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Joke

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A joke is a short story or short series of words spoken or communicated with the intent of being laughed at or found humorous by the listener or reader. A practical joke differs in that the humour is not verbal, but mainly physical (e.g. thrusting a custard pie in the direction of somebody's face).

Jokes are performed either in a staged situation in front of an audience, or informally for the entertainment of participants and onlookers. The desired response is generally laughter, although loud groans are also a common response to some forms of jokes, such as puns and shaggy dog stories.

Psychology of jokes

Why we laugh has been the subject of serious academic study, examples being:

Marvin Minsky suggests that laughter has a specific function related to the human brain. In his opinion jokes and laughter are mechanisms for the brain to learn nonsense. For that reason, he argues, jokes are usually not as funny when you hear them repeatedly.
  • Edward de Bono in "The Mechanism of the Mind" (1969) and "I am Right, You are Wrong" (1990).
Edward de Bono suggests that the mind is a pattern matching machine, and that it works by recognizing stories and behavior and putting them into familiar patterns. When a familiar connection is disrupted and an alternative unexpected new link is made in the brain via a different route than expected, then laughter occurs as the new connection is made. This theory explains a lot about jokes. For example:
  • Why jokes are only funny the first time they are told: once they are told the pattern is already there, so there can be no new connections, and so no laughter.
  • Why jokes have an elaborate and often repetitive set up: The repetition establishes the familiar pattern in the brain. A common method used in jokes is to tell almost the same story twice and then deliver the punch line the third time the story is told. The first two tellings of the story evoke a familiar pattern in the brain, thus priming the brain for the punch line.
  • Why jokes often rely on stereotypes: the use of a stereotype links to familiar expected behavior, thus saving time in the set-up.
  • Why jokes are variants on well known stories (eg the genie and a lamp): This again saves time in the set up and establishes a familiar pattern.

Laughter, the intended human reaction to jokes, is healthful in moderation, uses the stomach muscles, and releases endorphins, natural happiness-inducing chemicals, into the bloodstream.

One of the most complete and informative books on different types of jokes and how to tell them is Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor (1971), which encompasses several broad categories of humor, and gives useful tips on how to tell them, whom to tell them to, and ways to change the joke to fit one's audience.

Rules

The rules of humor are analogous to those of poetry, as said the French philosopher Henri Bergson: "In every wit there is something of a poet"[1]. These common rules are mainly: exactness, synthesis and rhythm.

Speed plays also a role, enhancing the laugh effect. As Mack Sennett showed in his works, the more frantic the funnier.

Exactness

To reach exactness, the comedian must choose the words in order to obtain a vivid, perfectly in focus image, and to avoid being generic (that drives the audience confused, and results in no laugh); to properly arrange the words in the sentence is also crucial to get exactness. An example by Woody Allen (from Side Effects, "A Giant Step for Mankind" story [3]):

Grasping the mouse firmly by the tail, I snapped it like a small whip, and the morsel of cheese came loose.

Synthesis

As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, "Brevity is the soul of wit"[2], that means that a joke is best when it expresses the maximum meaning with a minimal number of words; this is today considered one of the key technical elements of a joke. An example from Woody Allen:

I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

Rhythm

Main articles: Timing (linguistics) and Comic timing

The joke content (meaning) is not what provokes the laugh, it just makes the salience of the joke and provokes a smile. What make us laugh is the joke mechanism. This has been demonstrated with a classic theatre experiment by Milton Berle in the 50s: if during a series of jokes you insert phrases that are not jokes, but with the same rhythm, the audience laughs anyway. A classic is the ternary rhythm, with three beats: introduction, premise, antithesis (with the antithesis being the punch line).

Conclusions

When a technically-good joke is referred changing it with paraphrasing, it is not laughable anymore; this is because the paraphrase, changing some term or moving it within the sentence, breaks the joke mechanism (its vividness, brevity and rhythm), and its power and effectiveness are lost.

Why do we laugh (model of appreciation)

No satisfactory theory of laughter that explains why humans laugh has yet gained wide acceptance. Laughter is affected by three factors: cognitive, psychic and emotional.

Some of the prominent explanations (that is a humor appreciation model) comes from part of the ideas contained in the psychology essay Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, by Sigmund Freud (1905) [4].

According to Freud's operational description, we laugh when the unconscious energy emerges to reach the conscious mind; and it reaches it unexpectedly thanks to the techniques used by the comedian. This exceeding energy is rapidly discharged in the form of laughter.

Freud distinguishes three fields: the comic, the wit, and the humor.

Comic

In the comic field plays the 'economy of ideative expenditure'; in other words excessive energy is wasted or action-essential energy is saved. The profound meaning of a comic gag or a comic joke is "I'm a child"; the comic deals with the clumsy body of the child.

A classic example are Laurel and Hardy. An individual laughs because he recognizes the child that is in himself. In clowns stumbling is a childish tempo. In the comic, the visual gags may be translated into a joke. For example in Side Effects (By Destiny Denied story) by Woody Allen:

"My father used to wear loafers," she confessed. "Both on the same foot".

The typical comic technique is the disproportion.

Wit

In the wit field plays the 'economy of censorship expenditure'[3]; usually censorship prevent some 'dangerous ideas' to reach the conscious mind, or made us avoid to say everything that comes to mind; adversely, the wit circumvents the censorship and brings up those ideas, and the wit techniques allow to express them in a funny way. The profound meaning of a wit joke is "I have dangerous ideas". An example from Woody Allen:

I contemplated suicide again - this time by inhaling next to an insurance salesman.

Wit is a branch of rhetoric, and there are about 200 techniques (technically they are called tropes, a particular kind of figure of speech) that can be used to make jokes[4].

Irony can be seen as belonging to this field.

Humor

In the humor field[5] plays an 'economized expenditure of emotion' [6]; in other words, the emotion that should be felt about an event is erased. The profound meaning of the void feel of a humor joke is "I'm a cynic". An example from Woody Allen:

Three times I've been mistaken for Robert Redford. Each time by a blind person.

This field of jokes is still a grey area, being mostly unexplored. Black humor and sarcasm belong to this field.

Types of jokes

Jokes often depend for humour on the unexpected, the mildly taboo (which can include the distasteful or socially improper), or the playing on stereotypes and other cultural beliefs. Many jokes fit into more than one category.

Subjects

Political jokes are usually a form of satire. They generally concern politicians and heads of state, but may also cover the absurdities of a country's political situation. Two large categories of this type of jokes exist. The first one makes fun of a negative attitude to political opponents or to politicians in general. The second one makes fun of political clichés, mottos, catch phrases or simply blunders of politicians. Some, especially the you have two cows genre, derive humor from comparing different political systems.

Professional humor includes caricatured portrayals of certain professions such as lawyers, and in-jokes told by professionals to each other (e.g. Medical humor).

Mathematical jokes are a form of in-joke, generally designed to be understandable only by insiders.

Ethnic jokes exploit racial stereotypes. They are often racist and frequently offensive. Ethnic jokes are common, for example:

The British also tell jokes starting "An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman..." which exploit the supposed parsimony of the Scot, stupidity of the Irish, or some combination. The British, in fact, are more than happy to poke fun at any other race, including their own. Additionally, many cultures have Black jokes, which exploit the supposed stupidity and/or supposed incompetence of people of African descent.

Racially offensive humor is increasingly unacceptable, but there are similar jokes based on other stereotypes such as blonde jokes.

Religious jokes fall into several categories:

  • Jokes based on stereotypes associated with people of religion (e.g. Nun jokes and Jewish jokes)
  • Jokes on classical religious subjects: crucifixion, Adam and Eve, St. Peter at The Gates, etc.
  • Jokes that collide different religious denominations: "A rabbi, a medicine man, and a pastor went fishing..."
  • Letters and addresses to God.

Self-deprecating or self-effacing humor is superficially similar to racial and stereotype jokes, but involves the targets laughing at themselves. It is said to maintain a sense of perspective and to be powerful in defusing confrontations. Probably the best-known and most common example is Jewish humor. The egalitarian tradition was strong among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe in which the powerful were often mocked subtly. Prominent members of the community were kidded during social gatherings, part a good-natured tradition of humor as a leveling device. A similar situation exists in the Scandinavian "Ole and Lena" joke.

Self-deprecating humor has also been used by politicians, who recognize its ability to acknowledge controversial issues and steal the punch of criticism - for example, when Abraham Lincoln was accused of being two-faced he replied, "If I had two faces, do you think this is the one I’d be wearing?".

Dirty jokes are based on taboo, often sexual, content or vocabulary. Many dirty jokes are also sexist.

Other taboos are challenged by sick jokes and gallows humor; to joke about disability is considered in this group. An example could be;

"My father died in a concentration camp in WWII."
"Oh, I'm so sorry. In the gas chamber, or...?"
"Nope, he fell off the watchtower and broke his neck."

Surrealist or minimalist jokes exploit cognitive dissonance, for example: Q: What's red and invisible? A: No tomatoes..

Anti Jokes are jokes that aren't funny in normal sense, and often can be decidedly unfunny, but rely on absurdity, surrealism and abstractness of the joke or situation to provide entertainment.

Styles

The question / answer joke, sometimes posed as a common riddle, has a supposedly straight question and an answer which is twisted for humorous effect; puns are often employed. Of this type are knock-knock joke, lightbulb joke, the many variations on "why did the chicken cross the road?", and the class of "What's the difference between..." joke, where the punch line is often a pun or a spoonerism linking two apparently entirely unconnected concepts.

Some jokes require a double act, where one respondent (usually the straight man) can be relied on to give the correct response to the person telling the joke. This is more common in performance than informal joke-telling.

A shaggy dog story is an extremely long and involved joke with a weak or completely nonexistent punchline. The humor lies in building up the audience's anticipation and then letting them down completely. The longer the story can continue without the audience realising it is a joke, and not a serious anecdote, the more successful it is. Shaggy jokes appear to date from the 1930s, although there are several competing variants for the "original" shaggy dog story. According to one, an advertisement is placed in a newspaper, searching for the shaggiest dog in the world. The teller of the joke then relates the story of the search for the shaggiest dog in extreme and exaggerated detail (flying around the world, climbing mountains, fending off sabre-toothed tigers, etc); a good teller will be able to stretch the story out to over half an hour. When the winning dog is finally presented, the advertiser takes a look at the dog and states: "I don't think he's so shaggy".

Jokes and brain

Principal fissures and lobes of the cerebrum viewed laterally. (Frontal lobe is blue, temporal lobe is green.)
Further information: Laughter § Laughter_and_brain

The process of a joke understanding, is elaborated by the right prefrontal lobe and both the temporal lobes. If the inconsistency gets resolved, the brainwaves suddenly turn into negative on,es, and the individual laughs; otherwise, if the inconsistency doesn't get resolved, the brainwaves stay positive and there is no laugh.

See also

References

  1. ^ Henri Bergson (2005) [1901]. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Dover Publications.
    In this essay Bergson viewed the essence of humour as the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living. He used as an instance a book by an English humorist, in which an elderly woman who desired a reputation as a philanthropist provided "homes within easy hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of their failing, etc." This idea seems funny because a genuine impulse of charity as a living, vital impulse has become encrusted by a mechanical conception of how it should manifest itself.
  2. ^ William Shakespeare (1600–1602). Hamlet. pp. act 2, scene 2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
  3. ^ Freud literally calls it "the economy of psychic expenditure" (Wit and its relation to the unconscious, p. 180) [1]
  4. ^ Salvatore Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humor, p. 55 (1994, Walter de Gruyter, ISBN 3110142554).
  5. ^ Freud produced this final part of his interpretation many years later, in a paper later supplemented to the book and published in 1928 ("Humour", International Journal of Psychoanalysis)
  6. ^ Freud literally calls it 'economy of affect' or 'economy of sympathy'. Wit and its relation to the unconscious, p. 371-4
  • Eden, Rick. "Master Tropes in Satire." Style 21.4 (1987): 589-606.

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