Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (MIT Press)

Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (MIT Press)

<DIV>Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, <I>The Far Side</I>, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching <I>The Simpsons</I>? In <I>Inside Jokes</I>, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.</DIV>