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Inside jokes :using humor to reverse-engineer the mind

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

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

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Series Title

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Call Number

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Publisher

Cambridge : MIT Press,., 2011

Collation

1 online resource (xiii, 359 pages) :illustrations

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262303552

Classification

NONE

Content Type

text

Media Type

computer

Carrier Type

online resource

Edition

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Subject(s)

Laughter
Wit and humor

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

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

Other Information

Cataloger

hasyim

Source

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9027.001.0001?locatt=mode:legacy;http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/oclc/forms/terms/vbrl-201703.pdf

Validator

hasyim

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9027.001.0001

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