Five-month-old babies know what’s funny
aeon.co
aeon.co
Laughter would be the body's mechanism for successfully managing an input/output exception.
Jokes make us laugh because the punchline unexpectedly departs from the expected outcome of the narrative. Our brains try to anticipate what will happen and respond, but when the brain has been tricked, it has to reconcile what happened. We're rewarded not with a core dump, but a feeling of pleasure.
If it wasn't pleasurable to be surprised, we'd have an existential crisis: Our brain failed to anticipate the correct outcome. Now we have to figure out if our senses are wrong or if there is a new phenomena to understand. The natural reaction would probably be fear and flight.
That isn't the kind of behavior that moves the species forward- risk taking and information gathering only endure if you are able to manage ambiguity. Successful humans found pleasure in the unexpected. Laughter seems to be a core component of our survival skill. Laughter also seems to be a common symptom of schizophrenia. Maybe laughter is just the result of the brain's garbage collector firing.
Does this mean more intelligent people are less likely to laugh, esp on simple jokes, as they can anticipate them? It takes more complex ideas/stories for them to enjoy the surprise. Sometimes their jokes are also too complex for others. This may partially cause a chasm between people with a wide gap in cognitive skills/ability.
Intelligence wouldn't reduce the pleasure of simple jokes because it wouldn't help you anticipate the unexpected—the whole point being that the punchline doesn't logically follow.
Certainly there are some jokes that require more niche knowledge:
If the Silver Surfer and Iron Man team up, they’d be alloys.
People don't think in strictly logical terms, there's a whole mess of abstract pattern matching and built up experiential anticipations embedded in the process.
That pun might require some iota of shared knowledge, but it doesn't require much intelligence to get. Amount of knowledge doesn't define intelligence - someone who scores low on an IQ test will get that joke just as much as someone who scores highly (not that I'm equating IQ score with intelligence).
I don't think that a lack of shared knowledge is what they are getting at. Complexity of a joke has more to do with lots of disparate moving pieces, so to speak. The ability to quickly perceive those pieces - and what is unexpected within them - isn't shared by everyone.
I disagree. These types of jokes also tend to fall prey to interpretation by association, that is, the audience may just recognize that it's supposed to be funny and it's funny for scientific reasons, but they don't fully know what an alloy is or couldn't explain it. It's less about the actual knowledge of the joke and more that they to some degree have had the premise explained and find it funny due to "insider knowledge".
A lot of more common science jokes tend to be like this - the joke isn't that the setup or punchline are particularly good, it's the exclusivity that adds to the value of the understanding. It's not that you get the joke that is funny to many people, it's that others don't get the joke that adds value.
I seem to remember that there are many cultures where humor does not rely as much on an unexpected punchline, but rather on a repeated, expected structure (i.e. catchphrases).
In such situations, it's not really that you fully knew what was going to happen the whole time, mind you; it's just that you got to the conclusion faster than the joke itself did, and then your anticipational sense died down as you waited for the delivery to "catch up."
People say that comedy is all about timing. Essentially, that consists of telling someone about a pattern (or signalling to them that you're aware of said pattern), at exactly the moment they themselves also deduce that pattern. If you do it too soon, you get simple confusion; if you do it too late, you get a half-smirk of resigned acceptance.
But (adult) humans fall mostly into a pretty narrow band as far as prediction goes; and that band gets even narrower when the prediction is of social situations, since our social-tribal predictions are more "hardware accelerated" by genetically-specified bits of brain matter, and less the result of learned arbitrary pattern-recognition. So there are certain topics of comedy for which the timing is very close to universal, regardless of a person's IQ.
On the other hand, if you were to take IQ test questions (or "brainteaser" puzzles generally) and incorporate them into a visual narrative (e.g. a movie) where the protagonist goes about solving said problems as the audience watches--and then you showed this movie to people--I would expect you to see a reaction very much like that of people to a comedy sketch, but only, in each case, for the particular puzzles where the audience-member subconsciously solved the puzzle at exactly the same moment the movie's protagonist did. The rest would fall flat.
(This could actually be tested fairly easily: there are a lot of blind Let's Play videos of puzzle-platformer games that could be used as apparatus.)
Yes, but I think it's more nuanced than that. Laughter doesn't come from unexpected outcomes, it comes from things that are unexpected in unexpected ways.
E.g. not being able to find your shoes because they're under the coffee table vs duct-taped to the ceiling.
I wrote about this here: http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/06/how-writing...
But the theory is also easily testable. E.g. you can measure the humor response to unexpected events that violate the laws of physics verse unexpected events that don't violate the laws of physics. The Baillargeon toy car experiment I wrote about this is a good example of that, albeit that's not what it was designed to test.
Here's an evolutional theory for the author: there's an unavoidable feeling of regret that comes with introducing children into your life. There's late crying, the destruction of personal time, there's moments of unstoppable crying... but it all just sort of melts away the minute he looks at our silly faces and cracks a grin. In that second all is forgiven and there's no regret.
My son's in college now, and I still haven't forgotten when he was not yet walking, less than a year old, and we sat on the couch cracking each other up every time I said the word "chicken." Who knows why it was funny? It was hilarious to us.
Another time he was also not yet walking, and new to crawling (and I was new to his crawling). I set him down on the floor, left the room, came back and he wasn't there. Minor panic until I found him behind the couch. Then he cracked up. He played a joke on me.
If you'd like, you can try bonding once again over the collegiate-level telling of that joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3ogbzd/whats_you...
The nature of "what makes something funny" is one of those questions that is actually really hard to answer when you get into it.
All humour can be explained by an incorrect connection in the brain being corrected. For example, a play on words has one meaning that you make the connection with by default, but then you see the meaning they was actually intended and this correction induces laughter. In a slapstick comedy, actors may hit each other violently, so you expect a violent reaction, but then little physical damage is actually done, and this correction makes you laugh again.
Summing up, humour is when the brain gets something wrong, corrects itself, then produces a physical reaction to tell others 'I was wrong'. Showing weakness like this is likely a development of the 'social brain'. The feel good factor is also likely a reward for bonding with the group.
So at which point do people lose that knowledge again, and start watching Adam Sandler movies?
A large part of why these philosophies differ is they have different views of human nature, starting with infant psychology. They were free to have different views because these matters are hard to get good information about.
But in recent decades there has been a whole lot of excellent research, and we now know a great deal more about infant and child psychology. From what I understand, what the scientists have found fits most closely with the psychological assumptions of democratic liberalism, at least a version of it.
Islamism has a view of human nature as basically evil and sinful, and believes that people can be moral only if guided by religion. The same goes for other fundamentalist religious views.
Fascism has a basically tribalistic view of human nature. We are good if we belong to the right racial tribe, bad if we belong to any other one. People are incapable of guiding their lives unless lead by a powerful leader, and they love warfare.
Marxism has an idealistic view of human nature as naturally peaceful and cooperative. However, authoritarian communism as actually practiced in the Soviet Union or Mao's China implicitly assumes human beings are naturally irrational and selfish, and need a powerful regime to force them to be good citizens.
Liberalism has a more mixed view of human nature. Humans are seen as having a variety of motivations, some self-oriented, others more concerned with the well-being of others. They are capable of being rational or irrational, depending on the circumstances, and ditto whether they behave in a cooperative or win-lose manner. Human nature is designed for life in small foraging bands, as described by the evolutionary psychologist.
Let me add, liberalism explains human nature as the product of natural forces, as described by various sciences. The other philosophies at least implicitly assume it was created by supernatural forces.