Reading all the comments here, my reaction is 'Whoosh!". Perhaps it is possible to use Cantor diagonalization to demonstrate there are forms of humour that are not accessible to everyone?
I'm in the learning phase so I can't really comment on this but would love to hear others' comments.<p>(cross-post from http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/pj7le/i_gained_a_new_perspective/)
Actually, not quite so. There's structure, otherwise it would be incomprehensible and people would not resonate so much with it.
William James said that philosophy “sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar.” The same is true of standup comedy. Simon Critchley has written that both ask us to “look at things as if you had just landed from another planet”. [1]
>Not really. Most of the time is just the mental analogue of fart jokes.
I didn't say all insights were equal. If this was just a fart joke, I wouldn't have thought it was funny. But you can't draw a line between insight and humor, can you?
>No, that's just a cliche.
It's a cliche because it's Shakespeare. That doesn't make it less true.
Sure it does, such a joke is often called absurdist or surrealist humor. Quite popular on Twitter.
Anyway, I think that is a lot more likely than some obscure cultural reference that we’re expected to parse in the middle of musing about digital mapping.
Abstract: Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the
mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden"
thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense
as for other comical subjects. In this essay I argue that the
different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we
recognize the importance of knowledge about knowledge and,
particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and
suppressing bugs -- ineffective or destructive thought processes.
When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or
mysterious, becomes more understandable.
A gentleman entered a pastry-cook's shop and ordered a
cake; but he soon brought it back and asked for a glass of
liqueur instead. He drank it and began to leave without
having paid. The proprietor detained him. "You've not
paid for the liqueur." "But I gave you the cake in exchange
for it." "You didn't pay for that either." "But I hadn't
eaten it".
--- from Freud (1905).
"Yields truth when appended to its own quotation"
yields truth when appended to its own quotation.
--W. V. Quine
A man at the dinner table dipped his hands in the
mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. When his
neighbor looked astonished, the man apologized: "I'm so
sorry. I thought it was spinach."
[Note 11] Spinach. A reader mentioned that she heard this joke
about brocolli, not mayonnaise. This is funnier, because it
transfers a plausible mistake into an implausible context. In Freud's
version the mistake is already too silly: one could mistake
spinach for broccoli, but not for mayonnaise. I suspect that Freud
transposed the wrong absurdity when he determined to tell it
himself later on. Indeed, he (p.139) seems particularly annoyed at
this joke -- and well he might be if, indeed, he himself damaged it by
spoiling the elegance of the frame-shift. I would not mention this
were it not for the established tradition of advancing psychiatry by
analyzing Freud's own writings.
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