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What is funny?

07:45 / 26.04.02

Please help me with my research by answering any or all of the questions below.

1. What is the funniest word in the world? why?
2. What is the funniest animal in the world? why?
3. What is the funniest thing in the world? why?
4. Where can I find a book that, in simple terms, deconstructs Aristotle's/ Aristophanes' use of comedy.
5. Are there any psychological theories of comedy out there?
6. Is there such thing as a flavour/taste that makes you laugh?
7. ...and if not, why not?

cheers.

10:50 / 26.04.02

Cor blimey. That's a bit of an ask innit? Just one of those'd make a thread on its own.

But for no. 1 - the funniest word - how 'bout 'hirsutorufous' adj. red-haired? I quite like the alliterative run of 'the hirsutorufous Haus' .

11:14 / 26.04.02

I once read some cognitive theories for why we laugh, such as the fact that it's sometimes a release from tension -vis the whatever-it-is scene in Macbeth where the audience generally bursts out laughing as a relief from the horrible sense of dread that has been built up in the previous scene.
I can remember some stuff saying that pretty much all jokes will fit a particular one of a handful of categories like 'an incongruity of ideas' or whatever.

There's a bizarre Isaac Asimov short story (I think it's in one of those 'robot' anthologies) where this kind of famous polymath guy in the future gets paid to interrogate the world's top computers to find answers to mind-boggling metaphysical questions. Anyway, he becomes obsessed with the question of the origin of humour and spends years trying to get to the bottom of it. The twist in the tale is when the most powerful computer ever built (or something) finally delivers an answer which is along the lines of 'extraterrestrial origin'. And there's some bollocks about how it turns out humour is a mechanism aliens have been using to study human psychology- can't remember exactly.

wembley can change in 28 days

12:32 / 26.04.02

Definitely read Henri Bergson's Laughter.

Although Laughter (1900) is not among Bergson's best-known studies, Arthur Koestler considered it as important for his book The Act of Creation as (1964) Freud's classic Wit and its Relations to the Unconscious. Bergson defined the comic as the result of the sense of relief we feel when we feel ourselves from the mechanistic and materialistic - his examples were the man-automaton, the puppet on strings, Jack-in-the Box, etc. "A situation is always comic", he wrote, "if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings." He saw laughter as the corrective punishment inflicted by society upon the unsocial individual. "It seems that laughter needs an echo. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group."

From this site. It's not the best introduction to his theory, as it seems overly simplistic, but check it out. I'll swear by it.

wembley can change in 28 days

12:36 / 26.04.02

6. Wasabi makes me laugh, but I think it's the reaction to wasabi that I find funny. Perhaps food is designed not to make us laugh so that we don't end up with it up our noses half the time.

12:40 / 26.04.02

Meme:

"The twist in the tale is when the most powerful computer ever built (or something) finally delivers an answer which is along the lines of 'extraterrestrial origin'. And there's some bollocks about how it turns out humour is a mechanism aliens have been using to study human psychology- can't remember exactly."

I remember that one. The punchline is that, as soon as the exact reason becomes known, then nothing seems funny anymore, and no one laughs again.

So just watch it, lbb surgeon!

12:49 / 26.04.02

Can’t answer them all that usefully, but :
1. Gusset. You KNOW why.
2. Duck-billed Platypus. Funny name, funny appearance, and proof that creation has a sense of humour.
3. The funniest thing probably IS the world – no, make that everything. The old ‘why is there something instead of nothing?’ distillation of philosophy is also one of the best one-liners ever, despite people always trying to come up with a punchline to follow it. ‘Dunno’, followed by a shrug and a goofy grin is best. And that, when you get past nihilistic and existential despair and the intellectual itch to understand/now, is funny.
4. In a bookshop or library, I guess.
5. Freud’s book was mentioned, and is probably of note, were it not for the fact that the jokes he uses to illustrate his points are so weak as to undermine his points. “I met a rich man the other day, and he treated me very faMILLIONAIREly…” Oh, Siggy, stop, my sides !
6. I agree with Wembley here – it’d be counterproductive.
7. Like he said.

DBC

13:27 / 26.04.02

Here's a good joke I read yesterday:

"A guy and his friend are out in the forest hunting. Suddenly, the friend's eyes roll back in his forehead, he falls to the ground, and begins convulsing. The Guy tries to help, but very quickly the friend stops convulsing and appears motionless, his eyes rolled back into his head. The guy frantically dials 911 on his cellphone.

Guy: "My friend went into convulsions and now he's dead."
911: "calm down, sir. Now, please make sure he's dead."
Guy: "Okay"

The 911 operator hears a gunshot through the phone.

Guy:"Okay, now what?"

15:33 / 26.04.02

slamming matrices

put those two words in a search engine, and you'll get humor theory out the yin yang.