Introduction

Why are things funny? I’ve been wondering about this question for a while. Discussing it with my friends, we guessed that it must have something to do with being surprised. After a lot of pondering it was still very vague and it was difficult for us to get a grip on it. We all know when something is funny, but we can’t easily define and model it and bring it into the territory of manipulation. Like driving a car without understanding what’s under the hood.

I started searching online about this topic, and discovered a book that answered a lot of these questions for me. It’s called “Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind” by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams. Great book, highly recommended. A bit dry and academic, but very interesting and well thought-out. I’ll explain some of the theories from the book in this post.

Imagined worlds: the world of narrative

Let me first begin with the fact that we have world-building faculties in our minds. To give an example, when I say “Tom throws the ball to Rick”, some kind of conception of this world pops into your mind automatically. This can be called the world of narrative.

Now, what would you say if I ask you what kind of ball Tom threw to Rick? Maybe you would say it’s a generic ball, maybe it’s some kind of ball you would expect to be thrown, like a beach ball, or maybe your world didn’t even really have a clearly defined ball in it, and has now been extended to include a type of ball. Let me say that the ball was in fact a soccer ball. Your imagined world made out of this narrative is now changed to reflect that.

If you imagined specifics, like the type of ball, or maybe the way Tom or Rick looked, what is the cause of that choice? Throughout our lives we collect certain beliefs about the world. They can be seen as general patterns of knowledge. Like knowing a ball that gets thrown is likely a beach ball, based on what we have experienced, or knowing someone called Tom who would be a likely candidate to put in this scenario. These ideas are stored in our mind, and remain dormant until they’re activated in an imagined world.

We have beliefs that are passive - they are just there, and beliefs that are active. I mean, you know that grass is green when I say it, but you weren’t thinking about grass until you just read it. I just activated your previously inactive beliefs about grass for you using my narrative. Ha!

You can see the activation of beliefs as a branching out. We start by the word grass, and our mind extends it with the fact that it’s green, maybe the fact that it’s a plant and that it grows in the soil. Maybe a general image of how grass looks. Our mind branches out to some close associations and brings them into the imagined world.

Another interesting point is that the fact that beliefs can be passive means that contradicting beliefs can co-exist in our minds, and until they get activated into the same imagined world, they don’t get resolved. When contradicting beliefs clash in an imagined world, this is often a source of either insight, confusion, or humor.

Let me just shortly explain insight and confusion first before getting deeper into humor:

• Insight is essentially when multiple beliefs are activated in the same imagined world and a new connection is found between them. This gets rewarded.
• Confusion is when multiple beliefs get activated in the same imagined world and they fundamentally contradict each other. Confusion then is essentially motivating you to look for a solution.

The formula for humor

There are specific circumstances in which this clash provides humor. Humor often has a type of setup and a punch line, and this is for a reason.

A belief first needs to get activated in an imagined world, and the humor happens when this activated belief is suddenly shown to be wrong. A key fact is that the activated belief needs to enter covertly, without you realizing in any way that the belief is wrong in this context, and it should be a belief you’re sure about. If you’re not that committed to the belief, there’s no humor. It’s also crucial that the belief is actually active, it should already be present in your imagined world.

Two fish in a tank, one turns to the other and asks “How do you drive this thing”

Sorry for killing all the humor, but what’s happening is that you see the words about fishes in a tank, and you assume that the sentence is talking about an actual fish tank. Your idea of a fish tank has now covertly entered an imagined world you’ve built specifically for this sentence. It’s now an active belief, and it’s a belief you’re commited to. It’s the default “fish tank” for you. Later in the sentence, it’s revealed that the fish tank is actually a vehicle, shattering your commited and active belief about the fish tank. Boom, we got humor.

I know this is just a stupid pun, but try this theory out on other types of humor. So far it has held up well in my personal life. Also read the book if you can get your hands on it, it has way more detailled information, a lot more than I can put in this post. There’s a lot of things I’m not explaining here that are important, but it would make this post too long.

So, humor is actually a faculty of the parts of our mind that process beliefs and narrative. It can be seen as a reward for succesfully preventing a wrong belief from getting stored in your mind, where it could stay for a long time. Humor is a lot more, but this functionality is an important part it.

Weaponized humor

Humor has some properties that make it very interesting. First, it’s pretty difficult to surpress humor. People can get caught by it by surprise. Second, humor can betray people’s beliefs and knowledge.

Some people say that the true display of a man’s character is what he laughs at. This is completely true. How funny something is, or if it is even funny to us, depends entirely on our knowledge and what our existing beliefs are, and this could potentially be exploited. An adversary could actually design jokes to make you betray the fact that you have certain knowledge or beliefs, which is an interesting thing to think about.

I’m not sure if there’s even a defense to this attack. The only thing I can think of is to be careful of what you laugh at, haha. Luckily this should not be a big threat.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve learned something new from this post, as reading the book has been very interesting for me so far. I thought this topic would fit nicely here, as it’s about one of the emotions that are involved in the process of forming our beliefs.

I’d like to learn about the other epistemological emotions sometime as well, as I have a feeling they’re highly involved in the formation of echo chambers and other false belief systems.

If you have any in-depth questions about this theory or other ideas, feel free to leave a comment.