“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The equating of jokes and comedy here is an affront for anyone who has explored different avenues of comedy in any way. The analysis is fine and even interesting for (as others have pointed out) one specific type of joke but just flippantly calling that all of comedy is very jarring as it is obviously wrong.
I just completed a clown workshop this weekend where I was in tears laughing from an exercise of simply playing peekaboo, my improvised musical team has gotten laughs and applause from our piano man simply starting to play music and from us rhyming two words, I've seen TJ & Dave erupt a room from being as realistic and truthful as possible in their improv, one of my Edinburgh Fringe highlights was a performer crashing a live podcast recording multiple times and falling over, spilling many pints in the process.
That is all just to say that comedy is much more than just jokes, and especially much more than jokes that fit this theory. To be clear though, I am not against attempting such formalisms and theories (I have many myself and do think this kind of thinking is great for generating ideas), I've just yet to see a good comprehensive one.
Heard Adrian Edmondson on Desert Island Discs and one of the interesting things he said about comedy was that there were a limited number of jokes all of which he believed are contained in the recorded works of Laurel and Hardy and that he would be able to enumerate and show all of them from those works.
He also said he was tired of comedy as he knew all of the jokes. Later he sort of contradicted himself by saying that Waiting For Godot is a very funny play and that he felt he had not yet understood it all.
So that's kind of an interesting counterpoint...he does essentially conflate comedy and jokes.
Yes, the article mistakes punchlines for comedy. Watch some of Norm MacDonald's stuff on Conan (troubled moth, Jacques de Gatineaux, drunk dart thrower, Andy the Swedish-German)... sure, the punchlines fit the model in the article, but the real humor comes from his delivery and the weird worlds he creates leading up to the punchlines.
Comedy is a complex superstructure. I think the site has a probably-correct description of the ground-floor basis of that superstructure. But the rest of the structure is where the magic is.
I describe this "ground-floor basis" not as "comedy is search" but "comedy is learning." One of the first things babies laugh at is object permanence. But you quickly get into forms of comedy that are much more than the formula discussed into the article. Consider sarcasm. Consider crass humor derived from blatant invocation of socially inappropriate subjects. Consider "inside jokes" which are often purely social, having lost all connection to the "relating two concepts."
> I was in tears laughing from an exercise of simply playing peekaboo
My wife and I have a 15 month old and one of our favourite games is for one of us to sit with him on the stairs looking through the bannisters at the other one dancing and singing. Sometimes we are all in absolute hysterics. Humour is very much about a collective will to engage in the shared enjoyment, and I reckon most parents would agree with me.
But yes, OP's article does not really cover satire, parody, toilet humour, slapstick, deadpan, cringe humour etc...
Related to what you're saying, there's a whole essay by Mark Twain where he explains the difference between comedy (and comedic storytelling) and simply "telling a joke". He didn't think much of the "punchline" type of jokes, he was all about the storytelling... as you can tell by "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and his many other stories.
I feel like I've read this comment before, except the topic was music theory and the focus was on harmony and someone who valued rhythm, texture, and timbre felt left out.
I have a theory that everything is search. Protein folding? Search for minimal energy. DNA evolution - search for ecological niche fit. Cognition? attention is search, memory is search, imagination is also search, problem solving - of course is search. Scientific progress? It is (re)search. Optimizing an AI model? Search for optimal parameters to fit the data. Reinforcement learning? Search for optimal behavior to maximize rewards. Even speaking is search - we output words in sequence, searching the next word like LLMs. Now I can add comedy to the list.
<rant>Search is a nice concept, it defines everything clearly - search space, goal space, action space. Compare it with fuzzy concepts like understanding, intelligence and consciousness. We can never define them, precisely because they gloss over their input-output domains and try to present a distributed process as centralized in the brain.
Search has a bunch of properties - it is compositional, hierarchical, recurrent (iterative in time) and recursive. This pattern holds across many fields, I think it is based on the fundamental properties of space-time which are also compositional, hierarchical and recurrent (object state at time t+1 depends on its state at time t)
Search can be personal, inter-personal, physical or information based. It can explain away much of the mystery of the three fuzzy concepts I mentioned. I describe cognition as two search loops - search externally by applying known behavior to collect experience, and search internally to compress experience and update behavior.</>
You're spot on that all problems can be interpreted as a search problem. Similarly, all problems can be interpreted as a compression problem. Or parsing, boolean satisfiability, or halting, etc. It's helpful to keep them all in mind because sometimes a different problem domain has a tool that your preferred one doesn't, or just the mindset shift can be useful to unblock.
Lately I’ve come to think of science as a large-scale search algorithm so I think there’s truth to what you’re saying and it’s interesting to think about.
Strong agree. I'm on a similar path as you, travelling through related thoughts
I think this hypothesis goes a long way to explaining why the math of transformers (doing mathematical operations on language) create something that rhymes so much with intelligent thought. Though I should clarify that LLMs do not share the same processes or verbs of our intelligence, only the snapshot moment-in-time of a mind-like object ;)
I think another way to put that really good idea is simply to say that humans are innately wired to explore and discover!
I think a more specific denominator you might wanna look into is free energy minimization as you mention in your first example. I really liked reading Active Inference and What Is Life? on the subject.
How does this explain away the mystery of consciousness?
I've yet to see a theory of comedy which actually addresses that there are multiple kinds of comedy:
- Bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny, but instead relies on attacking someone's status in front of a crowd. The crowd laughs in recognition of the successful attack, not because the joke is clever.
- Epiphany humor -- the joke relies on some new thought, connection, or idea, and the "joke" is the leap your mind needs to make in order to comprehend the novel idea. eg. "Otis Elevators: They'll never let you down!" In this case, you must take the familiar phrase "let you down [emotionally]" and realize the second meaning "elevators move up and down [physically]."
- Story-based humor, which probably needs a better name, but is mostly what stand-up comedy is. Other kinds of humor can be mixed in here, but often the "joke" relies on something of a straw man -- setting up a character in the story where the audience can readily recognize that at least one character being related is a fool, and worthy to be laughed at. Often this is perspective-based, and is based around relating to the characters in the stand-up comedian's story. For instance, take Bill Burr's joke about women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1GY-yr-BM -- the "joke" here is mostly whether or not you agree with Bill's characterization of the situation. The joke is not universally funny, but relies on the audience's perspective. If you've never seen the world from the same perspective as Bill, the joke may not hit the mark, or might even seem rude.
- Tone-of-voice humor. This is a joke where there's no real joke, but the tone of voice is really doing 90% of the work. It's just retelling a relatively benign event, except the tone of voice exaggerates the emotions attached to the words. I don't have an example ready for this one because I really dislike this "style" of humor, but imagine some of the less creative or talented stand-up artists.
- SNL humor. "What if an unusual or annoying thing happened?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfE93xON8jk
- Social awkwardness humor / Dramatic irony. See all / most of Arrested Development.
I think "incongruity theory", that the article is alluding to, does actually apply to most of these. You're focusing on the context rather than the actual underlying mechanism driving the joke. e.g. the first one "bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny..." Consider that the incongruity of a comedian laying into someone verbally, compared to the way we're primed for them to talk in polite-society interactions, may be part of the reason why this works. Similarly example two - "Otis Elevators: They'll never let you down!" - there is an incongruity in the usual usage of the expression 'they'll never let you down' to here, that could be what makes this work as a joke.
I agree there are examples that incongruity doesn't cover, e.g. slapstick I personally believe is something a bit different, but generally I do think it's a pretty compelling explanation for a lot of modern comedy.
The most comprehensive theory I have seen is that laughter, and therefore humor, is primarily a fear response.
It starts as an infant when you laugh by having your surface nerves rapidly engaged through tickling. Even peakaboo is a fear game due to the child’s lack of object permanence.
When you examine all funny things through the lens of fear, it becomes an interesting logic exercise to draw a connection between the humor you see and how it may or may not be connected to fear.
Consider all of your examples through that lens.
Really love your thoughts here. Very thought-provoking to someone like myself who has spent quite a bit of time thinking about and researching the evolutionary origins of laughter and its relation to surprise/play
To respond to just one part:
> Bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny, but instead relies on attacking someone's status in front of a crowd. The crowd laughs in recognition of the successful attack, not because the joke is clever
I think you might have it inverted. The crowd doesn't laugh bc it's a successful attack. It's a successful attack bc they laugh.
The audience is largely voting with their choice of where they deploy their "social" laugh. Laughter used to be an involuntary hardwired animal sound (like a "moo"), that signaled a space of learning and safety, to explore and play. It attracted other primates to join on that merit. but along the way it became rewired into the software level of social context. Humans started deploying laughter to shape their social context: to flatter, to flirt, to charm, and yes, to hurt. This is why we laugh more and differently around other humans. (Some of this was discovered via dissecting muscles around the eyes, that activate most readily in more "true" involuntary Duchenne laughter, but not the contrived social laughter.)
So the laughing audience is complicit in the bullying. They are creating the weapon, and the attack. If it's actually funny, it just takes less work to get the audience on your side. That's the performance of bullying -- whether you can carry either a willing or unwilling audience along for the weaponising of the laughter.
I agree but i'd go even fruther and say the categories of comedy seem so damned plentify that almost any theory, or even set of theories, fails to capture all cases. Some people say it's about a twist in what one would expect, but in which case why is something happening repeatedly sometimes more funny, even when it begins to annoy you? And why is the buildup to an obvious punchline somehow funny (say a character you just know will fall off a ladder but waiting for it somehow is funny in and of itself). If it's about making witty connections then why is it genuinely just funny if someone shits themselves in a serious moment or just has a weird accent. Why are impressions funny? I laugh because part of me is saying "oh yeah, George Bush does squint his eyes like that a lot". it's funny to see... but why? Then you have anti-comedy: why is being unfunny funny? People say comedy comes from others pain: like cringe comedy or slapstick but there's times where someone really enjoying something obsessively is funny.
Also, if there are any universal theory then how come my grandad just doesn't understand why comedy i like is funny and vice-versa? It's not that i don't get "his comedy". It's just I find it hard to believe anyone would ever really laugh at it like mine. Then there's jokes from acient times that you wouldn't even think of as jokes now, but we know people laughted. If there is a universal theory of comedy i suspect it would be flexible to the point of being usless as it'd covers almost all human activity.
> Tone-of-voice humor. This is a joke where there's no real joke, but the tone of voice is really doing 90% of the work. It's just retelling a relatively benign event, except the tone of voice exaggerates the emotions attached to the words. I don't have an example ready for this one because I really dislike this "style" of humor, but imagine some of the less creative or talented stand-up artists.
Glad you mentioned this. Watched stand up specials in groups where the set up for a story joke used mostly tone-of-voice and my friends laughed and I wondered why they found it funny. Maybe the anticipation of a joke combined with the tone-of-voice make people laugh? I struggle to get it.
An exception that comes to mind is SNL's REALLY segment. Pohler and Meyers beat the joke so deep into the dirt it comes back around as funny
Where does something like this fall into (story-based?):
> I don't stop eating when I'm full. The meal isn't over when I'm full. It's over when I hate myself. (Louis C.K.)
I think the best jokes of the greatest comedians that ever lived were jokes that don't even work when you write them down, its all in the greater context, delivery and timing. One of my favorite types of jokes are references to earlier parts of a show, it feels like more work for the setup intensifies the punch line.
Tone-of-voice example (not mine): "It. Just. Works." vs "It juuuuust works."
How would you call jokes that only work due to laugh tracks (sitcoms)? Bandwagon humor?
-puns and word-play. Or does that fall under epiphany humor?
to be fair, i've seen plenty of examples of the "bullying" one be genuinely hilarious too.
Completely serious, I think Calvin & Hobbes had the best concise explanation.
(https://mymorningmeditations.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/...)
I'm not sure if I'm missing something (perhaps the joke, as it were) but the Calvin & Hobbes strip seems to be entirely about having a sense of humour, rather than a theory of comedy.
Great explanation, indeed, and a gem of a comic.
Almost reinvented the Benign Violation Theory: https://humorresearchlab.com/benign-violation-theory/
I think theories of humour have to explain why some jokes/stories are less funny the second time you hear them, while others remain funny forever. Does the "violation" go away after you hear the joke and your brain adapts? That seems plausible to me, but if so, why doesn't that always happen?
There's a Seinfeld episode where George gets fired -- and then decides to go back to work anyway, believing that he's teaching them a lesson. I've seen it many times, so I know exactly what's coming, but my brain still can't seem to prepare itself for the deep, character-consistent idiocy of it. I will never not laugh while watching this. The question is: Why?
This is exclusively the most primitive joke category base on double meanings. The jokes listed are boring and maybe suited for fillers in a standup routine.
Due to the title I presume that this is another pro-"AI" article that devalues human ingenuity. Well, enjoy the non-funny jokes. I'll stick to pre-2022 material.
The jokes in the article are just there to demonstrate the pattern. There are lots of more sophisticated jokes which clearly follow the same pattern. For example Milton Jones' classic (which won "best joke" at the edinburgh comedy festival I believe)
I come from a long line of police marksmen. Apart from my grandfather, who was a bank robber. But he died recently..... surrounded by his family.
Words with two meanings are just one type of shared aspect in their system. The "hunting cakes" joke was an example of using a shared aspect that isn't a word. (And while it didn't wow me on the page, I think it's the type of joke that a talented comic could make much funnier through their delivery.)
I agree that most of the jokes were weak, but they basically have to use one-liners in order to give many quick examples, and nearly all one-liners I meet are bad. That said, I genuinely enjoyed the "step ladder" one.
Ran into this today. From doing comedy for about 7 years now, this basically correct. Although most comedians approach joke writing organically rather than with this approach
I like the theory that jokes are funny to the extent they enable a discovery of 'shared knowledge' between the teller and audience.
I'll provide a light bulb joke as an example...
Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? A: That's not funny.
Shared beliefs, when they start complaining about things the audience relates to. Or completely obvious things we haven't noticed. A really funny monologue I saw once was a European comedian remarking how many different meanings can be carried by the word 'ass' and how often they are contradictory. Very clever observation.
The theory presented in this article was articulated in Arthur Koestler's "The Act of Creation", where he goes on to speculate that all creativity works in this way. It's well worth a read.
It's really annoying and deadening, not to mention foolish, when people try to reduce every activity of the soul to a mechanical, comprehensible process.
If you want to vindicate your distaste, check out the "Joke Examples" section of the argument:
> And here are a few jokes that were created using this method: (...)
> "I'm awful at jogging, I'm running slower than windows 95" (...)
> "You're such a great guy! - I'm not a great guy. Abraham Lincoln was a great guy. I'm a barely adequate guy." (...)
These are two out of 6 examples there - all are extremely plain and boring, except maybe for the last (which is just barely funny).
This. I've seen so much of this on Hacker News that it's almost like a game now to discover the variant of the archetype post in today's feed.
People with a "nerdy" mindset want to find the structure behind everything. That's not a bad thing, but it's so annoying to people who actually do comedy...or music...or art.
Not everything in life can be reduced and programmed. But they'll keep on trying.
How deadening would it be to imagine that our consciousness and agency is just an illusion created by firing synapses and hormones and that everything we think and do has been predetermined.
If the activities of the soul are so beyond mortal comprehension, then the futile attempt at understanding them should widen the soul in appreciation of the infinite depth of human creativity.
Failure at comprehension does not deaden, any more than only seeing a minute fraction of the cosmos deadens the soul. All that remains beyond our understanding should inspire awe.
A man swears he discovered the secret formula to satire. Turns out, it’s just one cup of irony and a lack of self-awareness, baked at 350 for 20 minutes.
Related: Information is surprise https://plus.maths.org/content/information-surprise
> If your string of symbols constitutes a passage of English text, then you could just count the number of words it contains. But this is silly: it would give the sentence "The Sun will rise tomorrow" the same information value as he sentence "The world will end tomorrow" when the second is clearly much more significant than the first. Whether or not we find a message informative depends on whether it's news to us and what this news means to us.
> [Claude] Shannon stayed clear of the slippery concept of meaning, declaring it "irrelevant to the engineering problem", but he did take on board the idea that information is related to what's new: it's related to surprise. Thought of in emotional terms surprise is hard to measure, but you can get to grips with it by imagining yourself watching words come out of a ticker tape, like they used to have in news agencies. Some words, like "the" or "a" are pretty unsurprising; in fact they are redundant since you could probably understand the message without them. The real essence of the message lies in words that aren't as common, such as "alien" or "invasion".
One joke category is something like "getting away with it". A comedian can say anything, and if it's funny they can get away with it. A ton of modern comedians fail at this, but instead of grinding harder to find the funny angles and adapt to the new meta they act like losers and start to blame the audience. 100% skill issue.
I've noticed there's some people who just say mean things while trying to be funny, but I haven't cracked the details on what makes these jokes land or flop.
Comedy is a complex, living, writhing thing. With rules.
This article feels like the author has taken the concept of one-liner (arguably the densest form of standup comedy) and extended that to be comedy at large. I feel like you could take the Comedian's Comedian podcast episode with Gary Delaney, and get a much more effective lesson with the same content.
Disclosure: I've done standup. It is frightening. It's also a lot of fun.
I've come to think of most everything as a search. It works far better as a metaphor than makes sense. Learning, Optimization, Modeling, etc. For many, it is clearly a multivariable search. ML, as an easy example, is both searching for a good model and searching for the optimal parameters to it.
I'd like a theory to explain why a certain class of jokes makes me feel physical pain, when others find them hilarious. This example from the article,
> Q: Why are cats so good at video games? A: They have nine lives.
firmly belongs in the "physical pain" category for me.
Comedy is tickling the "false alarm" part of the brain.
Laughter is a signal to the group that it's not actually a tiger and we can all relax again.
Steve Allen's "How to be funny" presents a compelling model of humor as a deliberate misinterpretation of the setup, which is delivered in the punchline. So you have initial context, pivot, and misinterpretation.
The most powerful versions of that reveal universal, strong and suppressed emotions as well as our basic human fallibility.
Urinal cakes?! I'll never fall for that one again...
Once of my favorite visual breakdowns of comedy structure is the interactive site The Pudding did for an Ali Wong standup show a couple years back: https://pudding.cool/2018/02/stand-up/
Is there a theory of humor which explains why theories of humor are invariably hilariously inadaquate?
There is some connection between music and comedy (or at least joke punchlines, like many, I'm not convinced this theory explains how all comedy works): Musical structure almost always relies on establishing a pattern (repetition) and breaking it (contrast).
This analysis is pretty good, and I liked the presentation style.
He lets himself down by saying "all comedy" when he doesn't need to. He's analysing a specific type of joke structure, and that's fine. He doesn't need to overreach like this.
Freud has a book on jokes called "The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious" which I thought was pretty interesting (although I mostly read the first section which analyzed the technique of the joke and the tendencies of the joke.)
If you are going to make a video about how comedy works you have to begin it with a joke and then use your theory to explain that joke. I don't want to hear your theory unless you give me something to think about first.
Comedy is branch misprediction.
My personal theory is that a joke has to be always both surpising, yet fitting.
The pattern presented in the article fits that requirement. Maybe it is even equivalent.
But that’s just a necessary condition for a good joke, not a sufficient one.
This feels like a manual for a completely humorless person to trying and understand why people laugh. I appreciate the effort, but it's quite naive, and honestly most of the example jokes are just bad puns.
Ah, yes, a step-by-step method for creating comedy from a site called rpgadventures - complete with templates, diagrams, and tables - what's funnier than that?
Be careful what you search for:
Art isn’t search, nor is it an algorithm to be optimized. Unfortunately, the modern human experience is so utterly commoditized that the incentive to cram everything possible into an algorithmic, quantitative box is enormous and almost overpowering or seemingly inevitable. Maybe I’m overreacting a little to this particular instance, but I do think that in general we need to be willing to resist this cultural phenomenon and put some things behind a line that we’re willing to defend.
Imo these one liners are only fun when they're actually not one liners, meaning when the context is part of the setup.
Some jokes only require a punchline, since the audience shares common knowledge or assumptions e.g.:
It's not funny and the frog dies.
See Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud for a similar analysis with far more depth.
Writing jokes was once considered an “AGI level” task - but after reading this I’m not so sure!
As seen in Colbert's new cookbook: Does this taste funny?
Don’t forget about The Greeno Test (1978)!
::=
Analogies Anagrams Transformations
comedy is search = you need to always be 'turned on' and working with details.
Now explain why some jokes following this formula are hilarious but most are painfully unfunny. This would seem to be the hard part.
> I’m awful at jogging. I run slower than Windows 95.
Yeah you have definitely cracked the secret to comedy.
Thank God for the hatchery.
Saying all you can do is search (brute force) means admitting that we have no theory.
I don't get it.
comedy is simply an inevitable surprise!
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