I've come to think of most everything as a search. It works far better as a metaphor than makes sense. Learning, Optimization, Modeling, etc. For many, it is clearly a multivariable search. ML, as an easy example, is both searching for a good model and searching for the optimal parameters to it.
Comedy Theory (2022)
91–100 of 182 posts
Re: Comedy Theory (2022)
#92[dead]
Re: Comedy Theory (2022)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Same with Phil Hartman and Matt Berry, they can make the most boring lines instantly funny through sheer power of charisma and vocal inflections.
With all of these, there's an element of absurdity. It's not about the world Norm is creating, it's the fact that the words aren't the joke, the joke is on you. The joke is that it's a long, boring story to set up a shitty punchline. You wait, and wait, and wait for the catharsis, but it never comes from the joke itself, it comes only a beat or two after when you realize what just happened.
Matt Berry gets mileage out of responding to everything with a sort of bombastic over-seriousness. He is a character that does nothing small.
Observational comedy is the pointing out of absurdity in everyday life.
Re: Comedy Theory (2022)
#94Now explain why some jokes following this formula are hilarious but most are painfully unfunny. This would seem to be the hard part. > I’m awful at jogging. I run slower than Windows 95. Yeah you have definitely cracked the secret to comedy.
[dead]
Re: Comedy Theory (2022)
#95“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…
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.
“Some say funny things.
Others say things funny.”
Something like that.
Re: Comedy Theory (2022)
#96I 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 maximize rewards. Even speaking is search - we output words in sequence, searching the next word like LLMs. Now I can add comedy to the list.
Search is a nice concept, it defines everything clearly - search space, goal space, action space. Compare it with fuzzy concepts like understanding, intelligence and consciousness. We can never define them, precisely because they gloss over their input-output domains and try to present a distributed process as centralized in the brain.
Search has a bunch of properties - it is compositional, hierarchical, recurrent (iterative in time) and recursive. This pattern holds across many fields, I think it is based on the fundamental properties of space-time which are also compositional, hierarchical and recurrent (object state at time t+1 depends on its state at time t)
Search can be personal, inter-personal, physical or information based. It can explain away much of the mystery of the three fuzzy concepts I mentioned. I describe cognition as two search loops - search externally by applying known behavior to collect experience, and search internally to compress experience and update behavior.
Re: Comedy Theory (2022)
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if I'm missing something (perhaps the joke, as it were) but the Calvin & Hobbes strip seems to be entirely about having a sense of humour, rather than a theory of comedy .
The C&H explanation has two parts, what triggers the humor response (perception of things that don't make sense) and why we have the humor response (evolutionary fitness). A theory of the humor mechanism should be congruent to a theory of comedy. The physiological manifestation of the humor response is also explained by evolutionary fitness when you consider it as countering the physiological reaction to the percepti…
That's actually very interesting... humor is lubrication for stressful ambiguity.
Re: Comedy Theory (2022)
#98“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…
Comedy is a complex superstructure. I think the site has a probably-correct description of the ground-floor basis of that superstructure. But the rest of the structure is where the magic is.
I describe this "ground-floor basis" not as "comedy is search" but "comedy is learning." One of the first things babies laugh at is object permanence. But you quickly get into forms of comedy that are much more than the formula discussed into the article. Consider sarcasm. Consider crass humor derived from blatant invocation of socially inappropriate subjects. Consider "inside jokes" which are often purely social, having lost all connection to the "relating two concepts."
Re: Comedy Theory (2022)
#99I'd like a theory to explain why a certain class of jokes makes me feel physical pain, when others find them hilarious. This example from the article,
> Q: Why are cats so good at video games? A: They have nine lives.
firmly belongs in the "physical pain" category for me.
Re: Comedy Theory (2022)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'm interested in reading that essay — is this the one? https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3250/3250-h/3250-h.htm
Yes! Good find.
> There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.
> The humorous story is strictly a work of art—high and delicate art—and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story—understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print—was created in America, and has remained at home.
I'm not sure I agree the humorous story is purely American, though doubtless Mark Twain was one of its masters.