Inside Jokes · Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
![Inside Jokes · Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind](/cover/fgEuAfstlpSmcplj/big/Inside%20Jokes%20%c2%b7%20Using%20Humor%20to%20Reverse-Engineer%20the%20Mind.jpg)
- Authors
- Hurle, Matthew M. & Dennett, Daniel C. & Adams, Reginald B.
- Tags
- psychology , philosophy , humour , science
- Date
- 2011-03-01T00:00:00+00:00
- Size
- 3.73 MB
- Lang
- en
Some 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.