Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
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Book Overview
This evolutionary and cognitive theory of humor seeks to reveal the complex science behind why we crack up. "A sophisticated analysis . . . written with clarity, good cheer, and, of course, wit." ―Steven Pinker, author of How The Mind Works Some things are funny--jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed--but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, 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 with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature--aka natural selection--cannot just order the brain to find and 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 humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0262518694
ISBN13:9780262518697
Release Date:February 2013
Publisher:MIT Press
Length:374 Pages
Weight:1.10 lbs.
Dimensions:0.8" x 5.8" x 8.6"
Age Range:18 years and up
Grade Range:Postsecondary and higher
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