Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the MindSome things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor. |
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Contents
| 1 | |
2 What Is Humor For? | 9 |
3 The Phenomenology of Humor | 15 |
4 A Brief History of Humor Theories | 37 |
5 Twenty Questions for a Cognitive and Evolutionary Theory of Humor | 57 |
6 Emotion and Computation | 61 |
7 A Mind That Can Sustain Humor | 93 |
8 Humor and Mirth | 117 |
10 Objections Considered | 177 |
11 The Penumbra | 213 |
12 But Why Do We Laugh? | 257 |
13 The Punch Line | 287 |
Epilogue | 301 |
| 305 | |
| 329 | |
9 HigherOrder Humor | 143 |
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Common terms and phrases
active belief agent AI-complete amusing assumption audience behavior brain cause chimpanzees cognitive cognitive science comedians comedy computational contradiction covert create cultural Dennett detection discover discovery effects epistemic commitment epistemic emotions event evolution evolved example exapted expectations experience explain exploit fact false belief feel fiction first-person humor frame frame problem funny funny bone happens heuristic human Huron incongruity inference insight instance intentional stance interpretation JITSA joke kind knowledge laugh logical long-term memory look mechanism mental space mind Minsky mirth mistake mistaken one’s perception perhaps person perspective phenomenology play pleasure predict problem punch line puns qualia reason response reward riddle role Schadenfreude semantic sense of humor simply situation social solving someone speech act Steven Wright stimuli story structure superiority theory surprise tell theorists theory of humor theory of mind things third-person humor thought tickling tion trigger valenced
Bibliographic information
| Title | Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind |
| Authors | Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, Reginald B. Adams |
| Publisher | MIT Press, 2011 |
| ISBN | 0262294818, 9780262294812 |
| Length | 376 pages |
| Subjects | › Philosophy / Social Psychology / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |