Being Funny: A History of Jokes

What makes something funny? Why do some things illicit amusement and others don't?

How can someone craft something funny? Can jokes be crafted or only found?

Who are the most (intentionally) funny pre-modern people, especially writers?

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psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/201101/why-we-laugh
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Funniness is derived from surprise and/or subversion, or more complicatedly, when something makes us learn in a clever way. This comes from a number of sources. For example, let's say fart jokes. Some people might laugh at these because you wouldn't expect such rude things as farts to show up in polite company; it's surprising, and therefore funny. Other people might not like fart jokes however because they're trite and overdone to the point where we got sick of them when we were younger. There's also schadenfreude which is a mix of this and more things, which is why things like slapstick works.

Our brains like to learn, and jokes make us learn in a roundabout way. That's why jokes make us happy. Jokes teach us about connections between two things that we'd never thought would be connected. For example puns may use wordplay between two different words or phrases. But if a joke is made too many times, you don't learn any new connections, it's the same one, which is why jokes get old.

If learning new things in surprise was all that it took, then wouldn't textbooks be the funniest thing ever, rather than the dullest thing ever?

>Jokes teach us about connections between two things that we'd never thought would be connected

like your penis and a girls vagina ?

Interestingly, this same nervous laughter has been noted to occur in many psychological experiments when subjects have found themselves placed under a high degree of emotional stress specifically involving perceived harm to others. Perhaps the most famous of these experiments were those conducted by Stanley Milgram, who set out to discover why some people will blindly follow authority (the impetus being a desire to understand the behavior of soldiers in Nazi Germany). He brought in test subjects and asked them to deliver a series of increasingly powerful electric shocks to an unseen person (the "learner") to see just how much voltage they would deliver before refusing to continue. An astounding 65% delivered the experiment's final jolt of 450 volts, fully believing they were actually shocking the "learners." (It turns out, they weren't. The "learners" were members of Milgram's team playing a role.) In the paper he published on his experiment, Milgram made mention of several subjects who began to laugh nervously once they heard screams of pain coming from the unseen "learners," and suggested this was a phenomenon that deserved further study.
psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/201101/why-we-laugh

its sometimes funny to see people die but seeing someone getting raped is never funny

Jokes about rape can be funny, though.

fight me after school

Sorry, I'll be busy after school. With Saki.

>seeing horrible things illicits slightly nervous, uncomfortable laughter
What did they see?

Other people's pain.

That's learning in a direct way. Humor takes advantage of your preconceptions to make connections between concepts that you'd never thought about before, and with textbook learning, you might not have any preconceptions on the subject, making it dull or matter-of-fact.

It has to be unexpected but also make sense. More specifically, it has to make sense in an unexpected way. If you're shown a surprising proof of a mathematical theorem, it's probably not funny because you're expecting a mathematical proof and that's what you get, even if the content is surprising. Humor happens when you're thinking according to one set of rules and the joke/joker suddenly reveals that it's been following another. The amusement comes when you "jump tracks" and see the logic of the joke. For example:

It's unexpected that user would turn the conversation to sex and use an obviously different sense of the word "connection" than the person he's quoting, but it makes sense because everyone on Veeky Forums is assumed to be a virgin.

This is unexpected because it's a childish way of picking a fight and obviously nonsensical in the context of two strangers having a discussion on an imageboard, but the joke makes sense because it points out that the kind of intense argument that often ensues over whether rape jokes can be funny is itself somewhat childish. user has changed the rules so that what could have become a serious debate in which self-deprecation is not expected instead has become a more light-hearted conversation.

Note that both of these posts use poor grammar, probably intentionally, to their advantage and in both of these cases, they have the additional advantage of the joke itself being at least slightly surprising, because you would normally expect a serious reply to a serious post. In contexts where you expect to hear jokes, they have to try harder to be funny.

But I don't think this is enough for a complete description of humor. For instance, in the first example surely the fact that user is making fun of/targeting someone else makes it funnier than just a random pun.

> and with textbook learning, you might not have any preconceptions on the subject,
Depends on the textbook.

Intro textbooks? You're right.
Advanced textbooks? Then you know the intro stuff about it already.

Do people find the same things funny throughout the ages?

Would a joke not referencing something that exists only now (like cars) make someone in 200 BCE laugh?

What are some historical jokes we know about?

thanks Data you can leave Veeky Forums now

Hehe nice surprising connection user

actually that's kinda funny

Roman graffiti showing profanities have the same profanities we use, which indicates a similar humour.

There was that one guy who laughed so hard at his own joke that he ended up dying of a heart attack.

>Chrysippus, the stoic of Soli was in attendance at the 143rd Olympiad when he saw a donkey eat some figs. Witnessing this, Chrysippus cried out: "Now give the donkey a drink of wine to wash them down", whereupon he died in a fit of laughter.

To be COMPLETELY fair, that shit's super funny. Imagine watching some ornery donkey, just munching away on some unattended figs like some sort of unabashed hedon, and to top it all off, not only does he steal some poor guy's figs, he also leans over and takes a swig of his wine! How humorous would that be?! It would be the ancient Greece equivalent of watching your dog standing in line at a cafeteria and saying "Look! He thinks he's people!", which, to this day, would never fail to get a laugh out of me.

B A S E D Chrysippus

I didn't know a first post could also be a best post without somehow being ironic or sarcastic.

>What makes something funny?

error.

This was pretty good joke

Has Veeky Forums read the Philogelos? It is a collection of Greek and Roman jokes from (iirc) third or fourth century AC.

Many of the jokes are about misogyny and the stupidity of scholars.


>Two guys talking: "I slept with your wife", confesses one. "Alas", replies the other, "I do that because she is my wife... What's YOUR excuse?"

What's one thing a new bride has never done?

Fart on her husband's lap.

Kek, bretty gud.