131–140 of 182 posts
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...
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...
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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…
> 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)
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.
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 ma…
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 ma…
How does this explain away the mystery of consciousness?
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"?
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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.
> 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”
That is comedy gold
“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…
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 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.
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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 interacti…
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 w…
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).
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> 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.