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bgrah449 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.
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.