Well, firstly, this isn't a big deal, but I'll describe it because you asked. In terms of clarity, Dennett has a habit of using unnecessarily complex language, as well as burying his leads and dancing around his points. The end result is that most people don't bother and so he doesn't communicate what may at its core be an interesting thought. A lot of the same happens when people describe his ideas (you don't need to say "coterminous" when you can just say "humor is not the same as laughter," for one example, and be more specific about how they aren't the same if or when it becomes necessary.) Specificity where it isn't needed is a common problem in academic writing. (rather than tell someone that it's "time to go," you could show them a multi-decimal readout from an atomic clock that would accomplish nothing additional).
I find it inelegant because it doesn't fit neatly with our common experiences of humor. For example in the book abstract, it's stated essentially that humor rewards us for fixing our mental models. I agree that we have mechanisms that reward us for that, as I've stated in the past that there's a pleasure chemical released in the brain when we make a new connection. But we don't laugh in all those circumstances. (the classic example being "Eureka!" That's that, but not a laugh).
What's important is that the new discovery not match your expectation. If it was just about updating your model, it would seem clearly that you'd laugh in the "Eureka" situation too. But we don't. The theory I'm proposing draws a clear distinction between those two moments of mental connection, and offers a (hopefully) logical reason WHY that distinction is there, including other traits associated with laughter, like why we laugh in a way that other people can hear and so on.
Lastly, regarding things being reducible to status. Let me be clear that that's the purpose of it, but the instinct triggers in its own way. Similar to how men might be attracted to large breasts for reasons that are reducible to reproductive ability in the woman, but that instinct is triggered in its own way, solely by breast size/shape etc, which means in modern times, there are situations where it's triggered without the intended purpose being fulfilled (like with breast implants).
I hope this is clear. If not I apologize and will try to use different terms.
I find that book not just clear, but positively lucid. Your description of it seems so wrong I find it impossible to imagine you've actually read that book.
And by the way: Hurley wrote most of this book, Adams did much of the rest. Dennett just helped polish it and promote it (using his status as one of the world's most influential living philosophers) because it is so obviously deserves that.
Alrighty, with the mass downvoters gone, I can make the leap to posting some ideas. Here's the Humor Theory I've been developing over the last few months and have discussed at Meet-Ups, and have written two SSRN papers about, in one page. I've taken the document I posted on the Facebook group and retyped and formatted it here.
I strongly suspect that it's the correct solution to this unsolved problem. There was even a new neurology study released in the last few days that confirms one of the predictions I drew from this theory about the evolution of human intelligence.
Note that I tried to fit as much info as I could on the page, but obviously it's not enough space to cover everything, and the other papers are devoted to that. Any constructive questions, discussion etc are welcome.
A "Holy Grail" Humor Theory in One Page.
Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and hundreds of other philosophers have tried to understand humor. No one has ever found a single idea that explains it in all its forms, or shows what's sufficient to create it. Thus, it's been called a "Holy Grail" of social science. Consider this...
In small groups without language, where we evolved, social orders were needed for efficiency. But fighting for leadership would hurt them. So a peaceful, nonverbal method was extremely beneficial. Thus, the "gasp" we make when seeing someone fall evolved into a rapid-fire version at seeing certain failures, which allowed us to signal others to see what happened, and know who not to follow. The reaction, naturally, would feel good and make us smile, to lower our aggression and show no threat. This reaction is called laughter. The instinct that controls it is called humor. It's triggered by the brain weighing things it observes in the proportion:
Humor = ((Qualityexpected - Qualitydisplayed) * Noticeability * Validity) / Anxiety
Or H=((Qe-Qd)NV)/A. When the results of this ratio are greater than 0, we find the thing funny and will laugh, in the smallest amounts with slight smiles, small feelings of pleasure or small diaphragm spasms. The numerator terms simply state that something has to be significantly lower in quality than what we assumed, and we must notice it and feel it's real, and the denominator states that anxiety lowers the reaction. This is because laughter is a noisy reflex that threatens someone else's status, so if there is a chance of violence from the person, a danger to threatening a loved one's status, or a predator or other threat from making noise, the reflex will be mitigated. The common feeling amongst those situations, anxiety, has come to cause this.
This may appear to be an ad hoc hypothesis, but unlike those, this can clearly unite and explain everything we've observed about humor, including our cultural sayings and the scientific observations of the previous incomplete theories. Some noticed that it involves surprise, some noticed that it involves things being incorrect, all noticed the pleasure without seeing the reason. This covers all of it, naturally, and with a core concept simple enough to explain to a child. Our sayings, like "it's too soon" for a joke after a tragedy, can all be covered as well ("too soon" indicates that we still have anxiety associated with the event).
The previous confusion about humor came from a few things. For one, there are at least 4 types of laughter: At ourselves, at others we know, at others we don't know (who have an average expectation), and directly at the person with whom we're speaking. We often laugh for one reason instead of the other, like "bad jokes" making us laugh at the teller. In addition, besides physical failure, like slipping, we also have a basic laugh instinct for mental failure, through misplacement. We sense attempts to order things that have gone wrong. Puns and similar references trigger this. Furthermore, we laugh loudest when we notice multiple errors (quality-gaps) at once, like a person dressed foolishly (such as a court jester), exposing errors by others.
We call this the "Status Loss Theory," and we've written two papers on it. The first is 6 pages, offers a chart of old theories and explains this more, with 7 examples. The second is 27 pages and goes through 40 more examples, applying this concept to sayings, comedians, shows, memes, and other comedy types, and even drawing predictions from the theory that have been verified by very recent neurology studies, to hopefully exhaustively demonstrate the idea's explanatory power. If it's not complete, it should still make enough progress to greatly advance humor study. If it is, it should redefine the field. Thanks for your time.