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gwern comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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I too have a proto-theory. My theory is that humor is when there is a connection between the joke & punchline which is obvious to the person in retrospect, but not initially.
Hence, a pun is funny because the connection is unpredictable in advance, but clear in retrospect; Eliezer's joke about the motorist and the asylum inmate is funny because we were predicting some other response other than the logical one; similarly for 'why did the duck cross the road? to get to the other side' is not funny to someone who has never heard any of the road jokes, but to someone who has and is thinking of zany explanations, the reversion to normality is unpredicted.
Your theory doesn't work with absurdist humor. There isn't initially 1 valid decoding, much less 2.
I love absurdist humor.
How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to hold the giraffe, and one to put the clocks in the bathtub.
"That isn't how the joke goes", said the cowboy hunched over in the corner of the saloon. The saloon was rundown, but lively. A piano played a jangly tune and the chorus was belted by a dozen drunken cattle runners, gold rushers, and ne're-do-wells. The whiskey flowed. In the distance, a wolf howled at the moon as if to ask it "Please, let the night go on forever." But over the horizon the sun objected like a stubborn bureaucrat. The bureaucrat slowly crossed the room, lighting everything at his feet as he moved. "Thank God I remembered to replace the batteries in this flashlight", the bureaucrat thought. The light bulb in his office had gone out again and would need to be replaced. Unfortunately that required a visit to the Supply Request Department downstairs. As he walked past the other offices he heard out of one "Fish!" as if the punchline to a joke had been given. But the bureaucrat heard no laughter.
The Secretary of Supply Requests seemed friendly enough and she had even offered him something to drink. He took a swig and the continued: "the light bulb in my office has...". Gulp. "It needs to be replace..." The bureaucrat looked around. Suddenly he was feeling dizzy. Something was wrong. He looked down at the drink and then at the Secretary. She smirked. Her plan had succeeded. He had been poisoned! The bureaucrat didn't know what to do. He was terrified. He felt vertigo, as if he stood at the top of a tall ladder. The room started to spin. Counter-Clockwise. Then all of a sudden everything went black. A few seconds later he felt the room spinning again-- strangely, in the opposite direction-- and suddenly, he lit up.
How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
One. They call in two surrealists, thus reducing it to an already solved problem.
How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? Fish.
Exactly. What are the 2 valid decodings of that? I struggle to come up with just 1 valid decoding involving giraffes and bathtubs; like the duck crossing the road, the joke is the frustration of our attempt to find the connection.
Well, surrealists like to clutter their apartments with random things like giraffes and clocks. One interpretation is just that they need to hold the giraffe so it doesn't get in the way of the lightbulb. They also need to move a ladder to reach the bulb, but the ladder is in a closet, and the closet door is blocked by all those clocks. The bathtub is just a handy open space to put them in. And they are surrealists, so why not put the clocks in the bathtub?
A man walks into a bar and says "Ow."
Doesn't that work for math proofs, too?
Could you enlarge?
Mathematical proofs are easy to verify but hard to generate. A proof is unpredictable in advance but clear in retrospect.
Mm. This might work for some proofs - Lewis Carroll, as we all know, was a mathematician - but a proof for something you already believe that is conducted via tedious steps is not humorous by anyone's lights. Proving P/=NP is not funny, but proving 2+2=3 is funny.
It's not funny if it's wrong.
Not all proofs.