Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-engineer the Mind

Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel Clement Dennett, Reginald B. Adams

MIT Press, 2011 - Psychology - 359 pages

Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The FarSide, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in thefirst place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks,watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, DanielDennett, 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 withopen-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to findand 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 humoristsover the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that ishumor.

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uses reverse humour to engineer the mind

Contents

• 1 Introduction: 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
• 9 HigherOrder Humor: 143
• 10 Objections Considered: 177
• 11 The Penumbra: 213
• 12 But Why Do We Laugh?: 257
• 13 The Punch Line: 287
• Epilogue: 301
• References: 305
• Index: 329

About the author

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He is the author of Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2005, 2006) and other books.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-engineer the Mind
• Authors: Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel Clement Dennett, Reginald B. Adams
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: MIT Press, 2011
• ISBN: 026201582X, 9780262015820
• Length: 359 pages
• Subjects: Psychology / Social Psychology