Comment by droopybuns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by droopybuns | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the evolutionary basis for laughter is that the pleasure of unexpected outcomes helps us cope with being wrong.

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.

> Maybe the evolutionary basis for laughter is that the pleasure of unexpected outcomes helps us cope with being wrong.

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...

I like this idea. Is it testable?

I'm going to assert that my definitions are correct by virtue of being the most logically consistent and everyone else should adjust their views accordingly.

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.

This sounds plausible enough. We tend not to laugh at things we expect to happen.

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.

You're arguing the incongruous juxtaposition theory of humor, one of the three primary theories of humor.

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.

You have to know what an alloy is to laugh at that one.

That doesn't seem right. Why wouldn't intelligence help predict the unexpected? The point of their argument is that higher intelligence may make it easier to expect what somebody with a lower intelligence would not expect.

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.

> You have to know what an alloy is to laugh at that one.

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.

This sounds like a very post hoc, anglo-centric way of interpreting humor in an evolutionary light.

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).

I dont know of a bio/chemical way to measure IQ, so I believe your premise is flawed.

Are you trying to justify your lack of a sense of humor by saying you're too smart?

Jokes have to be targeted at the audience's intelligence level, certainly. Watch a "comedic" children's cartoon, and you'll find many jokes which fall flat because you can see them coming.

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.)

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