Inside Jokes · Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind

Inside Jokes · Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
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
Downloaded: 150 times

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.