Inside jokes : using humor to reverse-engineer the mind

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Bibliographic Information

Inside jokes : using humor to reverse-engineer the mind

Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams

MIT Press, c2011

  • : hbk
  • : pbk

Available at  / 19 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [305]-328) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

: hbk ISBN 9780262015820

Description

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.
Volume

: pbk ISBN 9780262518697

Description

An evolutionary and cognitive account of the addictive mind candy that is humor. 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.

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