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The Science of Humor
Hugh Pickens writes "The sense of humor is a ubiquitous human trait, yet rare or non-existent in the rest of the animal kingdom. But why do humans have a sense of humor in the first place? Cognitive scientist (and former programmer) Matthew Hurley says humor (or mirth, in research-speak) is intimately linked to thinking and is a critical task in human cognition because a sense of humor keeps our brains alert for the gaps between our quick-fire assumptions and reality. 'We think the pleasure of humor, the emotion of mirth, is the brain's reward for discovering its mistaken inferences,' says Hurley, co-author of Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind. With humor, the brain doesn't just discover a false inference — it almost simultaneously recovers and corrects itself. For example, read the gag that's been voted the funniest joke in the world by American men. So why is this joke funny? Because it is misleading, containing a small, faulty assumption that opens the door to a costly mistake. Humor is 'when you catch yourself in an error, like looking for the glasses that happen to be on the top of your head. You've made an assumption about the state of the world, and you're behaving based on that assumption, but that assumption doesn't hold at all, and you get a little chuckle.'"
Now, this is funny: Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
If you make a joke too funny, you might die laughing. Like this one:
Wenn ist nunstück git und slotemeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das oder die flipperwaldt gersput!
I am officially gone from
Big Brother is Watching You.
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt
Monty Python - The Funniest Joke In The World
Humor is when you catch yourself in an error
But The Funniest joke in the (english speaking?) World reckons that people from different cultures find different styles of humour to be more/less funny.
So there appears to be a conflict here. You'd expect everyone's brain to be wired to catch the same sorts of errors or false inferences, yet if there's a cultural component to humour that contradicts the "error" theory.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I didn't expect the Spanish inquisition!
Some humor is purely hype-induced. From what I've read so far, I'm not sure if this scientific work has covered this aspect of it.
xkcd "comics" are a good example of this. Nothing about them is truly funny, creative, original or even insightful. Many of them just make some semi-obscure computing- or Internet-culture reference. There's not even any humor drawn from this reference. It's just a certain word or phrase being dropped in comic format, and this tricks some people into thinking it should be considered "funny". We end up with people supposedly finding an xkcd comic to be "humorous" just because it mentions SQL injection, for instance. The rest of the "comics" are just ancient jokes that anyone who has spent any time in an academic or laboratory setting would've seen years, or even decades, ago.
A rather pathetic community of hype has grown up around xkcd comics. It's much like the hype that surrounds Apple products, although this shouldn't be surprising. The same weak-minded fools who are drawn to the religious Apple subculture are also the ones who link to xkcd comics whenever possible. These people are somehow drawn to inferior products and culture, and for whatever reason try as hard as possible to export this nonsense whenever and wherever possible. In the case of xkcd, it becomes "popular" not on its own merits, but merely because it is constantly hyped.
(For any of you dipshits who are going to reply to this with links to xkcd "comics", don't bother. I have a Greasemonkey scrip that detects and removes crap like that. I won't even see your comments.)
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
This makes sense in the context of something I've noticed: the more extreme and deeply-held your views, the less likely you are to have a functioning sense of humour. In particular, hard-core religious people seem to have none whatsoever. If your dogma is so entrenched and rigid, then you aren't going to make self-correction and ambiguity a strong part of your mental tool-kit.
Never trust someone without a sense of humour, kids.
(Of course, too much can be a bad thing, too, at least insofar as maniacal giggling whilst ripping your still-living victims organs out can be considered humorous...)
Would you like a slice of toast?
A rabby, a priest, and a joak gowed to a bar.
And said teh joke: how u doin rabby
N teh rabby seadead lolhao u doin joak?!
N tehn teh pressed seaded, woat u toakin abt joak n rabby?!
N rabby lookdead 'rouwnd n sead ohay preest wear joak goed!
n tehn teh preest said lol u noa knoowed war ur fren goed?
N tehn teh rabby gt worred n sayed now eye iz srsly bunnay rabbid u seed banny bare?
N LOL teh rabby said wear barney bare cum frum??
N tehn the rabbidy bare sead he hear oal allong noa?
N tehn teh joked came beck frum teh john.
comedy = tragedy + time
I was going to post something, but the above analysis has taken all the fun out of it.
yet if there's a cultural component to humour that contradicts the "error" theory.
Indeed. Vast categories of jokes make fun of a group (different race, different cultural background, certain hobbies, certain lifestyles, etc.), including this one by the way. The stereotype this plays on is "hunters are stupid rednecks who shoot first and think later". Hunters would probably find the joke less funny but probably the "researchers" didn't define a category for them, so it didn't how up on their stats...
How about jokes perpetuating stereotypes about minorities or whatever strongly-held views the audience has? Jokes that would offend an average audience but not the intended one.
Sadly, I don't have any deeply religious friends to experiment on.
From TFA:"Bizarrely, computer analysis of the data also showed that jokes containing 103 words were thought to be especially funny. The winning "hunters" joke was 102 words long.
[...] He gasps: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says: "Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: "OK, so now what?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Plenty of humor (or satire) is about laughing at yourself in a normal everyday situation, but it works better when it's presented to you in a witty manner. I mean our everyday lives are funny and tragic, anything, from relationships, to work, to leisure, to death even. Tragedy and comedy are just two ends of the same stick.
You can't handle the truth.
The reason we don't see it so much in the animal kingdom is two-fold:
1. We're lousy observers, bringing our presumptions with us;
2. There's fewer opportunities.
To make the claim that it's rare or even non-existent (in other words, you don't even know) with zero proof (and something that's contradicted by observation of animals at play or interactions of animals and their owners) is just plain junk.
So that's why FAIL is LOL.
Animals may have a sense of humor. They just can't tell jokes because they can't speak.
My friend's dog used to hide in wait for the neighbor's cat. The cat would come round the corner of the house, face to face with the dog. The dog would woof loudly and the cat would flee over the fence. The dog didn't bother to chase the cat. He just seemed to enjoy the joke.
... say your girl is a lousy lay, but I want you to know that that's not my experience at all.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Am I the only one who noticed that the 'funniest joke' wasn't all that funny... then read the rest of the article and wondered what they'd cut out to get the 102-word joke down to less than 80?
Just what could be in those 20-something words to make the joke so much funnier?
“We don't allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.
A neutrino walks into a bar.
That joke was so funny, I read the paragraph after the joke had ended expecting the punchline to be there.
Did they use multiple choice to come up with "the funniest joke"? How bad were all the other jokes? Calling that the funniest joke "in the world" to American men is idiotic, there are millions of jokes, they could not possibly of tested them all. They used a very small subset selected by a person or group of people who obviously weren't comedians.
...wyTkon cmeeTcr haA bamn!!!
My dog watches Seinfeld but I don't know if it's for the jokes.
If you think humor or "mirth" is rare or missing in animals you haven't been paying attention, or you're too concerned with your colleges accusations of anthropomorphism.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
According to the funniest-joke-in-the-world article, jokes with 103 words were considered especially funny, however the winning joke has 102 words. That supports my opinion that the joke works a little better if you change the line to "First, let's make sure he's really dead." It's a more plausible phrasing that makes the emergency-services person's intention clearer (to the audience), but works equally well when misunderstood by the hunter.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
If I were to see a homeless hobo take a piss at a street corner, I wouldn't find it funny (It could be anything from sad to repulsive, depending on my current mood). If I were to see a businessman in a tailor made suit do that, I'd nearly certainly get a few laughs out of it. This is obviously a cultural issue and fully consistent with this theory: On one of those cases, my expectations are reversed and my mind needs to do some self-repairing.
Obviously there is a cultural component to humor - like there is to everything else that we do - but it doesn't even imply that this theory would be wrong (and it certainly isn't new).
I don't know how to spell, Colbert? Or the other guy, but they use jokes to make you laugh your way into socialist ideologies. Purely propaganda.
It is likely hard to test how humorous animals are as their mimic is hard to rate or nto at all. E.g. a raven who has just stolen the food of another raven, hiding behind a bush and watching the other raven upset jumping around the hiding place. If you see how the watching raven is behaving you get easy the impression he is laughing his ass off. However without a brain scan we can not "proof" this (providing we can figure where the humour center / laughing center in bird brain is).
I mean every few years we get surprised by some research that says: figured that a lizard can learn under wich cup the reward is, and that every mistake of choosing the cup leads to a longer waiting time for the next "test + reward". Doh, so an animal with a brain of the size of to rice corns can learn.
With birds, especially doves, they made experiments about counting and simple arithmetic. You have two bowls with a few grains. And a switch that can be activated with the peak of the bird. The test is to let the bird peek on that switch as often as the sum of the two bowls of grains are. The birds learned that pretty fast. One particular case is this: the dove stopped in front of the switch. It had figured it either has miscounted or miscalculated. So it went back to the bowls (now empty) and repeated the pickings in each bowl and "calculated/counted" again. Then it activated the switch successful.
Or you now about this parrot, where a researcher taught a few hundred words? The parrot started to correct other parrots when they practiced "speech". He could understand and make simple english sentences, like "I want to go into the garden", "Give me apple".
My assumption is that most live is able to learn, a smaller amount is "intelligent" to a certain level, and a smaller part is so intelligent that it also has humour. The question is more: why is everyone neglecting this and assuming that we humans are unique?
Another story: a cat is proudly prancing on the top of a roof. It slipped and avalanched down the roof into the roof gutter/rain pipe. After it landed it hid in the gutter for a moment (5 - 6 seconds) then it carefully stuck its head out and watched around: "did someone see me?" was written on her forehead. When she was sure no one saw her she continued to "prance" along the rain pipe ... if she had no humour, how can she be felt ashamed of falling down the roof?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
How do you make a duck soulful?
Put it in the microwave till it's Bill Withers.
or should I say Woody Allen?
bjd
Back in the day Ralph Nader ("Unsafe at any speed") was the consensus choice as the least funny person in America. So SNL invited him to be the guest host.
Today, in free software we have Richard Stallman and Theo de Raadt, to name two. Hand them the mic, maybe they'll kill everyone (figuratively speaking of course)!
The sense of humor is a ubiquitous human trait, yet rare or non-existent in the rest of the animal kingdom.
I have known parrots with excellent senses of humor.
...apparently this started as a real 911 phone call from a 'Dick Cheney'.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
Trust me, horse humor runs to slapstick, but they will definitely pull one on you, given the chance.
Somebody got paid to do a study any Henny Youngman era comedian could have told them the result of.
Why aren't illusions hilarious?
Sorry that I don't know the author, but I've found much wisdom in those few words. Perhaps it explains why puns and double entendre(sp?) are so popular?
Seriously though, it may be because those "hard core" ultrareligious sorts live in fear (which IMO is suboptimal). It's not funny if you feel unsafe.
Sounds plausible. I've heard theories that humour is associated with the release of tensions - people *do* laugh at inopportune times, frequently when something stressful has happened, not just when there's a "funny" in the air. So if religious types never feel relaxed (or, conversely, never feel under tension) then the release will never happen and the laughter won't be caused.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
First, this has to have been written by someone who has either never lived with dogs and/or cats and/or parrots and/dolphins, or else is emotionally retarded; second, humor is much simpler: as far as I can tell, it is predatory -- there is always a loser in an expression of humor. Making someone, or something, the butt of a joke engenders social ordering, or status. To put it another way, at a certain basic level, humor seems to me to range from mildly to extreme dominating behavior. Try to find a joke that doesn't have a victim, or a "butt"; that's the source of even calling someone the "butt of a joke."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
While I agree that animals have a sense of humor (dog owner), I wouldn't connect humor to shame. Shame is an emotional response designed to separate an animal from the rest of the pack, in the same way as fear/anger provoke responses based on a stimulus. Humor seems to be a bit more different, and I would associate it closely with the instinct for play (maybe a form of mental practice, in the same way as physical play trains important physical skills).
Anyway, none of this is based on anything other than my own experiences with animals as well as thinking about how I like to experience jokes.
If any of you were to take the time to read there 1001 joke list, you'd quickly realize that there are dozens and dozens of *DUPLICATES* of really stupid jokes. There were only a dozen or so funny ones, IMHO. That's hardly what I call "Science"; more like some bloke claiming to be a researcher has pulled a fast one on Slashdot.
print " duck" * 102, "marriage!"
While the cat story is quite funny, I'm not sure she was ashamed. Maybe she was just temporarily frightened from shock.
Cats are pretty intelligent and funny, so you might indeed be right, but I wouldn't count on it.
I don't agree with alot in TFA. I see laughter as an instinct related to conquering a threat. This makes sense in several ways...
- Sounds/looks similar
You have the "Haa Haa Haa" sound combined with showing teeth, the slight arching of the back with each sound, etc.
Even a little smirk says "Heh, easy win. Barely worth my time."
- By laughing, you show that you're not afraid of the challenge set before you.
That challenge could range anywhere from a real threat to a small mind-test (ie. a joke).
- By laughing in the face of danger, you show to yourself and those around you, that you're in control.
This raises morale for both you and those around you. This is the reason why humour is so very important in dire situations. If people can laugh at a threat, then the situation doesn't seem quite as bad, and people are more able to continue their struggle against the threat.
- By laughing at jokes you show that you're clever enough to get the joke.
If the joke is too hard, then it's not funny ('cos you didn't manage to conquer it) but you might pretend to laugh just to not look stupid in front of other people. If the joke is too easy, then you won't laugh because that joke is beneath you, and trying to make you laugh at that is (almost?) an insult.
- Being able to laugh at oneself proves that one is strong enough to take criticism.
Someone who get's offended "has a problem", a weakness. But if you can laugh at yourself, then you're in control anyway.
- If you find a joke to be morally wrong then that shows that you're "not on the same page" as the joke teller.
When that happens usually one of two things happen:
1. the joke teller tries to convince you that it really was funny, and will feel insecure if you still disagree, or
2. learns that that sort of humour was overstepping accepted bounds.
This is used to help members in a group understand what's acceptable within that group. A joke is a tool for testing those bounds in a relatively safe way.
Consequences of laughter thus are:
- stress relief, whether from chasing off physical threats ("Hah! And then the little shit ran off."), simulated threats (practical jokes) or even imaginary threats (spoken jokes).
- bonding with the group, because it shows members are "of the same mind".
So what makes something funny? Well, it needs to be:
- a challenge that can be overcome, whether it's a surprise or a constant challenge (such as gaming, which is "fun")
- something within acceptable norms (though often pushing at the edge of those norms, as that makes it more challenging)
- jokes need the right timing to allow listeners just enough brain time to conquer the challenge. Too long... insult ("Boring. Come on. I'm not that slow."). Too short... frustrating ("Hey, I'm not winning here. Give me a descent chance.").
About gaming... So how does this fit in with laughter? Well, I think the driving forces are very similar. We want challenges that we can beat, and the best games are the hard fought victories. If we play socially, then all points above seem to apply. If we play alone, then all the points above, except the social ones, apply.
The reason different cultures fine different jokes funny is because of different social norms.
Perhaps the 103 word joke gives enough time to parse the situation so that one is ready for the punch line.
Hurley: Well, anytime you find yourself making an error, it’s a downer initially. The initial emotional response to any discovery of error in your understanding of the world has got to be “uh oh.” But in humor, the brain doesn’t just discover a false inference, it almost simultaneously recovers and corrects itself. It gets the joke. The pleasure of the punch line is enhanced by that split second of negativity just before the resolution.
Well, my interpretation is that after the “uh oh” moment, one sees, then understands, thus conquers. And
"We laugh so we may not cry" - Roger Ebert
"So, in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice to laugh or cry. No animal does either. We do both, depending on the season and the need." - Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes)
This cognitive scientist seems to me to be only looking at a specific type of joke - the sleight of hand ones. He doesn't seem to account for the dark humorists - guys like Kurt Vonnegut, Danny DeVito, Bobcat Goldthwait or Woody Allen - who confront their audience with things that are so sad that all you can do is laugh so you don't cry. He also doesn't account for why people laugh for joy (or cry tears of joy). In Kurt Vonnegut's non-fiction A Man Without a Country, he does a great job of analyzing humor and it doesn't require cognitive science (I went to grab it but realized I loaned it to a friend).
Some other things that need to be accounted for: Why people with Asperger's syndrome tend to lack humor or have very strange senses of humor. Why does my friend's wife consider all my favorite comedians to be offensive and unfunny (how can anyone not enjoy Robin Williams' stand-up?) and I consider her sources of comedy to be banal and unfunny? We were watching Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad, for instance, and my friend and I were laughing so hard we had to pause the movie a couple times until we could compose ourselves. During that same scene his wife was on the verge of tears, calling us sick fucks for laughing. She thought the movie was a very sad drama! She couldn't even sit through Sleeping Dogs Lie.
Some questions are best left for philosophy and the question of humor is definitely one of them. Understanding what the brain does when a person is confronted with a humorous situation doesn't really explain why people have a sense of humor and what humor really is. All the examples here are the sleight of hand jokes, and his conclusion that they're funny because they're basically brain farts was something that Vonnegut already concluded about these jokes without studying the human brain. Then there's also toilet humor - completely unaccounted for in this guy's examples.
Vonnegut claimed this to be the funniest joke in the world, which is one of the sleight of hand type jokes this guy is focussing on:
"Last night I had this crazy dream where I was eating flannel cakes. When I woke up, the blanket was gone!"
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
From the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, 200, online http://www.thefreedictionary.com/climate
climate,
1. The meteorological conditions, including temperature, precipitation, and wind, that characteristically prevail in a particular region.
2. A region of the earth having particular meteorological conditions: lives in a cold climate.
3. A prevailing condition or set of attitudes in human affairs: a climate of unrest.
In the definition, climate, is the study of regional and long-term meteorological conditions and the set of human attitudes toward those conditions, i.e. human perceptions of meteorological conditions. Therein there are two distinct juxtaposed states: external physical conditions and internal psychology of perception of the physical conditions. Climatologers in India, Canada and Tierra Del Fuego studing temperature, precipitation, pressure and wind (even the same data) can reach very different conclusions as to "climate" because "climate" depends on their perceptions. Therefore, "climate" is an interpretation of regional meteorologic condition over time based on human perception depending on the psychological state of being of humans.
I wonder if jokes are like music, that it is hard to create something that wouldn't more or less resemble something that already exists.
Attemting to "account" for human emotions and other intangible human behaviors (like virtue, value, honor) - this is what ancient philosophers did starting 3,000 years ago up until 150 years ago. Those philosophers were not far off from what "science" says, except the difference is "science" uses the word "brain" instead of "mind". Ohhh wow. How funds this shit?
See:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s15e02-funnybot
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
clowns.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I think you're projecting human emotions on to that cat. For a cat to feel embarrassed it would have to be able to understand that other creatures have thoughts, which is a capability that has only been found in humans and the other great apes. Cats (& dogs) definitely have emotions, I've had enough of them to be sure of that, but I don't think shame is one of them. If they truly felt ashamed, then my dog wouldn't keep getting up on the leather couch when I'm gone. Oh, sure, she puts on a good show of being sorry when I get home, but I've learned to recognize that as typical pack behavior -- being submissive when the pack leader is mad at you. She doesn't actually regret getting her fur all over the couch, otherwise she'd stop doing it.
Condensed version: A guy phones home; maid answers. Guy asks to talk with his wife. Maid says she's in the bedroom having sex with her lover. Enraged, guy tells maid to get his gun and kill the wife and lover. Minutes later, guy hears gunshots; maid picks up phone and asks, "what next?" Guy says to drag the bodies into the back yard, past swimming pool. Maid says, "what swimming pool?" Guy says, "is this 555-1234?"
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
According to the article the world's funniest joke is 102 words long. Also, it is claimed that jokes 103 words long are the "funniest" length. Finally jokes with the word "duck" in them also are funnier.
Therefore change "there were two hunters..." to:
"there were two DUCK hunters..."
(Not only have you now included the word "duck" but you've know made the joke the optimal length! Did I really have to explain that?)
Did anyone here besides me find it rather ironic that the article was supposed to be about how humor works, yet the author told that joke so badly that it wasn't funny?
It really is a decent joke, when it's told properly.
What separates recognizable humor from The Joker's mental illness is consensus (per TFA, the funniest joke is determined by votes). At least, that's the methodology according to TFA. I may find a joke insanely hilarious, but it has to be modded up by society to be measured as humorous. And if some things are found only funny in hindsight, cockroaches will probably have the last laugh.
Gently reply
How do you make a duck soulful?
Put it in the microwave till it's Bill Withers.
Stuff it with a shoe?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I don't know if it would be the funniest. But the shortest joke is: A smart Pakistani [eoj].
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I find much more coherent the explanation that says that humor is a signal of no-danger. If somebody falls down and hurts himself, you don't laugh. If you laugh, the rest of the members of the tribe know is nothing dangerous.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I thought the two hunters joke in the article was pretty darn funny, so I posted it a couple of hours ago on Facebook. My friends sent this news story, about a Vermont hunter who accidentally shot his friend and then turned his own rifle on himself (I immediately took down the joke) http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/27/9049544-two-dead-in-vermont-hunting-accident So I guess humor is in timing,. Perhaps timing (rate of global extinctions) also explains why the animals aren't laughing.
Gently reply
Serve it with some collard greens and chitlins?
When you said that every joke has a "loser," what you actually meant was "listener." You seemed to be making a statement about the content of all jokes, but really you were just stipulating that the listener of a joke is always a loser (by the highly metaphorical reasoning you provided above).
If one didn't know better, one might be tempted to think you just made that up on the spot when you realized that your former statement was blatantly false. But fortunately for you, we all do know better.
Maybe Just the Two of Us know who Bill Withers is
That duck may put fat on you, but it's Lean on Me.
No question. He has a sense of humor. Of course he tells the same joke over and over, but it is actually kind of funny. He will grab a slipper or shoe or shirt or undergarment and prance around. While "bad dog" gets an appropriate response in MANY other situations, in this one it just makes him smile. He thinks he is so damned funny! And there is plenty of other evidence. His sister and mother are not nearly as funny, but they will also show a bit of joking on occasion. I reject the basic premise that only humans have sense of humor on the basis of clear evidence. OP is clearly wrong.
So many animals play, looks like humour to me.
How can the cerebral dissection of humour in this research be applied to beings that don't have concepts? Absurd. Humourous even...
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
Q:What's the most important factor in telling a good jo..
A:Timing.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is. http://www.jokes2go.com/06/4/j24.html
I love to sit back and curl up with a good flame war. There is nothing funnier in my book. I love seeing people get all worked up and start ripping each other a new ass on a forum, there is something terribly funny about it for some reason--the seriousness in all of it and the emotion over a text based discussion.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
...originated from Spike Milligan of the Goon Show. Figures.
If we would not have a sense of humor, I think we would have died out long ago... :)
I'm also interested in this subject. I had begun it out of sheer arrogance that I could make sense out of what humor is, I experienced a good bit of success, so much so that I was astonished that research on the topic was almost stagnate in the note worthy circles. But I do find it interesting that these knuckle heads have a completely different idea of what the purpose of humor is. As far as I could tell, humor is a social tool for verifying information and ridiculing individuals or groups who spout information which is faulty. It also works for behavior and actions, such as being laughed at for clothing, physical accidents, being contradicted, or so on. Anyway, my experience in just looking into the matter by myself is that we could go much further in this topic and solve it. Also that most of humanity are fucking retarded, researchers included.
"Among all of Godâ(TM)s creatures, human beings are the only animals who both laugh and weepâ"for we are the only animals who are struck with the difference between the way things are and the way things ought to be."
-- Methodist Bishop William Willimon
"A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."
-- William James
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
This just in! Scientists have a sense of humor. Scientist, meet Dante. Like always, you're 1000 years too late. Just like your big bang theory. Pick up a fucking book.
The latest German joke, very popular amongst Germans, especially politicians, is the following:
Germany will not be hurt by the Euro crisis.
Dedicated to Merkel.
Any behaviorist who believes that many common animals do not possess a sense of humor is an incompetent observer.
Well, my main point is: all this is hard to measure/test. ... and you can not "force" it to obey you (without breaking the otherwise fine relationship ... at least I assume so).
Your dog does not know that you hate the fur on the coach. But it does know you don't like it laying there. Otherwise it would not make the show. So question is: does it get on the coach because it likes you so much, and likes the smell there? Or is it like a child that only does it because it is forbidden, to see if it can get away with it? Or does it indeed have a smile on the face when it hears you coming and jumps down from the coach?
Fact is: the dog does it for a reason
Yes, it might be a typical submissive pack behaviour, but why does it put itself into the position to (need to) be submissive?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Reenacting, badly: Vermont deer hunter accidentally kills friend, then commits suicide.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
The finding that people in the US and Canada prefer jokes which have a strong sense of superiority very aptly illustrates the cultural problems in our countries. I can't speak for Canada, but in the US there is a huge amount of political division. Jokes which show someone else to be stupid reinforces this feeling. But why would this qualify as and get a reaction of mirth?
My thoughts are that there is no superiority complex without an inferiority complex beneath it. I myself experienced this in my teens. Superiority compensates for the feeling of inferiority. They are both divisive in the same way - separating a person from others. When a joke shows a stupid person, you can feel "humor" because it reveals the gap in the hidden assumption that you are inferior. This is a sad kind of humor because it reinforces the divisiveness of your beliefs. It's the same kind of hollow humor that a bully feels when putting someone down. (insert Nelson's "HA-hah")
In the "funniest joke", there is a clash of perspectives in which the hunter is shown to be a dunderhead. It's universally funny because it's unexpected, and additionally funny to Americans because of the superiority aspect of it.
The European preference for off-beat, surreal humor shows an appreciation of creativity, and is a much more self-assured sense of humor. Like two friends making up an increasingly bizarrely hilarious situation, each adding humorous elements to it - it's a humor that brings people together.
Here's a nice example of a seemingly-ashamed cat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMXKBh6z5LU
The hunter joke is the "funniest" not because it's intrinsically THAT funny, but because it's the easiest one to translate to other languages (and thus gets higher points across the board).
So the barman gives it to her.
Humour is almost entirely social, not individual, so looking at it on an individual level is severely limited. Human intelligence and thinking is also primarily social. Language.
Stupidity is its own reward.
Less than a day after this Slashdot posting, a hunter in Vermont shot his friend and hunting buddy, then himself, presumably out of sadness and grief. It hit the news nationwide because the guy who did the shooting was the son of a state representative.
Makes it kinda hard to laugh at the hunter joke in The Fine Article, no matter how universally appreciated it is.
So yeah, by all means, laugh while you still can. But do so even if Big Brother isn't watching. Events come around quickly enough to make any joke lose its funny.