiences. In other words embeddings explain away the qualitative aspects of qualia.
Just declaring that they explain it away doesn't make it so. You've come up with a theory that, from 10,000 feet up, could correspond with certain observations of consciousness. Why should it be true?
We were talking about "what is consciousness" but rapidly hit an end.
Sorry for the lack of clarity: "which creatures are conscious" was my attempt to switch topics to a line which I had hoped might be mutually interesting.
Cheers!
Before we stop, if you don't mind, could you answer why you are dissatisfied with the idea that there's a soul, and why we need to do away with it 100%?
To be clear, I really do take issue with the 100% aspect. There are many psychological functions that are clearly at least mediated if not outright caused by the brain and body.
But I think some people say "there's so many functions that are physical, that probably 100% are and we just don't know it yet." But that doesn't seem logically any more forced than "there's a soul that's mediated by the brain," so I don't know why people are so willing to give up the soul.
One take: Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being (2017) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...
You might get a kick out of this paper (though some may find it's proposal a bit bleak, I think there's a way to integrate it without losing any of the sense of wonder of the experience of being alive :) )
It analogizes conscious experience to the a rainbow "which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them".
> Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself.
I find these types of arguments very odd, though at one point in my life I would certainly have endorsed them.
What is it about the modern scientific mindset that makes people say "actually, the ubiquitous experience of being alive, having thoughts, feelings, and making choices, is actually 100% an illusion."
Don't get me wrong, obviously there is interaction between evolutionary functions, the brain, etc - I mean, there's anesthesia, there's being drunk, horny, fight or flight.. there's all sorts of ways that it's obvious there's a link.
But why do so many theorists want to go from "there's a link" to "this is 100% an illusion?" I just don't get it. Is it that uncomfortable to have something that is outside the reach of physical systems theorizing, or something that is unexplainable (i.e., the link) that we'd rather fit reality into the theory than the other way around?
We have to have the courage to live with something that is inexplicable, at least for now (and, honestly, maybe forever), rather than lose faith in our own existence.
You're spot on that all problems can be interpreted as a search problem. Similarly, all problems can be interpreted as a compression problem. Or parsing, boolean satisfiability, or halting, etc. It's helpful to keep them all in mind because sometimes a different problem domain has a tool that your preferred one doesn't, or just the mindset shift can be useful to unblock.
Lately I’ve come to think of science as a large-scale search algorithm so I think there’s truth to what you’re saying and it’s interesting to think about.
I've yet to see a theory of comedy which actually addresses that there are multiple kinds of comedy:
- Bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny, but instead relies on attacking someone's status in front of a crowd. The crowd laughs in recognition of the successful attack, not because the joke is clever.
- Epiphany humor -- the joke relies on some new thought, connection, or idea, and the "joke" is the leap your mind needs to make in order to comprehend the novel idea. eg. "Otis Elevators: They'll never let you down!" In this case, you must take the familiar phrase "let you down [emotionally]" and realize the second meaning "elevators move up and down [physically]."
- Story-based humor, which probably needs a better name, but is mostly what stand-up comedy is. Other kinds of humor can be mixed in here, but often the "joke" relies on something of a straw man -- setting up a character in the story where the audience can readily recognize that at least one character being related is a fool, and worthy to be laughed at. Often this is perspective-based, and is based around relating to the characters in the stand-up comedian's story. For instance, take Bill Burr's joke about women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1GY-yr-BM -- the "joke" here is mostly whether or not you agree with Bill's characterization of the situation. The joke is not universally funny, but relies on the audience's perspective. If you've never seen the world from the same perspective as Bill, the joke may not hit the mark, or might even seem rude.
- Tone-of-voice humor. This is a joke where there's no real joke, but the tone of voice is really doing 90% of the work. It's just retelling a relatively benign event, except the tone of voice exaggerates the emotions attached to the words. I don't have an example ready for this one because I really dislike this "style" of humor, but imagine some of the less creative or talented stand-up artists.
- SNL humor. "What if an unusual or annoying thing happened?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfE93xON8jk
- Social awkwardness humor / Dramatic irony. See all / most of Arrested Development.
I think "incongruity theory", that the article is alluding to, does actually apply to most of these. You're focusing on the context rather than the actual underlying mechanism driving the joke. e.g. the first one "bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny..." Consider that the incongruity of a comedian laying into someone verbally, compared to the way we're primed for them to talk in polite-society interactions, may be part of the reason why this works. Similarly example two - "Otis Elevators: They'll never let you down!" - there is an incongruity in the usual usage of the expression 'they'll never let you down' to here, that could be what makes this work as a joke.
I agree there are examples that incongruity doesn't cover, e.g. slapstick I personally believe is something a bit different, but generally I do think it's a pretty compelling explanation for a lot of modern comedy.
One gift of my flavor of ADHD - the instant branching to a multitude of interpretations of some series of inputs and multiple degrees of related ideas - is always being primed to make stupid jokes where I intentionally misinterpret or make you misinterpret something obvious.
Like the other day my friend read "shrimp cargot" off a menu. I said "They taught a shrimp how to drive??" The other friend present thought it was the funniest thing ever while the first friend was in pain from it, which just made it funnier. We had the same 50% split relaying it to two more people later.
(It also relies a bit on knowing the "a shrimp fried this rice?" joke to be funniest but it's not required)
> "a shrimp fried this rice?"
There was an italian phrase book I once ran across and have never seen since: its schtick was that all of the phrases were things one might find in a normal phrase book ("the lobster makes a good salad"), but the accompanying illustrations were of abnormal interpretations (in this case, the lobster in a toque tossing a salad).
Yeah I can relate! I've also heard Conan O'Brien say this before, he thinks that a big source of his comedy is just his brain outright not understanding things correctly.
YES. This is how I explain my brain. It doesn't understand correctly, and so it gets really great at exploring and making legible all the hidden dimensions and edges of thought. And from there, creativity is just taking those discovered dimensions and applying rote transformations: inversions or attenuations or extrapolations to absurd extremes ;)
The most comprehensive theory I have seen is that laughter, and therefore humor, is primarily a fear response.
It starts as an infant when you laugh by having your surface nerves rapidly engaged through tickling. Even peakaboo is a fear game due to the child’s lack of object permanence.
When you examine all funny things through the lens of fear, it becomes an interesting logic exercise to draw a connection between the humor you see and how it may or may not be connected to fear.
Consider all of your examples through that lens.
> The most comprehensive theory I have seen is that laughter, and therefore humor, is primarily a fear response.
I’ve been practicing / performing improv comedy for about 5 years now. Keith Johnson style, not UCB style.
Newbies always try to be clever, but being clever is a total trap. The moments that always get the biggest laughs are when you acknowledge something that was already in the room. The audience had a thought - or a proto thought - “where did the umbrella go?” “I thought his name was Fred?” “But why is the duck talking?”. When you acknowledge it on stage, with lightness and connection, you get mad laughter.
I think you’re right about the fear thing. I think doing this acknowledges some deep fear of being alone, or stupid, or something. As a performer, when we make you whole, and do it in a way that feels easy and comfortable, I think, just for a moment, it makes that fear go away. And that’s what the audience is responding to when they laugh. There’s an old line from clowning: “When the performer breathes, the audience breathes.” I think it’s deeper than that. When the performer demonstrates being deeply ok with themselves, the audience believes it might be possible for them too.
This is a very interesting way of putting it.
The way I’ve explained it is “unserious surprise” which also fits with this.
https://emnudge.dev/blog/a-grand-theory-of-humor/
I’ve had some thoughts in that direction.
Super interesting!
I thought about it for jokes, as the reaction is quick (just system 1 and very maybe for more complex jokes it’s system 2 understanding the joke and then system 1 laughing… but then it might not spontenous enough to lough out loud), didn’t though about that for “all funny things”.
Do you have some sources detailng this more?
Oh I couldn’t tell you the original source, it was well over a decade ago that I first heard it. Briefly searching though gave some interesting results.
Here’s a study that identified an unintended consequence of an antismoking fear campaign:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5844502/
Here’s a study that looks at this relationship from a therapeutic perspective:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38840335/
And of course dozens of blog posts exist trying to explain it in a more accessible way.
It's common knowledge (or used to be) that humor is a healthy coping mechanism for fear and dark/uncomfortable situations.
In other words; comical relief.
Really love your thoughts here. Very thought-provoking to someone like myself who has spent quite a bit of time thinking about and researching the evolutionary origins of laughter and its relation to surprise/play
To respond to just one part:
> Bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny, but instead relies on attacking someone's status in front of a crowd. The crowd laughs in recognition of the successful attack, not because the joke is clever
I think you might have it inverted. The crowd doesn't laugh bc it's a successful attack. It's a successful attack bc they laugh.
The audience is largely voting with their choice of where they deploy their "social" laugh. Laughter used to be an involuntary hardwired animal sound (like a "moo"), that signaled a space of learning and safety, to explore and play. It attracted other primates to join on that merit. but along the way it became rewired into the software level of social context. Humans started deploying laughter to shape their social context: to flatter, to flirt, to charm, and yes, to hurt. This is why we laugh more and differently around other humans. (Some of this was discovered via dissecting muscles around the eyes, that activate most readily in more "true" involuntary Duchenne laughter, but not the contrived social laughter.)
So the laughing audience is complicit in the bullying. They are creating the weapon, and the attack. If it's actually funny, it just takes less work to get the audience on your side. That's the performance of bullying -- whether you can carry either a willing or unwilling audience along for the weaponising of the laughter.
That's a great distinction, and I definitely think it's the better characterization. Similarly, the class clown will often fare _worse_ from the teacher if the joke doesn't land. The whole class laughing really turns the tide against the teacher. (although sometimes that just yields a more aggressive response)
> Tone-of-voice humor. This is a joke where there's no real joke, but the tone of voice is really doing 90% of the work. It's just retelling a relatively benign event, except the tone of voice exaggerates the emotions attached to the words. I don't have an example ready for this one because I really dislike this "style" of humor, but imagine some of the less creative or talented stand-up artists.
Glad you mentioned this. Watched stand up specials in groups where the set up for a story joke used mostly tone-of-voice and my friends laughed and I wondered why they found it funny. Maybe the anticipation of a joke combined with the tone-of-voice make people laugh? I struggle to get it.
An exception that comes to mind is SNL's REALLY segment. Pohler and Meyers beat the joke so deep into the dirt it comes back around as funny
I agree but i'd go even fruther and say the categories of comedy seem so damned plentify that almost any theory, or even set of theories, fails to capture all cases. Some people say it's about a twist in what one would expect, but in which case why is something happening repeatedly sometimes more funny, even when it begins to annoy you? And why is the buildup to an obvious punchline somehow funny (say a character you just know will fall off a ladder but waiting for it somehow is funny in and of itself). If it's about making witty connections then why is it genuinely just funny if someone shits themselves in a serious moment or just has a weird accent. Why are impressions funny? I laugh because part of me is saying "oh yeah, George Bush does squint his eyes like that a lot". it's funny to see... but why? Then you have anti-comedy: why is being unfunny funny? People say comedy comes from others pain: like cringe comedy or slapstick but there's times where someone really enjoying something obsessively is funny.
Also, if there are any universal theory then how come my grandad just doesn't understand why comedy i like is funny and vice-versa? It's not that i don't get "his comedy". It's just I find it hard to believe anyone would ever really laugh at it like mine. Then there's jokes from acient times that you wouldn't even think of as jokes now, but we know people laughted. If there is a universal theory of comedy i suspect it would be flexible to the point of being usless as it'd covers almost all human activity.
Agreed! I remember Jerry Louis (really!) playing a waiter just walking across an empty ballroom floor, a fifteen-twenty second take, and it was funnier the longer it lasted! He just did that on the spot, knew he could draw it out, knew how a walk could communicate everything about his mood, his attitude, what he thought of the person he was walking away from. Still don't understand how he did it.
Tone-of-voice example (not mine): "It. Just. Works." vs "It juuuuust works."
How would you call jokes that only work due to laugh tracks (sitcoms)? Bandwagon humor?
I might bucket them in with the bulling humor, since that seems to be very bandwagon-y. I would definitely also say that I've arranged (what I believe to be) useful descriptions, but they're by no means hard scientific fact, nor the only types of humor possible. I actually forgot one of my favorite styles of humor: slapstick!
to be fair, i've seen plenty of examples of the "bullying" one be genuinely hilarious too.
In a formal setting, I think this is called a "roast", when a famous person is the target of the bullying.
For sure! Nothing _prevents_ a bully from being funny, it's just that often this is not the point. And most people do not strictly try to stay in any of the lanes I've defined -- they combine and interweave the different styles. I think the purest example of "bullying humor" might come from kids in the 90s. You're minding your own business, really not doing anything out of the ordinary, and some other kid yells in from of a group "Look how gay he is!" The group laughs, but there's no "joke," and the insult has been wholly invented out of thin air; there's no epiphany for the mind to connect because the insult isn't actually based on anything. That same scenario could easily play out with an actual clever joke attached. It just often is not the case, and the laughter does not depend on the the joke existing, but is related to the attack on status.
Where does something like this fall into (story-based?):
> I don't stop eating when I'm full. The meal isn't over when I'm full. It's over when I hate myself. (Louis C.K.)
I think the best jokes of the greatest comedians that ever lived were jokes that don't even work when you write them down, its all in the greater context, delivery and timing. One of my favorite types of jokes are references to earlier parts of a show, it feels like more work for the setup intensifies the punch line.
Yes, I think that's what I was intending with regard to the story-based jokes. This joke probably lands best if you can relate to Louis C.K., and in this scenario, Louis is the (self-effacing, charming, relatable) fool. He's the target of his own joke, but he's sharing a common and relatable story, and delivering it well. He could have easily told the same joke, but with another person as the target. The example I gave uses another person as the target, but some of the best comics makes themselves the target, which often plays better with the audience. I guess I think there are at least two notable points here:
- In this case, Louis' delivery is part of what makes it clear that this is a joke. I guess I might say it's an intermixture of tonal and story-telling delivery. It would be possibly to tell the same story, but it would only be depressing and not funny. Part of the delivery is how the humor is conveyed. ie, "I don't really hate myself, I'm being hyperbolic for the sake of humor."
- Separately, I think his joke would be much less relatable if he didn't make himself the target of the joke. He's volunteering himself as the target of the humor, and so not punching down at anyone. It's much harder to be offended when the speaker volunteers the topic and the target.
-puns and word-play. Or does that fall under epiphany humor?
Completely serious, I think Calvin & Hobbes had the best concise explanation.
(https://mymorningmeditations.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/...)
I'm not sure if I'm missing something (perhaps the joke, as it were) but the Calvin & Hobbes strip seems to be entirely about having a sense of humour, rather than a theory of comedy.
The C&H explanation has two parts, what triggers the humor response (perception of things that don't make sense) and why we have the humor response (evolutionary fitness). A theory of the humor mechanism should be congruent to a theory of comedy.
The physiological manifestation of the humor response is also explained by evolutionary fitness when you consider it as countering the physiological reaction to the perception of stressful ambiguity.
That's actually very interesting... humor is lubrication for stressful ambiguity.
That's much more interesting than just the comic strip alone, thanks!
It's an interesting thought and a question "why did sense of humor develop through evolution?". I don't think this comic applies to the author's post though. Which is more about how to produce comedy, and seemingly quite one dimensionally?
Also I don't think the comics final answer is satisfactory, because you could definitely respond to absurdity, by calling out why something is absurd, you don't have to laugh at it.
So why do we have a sense of humor in the first place?
If absurdity made us despondent or desperately sad instead, that probably wouldn't do much for the ol' evolutionary fitness.
By default you don't have to have any such emotional reaction to absurdity. You could just analyze the situation and take action accordingly.
The point is exactly that you _can't_ just analyze every single situation that ever happens and then know what to do. That there's a huge amount of life experience for which there is no analytical solution. So you can't "just analyze" every single thing. What do you do then? Dispair? Or laugh.
The ancients eventually came up with the whole God thing to explain all confusion away but i have a feeling that happened after the evolutionary push to not kill yourself the first time you see lightening
So laugh = communication tool to indicate to others that a weird thing happened, but we think it's harmless, so we don't have to react?
Great explanation, indeed, and a gem of a comic.
Almost reinvented the Benign Violation Theory: https://humorresearchlab.com/benign-violation-theory/
See Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud for a similar analysis with far more depth.
I like the theory that jokes are funny to the extent they enable a discovery of 'shared knowledge' between the teller and audience.
I'll provide a light bulb joke as an example...
Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? A: That's not funny.
Shared beliefs, when they start complaining about things the audience relates to. Or completely obvious things we haven't noticed. A really funny monologue I saw once was a European comedian remarking how many different meanings can be carried by the word 'ass' and how often they are contradictory. Very clever observation.
For the curious, I suspect this was Ismo. I love his with on pointing out the incongruities in surface level features of English.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU
Comedy is a complex, living, writhing thing. With rules.
This article feels like the author has taken the concept of one-liner (arguably the densest form of standup comedy) and extended that to be comedy at large. I feel like you could take the Comedian's Comedian podcast episode with Gary Delaney, and get a much more effective lesson with the same content.
Disclosure: I've done standup. It is frightening. It's also a lot of fun.
It's really annoying and deadening, not to mention foolish, when people try to reduce every activity of the soul to a mechanical, comprehensible process.
This. I've seen so much of this on Hacker News that it's almost like a game now to discover the variant of the archetype post in today's feed.
People with a "nerdy" mindset want to find the structure behind everything. That's not a bad thing, but it's so annoying to people who actually do comedy...or music...or art.
Not everything in life can be reduced and programmed. But they'll keep on trying.
If you want to vindicate your distaste, check out the "Joke Examples" section of the argument:
> And here are a few jokes that were created using this method: (...)
> "I'm awful at jogging, I'm running slower than windows 95" (...)
> "You're such a great guy! - I'm not a great guy. Abraham Lincoln was a great guy. I'm a barely adequate guy." (...)
These are two out of 6 examples there - all are extremely plain and boring, except maybe for the last (which is just barely funny).
I like how they highlighted a commonality between two disparate things. When I recognized the pattern, my neurons lit up, eliciting a pleasurable response.
How deadening would it be to imagine that our consciousness and agency is just an illusion created by firing synapses and hormones and that everything we think and do has been predetermined.
Couldn't agree more! I am trying to spread the word that materialism is not the only rational position! (in fact, I find it quite irrational indeed)
If the activities of the soul are so beyond mortal comprehension, then the futile attempt at understanding them should widen the soul in appreciation of the infinite depth of human creativity.
Failure at comprehension does not deaden, any more than only seeing a minute fraction of the cosmos deadens the soul. All that remains beyond our understanding should inspire awe.
Its not that the soul is completely beyond mortal comprehension - art, philosophy, etc do a good job of exploring it. But this (philosophically) materialist way of viewing the world, where everything is caused by evolution and so everything is mechanical to the point where you can almost feed it to a computer -- that doesnt inspire awe to me at all. That makes me feel that my actual existence is being denied, because I'm "really just" this simple process. It's blatantly false but for some reason as tech people we like to put ourselves into a box rather than admit some things are beyond mechanical formalization.
The theory presented in this article was articulated in Arthur Koestler's "The Act of Creation", where he goes on to speculate that all creativity works in this way. It's well worth a read.
Ran into this today. From doing comedy for about 7 years now, this basically correct. Although most comedians approach joke writing organically rather than with this approach
This is exclusively the most primitive joke category base on double meanings. The jokes listed are boring and maybe suited for fillers in a standup routine.
Due to the title I presume that this is another pro-"AI" article that devalues human ingenuity. Well, enjoy the non-funny jokes. I'll stick to pre-2022 material.
The jokes in the article are just there to demonstrate the pattern. There are lots of more sophisticated jokes which clearly follow the same pattern. For example Milton Jones' classic (which won "best joke" at the edinburgh comedy festival I believe)
More Milton Jones "grandfather" jokes which all clearly demonstrate this pattern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEUfbSrpsHkThe ten best-voted one-liners from this year's Fringe are listed here:
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/aug/19/mark-s...
A couple follow that pattern exactly, but some also bank on taking words literally for comic effect.
> I love the Olympics. My friend and I invented a new type of relay baton. Well, he came up with the idea, I ran with it. (Mark Simmons)
But these are really not that funny. Specifically because you imagine that this is what you get if you bruteforce those combinations. If someone comes up on the spot with this and wants to share, sure it might be funny and clever, but if a professional comedian does jokes likes this, it seems plain and irrelevant. Just something that was bruteforced together.
But this is not truly funny comedy. These seem quite clearly made up and depend on this very specific scenario. I think truly funny jokes are ones that are plausible real life scenarios, that spot some sort of unexpected social circumstance or a phenomena with a clever take or perspective that people do not frequently consider and that many in the audience can relate with. Usually you would expect it to be something that actually happened or could have happened to the comedy teller, and you want to imagine them actually be in that situation. Or it can also be a common real life scenario, but an original, yet clever insightful take on it combined with the character of the teller.
Well as E.B. White put it, explaining a joke is a like disecting a frog. You learn a lot but the thing dies in the process. People do find Milton Jones funny - he won the Perrier "Best Newcomer" Award which is a pretty big deal in UK comedy.
I came from a long line of police marksmen. They serve good coffee next to the shooting range.
I came from a long line of police marksmen. We just won the precinct charity cancan dance competition.
the actually funny part is where you decided to create a throwaway account to make the joke
And that they even knew the jokes were bad since their name is "badjoak".
Words with two meanings are just one type of shared aspect in their system. The "hunting cakes" joke was an example of using a shared aspect that isn't a word. (And while it didn't wow me on the page, I think it's the type of joke that a talented comic could make much funnier through their delivery.)
I agree that most of the jokes were weak, but they basically have to use one-liners in order to give many quick examples, and nearly all one-liners I meet are bad. That said, I genuinely enjoyed the "step ladder" one.
A man swears he discovered the secret formula to satire. Turns out, it’s just one cup of irony and a lack of self-awareness, baked at 350 for 20 minutes.
Related: Information is surprise https://plus.maths.org/content/information-surprise
> If your string of symbols constitutes a passage of English text, then you could just count the number of words it contains. But this is silly: it would give the sentence "The Sun will rise tomorrow" the same information value as he sentence "The world will end tomorrow" when the second is clearly much more significant than the first. Whether or not we find a message informative depends on whether it's news to us and what this news means to us.
> [Claude] Shannon stayed clear of the slippery concept of meaning, declaring it "irrelevant to the engineering problem", but he did take on board the idea that information is related to what's new: it's related to surprise. Thought of in emotional terms surprise is hard to measure, but you can get to grips with it by imagining yourself watching words come out of a ticker tape, like they used to have in news agencies. Some words, like "the" or "a" are pretty unsurprising; in fact they are redundant since you could probably understand the message without them. The real essence of the message lies in words that aren't as common, such as "alien" or "invasion".
One joke category is something like "getting away with it". A comedian can say anything, and if it's funny they can get away with it. A ton of modern comedians fail at this, but instead of grinding harder to find the funny angles and adapt to the new meta they act like losers and start to blame the audience. 100% skill issue.
I've noticed there's some people who just say mean things while trying to be funny, but I haven't cracked the details on what makes these jokes land or flop.
I've come to think of most everything as a search. It works far better as a metaphor than makes sense. Learning, Optimization, Modeling, etc. For many, it is clearly a multivariable search. ML, as an easy example, is both searching for a good model and searching for the optimal parameters to it.
I'd like a theory to explain why a certain class of jokes makes me feel physical pain, when others find them hilarious. This example from the article,
> Q: Why are cats so good at video games? A: They have nine lives.
firmly belongs in the "physical pain" category for me.
I think it comes down to delivery. This premise in this format sets up a groan reaction.
But essentially the same elements used by a good standup, telling a story, saying something like “so I was playing super Mario with my cat, and of course he is wiping the floor with me, because… you know… nine lives” could get a solid laugh. Or a far side like cartoon of a cat playing a video game with a dog, and the dog looking upset while the cat looks smug…
The elements of a joke are there, but you still have to construct it into a delivery vehicle that lands it.
It’s a learned behaviour. Outside of North American culture, I don’t think there are “groaner” jokes.
Steve Allen's "How to be funny" presents a compelling model of humor as a deliberate misinterpretation of the setup, which is delivered in the punchline. So you have initial context, pivot, and misinterpretation.
The most powerful versions of that reveal universal, strong and suppressed emotions as well as our basic human fallibility.
Urinal cakes?! I'll never fall for that one again...
Freud has a book on jokes called "The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious" which I thought was pretty interesting (although I mostly read the first section which analyzed the technique of the joke and the tendencies of the joke.)
If you are going to make a video about how comedy works you have to begin it with a joke and then use your theory to explain that joke. I don't want to hear your theory unless you give me something to think about first.
Comedy is tickling the "false alarm" part of the brain.
Laughter is a signal to the group that it's not actually a tiger and we can all relax again.
There is some connection between music and comedy (or at least joke punchlines, like many, I'm not convinced this theory explains how all comedy works): Musical structure almost always relies on establishing a pattern (repetition) and breaking it (contrast).
This analysis is pretty good, and I liked the presentation style.
He lets himself down by saying "all comedy" when he doesn't need to. He's analysing a specific type of joke structure, and that's fine. He doesn't need to overreach like this.
My personal theory is that a joke has to be always both surpising, yet fitting.
The pattern presented in the article fits that requirement. Maybe it is even equivalent.
But that’s just a necessary condition for a good joke, not a sufficient one.
Be careful what you search for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qklvh5Cp_Bs
Art isn’t search, nor is it an algorithm to be optimized. Unfortunately, the modern human experience is so utterly commoditized that the incentive to cram everything possible into an algorithmic, quantitative box is enormous and almost overpowering or seemingly inevitable. Maybe I’m overreacting a little to this particular instance, but I do think that in general we need to be willing to resist this cultural phenomenon and put some things behind a line that we’re willing to defend.
I understand where you're coming from but unfortunately there is a vector that represents exactly that feeling of yours and it can be found via search
Agreed
Some jokes only require a punchline, since the audience shares common knowledge or assumptions e.g.:
It's not funny and the frog dies.
I think theories of humour have to explain why some jokes/stories are less funny the second time you hear them, while others remain funny forever. Does the "violation" go away after you hear the joke and your brain adapts? That seems plausible to me, but if so, why doesn't that always happen?
There's a Seinfeld episode where George gets fired -- and then decides to go back to work anyway, believing that he's teaching them a lesson. I've seen it many times, so I know exactly what's coming, but my brain still can't seem to prepare itself for the deep, character-consistent idiocy of it. I will never not laugh while watching this. The question is: Why?
Imo these one liners are only fun when they're actually not one liners, meaning when the context is part of the setup.
Yeah, to me, comedy is only actually funny if it's based on something that plausibly happened to the person in real life and it's an interesting, original or clever take on this situation. Not bruteforcing plays on words unless they also come up organically or tie absolutely well to the plausible real life situation. But then it's more like a cherry on top rather than the main funny part. I think a good comedy should also be able to work through multiple languages. It shouldn't be dependent on having those specific words in that specific language.
Comedy is branch misprediction.
Writing jokes was once considered an “AGI level” task - but after reading this I’m not so sure!
Don’t forget about The Greeno Test (1978)!
::=
Analogies Anagrams Transformations
Now explain why some jokes following this formula are hilarious but most are painfully unfunny. This would seem to be the hard part.
> I’m awful at jogging. I run slower than Windows 95.
Yeah you have definitely cracked the secret to comedy.
Try:
"Us humans are so limited in our capabilities. I'm willing to admit, in many ways, I run slower than Windows 95. God, I'm awful at jogging."
Running is the connection here, that's clear. But it seems to me that jogging should be the punchline, not Windows 95. Win95 works as the setup. Maybe I prefer that because Win95 is a much more specific thing than jogging. The punchline "I was talking about Windows 95 all along!" just feels so arbitrary compared to "I was talking about jogging all along!"
There's also a bit much lifting done in your punchline (double meaning of run + bringing in Win95), but even when you disjoint the two a little more, it doesn't work that well:
"I'm awful at jogging. I run slow... I'm not even the Windows 95 of joggers."
Windows 95's start menu was drastically faster than Windows 10's with its default settings. Things like that mean the joke just results in thoughts like "By what metric?" and "Was Windows 95 ever considered famously slow?"
Or is the point that the reference doesn't need to be accurate but just has to catch a general vibe of "old = slow"
I think it's at least three things:
1. win95 has waning cultural relevance, and nobody has any fresh memories of dealing with its slowness
2. most of us have seen "windows bad" jokes a million times over by now - it's stale
3. "run" is a pretty weak/generic connection.
Edit: 4 - "I'm bad at running" has a sort of boomer-humor vibe to it, it's less relatable to an audience that's generally in-shape.
Except that every single joke in that table is awful and that deconstruction on why the joke is bad doesn’t generically apply to all of them.
The column heading just says "mix ideas", I don't think they're supposed to be taken as finished, stand-alone jokes. I think some of them have potential if framed correctly or rephrased a bit (foraging for wild cake, in particular).
Take the not entirely dissimilar Windows Vista joke from the IT Crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IfnjBHtjHc
It's not especially funny if taken in isolation, but in the context of the scene and the show as a whole, I thought it was hilarious, at the time.
> The column heading just says "mix ideas", I don't think they're supposed to be taken as finished, stand-alone jokes.
Right above the table there’s a title that says “Joke Ideas”, and the text introducing the table is “And here are a few jokes that were created using this method”.
Everything indicates they are intended as jokes.
> Take the not entirely dissimilar Windows Vista joke from the IT Crowd
That joke doesn’t use the “mix ideas” concept at all. It’s straightforward in not deviating from the theme.
> It's not especially funny if taken in isolation, but in the context of the scene and the show as a whole
The idea of that joke could’ve worked in any context. It’s just:
A: “I’m having a computer problem.”
B: “What OS is that computer on?”
A: “Windows Vista.”
B: “That explains the problem.”
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Saying all you can do is search (brute force) means admitting that we have no theory.
comedy is simply an inevitable surprise!
Thank God for the hatchery.
This feels like a manual for a completely humorless person to trying and understand why people laugh. I appreciate the effort, but it's quite naive, and honestly most of the example jokes are just bad puns.
As seen in Colbert's new cookbook: Does this taste funny?
Is there a theory of humor which explains why theories of humor are invariably hilariously inadaquate?
Some activities are highly theoretical: you learn the principles of operation, and maybe how they break down into elements, practice briefly, and then execute at a high level.
Other activities are highly practical: you can learn the theory via a brief rundown, but executing at a high level takes years to decades of practice.
My theory of theory of humour is that humour is in the latter category.
Most likely humor is just not one thing but many and seeking a unifying theory about something that isn't a unity won't yield anything.
This is the most useful comment in the whole thread.
It's kinda like music theory - if you're already a talented composer, music theory helps clarify a few technical mysteries and sheds light on other composers' work. But it tells you nothing about creating interesting music, and it's typically apparent when a composer writes according to theory rather than according to their own ears.
Likewise I think some sophisticated humorists would benefit from reading philosophies of satire, psychology of slapstick, etc, to help hone their craft. But those are not how-to guides.
> Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process
No, any consist theory of humor cannot explain all humor. Gerbils' Incompleteness Theorem.
I googled that to see if it was an original joke and Google helpfully corrected me.
Did you mean: goebbels incompleteness theorem
I guess it's AI read the same article.
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