I had a childhood friend, who often started laughing and his laughter was so contagious, so I also laughted. He was starting to laugh just because he knew I would also start to laugh. And I laughed because I knew he expects me to laugh and I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from laughing. And vice versa recursively. The whole situation was so absurd, so we were continuing to laugh just because from the outside it looked like we started to laugh for no reason.
Something I agree with. First, The Superiority Theory of Humor, we have the phrase "make fun of" which is when we insult another person or thing and causes laughter, usually the target of making fun is an out group. One devise of making fun is self deprecating humor. Moreover some comedians like Jeff Foxworthy tell stores that the audience can relate to which sets the audience in the in group. Second, The Relief Theory of Humor, we laugh when we are uncomfortable and anxious. Sometimes this mental response manifests in the worst places, for example, Judge Judy scolding a defendant who is laughing while in an anxious predicament. With comedians they can illicit this by making shocking statements. There is a fine line between uncomfortable to the point of laughing and passed the line to the point of out right disgusted (do not go to Comedy Mothership in Austin) where nothing in the state of disgust is funny. As for The Incongruity Theory of Humor, it might be the other side of the same coin as the first. If making other people in the out group very stupid is funny so is making the audience and one self, the in group, very smart funny.
Laughter is an involuntary physiological response, so whatever is funny has to trigger that. The ideas in the article about superiority and related sentiments aren't satisfying to me tho. When you look at humor that uses disgust or discomfort/awkwardness, that underlying, necessarily involuntary aspect becomes more obvious. It explains why the failure mode of funny is often "asshole," as well, where you've made a play for someones involuntary responses and failed. To be funny, you have to prevail.
I am what I would call semi-pro level funny, where I can make pretty much anyone crack up in almost any situation, but there are people I've offended who will never laugh at anything I say again because they've been hurt by it and don't trust my words or intentions anymore. This trust or feeling of safety is another necessary ingredient. The expectations theory of humour has part of it, but mainly where when you are funny, you are taking peoples expectations on a ride. If you've crashed the bus before, they're not going to trust you to drive it again.
Comedians at the top of their art are storytellers, and what a friend calls stand-up philosophers, where at that level, punchlines are just satisfying closure on a baroque network of opened loops. You can compose stories like music, where you build tension and introduce themes and motifs, cresendo and decrecendo, etc. I think we're just at the beginning of understanding what funny is, and I'd suspect we're less than 18 months away from LLMs creating Python's, The Funniest Joke in the world.
There's a really great book by Kliph Nesteroff called The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy that dives into the broad history of comedy over the ages.
Something that really jumped out for me is that, according to Nestorhoff, comedy is very much generational. Comedians who were able to appeal to multiple generations are very rare. Don Rickles, Lucille Ball, Rodney Dangerfield, Dave Chappelle, etc. are able to connnect across those timelines.
The root of humor is surprise. Not everything that is surprising is funny. But if there's anything you can generalize about humor, I think it's subversion of expectation.
I agree, but as I read the article, I thought more about slapstick and physical humor ("The Superiority Theory of Humor" as labeled in the article). When I think, for example, of The Three Stooges[0], the pratfalls never seemed surprising, rather you knew Curly was eventually going to get banged up. I never found that part of their routine as funny as the verbal/visual puns and comebacks.
There is a strange paradox where sometimes you see a bit coming and it's hysterical, other times it's predictable and falls flat.
Ex (first case): In Ruthless People, they walk into a store to play a VHS tape on a VCR. They don't know (but we do) that the tape contains embarrassing scenes, which are about to be displayed to the whole store.
Another example of first case: In Asterix, whenever the Pirate Ship appears. We know (and they know) they're about to get trounced.
With the Three Stooges, we know he's going to smack him upside the head, the question is just how's he going to do it this time?
In my experience you unfortunately just can't put 'surprise' at the root. That's just one form. You'll discover that literally the opposite is also true, and that people will crack up laughing when exactly what they expect to happen ends up happening.
Catchphrases are a classic example of this, but it's everywhere. I once wrote a pretty terrible sketch where Sean Connery kept saying 'schlap' over and over. By the end of it, there was a sentence where it was obviously, blatantly, absolutely going to end in the word 'schlap'. You could /feel/ the the audience hang on that expectation, and when it inevitably hit, they lost their minds. Zero surprise. Zero subversion of expectation. Brought the house down.
"Benign violation" is the only generalization that I have found comes close to being true. Why did that line land even though it was no surprise? Because while it didn't violate expectations, it violated a lot of other norms (mockery, incorrect pronunciation, domestic abuse). And in fact, the more predictable it got, the funnier it got, because it simply became absurd that it was being uttered so frequently.
In any case, I have literally never been able to write anything funny from first principles like "surprise" or "benign violation". If you try, you ironically put yourself in the mindstate opposite to the nature of those terms. You actually need to forget the principles, to let go and be free, to reach anything that fits the principles.
I think you can reasonably generalize to surprise + inevitability. It needs to be unexpected, but make perfect sense in some context once revealed. Not everything funny works this way but a whooooole lot does.
I think comedians and humourists are teachers. They examine things in new ways and show us how to look at our condition. Laughter comes from the joy of learning.
Comedians from earlier generations are less funny because their message has been absorbed into our culture, and what they discovered then, has become understood, accepted, and is no longer new or surprising.
Shouldn't we first be looking at the physiology of humour, starting with the rawest stimulus that induces amusement and then trying to determine its evolutionary origins? Philosophical explanations feel like attempting to layer abstractions on top of something whose fundamental nature we fully don't understand.
Start with tickling, maybe. It induces laughter, like a good joke, and it is as physical as it can get.
An interesting thing with tickling is that it is notoriously difficult if not impossible to tickle oneself. Does it suggest something on the nature of laughter and humor? I don't know. Probably that there is some social aspect to it, and a form of unpredictability.
I think Heinlein nailed it in Stranger in a Strange Land. Humor is a reaction to pain, and may have evolved like a hiccup. A stress relieving burp that has evolved with the types of stress our minds can invent.
> I think Heinlein nailed it in Stranger in a Strange Land.
Also in _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_ he made the research of what is humour be one of the primary self-assigned directives of Mike (the accidentally created GAI).
Agreed, theories are testable, all of these theories are easily disprovable, in fact we can construct test jokes that abide by all of them and are still deeply unfunny.
One of the most counterintuitive elements of humor is breaking the flow by saying a wrong word and then correcting one’s self completely tanks jokes.
I have a comedian in mind who does this at least once per his weekly show — cue a grown from the audience and polite applause — it’s a friendly crowd.
Explain this and I think you’re on your way to a proper theory.
> in fact we can construct test jokes that abide by all of them and are still deeply unfunny
They could be necessary rules, but not sufficient. Necessary in the sense that, can you construct a joke that doesn't abide by one of the rules, but is still funny?
If it’s a rule that I can break and make a funny joke or follow and make an unfunny joke, I don’t think it can (even colloquially) be called a “rule” — maybe a predictive element, maybe nothing.
The way I see it, the source of humor is basically the superiority theory but applied only to a knowledge gradient. Socrates saying that he’s handsome is funny because it implies that he doesn’t know how ugly he is, and the rest of us do. We all laugh to show that we possess the knowledge he lacks - we “get the joke”. The handsomest man in the world saying he’s handsome isn’t funny because it’s just a true statement, there’s no one being dumb to be made fun of.
The punch line of a joke toys with the expectation of the most likely conclusion. GPT is fundamentally at odds with this because it wants to compute what is expected, so as a result there is no surprise, or unveiling of hidden insight.
It also has absolutely zero training on emotional cues, facial expressions, body language, etc. I suspect it would do better if it had that training.
Perhaps it is possible that humor could be an emergent property of GPTs. A higher order pattern that it learns.
You can hypothetically train the most likely outcome to be what people don't expect. I suspect the problem is simply that humour is not really in ChatGPT's training set. Most of its training data is strictly factual stuff like Wikipedia and textbooks. Where's the humour there?
I'm curious to see what would happen if you took a pretrained model and then specialized it on a large corpus of jokes.
I don’t know if she’s good or bad at deliberate humor, but she’s really good at impersonation humor. I’d ask her to impersonate someone to get a more nuanced reply and she’d do a hilarious monologue.
I liked this skittles study, pulled from the transcript:
MANDY: The skittles study goes like this. Participants go into a room to fill out a survey. There's a table and a bowl of skittles, and there's an actor posing as a research assistant. And the goal of the study is to figure out the funniest way the actor can offer the bowl of skittles.
They ran this test in lots of different ways, but in the first condition:
<TAPE> CALEB: The actor will say, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I'm in a couple seconds. I'm supposed to offer you these Skittles. Would you like these Skittles?
MANDY: This isn't that funny.
MANDY: But then, things get a little weird. In another group, the actor just flings the skittles at them.
<TAPE> CALEB: Out of nowhere, they'd launch the bowl of Skittles and only afterwards say, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I was told to launch the bowl of skittles.
MANDY: This is surprising but not that funny. It's a little messed up. In the last group though, the actor gives them some warning before it happens.
<TAPE> CALEB: They say, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but in a few seconds I need to throw this bowl of Skittles at you. Then they launch the bowl of Skittles on the participant.
MANDY: It's pretty funny.
<TAPE> CALEB: there was more laughter, certainly, in both of the throwing conditions, but there was a lot more laughter when the person was told the Skittles were gonna be thrown at them first.
MANDY: Under Incongruity theory, people should be more likely to laugh if there's surprise -- but that's not the case here. People are more likely to laugh when it's not a surprise, when they're warned before it happens.
<TAPE>
CALEB: That's because once you hear that and the Skittles get thrown, you know, it's part of the study,
PETER: You're prepared
CALEB: You're prepared! The point of this was to show that it's not about surprise and surprise in some cases actually hurts.
MANDY: So if it's not surprise that's making people laugh when skittles are being thrown at them, what is it? This is where Peter and Caleb's own theory comes in: what they call the benign violation theory.
It’s no great joke, but it serves as a nice tool to examine the theories of humor. The humor from this joke doesn’t depend on incongruity. Maybe a bit on the relief of tension, but it’s not a great explanation. And the scenario with surprise actually hurts here.
I still think there is a surprise element in the above exposition.
The surprise is the realization that we’re not supposed to throw around bowls of Skittles coupled with the unacknowledged realization that this rule is just some tiny, pointless restraint. The recognition and release of this restraint allows for joy! There’s an aesthetic beauty to a rainbow of candies flying through the air, akin to fireworks or streamers, yet in daily life we choose not to throw the bowl of Skittles because we’re more focused on the imagined cleanup than the active, lived experience.
It's still surprising because it breaks from expected social convention. And it gets progressively funnier as the examples go on. Ultimately the surprise is one of a person going through the motions of social convention, like the politeness of asking permission or warning before doing something anti-social. In the form of can you please hold my beer so I can slap you?
I think the surprise is the best theory for a root so far.
lol great question to ask on HN, notoriously dearth of any sense of humor. Maybe Betteridge’s Law applies in this fora, the answer is simply “nothing is funny, here’s your downvote now go away”
