The Philosophy of Humor: What Makes Something Funny? (2022)
1000wordphilosophy.com
1000wordphilosophy.com
I am what I would call semi-pro level funny, where I can make pretty much anyone crack up in almost any situation, but there are people I've offended who will never laugh at anything I say again because they've been hurt by it and don't trust my words or intentions anymore. This trust or feeling of safety is another necessary ingredient. The expectations theory of humour has part of it, but mainly where when you are funny, you are taking peoples expectations on a ride. If you've crashed the bus before, they're not going to trust you to drive it again.
Comedians at the top of their art are storytellers, and what a friend calls stand-up philosophers, where at that level, punchlines are just satisfying closure on a baroque network of opened loops. You can compose stories like music, where you build tension and introduce themes and motifs, cresendo and decrecendo, etc. I think we're just at the beginning of understanding what funny is, and I'd suspect we're less than 18 months away from LLMs creating Python's, The Funniest Joke in the world.
Something that really jumped out for me is that, according to Nestorhoff, comedy is very much generational. Comedians who were able to appeal to multiple generations are very rare. Don Rickles, Lucille Ball, Rodney Dangerfield, Dave Chappelle, etc. are able to connnect across those timelines.
Ex (first case): In Ruthless People, they walk into a store to play a VHS tape on a VCR. They don't know (but we do) that the tape contains embarrassing scenes, which are about to be displayed to the whole store.
Another example of first case: In Asterix, whenever the Pirate Ship appears. We know (and they know) they're about to get trounced.
With the Three Stooges, we know he's going to smack him upside the head, the question is just how's he going to do it this time?
Catchphrases are a classic example of this, but it's everywhere. I once wrote a pretty terrible sketch where Sean Connery kept saying 'schlap' over and over. By the end of it, there was a sentence where it was obviously, blatantly, absolutely going to end in the word 'schlap'. You could /feel/ the the audience hang on that expectation, and when it inevitably hit, they lost their minds. Zero surprise. Zero subversion of expectation. Brought the house down.
"Benign violation" is the only generalization that I have found comes close to being true. Why did that line land even though it was no surprise? Because while it didn't violate expectations, it violated a lot of other norms (mockery, incorrect pronunciation, domestic abuse). And in fact, the more predictable it got, the funnier it got, because it simply became absurd that it was being uttered so frequently.
In any case, I have literally never been able to write anything funny from first principles like "surprise" or "benign violation". If you try, you ironically put yourself in the mindstate opposite to the nature of those terms. You actually need to forget the principles, to let go and be free, to reach anything that fits the principles.
Comedians from earlier generations are less funny because their message has been absorbed into our culture, and what they discovered then, has become understood, accepted, and is no longer new or surprising.
An interesting thing with tickling is that it is notoriously difficult if not impossible to tickle oneself. Does it suggest something on the nature of laughter and humor? I don't know. Probably that there is some social aspect to it, and a form of unpredictability.
Also in _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_ he made the research of what is humour be one of the primary self-assigned directives of Mike (the accidentally created GAI).
Agreed, theories are testable, all of these theories are easily disprovable, in fact we can construct test jokes that abide by all of them and are still deeply unfunny.
One of the most counterintuitive elements of humor is breaking the flow by saying a wrong word and then correcting one’s self completely tanks jokes.
I have a comedian in mind who does this at least once per his weekly show — cue a grown from the audience and polite applause — it’s a friendly crowd.
Explain this and I think you’re on your way to a proper theory.
They could be necessary rules, but not sufficient. Necessary in the sense that, can you construct a joke that doesn't abide by one of the rules, but is still funny?
There are successful comics who play on their good looks exactly like this, and do it well. Anthony Jeselnik, for instance.
They are funny if they point to some known truth while throwing some sort of error in the audience mind.
The comedian is thus a societal test coder.
The punch line of a joke toys with the expectation of the most likely conclusion. GPT is fundamentally at odds with this because it wants to compute what is expected, so as a result there is no surprise, or unveiling of hidden insight.
It also has absolutely zero training on emotional cues, facial expressions, body language, etc. I suspect it would do better if it had that training.
Perhaps it is possible that humor could be an emergent property of GPTs. A higher order pattern that it learns.
I'm curious to see what would happen if you took a pretrained model and then specialized it on a large corpus of jokes.
I liked this skittles study, pulled from the transcript:
MANDY: The skittles study goes like this. Participants go into a room to fill out a survey. There's a table and a bowl of skittles, and there's an actor posing as a research assistant. And the goal of the study is to figure out the funniest way the actor can offer the bowl of skittles.
They ran this test in lots of different ways, but in the first condition:
<TAPE> CALEB: The actor will say, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I'm in a couple seconds. I'm supposed to offer you these Skittles. Would you like these Skittles?
MANDY: This isn't that funny.
MANDY: But then, things get a little weird. In another group, the actor just flings the skittles at them.
<TAPE> CALEB: Out of nowhere, they'd launch the bowl of Skittles and only afterwards say, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I was told to launch the bowl of skittles.
MANDY: This is surprising but not that funny. It's a little messed up. In the last group though, the actor gives them some warning before it happens.
<TAPE> CALEB: They say, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but in a few seconds I need to throw this bowl of Skittles at you. Then they launch the bowl of Skittles on the participant.
MANDY: It's pretty funny.
<TAPE> CALEB: there was more laughter, certainly, in both of the throwing conditions, but there was a lot more laughter when the person was told the Skittles were gonna be thrown at them first.
MANDY: Under Incongruity theory, people should be more likely to laugh if there's surprise -- but that's not the case here. People are more likely to laugh when it's not a surprise, when they're warned before it happens.
<TAPE>
CALEB: That's because once you hear that and the Skittles get thrown, you know, it's part of the study,
PETER: You're prepared
CALEB: You're prepared! The point of this was to show that it's not about surprise and surprise in some cases actually hurts.
MANDY: So if it's not surprise that's making people laugh when skittles are being thrown at them, what is it? This is where Peter and Caleb's own theory comes in: what they call the benign violation theory.
It’s no great joke, but it serves as a nice tool to examine the theories of humor. The humor from this joke doesn’t depend on incongruity. Maybe a bit on the relief of tension, but it’s not a great explanation. And the scenario with surprise actually hurts here.
The surprise is the realization that we’re not supposed to throw around bowls of Skittles coupled with the unacknowledged realization that this rule is just some tiny, pointless restraint. The recognition and release of this restraint allows for joy! There’s an aesthetic beauty to a rainbow of candies flying through the air, akin to fireworks or streamers, yet in daily life we choose not to throw the bowl of Skittles because we’re more focused on the imagined cleanup than the active, lived experience.
I think the surprise is the best theory for a root so far.