Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-engineer the Mind

Couverture
MIT Press, 2011 - 359 pages
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Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The FarSide, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in thefirst place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks,watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, DanielDennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose,evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished withopen-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to findand fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure.So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humoristsover the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that ishumor.

 

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Table des matières

1 Introduction
1
2 What Is Humor For?
9
3 The Phenomenology of Humor
15
4 A Brief History of Humor Theories
37
5 Twenty Questions for a Cognitive and Evolutionary Theory of Humor
57
6 Emotion and Computation
61
7 A Mind That Can Sustain Humor
93
8 Humor and Mirth
117
10 Objections Considered
177
11 The Penumbra
213
12 But Why Do We Laugh?
257
13 The Punch Line
287
Epilogue
301
References
305
Index
329
Droits d'auteur

9 HigherOrder Humor
143

Autres éditions - Tout afficher

Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
Matthew M. Hurley,Daniel C. Dennett,Reginald B. Adams
Aperçu limité - 2011
Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
Matthew M. Hurley,Daniel C. Dennett,Reginald B. Adams, Jr.,Reginald B. Adams
Aucun aperçu disponible - 2013

Expressions et termes fréquents

active belief agent AI-complete amusing assumption audience behavior brain cause chimpanzees cognitive cognitive science comedians comedy computational contradiction covert create cultural Dennett detection discover discovery Duchenne laughter effects epistemic commitment epistemic emotions event evolution evolved example exapted expectations experience explain exploit fact false belief feel fiction first-person humor frame frame problem funny funny bone funny-huh happen heuristic human incongruity inference insight instance intentional stance interpretation JITSA joke kind laugh law of noncontradiction logical long-term memory look mechanism mental space mind Minsky mirth mistake mistaken one’s perception perhaps person perspective phenomenology play pleasure predict problem punch line puns qualia question reason reward role Schadenfreude semantic sense of humor simply situation social solving someone Steven Wright stimuli story structure superiority theory surprise tell theorists theory of humor theory of mind things third-person humor thought tickling tion trigger valenced

À propos de l'auteur (2011)

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He is the author of Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2005, 2006) and other books.

Informations bibliographiques

QR code for Inside Jokes
TitreInside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-engineer the Mind
AuteursMatthew M. Hurley, Daniel Clement Dennett, Reginald B. Adams
Éditionillustrée
ÉditeurMIT Press, 2011
ISBN026201582X, 9780262015820
Longueur359 pages
  
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