Inside Jokes - Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (PDF)

An evolutionary and cognitive account of the science behind why we crack up-"one of the most complex and sophisticated humor theories ever presented" ( Evolutionary Psychology ).

Some things are funny-jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side , Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed-but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons ?

In Inside Jokes , Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature-aka natural selection-cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.

Inside Jokes - Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (PDF).rar

Inside Jokes - Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (PDF).rar