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[iguanaiguana]

Donald said all kinds of stuff.

[Donald X.]

Donald said all kinds of stuff.

I bet all the "it cost $4" stuff is in the secret history, and thus in the wiki already. And I'm not sure I said anything all that interesting strategy-wise.

And wero isn't the only one who updates the wiki. That's posterist.

[iguanaiguana]

Donald said all kinds of stuff.

And wero isn't the only one who updates the wiki. That's posterist.

[Donald X.]

Donald said all kinds of stuff.

And wero isn't the only one who updates the wiki. That's posterist.

[that's the joke]

A joke is where there's a shift in frame of reference that causes someone to lose dignity.

So no, that is not the joke.

[Roadrunner7671]

And wero isn't the only one who updates the wiki. That's posterist.

A posterist is one who makes or designs posters. Is that the joke?

[werothegreat]

His comments so far have basically been "I like this card".  Let me know when Empires previews start leaking.

[Donald X.]

His comments so far have basically been "I like this card".

I just thought everyone should know.

[Witherweaver]

His comments so far have basically been "I like this card".  Let me know when Empires previews start leaking.

Sounds wikiworthy to me.

[Asper]

Donald said all kinds of stuff.

And wero isn't the only one who updates the wiki. That's posterist.

[that's the joke]

A joke is where there's a shift in frame of reference that causes someone to lose dignity.

So no, that is not the joke.

That seems like a very restrictive definition of a joke. Although i think Wero shouldn't be taunted for caring about the wiki.

[Donald X.]

A joke is where there's a shift in frame of reference that causes someone to lose dignity.

So no, that is not the joke.

That seems like a very restrictive definition of a joke. Although i think Wero shouldn't be taunted for caring about the wiki.

Well, you can do your own research there. I have failed to have good times arguing about this on the internet in the past. There are people who actually propose that that's exactly what a joke is, and I find their arguments compelling.

[bardo]

Do you have any links or references to those arguments? I find the premise interesting, and my initial googling has failed to turn it up.

I did find the Incongruity Theory of Humor, which seemed related, but not quite the same as what you are saying.

[Donald X.]

Do you have any links or references to those arguments? I find the premise interesting, and my initial googling has failed to turn it up.

I did find the Incongruity Theory of Humor, which seemed related, but not quite the same as what you are saying.

The place where I saw this all spelled out was in Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, in the chapter "The Meaning of Life." You can read bits of it online but I don't know how to link to this. Wait someone has a hunk of it in a post on some forums somewhere: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=14788.msg570610#msg570610

[LuciferousPeridot]

I got an android virus warning hitting Donald's link.

[bardo]

Thanks, Donald. Interesting stuff.

[markusin]

Do you have any links or references to those arguments? I find the premise interesting, and my initial googling has failed to turn it up.

I did find the Incongruity Theory of Humor, which seemed related, but not quite the same as what you are saying.

The place where I saw this all spelled out was in Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, in the chapter "The Meaning of Life." You can read bits of it online but I don't know how to link to this. Wait someone has a hunk of it in a post on some forums somewhere: http://knowthyself.forumotion.net/t1290p40-humour-the-secret-of-laughter#45383

Interesting read, but I found some parts a bit confusing due to lack of examples. The article mentions the Incongruity Theory of Humour, which I've noticed about humour in the past, but there are other aspects of humour mentioned in the article that are worth considering as well.

[Donald X.]

Interesting read, but I found some parts a bit confusing due to lack of examples. The article mentions the Incongruity Theory of Humour, which I've noticed about humour in the past, but there are other aspects of humour mentioned in the article that are worth considering as well.

When I found the book online, the examples page was missing. It's there in the book though. You could peek at it in a bookstore. The book itself is thoroughly entertaining, although there a couple small sad mistakes and then he really blows it in the last chapter (on the topic of consciousness).

Consider:

"A man died, and left his three sons a ranch. They decided to call the ranch Focus, because that's where the sun's rays meet."

"I was afraid for my life. I became a mathematician, for I'd heard that there was safety in numbers."

Those are both puns. The first is clever, man, a triple pun. It's not funny though. The second is less clever but actually a joke. What makes the second one a joke? I put it to you that it's loss of dignity.

[Donald X.]

Here is how Koestler introduces the problem of humor:

"What is the survival value of the involuntary, simultaneous contraction of fifteen facial muscles associated with certain noises which are often irre- pressible? Laughter is a reflex, but unique in that it serves no apparent biological purpose; one might call it a luxury reflex. Its only utilitarian function, as far as one can see, is to provide temporary relief from utili- tarian pressures. On the evolutionary level where laughter arises, an ele- ment of frivolity seems to creep into a humourless universe governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the survival of the fittest.

The paradox can be put in a different way. It strikes us as a reasonable arrangement that a sharp light shone into the eye makes the pupil contract, or that a pin stuck into one's foot causes its instant withdrawal—because both the "stimulus" and the "response" are on the same physiological level. But that a complicated mental activity like the read- ing of a page by Thurber should cause a specific motor response on the reflex level is a lopsided phenomenon which has puzzled philosophers since antiquity."

Let's piece together the clues from Koestler's analysis, from more recent ideas of evolutionary psychology, and from actual studies of humor and laughter.

Laughter, Koestler noted, is involuntary noisemaking. As any school- teacher knows, it diverts attention from a speaker and makes it difficult to continue. And laughter is contagious. The psychologist Robert Provine, who has documented the ethology of laughter in humans, found that people laugh thirty times more often when they are with other peo- ple than when they are alone. Even when people laugh alone, they are often imagining they are with others: they are reading others' words, hearing their voices on the radio, or watching them on television. People laugh when they hear laughter; that is why television comedies use laugh tracks to compensate for the absence of a live audience. (The rim shot or drumbeat that punctuated the jokes of vaudeville comedians was a precursor.)

All this suggests two things. First, laughter is noisy not because it releases pent-up psychic energy but so that others may hear it; it is a form of communication. Second, laughter is involuntary for the same reason that other emotional displays are involuntary. The brain broadcasts an honest, unfakable, expensive advertisement of a mental state by transferring control from the computational systems underlying voluntary action to the low-level drivers of the body's physical plant. As with displays of anger, sympathy, shame, and fear, the brain is going to some effort to convince an audience that an internal state is heart-felt rather than a sham.

Laughter appears to have homologues in other primate species. The human ethologist Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt hears the rhythmic noise of laughter in the mobbing call that monkeys give when they gang up to threaten or attack a common enemy. Chimpanzees make a different noise that primatologists describe as laughter. It is a breathy pant made both when exhaling and when inhaling, and it sounds more like sawing wood than like the exhaled ha-ha-ha of human laughter. (There may be other kinds of chimpanzee laughter as well.) Chimps "laugh" when they tickle each other, just as children do. Tickling consists of touching vul- nerable parts of the body during a mock attack. Many primates, and chil- dren in all societies, engage in rough-and-tumble play as practice for fighting. Play fighting poses a dilemma for the fighters: the scuffling should be realistic enough to serve as a useful rehearsal for offense and defense, but each party wants the other to know the attack is a sham so the fight doesn't escalate and do real damage. Chimp laughter and other primate play faces have evolved as a signal that the aggression is, as we say, all in fun. So we have two candidates for precursors to laughter: a signal of collective aggression and a signal of mock aggression. They are not mutually exclusive, and both may shed light on humor in humans.

Humor is often a kind of aggression. Being laughed at is aversive and feels like an attack. Comedy often runs on slapstick and insult, and in less refined settings, including the foraging societies in which we evolved, humor can be overtly sadistic. Children often laugh hysterically when other children hurt themselves or suffer misfortune. Many reports in the literature on humor among foragers are similar. When the anthro- pologist Raymond Hames was living with the Ye'Kwana in the Amazon rainforest, he once smacked his head on the crossbar of the entrance to a hut and crumpled to the ground, bleeding profusely and writhing in pain. The onlookers were doubled over in laughter. Not that we are all that dif- ferent. Executions in England used to be occasions for the whole family to turn out and laugh at the condemned man as he was led to the gallows and hanged.

The horror that Orwell elicits by his pathetic description of the victims' terror shows that cruelty alone is not the trigger for humor. The butt of a joke has to be seen as having some undeserved claim to dig- nity and respect, and the humorous incident must take him down a few pegs. Humor is the enemy of pomp and decorum, especially when they prop up the authority of an adversary or a superior. The most inviting targets of ridicule are teachers, preachers, kings, politicians, military officers, and other members of the high and mighty. (Even the Schadenfreude of the Ye'Kwana feels more familiar when we are told that they are a diminutive people and Hames is a strapping American.)

But oddly enough, humor is also a prized tactic of rhetoric and intel- lectual argument. Wit can be a fearsome rapier in the hands of a skilled polemicist. The perfect quip can give a speaker an instant victory, deserved or not, and leave opponents stam- mering. We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way.

And here we get to Koestler's attempt to reverse-engineer humor. Koestler was an early appreciator of cognitive science at a time when behaviorism ruled, and he called attention to the mind's inventory of rule systems, modes of construal, ways of thinking, or frames of reference. Humor, he said, begins with a train of thought in one frame of reference that bumps up against an anomaly: an event or statement that makes no sense in the context of what has come before. The anomaly can be resolved by shifting to a different frame of reference, one in which the event does makes sense. And within that frame, someone's dignity has been downgraded. He calls the shift "bisociation."

Koestler's three ingredients of humor—incongruity, resolution, and indignity—have been verified in many experiments of what makes a joke funny. Slapstick humor runs off the clash between a psychological frame, in which a person is a locus of beliefs and desires, and a physical frame, in which a person is a hunk of matter obeying the laws of physics. Scato- logical humor runs off the clash between the psychological frame and a physiological frame, in which a person is a manufacturer of disgusting substances. Sexual humor also runs off a clash between the psychologi- cal frame and a biological one; this time the person is a mammal with all the instincts and organs necessary for internal fertilization. Verbal humor hinges on a clash between two meanings of one word, the second one unexpected, sensible, and insulting.

The rest of Koestler's theory suffered from two old-fashioned ideas: the hydraulic model of the mind, in which psychic pressure builds up and needs a safety valve, and a drive for aggression, which supplies the pres- sure. To complete the answer to the question "What, if anything, is humor for?" we need three new ideas.
First, dignity, stature, and the other balloons punctured by humor are part of the complex of dominance and status.

Dominance and status benefit those who hold them at the expense of those who don't, so peons always have a motive to mount a challenge to the eminent. In humans, dominance is not just the spoil of victory in fight- ing but a nebulous aura earned by a recognition of effectiveness in any of the arenas in which humans interact: prowess, expertise, intelligence, skill, wisdom, diplomacy, alliances, beauty, or wealth. Many of these claims to stature are partly in the eye of the beholder and would disintegrate if the beholders changed their weightings of the strengths and weaknesses that sum to yield the person's worth. Humor, then, may be an anti-dominance weapon. A challenger calls attention to one of the many less-than-exalted qualities that any mortal, no matter how high and mighty, is saddled with.
Second, dominance is often enforceable one-on-one but impotent before a united mob. A man with a single bullet in his gun can hold a dozen hostages if they have no way to signal a single moment at which to overpower him. No government has the might to control an entire popu- lation, so when events happen quickly and people all lose confidence in a regime's authority at the same time, they can overthrow it. This may be the dynamic that brought laughter—that involuntary, disruptive, and contagious signal—into the service of humor. When scattered titters swell into a chorus of hilarity like a nuclear chain reaction, people are acknowledging that they have all noticed the same infirmity in an exalted target. A lone insulter would have risked the reprisals of the target, but a mob of them, unambiguously in cahoots in recognizing the target's foibles, is safe. Hans Christian Andersen's story of the emperor's new clothes is a nice parable of the subversive power of collective humor. Of course, in everyday life we don't have to overthrow tyrants or to humble kings, but we do have to undermine the pretensions of countless blowhards, blusterers, bullies, gasbags, goody-goodies, holier-than-thous, hotshots, know-it-alls, and prima donnas.

Third, the mind reflexively interprets other people's words and ges- tures by doing whatever it takes to make them sensible and true. If the words are sketchy or incongruous, the mind charitably fills in missing premises or shifts to a new frame of reference in which they make sense. Without this "principle of relevance," language itself would be impossi- ble. The thoughts behind even the simplest sentence are so labyrinthine that if we ever expressed them in full our speech would sound like the convoluted verbiage of a legal document. Say I were to tell you, "Jane heard the jingling ice cream truck. She ran to get her piggy bank from her dresser and started to shake it. Finally some money came out." Though I didn't say it in so many words, you know that Jane is a child (not an eighty-seven-year-old woman), that she shook the piggy bank (not the dresser), that coins (not bills) came out, and that she wanted the money to buy ice cream (not to eat the money, invest it, or bribe the driver to turn off the jingling).

The jester manipulates this mental machinery to get the audience to entertain a proposition—the one that resolves the incongruity—against their will. People appreciate the truth of the disparaging proposition because it was not baldly asserted as a piece of propaganda they might reject but was a conclusion they deduced for themselves. The proposi- tion must possess at least a modicum of warrant or the audience could not have deduced it from other facts and could not have gotten the joke. This explains the feeling that a witty remark may capture a truth that is too complex to articulate, and that it is an effective weapon that forces people, at least for a moment, to agree to things they would otherwise deny.

How do we explain the appeal of the barely humorous banter that incites most of our laughter? If humor is an anti-dominance poison, a dignicide, it need not be used only for harmful purposes. The point of was that when people interact with each other they have to choose from a menu of different social psychologies, each with a different logic. The logic of dominance and status is based on implicit threats and bribes, and it vanishes when the superior can no longer make good on them. The logic of friendship is based on a commitment to mutual unmeasured aid, come what may. People want status and dominance, but they also want friends, because status and dominance can fade but a friend will be there through thick and thin. The two are incompatible, and that raises a signaling problem. Given any two people, one will always be stronger, smarter, wealthier, better-looking, or better connected than the other. The triggers of a dominant-submissive or celebrity-fan relationship are always there, but neither party may want the relationship to go in that direction. By deprecating the qualities that you could have lorded over a friend or that a friend could have lorded over you, you are conveying that the basis of the relationship, as far as you are concerned, is not status or dominance. All the better if the signal is involuntary and hence hard to fake.

If this idea is correct, it would explain the homology between adult human laughter and the response to mock aggression and tickling in children and chimpanzees. The laughter says, It may look like I'm trying to hurt you, but I'm doing something that both of us want. The idea also explains why kidding is a precision instrument for assessing the kind of relationship one has with a person. You don't tease a superior or a stranger, though if one of you floats a trial tease that is well received, you know the ice is breaking and the relationship is shifting toward friend- ship. And if the tease elicits a mirthless chuckle or a freezing silence, you are being told that the grouch has no desire to become your friend (and may even have interpreted the joke as an aggressive challenge). The recurring giggles that envelop good friends are reavowals that the basis of the relationship is still friendship, despite the constant temptations for one party to have the upper hand." [How the Mind Works]

[Donald X.]

I got an android virus warning hitting Donald's link.

Thx, fixed.

[jonts26]

Consider:

"A man died, and left his three sons a ranch. They decided to call the ranch Focus, because that's where the sun's rays meet."

"I was afraid for my life. I became a mathematician, for I'd heard that there was safety in numbers."

Those are both puns. The first is clever, man, a triple pun. It's not funny though. The second is less clever but actually a joke. What makes the second one a joke? I put it to you that it's loss of dignity.

I don't see why the first example isn't a joke if the second one is. 

[Donald X.]

Consider:

"A man died, and left his three sons a ranch. They decided to call the ranch Focus, because that's where the sun's rays meet."

"I was afraid for my life. I became a mathematician, for I'd heard that there was safety in numbers."

Those are both puns. The first is clever, man, a triple pun. It's not funny though. The second is less clever but actually a joke. What makes the second one a joke? I put it to you that it's loss of dignity.

I don't see why the first example isn't a joke if the second one is.

I put it to you that it's loss of dignity.

[LastFootnote]

I don't even understand the puns in the first one, sad to say.

[Mic Qsenoch]

"sons raise meat"

[jonts26]

Consider:

"A man died, and left his three sons a ranch. They decided to call the ranch Focus, because that's where the sun's rays meet."

"I was afraid for my life. I became a mathematician, for I'd heard that there was safety in numbers."

Those are both puns. The first is clever, man, a triple pun. It's not funny though. The second is less clever but actually a joke. What makes the second one a joke? I put it to you that it's loss of dignity.

I don't see why the first example isn't a joke if the second one is.

I put it to you that it's loss of dignity.

So your example was not meant to illustrate why loss of dignity is a reasonable requirement for a joke, but just to show, if that were a reasonable definition, examples of what is and is not a joke.

[LastFootnote]

"sons raise meat"

Nice, thanks.

[Donald X.]

So your example was not meant to illustrate why loss of dignity is a reasonable requirement for a joke, but just to show, if that were a reasonable definition, examples of what is and is not a joke.

Someone had commented that the text I linked to but then quoted was lacking in examples. So that was on my mind and then I posted some stuff. The actual examples in the book no doubt try harder to demonstrate whatever it is the author is interested in demonstrating.