Juergen Schmidhuber writes about humor as information compression and that plus decompression seems about right to me. Being on TV is decompression from a phrase-as-concept to the component words, a pun, a switch to a lower level analysis than that which adults favor (a situation children constantly have to deal with). Muffin and cupcake is a proposal for a new lossy compression of two concepts to a new concept with a "topping" variable, which would be useful if you wanted to invent, for instance, the dreadful sounding "muffin-roll sushi", "next Wednesday" is a commentary on the inadequacy of current cultural norms for translating concepts and words into one another even for commonly used concepts. The last one is a successful compression from sense data to the fact that a common joke pattern is happening and inference that one is in a joke.

I wish that we had a "Less Wrong Community" blog for off-topic but fun comments like the above to be top level posts, as well as an "instrumental rationality" blog for "self help" subject matter.