[HN Gopher] Comedy Theory (2022)
___________________________________________________________________
Comedy Theory (2022)
Author : harryf
Score : 232 points
Date : 2024-09-27 12:35 UTC (4 days ago)
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| harryf wrote:
| 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
| ixxie wrote:
| Almost reinvented the Benign Violation Theory:
| https://humorresearchlab.com/benign-violation-theory/
| fire_lake wrote:
| Writing jokes was once considered an "AGI level" task - but after
| reading this I'm not so sure!
| iimaginary wrote:
| 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.
| klar120 wrote:
| 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.
| seanhunter wrote:
| 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.
|
| More Milton Jones "grandfather" jokes which all clearly
| demonstrate this pattern:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEUfbSrpsHk
| badjoak wrote:
| I came from a long line of police marksmen. They serve good
| coffee next to the shooting range.
| badjoak wrote:
| I came from a long line of police marksmen. We just won the
| precinct charity cancan dance competition.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| the actually funny part is where you decided to create a
| throwaway account to make the joke
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| And that they even knew the jokes were bad since their
| name is "badjoak".
| Freak_NL wrote:
| The ten best-voted one-liners from this year's Fringe are
| listed here:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/aug/19/mark-s.
| ..
|
| A couple follow that pattern exactly, but some also bank on
| taking words literally for comic effect.
|
| > I love the Olympics. My friend and I invented a new type of
| relay baton. Well, he came up with the idea, I ran with it.
| (Mark Simmons)
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| But these are really not that funny. Specifically because
| you imagine that this is what you get if you bruteforce
| those combinations. If someone comes up on the spot with
| this and wants to share, sure it might be funny and clever,
| but if a professional comedian does jokes likes this, it
| seems plain and irrelevant. Just something that was
| bruteforced together.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| But this is not truly funny comedy. These seem quite clearly
| made up and depend on this very specific scenario. I think
| truly funny jokes are ones that are plausible real life
| scenarios, that spot some sort of unexpected social
| circumstance or a phenomena with a clever take or perspective
| that people do not frequently consider and that many in the
| audience can relate with. Usually you would expect it to be
| something that actually happened or could have happened to
| the comedy teller, and you want to imagine them actually be
| in that situation. Or it can also be a common real life
| scenario, but an original, yet clever insightful take on it
| combined with the character of the teller.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Well as E.B. White put it, explaining a joke is a like
| disecting a frog. You learn a lot but the thing dies in the
| process. People do find Milton Jones funny - he won the
| Perrier "Best Newcomer" Award which is a pretty big deal in
| UK comedy.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| 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.
| everdrive wrote:
| 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.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| 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.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| One gift of my flavor of ADHD - the instant branching to a
| multitude of interpretations of some series of inputs and
| multiple degrees of related ideas - is always being primed to
| make stupid jokes where I intentionally misinterpret or make
| you misinterpret something obvious.
|
| Like the other day my friend read "shrimp cargot" off a menu.
| I said "They taught a shrimp how to drive??" The other friend
| present thought it was the funniest thing ever while the
| first friend was in pain from it, which just made it funnier.
| We had the same 50% split relaying it to two more people
| later.
|
| (It also relies a bit on knowing the "a shrimp fried this
| rice?" joke to be funniest but it's not required)
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| Yeah I can relate! I've also heard Conan O'Brien say this
| before, he thinks that a big source of his comedy is just
| his brain outright not understanding things correctly.
| patcon wrote:
| YES. This is how I explain my brain. It doesn't
| understand correctly, and so it gets really great at
| exploring and making legible all the hidden dimensions
| and edges of thought. And from there, creativity is just
| taking those discovered dimensions and applying rote
| transformations: inversions or attenuations or
| extrapolations to absurd extremes ;)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _" a shrimp fried this rice?"_
|
| There was an italian phrase book I once ran across and have
| never seen since: its schtick was that all of the phrases
| were things one might find in a normal phrase book ("the
| lobster makes a good salad"), but the accompanying
| illustrations were of abnormal interpretations (in this
| case, the lobster in a toque tossing a salad).
| gosub100 wrote:
| -puns and word-play. Or does that fall under epiphany humor?
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| emnudge wrote:
| This is a very interesting way of putting it.
|
| The way I've explained it is "unserious surprise" which also
| fits with this.
|
| https://emnudge.dev/blog/a-grand-theory-of-humor/
| nfin wrote:
| I've had some thoughts in that direction.
|
| Super interesting!
|
| I thought about it for jokes, as the reaction is quick (just
| system 1 and very maybe for more complex jokes it's system 2
| understanding the joke and then system 1 laughing... but then
| it might not spontenous enough to lough out loud), didn't
| though about that for "all funny things".
|
| Do you have some sources detailng this more?
| cheschire wrote:
| Oh I couldn't tell you the original source, it was well
| over a decade ago that I first heard it. Briefly searching
| though gave some interesting results.
|
| Here's a study that identified an unintended consequence of
| an antismoking fear campaign:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5844502/
|
| Here's a study that looks at this relationship from a
| therapeutic perspective:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38840335/
|
| And of course dozens of blog posts exist trying to explain
| it in a more accessible way.
| josephg wrote:
| > The most comprehensive theory I have seen is that laughter,
| and therefore humor, is primarily a fear response.
|
| I've been practicing / performing improv comedy for about 5
| years now. Keith Johnson style, not UCB style.
|
| Newbies always try to be clever, but being clever is a total
| trap. The moments that always get the biggest laughs are when
| you acknowledge something that was already in the room. The
| audience had a thought - or a proto thought - "where did the
| umbrella go?" "I thought his name was Fred?" "But why is the
| duck talking?". When you acknowledge it on stage, with
| lightness and connection, you get mad laughter.
|
| I think you're right about the fear thing. I think doing this
| acknowledges some deep fear of being alone, or stupid, or
| something. As a performer, when we make you whole, and do it
| in a way that feels easy and comfortable, I think, just for a
| moment, it makes that fear go away. And that's what the
| audience is responding to when they laugh. There's an old
| line from clowning: "When the performer breathes, the
| audience breathes." I think it's deeper than that. When the
| performer demonstrates being deeply ok with themselves, the
| audience believes it might be possible for them too.
| theultdev wrote:
| It's common knowledge (or used to be) that humor is a healthy
| coping mechanism for fear and dark/uncomfortable situations.
|
| In other words; comical relief.
| yungporko wrote:
| to be fair, i've seen plenty of examples of the "bullying" one
| be genuinely hilarious too.
| everdrive wrote:
| For sure! Nothing _prevents_ a bully from being funny, it's
| just that often this is not the point. And most people do not
| strictly try to stay in any of the lanes I've defined -- they
| combine and interweave the different styles. I think the
| purest example of "bullying humor" might come from kids in
| the 90s. You're minding your own business, really not doing
| anything out of the ordinary, and some other kid yells in
| from of a group "Look how gay he is!" The group laughs, but
| there's no "joke," and the insult has been wholly invented
| out of thin air; there's no epiphany for the mind to connect
| because the insult isn't actually based on anything. That
| same scenario could easily play out with an actual clever
| joke attached. It just often is not the case, and the
| laughter does not depend on the the joke existing, but is
| related to the attack on status.
| duderific wrote:
| In a formal setting, I think this is called a "roast", when a
| famous person is the target of the bullying.
| patcon wrote:
| 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.
| everdrive wrote:
| That's a great distinction, and I definitely think it's the
| better characterization. Similarly, the class clown will
| often fare _worse_ from the teacher if the joke doesn't land.
| The whole class laughing really turns the tide against the
| teacher. (although sometimes that just yields a more
| aggressive response)
| lyu07282 wrote:
| 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.
| everdrive wrote:
| Yes, I think that's what I was intending with regard to the
| story-based jokes. This joke probably lands best if you can
| relate to Louis C.K., and in this scenario, Louis is the
| (self-effacing, charming, relatable) fool. He's the target of
| his own joke, but he's sharing a common and relatable story,
| and delivering it well. He could have easily told the same
| joke, but with another person as the target. The example I
| gave uses another person as the target, but some of the best
| comics makes themselves the target, which often plays better
| with the audience. I guess I think there are at least two
| notable points here:
|
| - In this case, Louis' delivery is part of what makes it
| clear that this is a joke. I guess I might say it's an
| intermixture of tonal and story-telling delivery. It would be
| possibly to tell the same story, but it would only be
| depressing and not funny. Part of the delivery is how the
| humor is conveyed. ie, "I don't really hate myself, I'm being
| hyperbolic for the sake of humor."
|
| - Separately, I think his joke would be much less relatable
| if he didn't make himself the target of the joke. He's
| volunteering himself as the target of the humor, and so not
| punching down at anyone. It's much harder to be offended when
| the speaker volunteers the topic and the target.
| laurentlassalle wrote:
| How would you call jokes that only work due to laugh tracks
| (sitcoms)? Bandwagon humor?
| everdrive wrote:
| I might bucket them in with the bulling humor, since that
| seems to be very bandwagon-y. I would definitely also say
| that I've arranged (what I believe to be) useful
| descriptions, but they're by no means hard scientific fact,
| nor the only types of humor possible. I actually forgot one
| of my favorite styles of humor: slapstick!
| isotropy wrote:
| Tone-of-voice example (not mine): "It. Just. Works." vs "It
| juuuuust works."
| TheBruceHimself wrote:
| 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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Agreed! I remember Jerry Louis (really!) playing a waiter
| just walking across an empty ballroom floor, a fifteen-twenty
| second take, and it was funnier the longer it lasted! He just
| did that on the spot, knew he could draw it out, knew how a
| walk could communicate everything about his mood, his
| attitude, what he thought of the person he was walking away
| from. Still don't understand how he did it.
| boogieknite wrote:
| > 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
| lupusreal wrote:
| Is there a theory of humor which explains why theories of humor
| are invariably hilariously inadaquate?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Some activities are highly theoretical: you learn the
| principles of operation, and maybe how they break down into
| elements, practice briefly, and then execute at a high level.
|
| Other activities are highly practical: you can learn the theory
| via a brief rundown, but executing at a high level takes years
| to decades of practice.
|
| My theory of theory of humour is that humour is in the latter
| category.
| namaria wrote:
| Most likely humor is just not one thing but many and seeking
| a unifying theory about something that isn't a unity won't
| yield anything.
| lee-rhapsody wrote:
| This is the most useful comment in the whole thread.
| RhysU wrote:
| No, any consist theory of humor cannot explain all humor.
| Gerbils' Incompleteness Theorem.
| whaleberg wrote:
| I googled that to see if it was an original joke and Google
| helpfully corrected me.
|
| Did you mean: _goebbels_ incompleteness theorem
|
| I guess it's AI read the same article.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| It's kinda like music theory - if you're already a talented
| composer, music theory helps clarify a few technical mysteries
| and sheds light on other composers' work. But it tells you
| nothing about creating interesting music, and it's typically
| apparent when a composer writes according to theory rather than
| according to their own ears.
|
| Likewise I think some sophisticated humorists would benefit
| from reading philosophies of satire, psychology of slapstick,
| etc, to help hone their craft. But those are not how-to guides.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand
| it better but the frog dies in the process
| bazoom42 wrote:
| 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.
| forgotacc240419 wrote:
| Windows 95's start menu was drastically faster than Windows
| 10's with its default settings. Things like that mean the joke
| just results in thoughts like "By what metric?" and "Was
| Windows 95 ever considered famously slow?"
|
| Or is the point that the reference doesn't need to be accurate
| but just has to catch a general vibe of "old = slow"
| Retr0id wrote:
| I think it's at least three things:
|
| 1. win95 has waning cultural relevance, and nobody has any
| _fresh_ memories of dealing with its slowness
|
| 2. most of us have seen "windows bad" jokes a million times
| over by now - it's stale
|
| 3. "run" is a pretty weak/generic connection.
|
| Edit: 4 - "I'm bad at running" has a sort of boomer-humor vibe
| to it, it's less relatable to an audience that's generally in-
| shape.
| latexr wrote:
| Except that _every single joke_ in that table is awful and
| that deconstruction on why the joke is bad doesn't
| generically apply to all of them.
| Retr0id wrote:
| The column heading just says "mix ideas", I don't think
| they're supposed to be taken as finished, stand-alone
| jokes. I think some of them have potential if framed
| correctly or rephrased a bit (foraging for wild cake, in
| particular).
|
| Take the not entirely dissimilar Windows Vista joke from
| the IT Crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IfnjBHtjHc
|
| It's not especially funny if taken in isolation, but in the
| context of the scene and the show as a whole, I thought it
| was hilarious, at the time.
| latexr wrote:
| > The column heading just says "mix ideas", I don't think
| they're supposed to be taken as finished, stand-alone
| jokes.
|
| Right above the table there's a title that says "Joke
| Ideas", and the text introducing the table is "And here
| are a few jokes that were created using this method".
|
| Everything indicates they are intended as jokes.
|
| > Take the not entirely dissimilar Windows Vista joke
| from the IT Crowd
|
| That joke doesn't use the "mix ideas" concept _at all_.
| It's straightforward in not deviating from the theme.
|
| > It's not especially funny if taken in isolation, but in
| the context of the scene and the show as a whole
|
| The idea of that joke could've worked in any context.
| It's just:
|
| A: "I'm having a computer problem."
|
| B: "What OS is that computer on?"
|
| A: "Windows Vista."
|
| B: "That explains the problem."
| ndarray wrote:
| Try:
|
| "Us humans are so limited in our capabilities. I'm willing to
| admit, in many ways, I run slower than Windows 95. God, I'm
| awful at jogging."
|
| Running is the connection here, that's clear. But it seems to
| me that jogging should be the punchline, not Windows 95. Win95
| works as the setup. Maybe I prefer that because Win95 is a much
| more specific thing than jogging. The punchline "I was talking
| about Windows 95 all along!" just feels so arbitrary compared
| to "I was talking about jogging all along!"
|
| There's also a bit much lifting done in your punchline (double
| meaning of run + bringing in Win95), but even when you disjoint
| the two a little more, it doesn't work that well:
|
| "I'm awful at jogging. I run slow... I'm not even the Windows
| 95 of joggers."
| seanhunter wrote:
| 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.
| itronitron wrote:
| 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.
| gosub100 wrote:
| 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.
| nvader wrote:
| For the curious, I suspect this was Ismo. I love his with on
| pointing out the incongruities in surface level features of
| English.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU
| wrp wrote:
| Completely serious, I think Calvin & Hobbes had the best concise
| explanation.
|
| (https://mymorningmeditations.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/...)
| Hoasi wrote:
| Great explanation, indeed, and a gem of a comic.
| qwery wrote:
| 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_.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| It's an interesting thought and a question "why did sense of
| humor develop through evolution?". I don't think this comic
| applies to the author's post though. Which is more about how
| to produce comedy, and seemingly quite one dimensionally?
|
| Also I don't think the comics final answer is satisfactory,
| because you could definitely respond to absurdity, by calling
| out why something is absurd, you don't have to laugh at it.
|
| So why do we have a sense of humor in the first place?
| taylorius wrote:
| If absurdity made us despondent or desperately sad instead,
| that probably wouldn't do much for the ol' evolutionary
| fitness.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| By default you don't have to have any such emotional
| reaction to absurdity. You could just analyze the
| situation and take action accordingly.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| The point is exactly that you _can't_ just analyze every
| single situation that ever happens and then know what to
| do. That there's a huge amount of life experience for
| which there is no analytical solution. So you can't "just
| analyze" every single thing. What do you do then?
| Dispair? Or laugh.
|
| The ancients eventually came up with the whole God thing
| to explain all confusion away but i have a feeling that
| happened after the evolutionary push to not kill yourself
| the first time you see lightening
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| So laugh = communication tool to indicate to others that
| a weird thing happened, but we think it's harmless, so we
| don't have to react?
| wrp wrote:
| The C&H explanation has two parts, what triggers the humor
| response (perception of things that don't make sense) and why
| we have the humor response (evolutionary fitness). A theory
| of the humor mechanism should be congruent to a theory of
| comedy.
|
| The physiological manifestation of the humor response is also
| explained by evolutionary fitness when you consider it as
| countering the physiological reaction to the perception of
| stressful ambiguity.
| qwery wrote:
| That's much more interesting than just the comic strip
| alone, thanks!
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| That's actually very interesting... humor is lubrication
| for stressful ambiguity.
| HPsquared wrote:
| 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.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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.
| d--b wrote:
| As seen in Colbert's new cookbook: Does this taste funny?
| jelder wrote:
| Comedy is branch misprediction.
| namaria wrote:
| Saying all you can do is search (brute force) means admitting
| that we have no theory.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| 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?
| Miraltar wrote:
| Imo these one liners are only fun when they're actually not one
| liners, meaning when the context is part of the setup.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Yeah, to me, comedy is only actually funny if it's based on
| something that plausibly happened to the person in real life
| and it's an interesting, original or clever take on this
| situation. Not bruteforcing plays on words unless they also
| come up organically or tie absolutely well to the plausible
| real life situation. But then it's more like a cherry on top
| rather than the main funny part. I think a good comedy should
| also be able to work through multiple languages. It shouldn't
| be dependent on having those specific words in that specific
| language.
| OisinMoran wrote:
| "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.
| clucas wrote:
| 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.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Same with Phil Hartman and Matt Berry, they can make the most
| boring lines instantly funny through sheer power of charisma
| and vocal inflections.
| bena wrote:
| With all of these, there's an element of absurdity. It's
| not about the world Norm is creating, it's the fact that
| the words aren't the joke, the joke is on you. The joke is
| that it's a long, boring story to set up a shitty
| punchline. You wait, and wait, and wait for the catharsis,
| but it never comes from the joke itself, it comes only a
| beat or two after when you realize what just happened.
|
| Matt Berry gets mileage out of responding to everything
| with a sort of bombastic over-seriousness. He is a
| character that does nothing small.
|
| Observational comedy is the pointing out of absurdity in
| everyday life.
| amenhotep wrote:
| You and he were buddies, weren't you?
| tetris11 wrote:
| _I 'm a one track lover..._
| aantix wrote:
| "Some say funny things.
|
| Others say things funny."
|
| Something like that.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > troubled moth
|
| This is worth googling for anybody who's not urgently meant
| to be doing something for the next ten minutes. Also on
| Conan, for anyone looking for an amazing example of humour
| without a punchline is "conan nathan fielder susan"
| BizarroLand wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJN9mBRX3uo
|
| That is comedy gold
| nickpeterson wrote:
| I'm a big fan of his dirty Johnny joke on stern,
| https://youtu.be/4gshCmZVAV8
| golergka wrote:
| Thank g-d for the hatchery.
| scandox wrote:
| 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.
| wanda wrote:
| I think the word "joke" in the context of his interview was
| more or less intended to mean "bit" or "skit" or "humour-
| incitement type" -- rather than literally joke as in "knock
| knock."
|
| I believe he actually said that all humour is passed on, i.e.
| that all the comic acts that have come along after Laurel and
| Hardy were in essence re-enacting scenes that they had
| performed, in another form, prior.
|
| Of course, Laurel and Hardy were brilliant, but it would
| actually be naive to think that the chain began there.
| Performed comedy is as old as civilisation itself, and always
| fluctuates in sophistication/depth relative to the target
| audience.
|
| Laurel and Hardy represent a talented comedic duo, heavy on
| physical humour (though not without wit) _captured on film_
| so that the physicality of their performance was not up for
| debate or a supposition, and was available to be absorbed and
| drawn upon by later comedic performers, and I think this
| physicality is why Adrian calls back to them. For him, they
| offer a textbook approach to a broad category of humour.
|
| As for the finitude of humour, I think it would be rather
| more bizarre if the contrary was true and humour was
| infinite. Then everything could be funny. Maybe there are a
| lot of permutations for humour -- if you think about it, the
| audience (and by extension the time they live in) somewhat
| dictate what is and isn't funny, and there are considerations
| as well for cultural context (i.e. JP and CN are going to
| have a lot of material that will seem nonsensical to a
| Western audience and vice versa) some humour is obviously
| universal.
|
| But even to include all topical, regional humour, the number
| of phrases and physical movements of bodies that can trigger
| genuine amusement is very likely to be a finite subset of the
| possible permutations, especially given that all permutations
| themselves will be finite in total number (there are not an
| infinite number of words or possible physical occurrences...)
|
| Perhaps indeed there is even a small number of _types_ of
| humour-incitement, of which all topical, regional jokes are
| simply manifestations. To group humour-incitement types in
| this way, Adrian 's assertion seems even more acceptable.
|
| He doesn't say Laurel and Hardy invented humour or anything
| that we could immediately refute. I think he considers their
| work to be _the_ textbook. Everything you should see before
| coming up with your own material can be found in their
| catalogue.
|
| Like all art, grasp the fundaments and figure out which rules
| you want to subvert to get your message across, for the sake
| of doing so rather than empty rebellion or feeding reviewers
| from a marketing perspective.
|
| Sometimes there's no reason to break a rule, and sometimes
| there's every reason.
|
| As for his fatigue, whether the man has had exposure to
| humour from other cultures is not clear, but certainly in the
| context of his own culture I would be inclined to agree. The
| vast majority of comedy in the West is very obviously
| recycled material with different packaging. That's not to say
| that sometimes the later recyclings aren't better than the
| "originals" --- a lot of it is in the delivery, and if you
| watch them all without bias (nostalgia) you can probably pick
| out some cases where a comedy from 2007 is funnier than
| something conceptually similar from 1987.
|
| A lot of people grew up with comedy shows that were the best
| of their time and thus become the best for those people, and
| they watch stuff 20 years later after having rewatched their
| favourites a dozen times as well and it all seems less novel.
| Perhaps the same effect occurs for the performers as well as
| the audience.
|
| Adrian also lost his partner in comedy, the infamous Rik
| Mayall, and this perhaps soured him on comedy without that
| second half to bounce off of. They used to tour live and they
| would often break character and break the fourth wall ---
| while their long collaboration and friendship would lend a
| good deal of weight to it, as well as topical spice depending
| on the region, I think they were keen to do it anyway to keep
| their material a little fresher and keep things interesting
| for themselves while doing it. Touring the same act up and
| down the country would surely be enough to convince anyone
| it's all been done before. Losing that certainly confines
| one's repertoire to only the rehearsed material.
|
| I think he's married to Jennifer Saunders (of _Absolutely
| Fabulous_ and _French and Saunders_ fame) but I don 't think
| they ever collaborated much.
| airstrike wrote:
| > if the contrary was true and humour was infinite. Then
| everything could be funny.
|
| I don't think that necessarily follows. Some infinities are
| greater than others.
|
| (Even though I happen to think anything _could_ be funny
| with sufficient effort. Even tragedy)
| wanda wrote:
| Schadenfreude to the extent of humour. That is a
| difficulty isn't it, the audience can find whatever it
| wants funny if that's how it's wired. Perhaps you're
| right.
| airstrike wrote:
| Mike Birbiglia IMHO is a master of turning terrible
| things into hilarious ones
| psunavy03 wrote:
| It's definitely contextual. As an example, military or
| veterans, first responders, doctors, lawyers, and others
| like that will usually have a much greater appreciation
| for dark humor than people who haven't had to deal with
| tragic circumstances in their day jobs.
| the_af wrote:
| 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.
| jonkratz wrote:
| I'm interested in reading that essay -- is this the one?
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3250/3250-h/3250-h.htm
| the_af wrote:
| Yes! Good find.
|
| > _There are several kinds of stories, but only one
| difficult kind--the humorous. I will talk mainly about that
| one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is
| English, the witty story is French. The humorous story
| depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the
| comic story and the witty story upon the matter._
|
| > _The humorous story is strictly a work of art--high and
| delicate art--and only an artist can tell it; but no art is
| necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody
| can do it. The art of telling a humorous story--understand,
| I mean by word of mouth, not print--was created in America,
| and has remained at home._
|
| I'm not sure I agree the humorous story is purely American,
| though doubtless Mark Twain was one of its masters.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Mark Twain wrote a book called "Roughing It", and I can't put
| my finger on it and tell you exactly what it is about this
| book, but there's some essence of Mark Twain dictating this
| story to you, the reader, that has persisted all of these
| many years since it was written that imbues it with a special
| kind of comedy magic the likes of which you are unlikely to
| find anywhere else.
|
| I have tried to read it 3 times and ended up laughing so hard
| my stomach hurt until I had to stop reading.
|
| I can't finish it, it's too funny.
|
| 100% worth an attempt to read at least 3 times so far.
| jsrcout wrote:
| What a wondrous book. So many hilarious anecdotes. Tom
| Quartz the mining cat. The escaped tarantulas. The retired
| Admiral. But it's not just the little stories. His
| characters, the comical exaggerations, his poking fun at
| his younger and ridiculously naive self, the description of
| the places, the little observations serious and humorous,
| the very _language_ are all just a pleasure.
| zzbzq wrote:
| 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."
| patcon wrote:
| Interesting. Re: search vs learning.
|
| With search, I understand it as a process of learning, where
| diff search strategies create different learnings. Maybe
| laughter is a strategy of search, or what the algorithm feels
| like from the inside attention head...?
|
| And search feels like moving around a tree or maybe graph
| (moving thru graph from known origin to unknown extremities,
| this is maybe tree-like in any meaningful local sense).
| Anyhow, searches being depth-first vs breadth-first with
| attention feels related.
|
| Thinking through your comment has me reflecting on the
| distinction between depth-first vs breadth-first comedy, and
| if that even makes sense :)
| n4r9 wrote:
| > 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...
| pohl wrote:
| 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.
| konschubert wrote:
| 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.
| binary132 wrote:
| 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.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I understand where you're coming from but unfortunately there
| is a vector that represents exactly that feeling of yours and
| it can be found via search
| assanineass wrote:
| Agreed
| patcon wrote:
| 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".
| ccppurcell wrote:
| Some jokes only require a punchline, since the audience shares
| common knowledge or assumptions e.g.:
|
| It's not funny and the frog dies.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| 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.
| tester457 wrote:
| 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.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| Its not that the soul is completely beyond mortal
| comprehension - art, philosophy, etc do a good job of
| exploring it. But this (philosophically) materialist way of
| viewing the world, where everything is caused by evolution
| and so everything is mechanical to the point where you can
| almost feed it to a computer -- that doesnt inspire awe to me
| at all. That makes me feel that my actual existence is being
| denied, because I'm "really just" this simple process. It's
| blatantly false but for some reason as tech people we like to
| put ourselves into a box rather than admit some things are
| beyond mechanical formalization.
| gota wrote:
| 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).
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| I like how they highlighted a commonality between two
| disparate things. When I recognized the pattern, my neurons
| lit up, eliciting a pleasurable response.
| fracus wrote:
| 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.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| Couldn't agree more! I am trying to spread the word that
| materialism is not the only rational position! (in fact, I
| find it quite irrational indeed)
| scrozier wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| Be careful what you search for:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qklvh5Cp_Bs
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| 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.</>
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| 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.
| nxobject wrote:
| I think another way to put that really good idea is simply to
| say that humans are innately wired to explore and discover!
| duderific wrote:
| Not surprising I guess, since our survival literally depended
| on that capability for tens of thousands of years (and still
| does, to a lesser extent)
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| How does this explain away the mystery of consciousness?
| patcon wrote:
| One take: Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of
| Being (2017) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fps
| yg.2017.0192...
|
| You might get a kick out of this paper (though some may find
| it's proposal a bit bleak, I think there's a way to integrate
| it without losing any of the sense of wonder of the
| experience of being alive :) )
|
| It analogizes conscious experience to the a rainbow "which
| accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts
| no influence over them".
|
| > Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious
| executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful
| evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate
| (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting.
| This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially
| adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of
| others and underlies the development of social and cultural
| structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it
| is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the
| personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage--
| not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness)
| itself.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| I find these types of arguments very odd, though at one
| point in my life I would certainly have endorsed them.
|
| What is it about the modern scientific mindset that makes
| people say "actually, the ubiquitous experience of being
| alive, having thoughts, feelings, and making choices, is
| actually 100% an illusion."
|
| Don't get me wrong, obviously there is interaction between
| evolutionary functions, the brain, etc - I mean, there's
| anesthesia, there's being drunk, horny, fight or flight..
| there's all sorts of ways that it's obvious there's a link.
|
| But why do so many theorists want to go from "there's a
| link" to "this is 100% an illusion?" I just don't get it.
| Is it that uncomfortable to have something that is outside
| the reach of physical systems theorizing, or something that
| is unexplainable (i.e., the link) that we'd rather fit
| reality into the theory than the other way around?
|
| We have to have the courage to live with something that is
| inexplicable, at least for now (and, honestly, maybe
| forever), rather than lose faith in our own existence.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Consciousness is just the result of a search for "a more or
| less linear story that makes sense of the way I act and
| react"
|
| We're good at predicting states of minds of others (helpful
| when trying to exploit limited resources, and very helpful
| for either predator or prey), and we can cheaply gather a
| _lot_ of data on ourselves, so why should the capability for
| inferring states of mind not, as a side effect, also provide
| us with our own inferred state of mind: our own "I"?
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| This is a theory that would work, except for the fact that
| I know I exist. Why does materialism so desperately want to
| ignore that knowledge? Is that really simpler than the idea
| that we have a soul that interacts with the body and brain,
| but which _also_ has its own nature that is separate from
| biology and evolution? Do we have to go 100% and say things
| that start with "consciousness is _just_ "?
|
| I'm passionate about this because I know -- from personal
| experience -- that this type of philosophy can really go
| along with denying ones own existence in a deep way. It
| feels great to know you're a soul that exists. I don't know
| why it's supposed to be "rational" to convince yourself
| against a simple truth that we all know intuitively. And I
| say that as someone who used to feel that way.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| The quality of consciousness and the existence of a non-
| body non-brain soul seem to me like two completely
| orthogonal issues (I can easily imagine creatures without
| conscious awareness but with a soul; I can certainly
| imagine creatures with brain-driven consciousness but
| without a soul; a rock has neither; in your model people
| have both) so it seems unlikely that answering your two
| questions would move the conversation forward.
|
| For what it's worth, I know I exist as well; can we agree
| that we both exist, but we have differing models for what
| the necessary constituents of that existence are?
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| > Can we agree that we both exist, but we have differing
| models for what the necessary constituents of that
| existence are?
|
| Of course, yes.
|
| > I can certainly imagine creatures with brain-driven
| consciousness but without a soul
|
| This would probably be the heart of the disagreement. I
| don't believe this is possible. Such a creature would not
| have qualia.
|
| And, as a species, I don't think we're any closer to
| resolving this question "objectively" than we ever were.
| fMRIs say where blood is flowing in the brain, but that's
| hardly enough to explain the phenomenon of subjective
| experience.
|
| By the nature of the question, we won't be able to attack
| it from the outside, and I don't think I could generally
| convince another person that they have a soul that
| exists, if they're inclined to explain themselves using
| materialism, which at this point has become flexible
| enough to be unfalsifiable, with the everlasting faith
| that someday science will fill in all the gaps.
|
| That's why my approach now is just to poke holes in the
| seemingly impenetrable confidence that materialism is the
| only "rational" way to think.
|
| (By the way, I'm not saying you hold that position.)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _This would probably be the heart of the disagreement_
|
| OK, sounds like we're agreed there.
|
| If souls are required for consciousness, then I guess we
| could try to decide which creatures are conscious by
| first deciding which have souls? Would that question be
| any easier to answer that way around?
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| I thought we were talking about "what is consciousness"
| rather than "which creatures are conscious." The
| conversation started with "consciousness is _just_ [a
| series of material processes resulting in an illusion of
| interiority, rather than a genuine phenomenon of -- for
| lack of a better word -- personhood] "
|
| I would probably say "consciousness is the soul" rather
| than "souls are required for consciousness," but either
| way I don't see how that helps the fundamental issue that
| it's impossible to physically prove another creature's
| interiority, including humans.
| visarga wrote:
| What I said was that it's all search. We search and
| learn, search and learn. This feels like consciousness
| because it is a recurrent process that feeds on itself.
| We create relational representations from data, and these
| representations encode the structure of our experiences.
| In other words embeddings explain away the qualitative
| aspects of qualia.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| Just declaring that they explain it away doesn't make it
| so. You've come up with a theory that, from 10,000 feet
| up, could correspond with certain observations of
| consciousness. Why should it be true?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| We were talking about "what is consciousness" but rapidly
| hit an end.
|
| Sorry for the lack of clarity: "which creatures are
| conscious" was my attempt to switch topics to a line
| which I had hoped might be mutually interesting.
|
| Cheers!
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| Before we stop, if you don't mind, could you answer why
| you are dissatisfied with the idea that there's a soul,
| and why we need to do away with it 100%?
|
| To be clear, I really do take issue with the 100% aspect.
| There are many psychological functions that are clearly
| at least mediated if not outright caused by the brain and
| body.
|
| But I think some people say "there's so many functions
| that are physical, that probably 100% are and we just
| don't know it yet." But that doesn't seem logically any
| more forced than "there's a soul that's mediated by the
| brain," so I don't know why people are so willing to give
| up the soul.
| visarga wrote:
| > fMRIs say where blood is flowing in the brain, but
| that's hardly enough to explain the phenomenon of
| subjective experience.
|
| fMRI scans correlate well with neural net embeddings.
| That is a great hint. We just need to look at the
| semantic spaces developed in these models, by a purely
| mechanistic process, to see how it goes from data to
| semantics.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| The idea that we will _just_ need to do that is a form of
| faith, no more rational (in my opinion, less so) than
| belief in a soul.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| Making up nonsense will always be easier than actually
| understanding reality.
|
| Just because we can't explain something right now does
| not mean you can insert whatever you want into that hole
| and assert it's just as valid as any other explanation.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| It's funny how much I agree with your whole comment ;)
|
| Also, "making up nonsense" is a very disrespectful, and
| intellectually dishonest, way to approach someone's
| understanding of life which is hard-earned through
| experience and thousands of hours of introspection and
| study. Consider that people who disagree with you on this
| may still be just as educated and smart as you are.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| Not if they think making up supernatural explanations is
| valid.
|
| It's the same logic as God of the gaps. Science doesn't
| understand something yet so better fill it up with feel-
| good made up stuff and pretend it's just as valid as
| actual science.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| To me, this theory is Science of the gaps. "Science can't
| prove it yet, but it will." :shrug: That's faith, not
| logic.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| One of the stupidest things I've read on here. Science
| has an incredible track record. Faith doesn't.
| visarga wrote:
| We have a dual search loop - outside, we act using our
| experience to gain new data. Inside, we compress this data
| and update our experience. We search for experience and
| search for understanding. Acting is search for new insights,
| learning is search for error minimization.
|
| I think the way we encode our experiences is relationally,
| like neural networks. We relate new experiences against past
| experiences, this creates a semantic space that is highly
| dimensional. Any concept is a point or a region in this
| space. It has consistent semantics, which leads to the
| unified experience. We can relate anything to anything in
| this space without having a central understander. Encoding
| your own experiences creates a first person perspective from
| 3rd person data, which was always a "hard" problem to explain
| in philosophy.
|
| The serial action bottleneck adds to the illusion of
| centralization. But it's still a distributed process, no
| neuron is conscious or understands by itself. And even in
| society, no human can recreate even a 1% of human culture
| individually. We are not that smart on our own. We should
| always look for the larger context where we develop, not just
| the brain.
|
| Search has the virtue of not hiding the environment, it is
| social and distributed, unlike more personal concepts like
| consciousness, intelligence and understanding. But as I said
| above, even inside the brain there is nothing but distributed
| processing, no homunculus.
|
| I think the core of my argument is "there is no centralized
| consciousness, understanding or intelligence, they are
| distributed processes, they act across neurons in the brain
| and across people in society". It seems like a hard pill to
| swallow, if that is true then there is also no centralized
| understanding or truth.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| I commend your diligence, your theory may even be
| internally consistent, but I don't see why I should believe
| this rather than the comparatively simple and intuitively
| true (to me, anyway) notion that there is a genuine soul,
| it has its own volition, and it certainly interacts with
| the physical body and brain through a link that is
| currently (and may always be) mysterious.
| visarga wrote:
| What you say that the soul acts like a homunculus,
| "interacts with the physical body and brain through a
| link that is currently mysterious". It is a "center"
| thing that has volition, and semantics, and is genuine.
|
| And it is understandable to do so. It certainly feels
| unified, and genuine. And it is simple and nice to be so.
| But intuition fails us hard when it comes to
| introspection. We feel alive, and conscious, but we are a
| few billion neurons connected by trillion branches, all
| wrapped in a bio-robot, put inside a complex environment
| full of living things in a state of cooperation and
| competition.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| Again, that is your theory. Just because you've created
| it using the primitives of materialist science doesn't
| mean it's true or that it's more likely than another
| theory. The fact is there's no scientific basis for
| believing what you've said. There just isn't.
|
| If it feels like there's a scientific basis for what
| you're saying, that's because you're invoking the
| metaphysical principle of strict materialism, which is a
| common (though not inherently valid) way of thinking
| about science, and if that were true then yes, something
| like your theory would have to be true.
|
| But be clear - that is not something proven by science,
| it is an axiom that is far from obviously true or
| universally accepted.
|
| It may also feel that your theory should be true because
| so much about how the body and brain works _is_ , I
| agree, materialist in nature, so why not hypothesize that
| _everything_ is materialist? But that is very much a
| hypothesis and an intuition, not something that is
| scientifically proven or logically forced. And, as you
| say, intuition can be flawed.
| patcon wrote:
| 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 ;)
| smilliken wrote:
| 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.
| ma9o wrote:
| 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.
| codeflo wrote:
| 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.
| xattt wrote:
| It's a learned behaviour. Outside of North American culture, I
| don't think there are "groaner" jokes.
| jameshart wrote:
| I think it comes down to delivery. This premise in this format
| sets up a groan reaction.
|
| But essentially the same elements used by a good standup,
| telling a story, saying something like "so I was playing super
| Mario with my cat, and of course he is wiping the floor with
| me, because... you know... nine lives" could get a solid laugh.
| Or a far side like cartoon of a cat playing a video game with a
| dog, and the dog looking upset while the cat looks smug...
|
| The elements of a joke are there, but you still have to
| construct it into a delivery vehicle that lands it.
| cyco130 wrote:
| 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).
| clueless wrote:
| comedy is simply an inevitable surprise!
| stevage wrote:
| 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.
| camillomiller wrote:
| 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.
| tug2024 wrote:
| Don't forget about The Greeno Test (1978)!
|
| ::=
|
| Analogies Anagrams Transformations
| antiquark wrote:
| Thank God for the hatchery.
| JoblessWonder wrote:
| 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.)
| soniman wrote:
| 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.
| blueyes wrote:
| 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...
| bostik wrote:
| 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.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| See _Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious_ by Sigmund
| Freud for a similar analysis with far more depth.
| buescher wrote:
| 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?
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