taelor comments on False Laughter - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 December 2007 06:03AM

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Comment author: taelor 01 December 2011 06:06:29AM *  0 points [-]

Actually I've always felt a large part of humour is depicting saying what everyone thinks but nobody says. How many comedians make jokes about spouses, traffic, their own minority, how often are those jokes things people in the audience don't already think about?

I suspect that the "You think it, I say it" brand of comedy is more about signalling and/or wish-fulfillment than any thing else. Alternately, the surprise could be derived from the comedian saying things that the audience didn't expect to anyone to say out loud, which would explain why this kind of schtick quickly loses it's charm as you can predict the jokes by asking yourself what you'd think in thesituation, but wouldn't say (of course this requires that the audience be good enough at metacognition to complete the pattern).

Personaly, my theory is that humor is derived from seeing the unexpected, and realizing that we should have expected it.