xi “Humor, we will try to show, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking.”
1 ISAAC ASIMOV “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, h not “Eureka.t~ (I found
!t!) but “That’s funny ….•
4 “the structure of humor is dictated by the riskiness of heuristic processes that have evolved to permit real-time conclusion-leaping, and by the safeguards that have also evolved to protect our minds from these risks.”
6 Note 4 ” There Is certainly a complex developmental path from pure genetic information to the behavioral characteristic of humor; however, If
environmental regularities ensure that this path is taken in all healthy members of the species so that some fundamental aspect of the trait is shared in us all, then in a useful manner of speaking, the trait is inate. In this fairly regular environment, the genes specify the trait.”
6-7 “Being funny is not just for fun; humor has been exapted as a tool In mate selection and sexual competition, allegiance probing, belief extraction, and the building of social capital, for instance.”
11-12 MILLER “Some theories of humor have proposed that laughter evolved to promote group bonding, discharge nervous tension, or keep us healthy. The more laughter the better. Such theories predict that we should laugh at any joke, however stupid, however many times we have heard it before, yet we do not. A good sense of humor means a discriminating sense of humor, not a hyena·like shriek at every repetitive pratfall. Such discrimination is easy to understand if our sense of humor evolved in the service of sexual choice, to assess the joke-telling ability of others.”
12 “… people may not have the slightest idea just why they distrust various others who laugh or don’t laugh at various moments; these fo lks just “strike them the wrong way,” while others, whose laughter Is fel t to be genuine and which synchronizes with their own, are sought out and categorized as friends. But before any of these effec ts can evolve culturally, there has to be a genetically evolved basis with a more fundamental rationale, a proclivity that can be harnessed by these social ends, wittingly or unwittingly.”
12-13 “Our brains arc engaged full time in real-time (risky) heuristic search, generating presumptions about what will be experienced next in every domain. This time-pressured, unsupervised generation process has necessarily lenient standards and Introduces content- not all of which can
be properly checked for truth- into our mental spaces. If left unexamined, the inevitable errors in these vestibules of consciousness would ultimately continue on to contaminate our world knowledge store. So there has to be a policy of double-checking these candidate beliefs and surmisings, and the discovery and resolution of these at breakneck speed is maintained by a powerful reward system-the feeling of humor; mirth-that must support this activity in competition with all the other things you could be thinking about.”
25 “Electrostimulation can dearly cause spurious or hallucinated feelings of humor, presumably analogous to phantom 11mb pains, deja vu experiences (hallucinated feelings of familiarity), and hallucinated odors and auras during epileptic seizures.”
33 “The folk notlon that humor Is ~unlversal” Is actually an arti fact
of a misunderstanding of statistical samples: since most of the people we encounter in contexts where humor might arise do share a massive amount of common knowledge with us, the idea that everybody would see the humor In anything that was “really funny” naturally arises and seems to receive confirmation. Then it is puzzling to us-but shouldn’t be- when we encounter putative examples of humor that depend on shared knowledge that we don’t share. it is not that Koreans have a weird sense of humor; it is simply that they share knowledge with each other that we don’t share with them.”
34 “Provine (2000) draws attention to one more feature Ignored by many earlier theories of humor: gender differences. In his studies of conversational laughter, female listeners laughed far more often
than did male listeners, regardless of the gender of the speaker, and male speakers were met with far more laughter than female speakers by either gender of listener.” [EDIT]