Carol Burnett Show- No Frills Airline

Larry David the palestinian chicken

Muppet Show. Swedish Chef - Spicy Sauce (ep.115)

Monty Python- Lumberjack Song FULL

What makes jokes funny?

(False) Antonyms

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
Woody Allen
In love there are two evils: war and peace.
Horace
You've gotta take the bitter with the sour.
Samuel Goldwyn
A "Bay Area Bisexual" to told me that I didn't quite coincide with either of her desires.
Woody Allen
Never mistake endurance for hospitality.
Unknown
Never mistake motion for action.
Ernest Hemingway
There will be a rain dance Friday night, weather permitting.
George Carlin
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cambell

A Fork in the Garden Path

The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he's a baby.
Natalie Wood
I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.
Robert Orben
My doctor gave me two weeks to live. I hope they're in August.
Ronnie Shakes
I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself there.
Fred Allen
The horse raced past the barn fell.
Unknown
If you are going to try cross-country skiing, start with a small country.
Saturday Night Live
Thomas Jefferson's slaves loved him so much they called him by a special name: Dad.
Mark Russell
My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety seven now, and we don't' know where the hell she is.
Ellen DeGeneris
Time flies like an arrow, Fruit flies like a banana.
Lisa Grossman



Surprise Instance

I phoned my Dad to tell him I had stopped smoking. He called me a quitter.
Stephen Pearl
The trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up your on the job.
Slappy White
Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.
Mark Twain
Nothing is wrong with Southern California that a rise in ocean level wouldn't cure.
Ross MacDonald
Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.
Charles Kuralt
I'm glad Reagan is President. Of course, I'm a professional comedian.
Will Durst
In spite of the cost of living, its still popular.
Kathleen Norris
Always get married early in the morning. That way if it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted a whole day.
Mickey Rooney
I bought some batteries, but they weren't included.
Steven Wright
I was walking down the street wearing glasses, when the prescription ran out.
Steven Wright
I got food poisoning today. I don't know when I'll use it.
Steven Wright.

Funny/Literal Definition

Jesus was a Jew, yes, but only on his mother's side.
Archie Bunker
Charm is a way of getting an answer yes without a clear question.
Albert Camus
Copy from one its plagiarism; copy from two its research.
Wilson Mizner
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Oscar Wilde
Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.
Herotodus
Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.
Cynthia Nelms
Diets are mainly food for thought.
N. Wylie Jones
Most isms are wasms.
Gerald Vision

Logically Valid but Silly Inference, or a Conjunction With Nonsequitur

Organized crime in America takes in over 40 billion dollars a year, and spends very little on office supplies.
Woody Allen
Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
Wallace Irwin
Stuffed deer heads on walls are bad enough, but its worse when their wearing dark glasses and hair streamers and ornaments in their antlers, because then you know they were enjoying themselves at a party when they were shot.
Ellen DeGeneris
The cable TV sex channels don't expand our horizons, don't make us better people, and don't come in clearly enough.
Bill Maher
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
Barry LePatner
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.
E. Somerset Maugham
Only two things are infinite: the Universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein
On a New York Subway you get fined for spitting, but you can puke for free.
George Carlin
The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.
Sid Caesar

Variations on Famous Last Words

I'm not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde
You are where you eat.
Unknown
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Mark Twain
If the phone doesn't ring it's me.
Jimmy Buffet
The shortest distance between two points is usually under repair.
Unknown
Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was suspect.
Steven Wright

Not-So-Scientific Hypothesis

Life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.
Unknown
The length of a movie should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
Alfred Hitchcock
My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.
Steven Wright
When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.
Gracie Allen
It is possible that blondes also prefer gentlemen.
Mamie Van Doren

Analogy

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G. K. Chesterton
Why should I tolerate a perfect stranger at the bedside of my mind?
Vladimir Nabakov on Psychoanalysis
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested in it and the frog dies of it.
E.B. White
The economy of Houston is so bad right now that two prostitutes that the police arrested turned out to be virgins.
Bill Abeel

Self-Reference/Truism

This sentence no verb.
Unknown
You have to have a talent for having talent.
Ruth Gordon
There are two kinds of people, those who finish what they start, and so on.
Robert Byrne
WYMI-the all philosophy radio station.
Mike Dugan

Observational Humor

It has been my experience that people who have no vices, have very few virtues.
Abraham Lincoln
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T. S. Elliot
The average person thinks he isn't.
Father Larry Lorenzoni
Did you ever notice that...
Jerry Seinfeld

Could you Rephrase That

Why is there so much month left at the end of the money?
Unknown
Wise men talk because they have something to say. Fools talk because they have to say something.
Plato
My karma ran over your dogma.
Unknown

Problem Solving

I am sitting in the smallest room in the house. Your review is in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.
Max Reger, Author
Some Mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.
Emo Williams

Running off at the Mouth

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
Garrison Keillor

Euphemisms

I don't consider myself bald. I'm simply taller than my hair.
Tom Sharp
Meat is murder, but fish is justifiable homicide.
Jeremy Hardy
Cannibals aren't vegetarians, their humanitarians.
Unknown
The parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet it's maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it down to the pearch, it'd be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.
Monty Python

Bi-association

We had a quicksand box in our backyard. I was an only child, eventually.
Steven Wright


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Jonah Bossewitch
Senior Thesis Chapter X: A Brief Survey of Theories of Humor

The production and comprehension of humor must depend upon knowledge of what is funny. This knowledge need not be explicit in the minds of the participants, however it must be represented at some level in order for individuals to recognize jokes and evaluate their funniness. The comic uses this judgment in the creation of the joke, to separate the wheat from the chaff, while the listener uses this judgment to respond to the joke. Of course, humor is a multifaceted phenomenon, and no one theory has managed to encapsulate and explain it entirely (although some have claimed to). However, it is worthwhile to review the major historical theories, since between them all most instances of humor can be understood.
Why is something funny? The various approaches to this question have focused on many different aspects of humor. Some theorize emphasize the semantic content of the joke, while others rely on its syntactical form. In practice, these two elements are usually combined to produce the humorous effect, and it is difficult to isolate these components. Many of these theories are complementary, as a psychoanalytic or social theory of humor may operate in tandem with a cognitive theory. A single joke may be humorous for a multitude of reasons, and it might be too much to expect that a single theory of humor might account for all of levels that a joke simultaneously engages.
Humorous History (or a the History of Theories of Humor)
The majority of humor theories fall into three broad classes: social-behavioral usually associated with derision and disparagement, psychoanalytical, usually associated with suppression and repression, and cognitive-perceptual usually associated with incongruity.
"And if you take the state of our minds when we see a comedy, do you realize that we have a mixture of pleasure and pain?"
The earliest known theory of humor is attributed to Plato, who observed that comedy in his time revolved around the humiliation of others. Laughing at the misfortune of others or at their expense is still prevalent in the humor of today, and these types of jokes fall into the category of derision or superiority humor. "Derision theory is based on the premise that we laugh down at others. Its basic drive is to humiliate, to subjugate, to disparage. . . . Even when the punch line is not disparaging, any joke which in its telling has negative connotations, directly or indirectly, is malicious and destructive." Supporting the completeness of this theory W.C. Fields claimed that he"never saw anything funny that wasn't terrible. If it causes pain, it's funny; if it doesn't, it isn't." However, instances of humor which do not employ superiority are abundant, and it is clear from the laughter that a simple pun elicits that the derision/superiority theory of humor is drastically incomplete. Arthur Koestler has characterized humor where "cruelty and boastful self-assertion are much in evidence" as childlike and primitive, as this type of humor is typically appreciated earliest in development. Given the similarities between childhood development and mankind's development, it is not surprising to find an abundance of this type of humor in the early stages of human civilization.
The derision theory of humor extends beyond ancient times, and many attribute the modern formulation of this theory to Thomas Hobbes who wrote that "The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from the sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our won formerly." Georg Hegel also expressed the similar view that laughter is little more than "an expression of self satisfied shrewdness."
The hostility/superiority/malice/aggression/derision theory of humor is very much alive in contemporary psychological research, and plays an important role in the analysis of a joke's contents. However, clearly not all derisive remarks are funny, so that even the jokes which this theory "explains" may also involve complicated mechanisms which dictate the form that a successful joke takes. There are many ways to insult somebody, and not all of them are funny. We may need to look to another level of joke explanation to complete our comic filter, and learn what makes X funny, and Y serious.
Derision theory focuses on the relationship between the speaker and the listener, which is important, but not the only factor influencing the reception of a joke. Psychoanalytical theories, and more generally release theories, comment on the feelings and the psychology of the listener only (in the case of joke production, sometimes the speaker also acts as the listener). "The basic principle of all such theories is that laughter provides relief for mental, nervous, and/or psychic energy and thus insures homeostasis after a struggle, tension, strain, etc. This relief can be studied physiologically, psychologically, philosophically, psychoanalytically, or more or less generally."
Darwin observed that laughter is primarily an instinctual expression of joy and happiness, which may sound obvious to some, and leaves us with the question of what causes joy and happiness. This is where Sigmund Freud's theories become relevant, as Freud devoted tremendous energy to explaining the causes of mental pleasure and pain. In his work on humor Freud concluded:
"The pleasure in jokes has seemed to us to arise from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition, the pleasure from an economy in expenditure upon inhibition, the pleasure in the comic from an economy in expenditure upon ideation (upon cathexis) and the pleasure in humor from an economy in expenditure of upon feeling. . . . For the euphoria which we endeavor to reach by these means is nothing other than the mood of a period of life in which we were accustomed to deal with in our psychical work in general with a small expenditure of energy—the mood of our childhood, when we were ignorant of the comic, when we were incapable of jokes and when we had no need of humor to make us feel happy in our life."
According to Freud the pleasure derived from humor stems from two sources: the economy of effort in the joke, and the playful regression to old childhood pleasures. Freud also noted the parallel between dreams and jokes, which both seemed to employ the same techniques. These techniques include condensation, application of the same material, and double meanings. The transition from Darwin's theory to the various stages of Freud's theory illustrates an important principle in the study of humor. The theory must strive to explain humor as deeply as possible, without simply grouping all of the instances of humor under one heading. Darwin claimed that the source of all humor is pleasure, but then failed to give a satisfactory account of pleasure. Freud not only attempted such a definition, but also tried to show how the various mechanisms of humor satisfy this account. His theory provides a model for how to link the specific instances of humor with their underlying structure, although he certainly did not complete the task of bridging the gap between the theory and the data. The release theories do not necessarily contradict the superiority theories since some jokes may evoke pleasure through superiority, although most release theorists did not believe that this is the only way for something to be funny.
"Comedy is, as I said, a mim sis of people worse than are found in the world—'worse in the particular sense of 'uglier', as the ridiculous is a species of ugliness; for what we find funny is a blunder that does no serious damage or an ugliness that does not imply pain, the funny face, for instance, being one that is ugly and distorted, but not with pain."
Based on this remaining fragment of the fifth chapter of Aristotle's Poetics, scholars have attributed the original "frustrated expectation" theory to Aristotle. The idea that humor is founded on a disappointment or unrealized expectation is more fully elaborated by later thinkers, however Aristotle's theory contains the seeds for many later explorations. He goes in a different direction than the derision theory and recognizes the type of humor based on "make believe" that has been put on or set up all in good fun. His theory of humor best applies to absurd, clown like situations where the audience's awareness of the fantasy allows them to find humor in typically morbid themes (such as death, murder, or violence). This brand of humor can be found in many situations ranging from a pie in the face to a poorly made horror movie. The significant feature of this theory is that it focuses on the joke itself rather than on the speaker or hearer of the joke. Later incarnations this theory broaden its scope to incongruity of any sort, but one can not help but wonder what might be contained in the missing sections of Aristotle's theory of humor.
Immanuel Kant developed Aristotle's absurdity theory and postulated that "Laughter is an affectation arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing." Schopenhauer essentially shared this view, and explicitly endorsed an incongruity based theory of humor: "The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between the a concept and the real objects which have been thought through in some relation, and the laugh itself is just the expression of this incongruity." Researchers dispute whether incongruity is sufficient, or whether a joke requires incongruity immediately followed by resolution, and we will return to this point later. It is important to note that incongruity-resolutions theories mirror Koestler's "biassociation" theory which refers to "the creative thinking which links two self-consistent but mutually incompatible frames of reference or associative contexts at the same time." Koestler's method for the creation of jokes produces jokes which are funny according to the incongruity theory of humor. Raskin's formulation of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a text to be funny is founded on incongruity, and we will be exploring his bold theory in depth soon.
Most theorists believe that none of these three theories of humor are complete, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another. For example, Frank MacHovec has recently proposed a theory of humor which attempts to synthesize the features of all of these theories. He speaks of humor's dependence on the convergence of three "cluster-like forces", polarity (direct feeling tone), power (force or valence of the feeling tone), and process (mechanics, details of technique; how polarity and power are focused). This theory demonstrates that most of the various theories can be successfully integrated with one another without excluding or favoring one theory. Where the theories conflict, it is possible that the two versions simply produce jokes of varying funniness. MacHovec has argued that the problem with the incongruity theory on its own is that it is too focused on micro mechanistic, nuts and bolts of the joke, and sometimes misses the larger context in which a joke is placed. Raskin, on the other hand claims to found a script based semantic theory of humor which provides all of the requirements for a joke. It will be important to keep these two viewpoints in mind as we explore the possibility of a complete, unifying theory of humor.
But Why is That Funny?
Before continuing to explain the details of these theories, it is worthwhile to point out where they all fall short. In an important sense, none these theories provide us with an answer to the question "why is X funny". Rather, they simply attempt to point out which things are funny without giving us an reason why. It is unclear what type of answer we are seeking to this question since the nature of humor is as mysterious and uniquely human as love. In fact, an answer to a question of this type could lie outside of the range of any theory of humor, as there may not be any reason why we find the things that we do funny. However, we should not allow the possibility of failure to stop us from speculating, after all, we have only suggested that such a theory might not exist, which is a far cry from proving that it doesn't. The following question will help guide this investigation and give it a form which can be grappled with more readily: Are the things that we find funny necessarily funny, or could we conceive of another culture/species that found, for example congruity rather than incongruity funny?
One of the most important strategies we will employ in answering this question is a comparison of humor to other well studied psychological phenomena. In the process of searching for things which are similar to humor, we will find that no perfect analogy exists. Of course, if two items were anaogous in every possible way, they would be identical (or at least isomorphic), so all of our analogies to humor must be disanalogous in some ways. In an analogy between humor and colors, nobody intends to suggest that funny things are colors, only that they are similar in some important ways. It is important to pay attention to the ways in which things are analogous as well as disanalogous to obtain a more complete conception of the concept under investigation. Humor does not fit perfectly into the catogory of an emotion, a peice of sense data, or a conditioned reflex, but it is like them all in certain important respects. Each of the analogies that will be drawn, serve to illucidate a particular set of humor's features through an analogy with something in which those features are salient. This technique is a powerful method of brainstorming, since everything is analogous to something in some respect, and it gives us a chance to compare humor with other strange experiences that life has to offer.
The underlying motivation for this line of inquiry is the fact that we have so little access to our reaction to humor that we are unsure of the extent in which conscious processing intervenes. In many ways our reaction to a joke is as reflexive as our physiological response to being tickled. Ticking is not a perfect example of a reflex, since as many people have observed, you can not tickle yourself, and some have reported that people only respond to a tickle if it is percieved as a mock attack. Thus, babies will often cry when tickled by a stranger, and only laugh when tickled by their mother (or someone that they know very well). Simple reflexes are completly automatic responces to stimulus, which often bypass the brain entirely. Since we have not yet discovered a nerve receptor which, without the brains help, can deferentiate between the tocuh of someone trustworthy and someone who might be a threat (if the correct force is appiled, your knee will jerk no matter who or what hit it), it seems as if the responce to tickling is more than just simple reflex.
Some have argued that there is no separate cognitive step which evaluates whether or not a sentence is funny after its meaning is apprehended. There is no way to understand the sentence without "getting" the joke, just as there is no way to get the joke without understanding the sentence. As evidence for this assertion they point to the fact that spies have often been exposed by telling them a joke in their native tongue, resulting in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. This does not prove that humor is a reflex, but it does demonstrate a fact we all know well; sometimes it feels impossible to prevent oneself from laughing, and laughter often slips out before we have had a chance to fully process the joke consciously.
Unlike the evaluation of a scientific theory or even a work of art, humor is not the sort of thing that we evaluate and then decide what we think of it. It usually either strikes us as funny, or not to some degree or another. Furthermore, when somebody thinks that something is funny, he leaves little doubt about his opinion to those around him. It is hard to tell if somebody thinks that a painting is beautiful, but a comedians know instantly if a joke is flop—laughter betrays the soul.
If humor were a reflex, it would be a truly amazing one considering that the physiological response depends upon a very high level of cognitive processing. In many ways humor is analogous to stress, the catch all cause that medical science blames for every ailment from cancer to heart disease. Stress, like laughter, can be directly induced by physical trauma (i.e. falling into ice cold water), however it can also be induced by the agents perception of fear, anxiety, or embarrassment. There are many situations which not everybody agrees are stressful (most people may even change their own conceptions of what is stressfull over time), and it is hard to conceive of "stressful" being a quality of a situation that exists independent of the agent who feels stressed by it. When people find something stressful it is not as if they are perceiving the stress that is out there in the world, and perhaps this is the appropriate model for thinking about humor.
Becoming Emotionally Attached
What these observations amount to is that humor is somewhere in between a reflex and a full fledged decision. Keith Oatley and Philip Johnson-Laird have agrued that this middle ground is precisely the domain of emotions and the feelings that they give rise to. "A complex organism has feelings of both bodily sensations such as pain and of emotions such as anxiety, and they are an independant means of guiding behavior. They prepare the organism, not for a specific innate responce, but for a general course of action appropriate to the situation. They do not require complex inferential processes. Indeeed they are an evolutionarily older method of control and their effects can be rapid and effective." The operation of emotions is amorphous and ill defined compared to a consciously deliberated inference, and this quality directly translates into faster responce time than a costly, complex, explicitly symbolic inference.
Although emotions are primarily non-symbolic it is obvious that they still involve some inferential reasoning, even if much of it unconscious and not very complicated. The evaluation that a particular peice of sense data is threatening, which in turn elicits the emotional responce of fear, needs to be flexible enough to adjust to chaning environments where vaslty different types of things are dangerous. This evaluation also must be made very quickly, but the organism can not sacrifice the inferential power absent in a reflex. This is where emotions entered the evolutionary stage.
Emotions have the ability to effect perceptions, as emotionally charged words are harder to recognize than emotionally neutral ones, and as everybody knows, yoru mood effects that nature of your interpretation of reality. Emotional responces are also tempered by social forces, and this is born out in our everyday emotions such as disgust and shame. There are numerous examples of foods (inscets, pets, live animals) that are considered beyond repulsive in some parts of the World, while they are delicasies in another. Similiarly, different cultures place different emphases on what is veiwed as shameful (lying, nakedness, etc.) and what an appropriate responce to shame should be. (ranging from nothing to repentance or ritual suicide). These examples demonstrate that the roles of cognition and emotion are interwoven, and many systems exist which invlove the interaction between unconscious inferences and physiological responces, uniting the domians of reflex and consious decision making.
Emotions also seem to fall into five basic categories: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. These basic categories seem to span all of the emotions found in animals, and any emotions that are (apparently) unique to people can also be grouped under these primary categories. Evidence that these are the only five categories comes from linguistic as well as experimental sources, but this point need not concern us here. What is important is that some theorists have grouped humor as mode of the underlying basic emotion of happiness (despite the glaringly unique feature of laughter, namely that it is both an innate responce to tickling as well as the emotional responce to something being perceived as funny). This move puts humor in the complany of many other seemingly magical phenomena, but at the same time may help explain the difficulty that humorists have had trying to pin down the essence of humor. We will continue to persue this point below.
You Mean She's Beautiful and Funny Also?
Returning to the comparison between humor an beauty, the question of what makes an object or an idea beautiful has puzzled philosophers for ages. While someone might propose a criterion such as symmetry or asymmetry, this type of answer is lacking in the same way that the theories of humor are. The follow up question, 'But what makes symmetry beautiful?'' leaves us with virtually the same predicament with which we started. Perhaps at this point in the line of questioning we must postulate a bottoming out foundation point and claim that the perception of humor is much like the perception of color. Red does not look red for any reason, it just looks red because that is how we experience it. The perception of color does not rely upon rules that tell us which sense data correspond to which colors. We discriminate between colors by being able to tell that a thing looks like the experience that we have learned to label 'red' or 'green'.
On the other hand, it is not all that difficult to imagine possible reasons for the evolution of humor. The expression of anger and hostility via superiority humor is obviously a vast improvement for society over actual physical violence, since although a biting remark might embarrass someone, very few people have suffered direct physical harm from humiliation. To this day, humor is used within social communities to maintain power relationships and dominance hierarchies. One need only ovbserve a social group interacting to watch this principle in aciton, as different people make the same types of cracks, which are responded to very diferently, simultaneously reflecting the relative social positions of both the joker and the respodants.
Superiority humor also provides an effective method of social control, as people have a hard time accepting and responding to direct criticism, but seem to handle the criticism far better if it is expressed as a joke or a parable. It is important to note that many discussion of political reform, subversion, and criticism takes the form of jokes, which thinly mask the very serious sentiments beneath their punchlines. This is especially true under repressive regimes, such as the former Soviet Union, where the joke served as a form of underground subterfuge, but is also true in many other contexts such as William Shakespeare's fool bearing the message of the truth to Henry IV.
The role of comedy in social reform and criticism is crucial even in an "unrepressed" context such as modern day America. Jay Leno's and David Letterman's nightly bashing of politicians and the media are poignant examples of the power of humor, and even seemingly innocuous cartoons like the Simpsons often carry with them messages that would be far more difficult to convey without the medium of humor to sugar coat their critical observations. The humor in these jokes also allows people who are unwilling or incapable of listening to the underlying message to dismiss it as nothing more than superficial entertainment. In some cases, the laughter response may have simultaneously developed as a defense mechanism for some to deny the seriousness of a potentially disturbing information, and to provided a deceptive disguise for unacceptable topics of communication.
As far as incongruous humor goes, it is clear that our minds, optimized to process rational, consistent data (or so we would like to believe) needed to evolve a mechanism for dealing with inconsistent, ungrammatical, or irrational input. As the Star Trek character Spock teaches us there are many ways that we might have dealt with such data. Upon hearing an incongruous or ambiguous sentence, Spock responds with a blank look of incomprehension, the humanoid equivalent a the "Syntax Error" messages that computers report when confronted with incongruity or ambiguity. Humans needed to develop some method for registering and dealing with the fact the not all input is sensible, and it would be awfully inconvenient if we "core dumped" every time we encountered something of this sort. Perhaps laughter is indication that we should stop trying to make rational sense of something, and helps us recognize the futility in trying.
Seemingly irrational and inconsistent data is plentiful in the world, and many jokes serve to reveal the absurdities of universal activities such as sex and eating."Diets are mainly food for thought." N. Wylie Jones—This joke pokes fun of the fact that although many people want to lose weight, this desire does not succeed in overcoming the desire to eat fattening foods. Cultural dating rituals, arbitrary standards of etiquette, and inapproriate shame are all topics ripe for exposure by the comic, but taboo under ordinary circumstances. It may also be a relief to discover that many private feelings and ideas are in fact shared by others as well, and this instance your similarity or congruity with other people may be humorous.
Is Humor in the Belly of the Laugher?
An interesting corollary of the analogy between humor and colors is the ontological status that colors have and the possible extension of this interpretation to humor. When faced with the question of whether or not jokes are intrinsically funny or funny solely based on our perception of them, the analogy with colors reminds us that the perception of some qualities depends on both internal and external factors. Color is a paradigm example of such a quality, and although the question of how we perceive colors is far more complex than most people imagine, the fact that the perception of colors is response dependent, seems inescapable. Colors serve to demonstrate the plausibility of the position that some types of things can simulteneously be thought to have an objective existence that depends upon a subjective responce. Humor might be just that sort of thing.
In his book Color for Philosophers, Hardin relentlessly demonstrates that the psychology of color is far more complex than philosophers had ever previously imagined. He shows that the perception of color is not simply a function of the light that is reflected off the surface of an object, and in fact seems to involve the active imposition of a perception by the agent.Hardin, Color for Philosophers, p. 2. Hardin cites Naussau's work (Naussau 1983, 23) which distinguishes between at least fifteen different causes, grouped in five categories, for "standard" color perception. Colors are not simple qualities of an object that exist "out there" independent of our perception. Rather they arise out of a complicated interaction between the external world and out internal world which together produce the perception of color.
Like color, humor seems to be a quality of this sort, which has some components which are objectively funny, and some which depend upon the particular quirks of the individual listening to the joke. Implicit in this analysis is the notion that cultural context will also play a role in determining the funniness of a piece of humor, since a person's personality is inevitably shaped by the environment of his upbringing. However, if humor is truly like color, in that a joke must possess certain objective qualities for a human to consider it funny, then an investigation of these properties is well worth our while. The search for the universal criterion of humor may be highly ambitious, but it is not doomed from the start as many people feel.
What type of humor criterion are we after? Some researcher dream of a set of conditions that specify exactly when a given sentence is funny. But, we must bear in mind that rigorous analyses that demand necessary and sufficient conditions often fail to withstand the onslaught of clever philosophers with witty counter examples. For some concepts, it is fruitless to expect this type of definition, although much can be learned by attempting to find one. In these cases it is sometimes helpful to search for prototypes, paradigm instances of the concept, which can provide the axis that span the meaning of concept without rigidly defining it.
Whats in a Definition?
The Precedence for the Indefinability of Concepts.
Some philosophers acknowledge that certain concepts are indefinable due to their atomic nature. For example, G.E. Moore presented a famous argument for the indefinability of "good" based on the fact that for any possible definition proposed, it can meaningfully be asked whether or not that definition is good. Formally this can be expressed as follows:

If "x is 'y' iff x is D" is a definition of 'y', then 'y' and D are synonyms (intersubstitutable).
If 'y' and D are synonyms, the question (Q) "Granted y is D, is x 'y'?" is a trivial,
self‑answering one.
If Q is never (except trivially) meaningless, then there must not exist a D that is synonymous with 'y'.

Moore made this argument for [y = good], and concluded that aside from a few uninformative examples such as "x is 'good' iff x has intrinsic value." this question (Q) is always meaningful, so, there are no definitions of good. It is important to note that good is not the only concept that could be substituted for y, and that we can apply his argument to the case where [y = funny].
Moore asserts that apart from trivialities such as 'x is good iff x has intrinsic value' and 'x is good iff x ought to exist for its own sake' there are no definitions of x that make (Q) vacuous. One problem with this argument is that Moore provides no procedure for determining if there exists some non‑trivial D such that (Q) is self-answering. Of course, Moore can insist that his argument shifts the burden of proof to the proponents of rigorous definitions for 'y', who must now produce such a D to defeat Moore's claim, however, it is still possible that such a D does exist, it's just that nobody has ever thought of it. In other words, the Open Question argument describes one of the properties of an atomic concept, namely that it is always meaningful to ask "Is x 'y'?" when y is atomic. However, Moore's argument does not provide a any procedure, aside from intuition, which determines whether or not such a y exists. In this respect the argument is fundamentally inconclusive—it can tell you with certainty that a concept is definable, but it will always leave a lingering doubt as to a concept's indefinability.
The applicability of this argument to the concept of humor is not as clear cut as Moore's argument against the definablitiy of good, since in the case of [y = good] Moore expresses a claim which seems correct, and with which many philosophers agree. However, it remains to be seen whether we can find a non-trivial D such that the question "Granted x is D, is x funny?" is always self answering. The existence of such a D would provide us with a definition of funny that would specify the precise conditions under which x is funny. As Moore's argument demonstrates, it is not at all obvious that such a definition needs to exist for all concepts. The question is whether 'funny' is the type of concept that is indefinable, or if it can actually be specified by some synonymous criterion.
If there were no D that provided us with a Moorian definition of humor, it would not be time to wave the white flag. Our inability to define a term in Moore's sense of definability should not threaten our conviction of the power, significance, and meaning of that term. We would hard pressed to formulate a Moorian definition of many concepts, such as identity, game, heap, or lamppost, and yet most of us have little difficulty using them meaningfully in a sentence. Moore's standards of definition may be too stringent for all but a few concepts, especially as a scientific theory strives to capture a working definition of a phenomena that may change over time. An alternative to Moore's stlye of definition is the prototype model of a concept advocated by Ludwig Wittgenstien. Under this schema, the determination of a new judgment is based upon the comparison between known instances. This procedure is a common cognitive technique that is employed in many different tasks and may play a central role in determining the funniness of particular situation. Something may be judged funny if it is similar in a crucial way to another previously known funny instances. Peter Strawson suggests this approach in his analysis of personal responsibility.
Strawson has argued that "there is no independent notion of responsibility that explains the property of the reactive attitudes. The explanatory priority is the other way around: It is not that we hold people responsible because they are responsible; rather, the idea (our idea) that we are responsible is to be understood by the practice, which itself is not a matter of holding some propositions to be true, but of expressing our concerns and demands about our treatment of on another." By defining responsibility in terms of people's reactive attitudes, Strawson sets us up an account of responsibility that resists rigorous analysis. Following Strasson's lead, we might find that we can make significant headway by definining funiness in terms of what people find funny.
It has been shown experimentally that some of human knowledge representation probably operates according to the prototype model. That is, when asked to identify whether an object B is a bird, we do not employ a propositional conditional that is satisfied just when B is a bird. Rather, we compare B to an prototypical bird (i.e. a canary) and determine the similarity of B to the prototype. This feature of human cognition is easy to detect through introspection in the case of moral evaluations. We often do not first know what our reactive attitude "should" be, and although an attitude is supposed to be an instinctive response, even our intuitions are at a loss in some cases. In these instances we tend to compare the case with other cases whose evaluations we are sure of by extracting the relevant features and determining if the uncertain case fits the mold (much like identifying object B). However, in order for this strategy to be effective we must have available clear cut, prototypical examples with which we can preform this comparison. Later we will examine this avenue of analysis in greater depth to see if it can be applied to the analysis of humor. Meanwhile, it should be kept in mind as an alternative to the necessary and sufficient condition approach that many theorists have attempted to construct.
The possibility of finding the necessary and sufficient conditions for x to be funny is tantalizing, and has led many researchers on relentless quests for these conditions. If such conditions could be adequately spelled out (where x is restricted to verbal humor), it ought to be possible to write a computer program which would be able to evaluate the humorous content of any given sentence. Conversely, the best way to test a theory of humor is by writing such a program, or at least specifying how one could be written. The possibility of designing a program that takes a sentence as input and returns a value corresponding to its funniness (in the simplest case it would return a message of either funny or not-funny) is intriguing, considering that many people consider humor to be the sole province of human intelligence. Furthermore, this thought experiment raises tricky issues concerning the role that understanding plays in "getting" a joke. Granted that some D exists that is a definition of humor, it is still an open question what form D will take. Could there ever be a rigorous definition of humor, for at least some classes of jokes? Or will D always incorporate semantic information and perhaps common world knowledge as well. Work carried out on the comprehension of stories and texts demonstrates that a great deal of background knowledge is required in order to make the necessary inferences implied by the story. Any computer program designed to evaluate jokes would have to have some method of representing such knowledge.
It also seems that any robust definition of humor would have to be powerful enough not only to evaluate humor but to generate it as well. A very crude heuristic would simply have the program generate random grammatical sentences, and then run the humor evaluator on those sentences discarding the ones that are not funny. This is probably not the process that human comedians employ to come up with jokes, however if we had a good enough evaluator function this method would prove effective.
A more challenging project would be to design a program that took as input an idea or a situation, and transformed that idea into a funny formulation. Intuitively, it seems as if some ideas could never be construed in a funny manner, such as a funeral or an operation. However it is hard to find an example of any situation that has not received humorous treatment at some point or another. For example, Tati's Les Vacances de M. Hulot (Mr. Hulot's Holiday) contains a hysterical funeral scence involving a deflated inner tube being mistaken for a wreath, and Levi's is presently running an ad where the patient on the operating table bursts into song to the beat of his own electrocardiogram. It remains an unresolved question whether any idea can be recast in a humorous fashion, but many jokes can be robbed of their humorous value if they are told slightly differently, so it is reasonable to ponder the reversal of this process and to expect a comprehensive theory to provide an account of this transformation. Consider the following:
(1a) Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
(1b) Statistics are often meaningless, people need to eat, and everybody dies.
These two sentences convey essentially the same meaning, and yet only (1a) is funny. A good theory of humor ideally should explain how to get from (1b) to (1a).

We're Off See the Wizard.

There are currently many humorists circulating what they claim are comprehensive theories. Some are slight variations on preexisting theories while some are beefed up syntheses of them. Victor Raskin has make the bold assertion that he has formulated a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a text to be funny, what we have been reffering to in our terms as D. He claims that his "semantic theory of humor is compatible with all three approaches [social-behavioral, psychoanalytical, cognitive-perceptual] simply because it does not concern itself with why something is funny, which is the focus of psychological theories of humor. It addresses a different question, namely, "How does a text convey humor?" He presents his theory as a full fledged scientific hypothesis, subject to Popper's falsifiability criterion which states that scientific sentences are falsifiable and unscientific sentences are not. The very application of Popper's critereon to a theory of humor has humorous merits on its own, but these are neutral with regards to confirmation of the theory. His main hypothesis consists of two conditions that are expressed in the theory laden language of linguistics:
"A text can be characterized as a single-joke-carrying text if [and only if] both of the[se] conditions are satisfied.
(1) The text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts.
(2) The two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite in a special sense defined [below]."
Raskin's hypothesis is written in a sort of shorthand, since concepts such as 'script' and 'opposite in a special way' are explained elsewhere. In order to fully understand the nature of Raskin's we must take a brief detour through the world of a scripts.
Scripts were introduced during the early days of artificial intelligence (around twenty five years ago) to cope with the problem of a machine processing natural language. Roger Schank was the major proponent of scripts, which began as a model of knowledge representation and grew into a more general theory of memory and association. The original problem that Schank was confronted with was the occurrence of sentences and situations that were impossible to understand without some piece of background knowledge. For example, the exchange
Q: Do you want a piece of chocolate?
A: I just had an ice cream cone.
cannot be understood without some prior outside knowledge not contained in the two sentences. Clearly, the response to the questions is intended to be a negative one, but there is not direct chain of inferences that entail that conclusion. What is needed in order for the questioner to understand the response is the knowledge by that people only want to eat when they are not full. This intermediate piece of outside knowledge provides the questioner with the missing link in his chain of reasoning, and allows him to conclude that the intention of the response, or its equivalent meaning "No thanks, I do not want a piece of chocolate." This little piece of information does not constitute a complete script according to Schank's theory, but it does provide am accurate model of the function that they serve.
"Scripts are really just prepackaged sequences of causal chains. Some causal chains are used so often that we do not spell out enough of their details for an understander to make the connections directly. Scripts are a kind of key to connecting events together that do not connect by their superficial features but rather by the remembrance of their having been connected before. . . Scripts are not data structures that are available in one piece in some part of memory. Rather, script application is a reconstructive process. We build pieces of scripts as we need them from our store of knowledge as we hear them."
The classic prototype of a script is the first script that Schank implemented, the restaurant script. This script stores information that is crucial for drawing inferences about restaurant situation such as the normal sequence of ordering, eating and paying. A story or a text about a restaurant scene might mention that someone entered the restaurant and assume that the reader understands the normal course of events and their proper interpretation implicit in that scenario. The question "Waiter, could you bring another round of drinks?" will be interpreted as an imperative request to bring another round of drinks, based upon the information that the restaurant script provides.
Schank identified a deep problem in language comprehension, and early responces to scripts were very receptive. However, in tim even Schank was forced to abandon the primary role of scripts in the face of mounting difficulties with the script paradigm. One major problem was concerned with the relative specificity of a script. Would a person have separate scripts specifying a visit to a podiatrist's office and the orthadondist's, or do they have a single script specifying a visit to a health care professional? "Such a script is beyond [Schanks] intitial conception of what a script was, becuase it was not specific enough. We had always believed that scripts were rooted in actual expereiences rather than in abstractions and generalizations from experiences."
Part of the trouble with the insistence upon scripts being rooted in actual experiences is that in the limit this strategy ends up postulating a separate script for every possible experience that a person might have, resulting in a highly inefficient middle man, whose explanatory role has been reduced to zero. If everybody must recall an individual script for every situation, they may as well remember the actual details of the situation itself, instead of constructing the virtually infinite number of scripts that such an organization would entail. At the same time, it does seem as if an inordinate number of scipts might be necessary, as there could be no single restaruant script, since for example, at fast food restuarants you pay and then eat, at Diners you pay at the register after you eat, and at fancy restaurants the waiter collects the check from you at the table.
These concerns eventually lead Schank to expand his original idea of scripts into a complex recursive hierarchy which he named MOPs (Memory Organizing Packets). Under this revised model Shank retained the used of scripts, but embedded them within a larger aabstract hierarchy. He maintained that "scripts are not data structures that are available in one peice in some part of memory. Rather, script application is a reconstructive process. We build peices of scripts as we need them from our store of knowledge to help us interperet what we hear."
The finer differences between scripts and MOPs does not concern us here, although it is significant to note that the original proponent of scripts acknowledged himself that the model had serious flaws and required a substantive makeover in order to survive. Raskin writing in 1985 may not have had the opportunity to study some of the later criticisms of scripts, and he does not directly address their limitations in his book. He justifies their usage based on the fact that no other system gets the linguistic job done as effectively as scripts do, and he points to their effectiveness in analyzing jokes as proof that they provide are feasable. However, we must be cautious in evaluating Raskin's evaluation of scripts and determine who is actually doing the work in Raskin's theory—scripts or Raskin himself.
Raskin heavily employs the notion of scripts in his theory of humor and mostly passes the buck to this system in his analysis of jokes. His conditions stipulate that for a text to be funny it must be compatible with two scripts that are opposed in a certain way. Having outlined a working theory of scripts we must now turn to Raskin's condition of opposition. Raskin postulates three basic types of opposition between scripts, corresponding to the "real" and the "unreal" situation expressed by the text: (1) "The first type clearly distinguishes between the actual situation in which the hero of the joke finds himself or, somewhat more generally, in which the joke is actually set, and a non-actual, non-existing situation which is not comppatible with the actual setting of the joke." (2) "The second type introduces the normal, expected state of affairs and opposes it to the abnormal, unexpected state of affairs." (3) "The third type distinguishes between a possible, plausible situation and a fully of partially impossible or much less plausible situation." Raskin enumerates a short list of the most frequently occuring oppositions, and devotes whole chapters to their standard instantiation in the particular categories of sexual, ethnic, and political humor. Raskin blurs his definition of opposition, by allowing for implicit second scripts in more complicated jokes. The best way to explore Raskin's theory is by applying it to an example, and evaluating its performance. For example, consider this simple "joke" which Raskin spends over ten pages analizing:
"Is the doctor at home?" the patient asked in his broncial whisper. "No," the doctor's young and pretty wife whispered in reply. "Come right in."
Raskin's model of comprehension involves the clarification of every word in the text and the selection of the corrrect meaning. In this joke the words "doctor" "patient" and "bronchial" evoke and reevoke the script of a patient visiting a physician (the DOCTOR script). The fact that the doctor's wife is "young" and "pretty" is irrelevant on this first reading of the joke, and only comes into play after the script switch is triggered by an incongruity. When the wife "whispers" her invitation, after it is clear that there is no reason for the patient to stay if he came to see the doctor (she did not say "He's on the way back." or "You can wait if you like.") the search for other compatible scripts immeadiately produces the alternative scripts LOVER (or ADULTERY). As soon as this alternative script is discovered, all the loose ends of the joke are tied up, and it suddenly is clear why the doctor's wife was whispring, and why it was important that she be young and pretty.
According to Raskin, "the joke is created by a partial overlapp of two opposed scripts, tentatively labled DOCTOR and LOVER. The opposition between the real and the unreal situations evoked by the text belongs to the actual/non-actual type. The non-actual situation exists externally as opposed to being conjectured by the hero(es) of the joke. There is a certain distance between the opposed scripts—they are niether the negations of each other nor compatible conjunctions of one another. They joke contains a discontinuous contradiction trigger."
It is not obvious that all of this rigourous jargon enlightens our understanding of humor. Raskin's abmitious project is haunted by a number of serious shortcomings. His theory is built on the shaky foundations of script theory, and there may be some problems which will percolate up and threaten the integrity of his semantic theory of humor. Furthermore, as we will discuss below, the very possibility of formulating a rigourous definition of humor may be doomed from the start. However, before we concern ourselves with these braoder methodological issues, it is worthwhile to examine Raskin's theory on its own terms, and to test its robustness while temporarily granting Raskin the benifit of the doubt with regards to the broader issues just mentioned. In particular, before we attempt to determine if any conditions would suffice, we ought to give Raskin a fair chance, and confirm the limits of his hypthesis.
What we need to show in order to demonstrate that Raskin's definition of 'joke' is not satisfactory is either one (or both) of two things: (a) That it suffers from the sin of omission— Some texts are jokes, but are not included by the conditions stipulated in Raskin's main hypothesis. (b) That it suffers from the sin of commission—Some texts are not jokes, but are included by Raskin.
Are there any texts that are jokes, but are not included by Raskin's conditions? This question is actually very difficult to answer as it deepnds upon the leaway that we grant to the notion of a script. One reading of Raskin's theory provides us with numerous examples of texts that are funny but not included by the conditions. For example, many jokes contain a single script (euphamisms , witty turns of phrase "The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read." - O. Wilde
Both of these sayings contain one script (The script of COMPARISON) and they express no ingongruity or ambiguity. The humorous pleasure seems to be derived both from the sentiment expressed and the sounds of the words used to link the thoughts together. Wordplay is not always funny, so it would be difficult to build into the definition of humor, but its role should not be understated., and even some simple noises), or two scripts that are not in opposition to one another (puns or clever sayings which simultneously convey two parrallel, but unopposed meanings). However, scripts are a very slipery concept, and their vaugness may allow a theorist to emply them without them actually doing any real work for the theory. For example, in many of his analysis, Raskin seemed to be explaining each joke individually and on its own terms in a is far more specific than the mere invokation of scripts.
On one reading, Raskin's theory might be vacuous enough that someone dedicated to it could easily finagle an analysis in accordance with the theory. For example, the deadpan liar is often considered very funny in many settings but based solely on the information contained in the utterance there it is only comprised of a single script. If we were feeling generous, we might explain that there is an implicit second script which pits he the script of the real versus the unreal, the liar versus the truth. However, it is unclear how Raskin's conditions identify such implicit scripts, and he makes up for this deficientcy by fudging the analysis to fit his theory by a seemingly mechanical procedure.
The trouble with a vacuous theory is not that it is not very informative, and if it wraps around everything without really exlaining anything, its not much of a theory. This is one of the reasons that researchers have begun to demand machine based implamentations of theories; to expose the vaguries and abiguities inherent in many such systems. Raskin's theory certainly does evaluate many statements that we condsider funny as funny, but if we should not expect the theory in its current form to be complete enough that an automaton could learn a sence of humor. Considering that Schank only succeeded in implemnting about a dozen scripts, he was never truly able to test his hypothesis on a full corpus of real world data, and it is unclear whether his theory would have passed the test of the limitless possibilities existent outside of the world of toy models—an actual novel is more than a simple extrapolation of restaruant, doctor, and lover scripts. Unless we grant scripts imaginary powers that they do not pocess, therby passing the buck to a nonexistent reciever, the dream (or perhaps nightmare?) of defining the set of what is funny sems to be in danger.
Are there any texts that are not jokes, but are included by Raskin's conditions ? Aside from ommiting statements that most consider funny, Raskin's theory of humor also seems to miscategorize many markedly unfunny ideas as funny. Consider some of the famous logical paradoxes such as Zeno's paradox, the Liar's paradox or Russel's paradox. They all contain two scripts opposed in the appropriate way (I'm telling a lie versus I' m telling the truth) and yet most (save perhaps a few perverse logicians) find them to be at all humorous. Many of the most serious discussions the history of science and philosophy, involve the attempt to resolve opposing scipts, such as the wave-particle duality or the mind-body problem, and yet while its important to have a sence of humor about such matters (enter Schrödinger's cat), few consider the subjects themselves to be a source of mirth.
Raskin claims that his theory can distinguish a joke from a non-joke, but it can not predict how people will react to it. It seems strange that according to Raskin's scheme, a text might be considered a joke even if it is not funny. In a sense, Raskin's theory redefines the term "joke", and we are free to follow his lead as long as we are conscious of this move. Consider the fact that some identical statements are hysterical in some situations, and grounds for excommunication in others. This obeservation does not devastate to a a theroy of humor, since it merley suggests that the theory should bulild into its conditions a stipulation regarding the context of the joke. Humorists such as Neal Norrick have identified this condition as the stipulation that the listener must be in playful or humorous mode/frame for them to be receptive to potential jokes. Jerry Palmer has described the joke telling process as a negotiation, harkening back to our analogy between humor and colors. If humor is a complex negotiated interaction beteen the speaker (sometime the mute ink splotches on a page) and the listener then all what we hope for from a theory is a specification of the nature of the context that is required for a funny statement to be recieved as funny. If we take this approach, we are not forced to redefine humor in a way that is not correlated to what people consider funny.
Raskin is not a lone maverick for thinking that incongruity is intimatly connected to humor, and some have actually tried to quantify the relationship between the two, expressing the funnieness of a joke as a function of the incongruity it expresses. A number of studies have also been designed in an attemp empirically test to test the hypothesis that non-verbal humor is merely incongruity. G. Nerhardt cunducted a series of experiments in which the subjects were asked to lift wieghts and rate their heaviness. The weights were incremented every trial, establishing an expectation for their heaviness. On the last trial the wieght was either sharply reduced or increased, and this last incongruous wight evoked laughter (the probability of laughter increased "as a linear function of the discrepency form expectation").
Nerhardt hoped to show that incongruity was at least a sufficient, if not necessary condition for something to be funny. Unfortunatly, the control group of subjects whose last trial's weights were in accordance with the pattern, sometimes laughed at their final trial. Nerhardt felt that this indicated that laughter has multiple menaings and funcitons, and argued that laugther without amusement or a stimulus of incongruity might reflect friendliness or unease. On the other hand, we might think that there was something inherently humorous (although not necessarily absurd) about his experimental setup which caused the reaction that he measured. In either case, this experiment illustrates how empirical studies of reactions to humor have proven so difficult. Not only is it hard to interpret the subjects reactions, but it is difficult to design experiments since concepts such as incongriuty and semantic distance are hard to quantify and there is no standard by which to measure them.
Meet The Family
An important fact which these studies and examples teach us is the futility of searching for the absolute necesary and suffficent conditions which define the concept funny. In his analysis of the concept of games in the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that there is no fixed concept of a game itself. Different games (board games, card games, athletic games, for
example) have no one thing in common, other than being human activities which are "played" by
rules. The resemblance among the games is like that shown among members of a family, each unique yet somehow similar to one another. Perhaps we were chasing our own tails in searching for a single unifying critereon that all humor must satisfy, and we ought to consider a disjoint definition whose members bear a familial resembelance to one another, but cannot be boxed and shipped as many humorists have hoped.
In fact, if humor is indeed an emotion there is a preecedence for the fact that we may not be able to define it. The Polish linguist Anna Wierzbicka encountered this problem in tryring to define the basic emotion 'sadness'. She conceded that the structure of feelings prevents them from being expressed in words since basic feelings are signals which have no symbolic structure, and consequently do not correspond to any analytical concepts. Of couse we would like to be able to say more about a concept other than that it is ineffable and cannot be expressed in words. Following Wittgensteins lead, there meay be merit in examining the disjoint prototypical phenomena that comprise the concept of funny in the hopes that we may discover family resembalnces between various members of this set, which in turn may lend themselves more readily to an analysis.
There is good reason to think that humor is a disjoint phenomena of this type. Aside from the exceptionally large variety of things which different cultures find humorous individual's sense of humor vary from person to person, and even within the same person over his lifetime. People learn to appreciate new forms of humor, either through association with forms that they already consider funny, or eventually by actually creating a new category of things which they consider funny. There is a point in the development of children where they begin to appreciate sarcastic comments, (although some people never do find them funny) whereas previously they simply took them at face value. Not only do our sences of humor become increasingly refined over our lifetimes, but they develop as well, as we no longer (at least we don't admit ir) laugh at jokes we consider childish or primitive and we cultivete new modes of comedic expression.
Many of these modes of expression are highly idiosyncratic, as Bill Cosby, Robbin Williams, or Jim Carey all attest. There are certain bits that these comedians perform that are only funny because they said it the way that they do. This phenomenon carries over into the domain of written humor, asthe humor of many jokes relys on who authored them. O do not ussualy

Emotions ...
Fear/scary - disjoint phenomena
Familial similarity

asdf
Could Humor be an Emotion?

Can you ever have a theory which "explains" the which w/out a why?
Could the which ever be the why?

Developing sense of humor for new forms...

- Relate Raskin's model to the semantic taxonomy of one-liners that I have been working on (the ones in my last draft). Try to show how the specific frames satisfy the requirements. Could the various forms of humor be exhaustively generated?
- Mental Models and incongruity theory - how incongruity resolution may present a case for model based processing (one of the crucial debates in the cognitive aspects of humor is whether or not there is a cognitive step when we decide if a joke is funny - MacHovec thinks not, based on instantaneous, uncontrollable fits of laughter).

Noel Coward - There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner

Lyrics to There are Bad Times Just Around The Corner by Noel Coward:



Verse 1

They're out of sorts in Sunderland
And terribly cross in Kent,
They're dull in Hull
And the Isle of Mull
Is seething with discontent,
They're nervous in Northumberland
And Devon is down the drain,
They're filled with wrath
On the firth of Forth
And sullen on Salisbury Plain,
In Dublin they're depressed, lads,
Maybe because they're Celts
For Drake is going West, lads,
And so is everyone else.
Hurray-hurray-hurray!
Misery's here to stay.

Refrain 1

There are bad times just around the corner,
There are dark clouds hurtling through the sky
And it's no good whining
About a silver lining
For we know from experience that they won't roll by,
With a scowl and a frown
We'll keep our peckers down
And prepare for depression and doom and dread,
We're going to unpack our troubles from our old kit bag
And wait until we drop down dead.

Verse 2

From Portland Bill to Scarborough
They're querulous and subdued
And Shropshire lads
Have behaved like cads
From Berwick-on-Tweed to Bude,
They're mad at Market Harborough
And livid at Leigh-on-Sea,
In Tunbridge Wells
You can hear the yells
Of woe-begone bourgeoisie.
We all get bitched about, lads,
Whoever our vote elects,
We know we're up the spout, lads.
And that's what England expects.
Hurray-hurray-hurray!
Trouble is on the way.

Refrain 2

There are bad times just around the corner,
The horizon's gloomy as can be,
There are black birds over
The grayish cliffs of Dover
And the rats are preparing to leave the B.B.C.
We're an unhappy breed
And very bored indeed
When reminded of something that Nelson said.
While the press and the politicians nag nag nag
We'll wait until we drop down dead.

Verse 3

From Colwyn Bay to Kettering
They're sobbing themselves to sleep,
The shrieks and wails
In the Yorkshire dales
Have even depressed the sheep.
In rather vulgar lettering
A very disgruntled group
Have posted bills
On the Cotswold Hills
To prove that we're in the soup.
While begging Kipling's pardon
There's one thing we know for sure
If England is a garden
We ought to have more manure.
Hurray-hurray-hurray!
Suffering and dismay.

Refrain 3

There are bad times just around the corner
And the outlook's absolutely vile,
There are Home Fires smoking
From Windermere to Woking
And we're not going to tighten our belts and smile, smile, smile,
At the sound of a shot
We'd just as soon as not
Take a hot water bottle and go to bed,
We're going to untense our muscles till they sag sag sag
And wait until we drop down dead.
http://www.free-lyrics.org

Refrain 4

There are bad times just around the corner,
We can all look forward to despair,
It's as clear as crystal
From Bridlington to Bristol
That we can't save democracy and we don't much care
If the Reds and the Pinks
Believe that England stinks
And that world revolution is bound to spread,
We'd better all learn the lyrics of the old 'Red Flag'
And wait until we drop down dead.
A likely story
Land of Hope and Glory,
Wait until we drop down dead.

[When Noel later used this number in his Las Vegas cabaret act, he adapted it to the American milieu, as he did with many of the topical numbers]

There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner
[American Lyric]

Verse 1

They're nervous in Nigeria
And terribly cross in Crete,
In Bucharest
They are so depressed
They're frightened to cross the street,
They're sullen in Siberia
And timid in Turkestan,
They're sick with fright
In the Isle of Wight
And jittery in Japan,
The Irish groan and shout, lads,
Maybe because they're Celts,
They know they're up the spout, lads,
And so is everyone else.
Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!
Trouble is on the way.

Refrain 1

There are bad times just around the corner,
There are dark clouds hurtling through the sky
And it's no use whining
About a silver lining
For we KNOW from experience that they won't roll by,
With a scowl and a frown
We'll keep our sprits down
And prepare for depression and doom and dread,
We're going to unpack our troubles from our old kit bag
And wait until we drop down dead.

Refrain 2

There are bad times just around the corner,
The horizon's gloomy as can be,
There are black birds over
They grayish cliffs of Dover
And the vultures are hovering round the Christmas tree
We're an unhappy breed
And ready to stampede
When we're asked to remember what Lincoln said,
We're going to untense our muscles till they sag sag sag
And wait until we drop down dead.

Verse 2

They're morbid in Mongolia
And querulous in Quebec,
There's not a man
In Baluchistan
Who isn't a nervous wreck,
In Maine the melancholia
Is deeper than tongue can tell,
In Monaco
All the croupiers know
They haven't a hope in Hell.
In far away Australia
Each wallaby's well aware
The world's a total failure
Without any time to spare.
Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!
Suffering and dismay.

Refrain 3

There are bad times just around the corner,
We can all look forward to despair,
It's as clear as crystal
From Brooklyn Bridge to Bristol
That we CAN'T save Democracy
And we don't much care.
At the sound of a shot
We'd just as soon as not
Take a hot-water bad and retire to bed
And while the press and the politicians nag nag nag
We'll wait until we drop down dead.

Refrain 3

There are bad times just around the corner
And the outlook's absolutely vile,
You can take this from us
That when they Atom bomb us
We are NOT going to tighten our belts and smile smile smile,
We are in such a mess
It couldn't matter less
If a world revolution is just ahead,
We'd better all learn the lyrics of the old 'Red Flag'
And wait until we drop down dead.
A likely story
Land of Hope and Glory,
Wait until we drop down dead.

Buddy Hackett- live and uncensored - complete performance

John Pinette Around the world in 80 Buffets

Tim Hawkins- Old Rock Star Songs

Who's on first?