1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910792051303321

Autore

Hurley Matthew M. <1977->

Titolo

Inside jokes : using humor to reverse-engineer the mind / / Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge, Mass., : MIT Press, ©2011

ISBN

0-262-29481-8

1-299-28430-2

0-262-30355-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (374 p.)

Altri autori (Persone)

DennettD. C (Daniel Clement)

AdamsReginald B

Disciplina

152.4/3

Soggetti

Laughter - Psychological aspects

Laughter - Philosophy

Wit and humor - Psychological aspects

Wit and humor - Philosophy

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [305]-328) and index.

Nota di contenuto

What is humor for? -- The phenomenology of humor -- A brief history of humor theories -- Twenty questions for a cognitive and evolutionary theory of humor -- Emotion and computation -- A mind that can sustain humor -- Humor and mirth -- Higher order humor -- Objections considered -- The penumbra : non-jokes, bad jokes, and near-humor -- But why do we laugh? -- The punch line.

Sommario/riassunto

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.