![]() Ramachandran, in "Phantoms in the Brain" (1998), written with Sandra Blakeslee, provided incongruity theory with a nifty evolutionary rationale. In recent years, evolutionary biologists have turned the focus from what makes us laugh to why we bother. "Incongruity theory," the most widely accepted humor doctrine today, was born in the seventeenth century, when Blaise Pascal wrote, "Nothing produces laughter more than a surprising disproportion between that which one expects and that which one sees.". ![]() How the brain processes humor remains a mystery. At times, comedy seems reminiscent of mathematics: as John Allen Paulos observed in his book "Mathematics and Humor," both disciplines prize ingenuity, concision, literal-mindedness, and the use or misuse of logical notions such as presupposition, disguised equivalence, non sequitur, and reductio ad absurdum. And the point is that you can’t get a computer to do it-humor is a thoroughly human activity, and very, very hard to explain.". People thought we’d have a computer that would tell you ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ is objectively a 4 on a scale of 5. Of course, the idea of scientifically determining the world’s funniest joke is completely ridiculous. "I was asked if I had any ideas for the government’s Science Year," Wiseman said, "and I instantly thought, World’s funniest joke! With one sentence, you’ve sold the project. Richard Wiseman told me that his own efforts to advance humor theory had begun almost in jest. Comedy theorists-philosophers, psychologists, comedy writers, and, most recently, neurologists-have yet to resolve even such seemingly simple questions as where knock-knock jokes come from, why you can’t tickle yourself, and whether any woman anywhere, ever, has appreciated the Three Stooges. He now has a repository of forty thousand jokes, some two-thirds of which are so racist, violent, or dirty that he can’t post them for the site’s visitors. Since last fall, he has been conducting a global humor study at .uk, a Web site where visitors submit jokes and rate other people’s jokes on a five-point scale called, somewhat unrigorously, the Giggleometer. comedy club to assess the humor value of jokes. Tells about an appearance he made at an L.A. OF HUMOR about the scientific study of humor and Dr.
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