10 ms·

Why Exaggeration Jokes Work

106 points by samclemens 8y ago

torstenvl 8y ago
There is a reason that it became common practice for an introduction to give a broad overview of the topic. It seriously detracts from the writing when the first paragraph plunges you into deep background, and you don't get a hint as to the supposed topic until halfway through.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- baxtr 8y ago
  +1 I find myself regularly scrolling heavily until I find the “meat” of the article teasered in the title. I guess someone told them before “you need to tell a story” or they do it for SEO reasons.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- SonicSoul 8y ago
  seems that most posts dedicate first 1-n paragraphs for unnecessary background and/or rehashing of the title. it's as if writers feel the need to ease into the topic as if it was a bucket of ice water for the reader to avoid being startled by
  - Swizec 8y ago
    It’s actually just a mark of bad writing. Lots of books do it too, but it’s less common coz you get a lot of practice before you attempt a book. First rule of good writing: Start the story as late as you can get away with. Preferably right before the punchline. Compare: 1) I woke up that morning, showered, put on my shoes, and went on a hike. It was a beautiful day the sun was shining the bees were buzzing. I walked for 30 minutes when I happened upon a bear in the road. 2) Shit, is that a bear!? I was on a hike in the Rocky mountains in the middle of nowhere and there’s this bear rught in front of me. Now what do i do? Ok I’m not doing these examples justice but think of your favorite stories: Do they start with the action or with the long wind up? In modern storytelling the windup usually comes during/after the action as backstory. A counter example are horror movies and thrillers where you want to build suspense first.
    - gumby 8y ago
      But there's a difference between a story for the purpose of entertainment vs an expository story. The former are quite rare on HN.
      - Swizec 8y ago
        Same rules apply. Writing is better when you start with the conclusion then expand on the supporting argument. Unless you want to bring the reader along for the ride of discovery.
        kbutler 8y ago
        > bring the reader along for the ride That's the point of long form story telling in the Atlantic. Sometimes it is well done, this isn't a good example of it (the ride isn't worth it).
- phalangion 8y ago
  I wonder if writing like this, where you don't really get to what the article is about until you're well into it, are because of advertising. I imagine people are more likely to spend more time on the page if they can't it all out of the intro.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I believe so. I think that's why the "inverted pyramid" is so highly regarded, and yet so rarely used in practice. It's because if you go with it, you quickly shed readers who found all the info they wanted partway, and go out to do other things. Which is great if you care about delivering value to readers - and that is not what most ad-driven publications really care about.
- CPLX 8y ago
  This has been how storytelling has been done for centuries, it’s a a mark of thoughtful feature writing. The Atlantic is over 100 years old and extremely prestigious, it’s resonable to assume that at least from a technical writing standpoint they know what they are doing and do it on purpose. It’s not writing intended for a textbook or academic paper. It’s a story. You’re supposed to read it and get introduced to things and discover the themes of the story gradually. I see a variation of this criticism of a long form feature about every week or so on HN. It’s sort of equivalent to a person walking into a modern art museum and asking why the artists didn’t just paint the pictures so they look exactly like the thing the artist was looking at when he painted the picture.
  - iscrewyou 8y ago
    In the age of tweets, memes, and captions, it has simply become such criticism to even surface to the top. I usually ignore critiques of long form story telling.
  - torstenvl 8y ago
    I believe you're thinking of an attention step, an immersion into a human interest aspect of the story before the formulaic structure of a traditional introduction. I have no problem with an attention step. I'm using one right now in a paper I hope to have published. What I object to is an article ostensibly on Topic A that spends the first 60% completely ignoring Topic A in favor of Topic B, only to draw the most fleeting and hand-wavy of analogies between the two, and subsequently pretending as if the author had presented some work of scholarship on Topic A. "Until halfway through" was not an exaggeration in my original comment.
    - hexane360 8y ago
      >spends the first 60% completely ignoring [biology] Only if you ignore the literal second paragraph: >Even neurons are formed by habit. When continuously exposed to a fixed stimulus, neurons become steadily less sensitive to that stimulus—until they eventually stop responding to it altogether.
- cbhl 8y ago
  This article is literally an advertisement for a book. From the fine article: "This piece was adapted from James Geary’s new book, Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It." Seen under that light, the article works perfectly. It contains a headline with seemingly simple question, meanders along with some anecdotes, and then at the end -- if you're still reading -- it tells you that you can go buy the book if you want to know the answer.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
baron816 8y ago
1000% if my jokes are exaggeration jokes.
- tabtab 8y ago
  97.471% of my jokes are about pedanticy.
  - jfk13 8y ago
    I think you mean "pedantry".
    - gammateam 8y ago
      Meant
      - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
        Do they no longer mean "pedantry"? Seems that they meant it and mean it.
        groestl 8y ago
        All of you have a mean pedantry going on.
        gammateam 8y ago
        thats the joke
        groestl 8y ago
        64.3% of it. 14.3% is a wordplay, and 21.4% is explaining the joke, if you count this post fifty-fifty.
        TrustAndSafety 8y ago
gnicholas 8y ago
I felt like this article over-promised and under-delivered. There was a lot of ink spilled on the animal kingdom, and a weak/unconvincing analogy to human humor.
- ncr100 8y ago
  In my understanding, humor is surprise. The article talks about wit because the article is an excerpt from a book on wit. Maybe that section was not fit to be an article with such a specific title?
  - rayalez 8y ago
    Why are new insightful ideas, scientific inventions, plot twists, jump-scares, shocking news aren't funny?
    - labster 8y ago
      Surprise is only one element. Humor is about the inherent conflict between our expectations and reality, the conflict is only intensified when we don't expect it. There are a lot of jokes I see coming a mile away, but there's a grade of execution for comedians too. If the timing is tight, even the most expected joke can still earn a laugh.
- zyngaro 8y ago
  I expected more too
- TaupeRanger 8y ago
  All articles that purport to explain how some aspect of the human mind works (in this case, why exaggeration jokes trigger the emotional response they do) inevitably fail miserably. This is simply due to the fact that science has basically nothing meaningful to say about human experience, other than to draw vague correlations between it and fMRI scans or lesion studies. For god's sake, we don't even know why/how Ibuprofen works...what kind of moronic hubris makes an Atlantic writer think they can illuminate anything worthwhile about something as complex as humor?
ryanmarsh 8y ago
For just once could we not downvote jokes here? The topic is humor. One HN thread of jokes won’t turn this place into reddit.
- andai 8y ago
  Should have phrased it as a joke!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  That's what they all say. You let one joke in, and the next day you have to scroll through thousands of pictures of Pepe the Frog on a bloated app that tracks your every scroll. If you want to avoid that, you have to nuke all humor from orbit. That's the only way to be sure.
  - labster 8y ago
    Don't worry, if Pepe shows up, I'll call in Gritty to take him down a peg or two.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
a11595 8y ago
light on content, not sure what the point of the article is besides filler (I stopped reading half way through), so I'll go by the title. This must be a story about a guy with a liberal arts degree, who exaggerated on his resume, got hired as a joke, didn't get the joke (due to lack of iq), and just started writing crap. James Geary mesdames et messieurs. Calling his work and career a joke would be an exaggeration.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
> The same principle is at work in verbal wit. The English film director Anthony Asquith, for example, once introduced Jean Harlow, the platinum-blond 1930s Hollywood star, to his mother, Lady Margot Asquith, the author and wife of the longtime British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith. Harlow mispronounced Lady Margot’s first name, sounding the final t, as in forgot. “The t is silent, my dear,” Asquith snipped, “as in Harlow.” Lady Margot isolated and exaggerated the significance of the simple t, just as Tinbergen isolated and exaggerated the herring gull’s orange spot, thereby dramatically enhancing its impact. Is that a way of saying "she called her a harlot" that went over my head? Or did the author not catch that she called her a harlot? At any rate, I don't see the wit there (a smart person wouldn't betray their pettyness, cruelty and insecurity like that at "hello"), and I noticed how it's all in the setup, in "platinum-blonde" vs "the author and wife of longtime prime minister". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margot_Asquith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margot_Asquith > she accused her shell-shocked stepson Herbert of being drunk. Jesus Christ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Harlow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Harlow ... hey wait a second ... I don't know these people. But neither did the author, so here goes nothing: > A totally different principle is at work in psychological abuse. The English film director Anthony Asquith, for example, once introduced Jean Harlow, the young, beautiful and warmhearted 1930s Hollywood star, to his mother, Lady Margot Asquith, a woman of a remarkable lack of any endearing features, who had developed an especially cruel looking mouth. Harlow mispronounced Lady Margot’s first name, sounding the final t, as in forgot, though she meant nothing by it. “The t is silent, my dear,” Asquith snipped, “as in Harlow.”, marking the beginning of an evening that to the young people felt like trying to have a picnic while being harrassed by a flock of old sea gulls that seemed more intent on shitting on the food than stealing any. > They didn't talk back, laughed politely, because it seemed clear Margot was not just unhappy, she didn't even remember happiness, and this was her way to get back at all what that had broken her heart when she was younger. Harlow knew Margot think she meant her, but that she didn't, didn't even see her, couldn't see her, saw only the light playing on her hatred for herself... so she came to feel deep compassion for this person. In the picnic analogy, she simply decided that they weren't going to get to eat a bite anyway, and that they may as well watch the acrobatics of the shitting birds... for even the ugliest human is beautiful, if you look at them careful enough, listen well enough. What seems ugly, what seems like chaos, is just as causally ordered, that order is just hidden from casual glance. Beauty is symmetric, and that's sublime, but uglyness is complex, and that is sublime too, and sneaking these kind of bald claims into stories is probably what makes writing them so fun. > Later that night, when they were alone, Harlow said "you said it was bad, but I had no idea" and made sweet pity love to Anthony Asquith, which totally blew his mind. [actually looking at his bio he was homosexual, which both makes that ending unlikely, and gives the scene a whole other level of oppressive atmosphere, at least in my mind: his mother calling a person she literally just met a harlot for being pretty and an actress, makes it seem unlikely she would have approved of his homosexuality, so maybe they were relieved she called her harlot, since that meant she had no clue of his homosexuality and they gladly played along]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bambax 8y ago
Very weak article, as pointed out by other comments. There isn't even the beginning of a proof of a connection between wit and exaggeration, and the examples don't help.
rayalez 8y ago
Jokes are "absurd associations". Our brain thinks in patterns. When you put together two patterns(ideas) that don't belong together, it creates the feeling of absurdity, the less patterns belong together, the less they fit together, the more absurd they will feel. ("A man on a bicycle" is not absurd, "a man on a unicycle" is a little bit absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle" is very absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle while wearing a white dress and juggling fish" is absurd as fuck). Comedy is the art of finding connections between patterns. You "connect the dots" between two ideas, find an overlap(an association) between two patterns that are far apart, and you put them together. The more absurd(less compatible) the two ideas are, and the stronger the connection(the more it makes sense), the funnier the joke will be. A longer post on this: https://medium.com/@rayalez/comedy-theory-fd142076657e https://medium.com/@rayalez/comedy-theory-fd142076657e ---- I can analyze about 80% of the jokes this way and find two different patterns with clear connection between them, remaining 20% are what I call "purely absurd" jokes, they don't have two connected patterns, they're just ideas that make as little sense as possible. I don't know how to explain both types with some common underlying mechanism. Just as an example, here's a "dot-connect" comedy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT6jS_X4NaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT6jS_X4NaY (Pattern 1 is clouds, common recognizer is "cloud that looks like a mushroom", pattern 2 is nuclear explosion). And here's a "pure absurd" comedy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQfvSLxTsEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQfvSLxTsEs (no two distinct but connected patterns that I can discern, just an absurd idea that makes as little sense as possible) - Puns are the simplest example of dot-connect jokes ("this word sounds like this other word"). Pranks too (the same situation means one thing to the person who's doing the prank, and another to the person who's being pranked). - Metaphors are associations that aren't absurd enough to be funny, if a metaphor is absurd/weird enough it becomes a joke. - Exaggeration/reversal jokes are closer to "pure absurd" jokes, you're taking a normal idea and making it make less sense by exaggerating a part of the pattern, or replacing it with it's opposite. ---- Animals seem to laugh when playing, another way to put it - "fake fighting". Play makes sense evolutionarily because kids are practicing fighting, and laughter seems like a signal that "I'm not actually trying to hurt you". I couldn't figure out how to reconcile it with the idea of absurdity, they seem vaguely similar, but I can't expain how comedy works from evolutionary standpoint. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_in_animals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_in_animals To understand humor from evolutionary perspective, it would be interesting to analyze the jokes babies and kids find funny. Why do babies laugh at peekaboo? Here's a fascinating video about the first jokes Hank Green's kid has came up with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q9AEu27NAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q9AEu27NAg Interestingly, two of them are "pure absurd" jokes (blue baby, police bus), and three of them are "dot-connect" jokes(mam-da, papa pants, coconut baby). ---- Laughter and humor are not the same thing. Tickling isn't funny, "social signaling" laughter isn't funny (like when girl giggles when she's attracted to a guy). ---- It would make sense if brains evolved to reward novelty. When you learn something insightful about the world, you get a pleasant dopamine hit. If comedy is "supernormal stimuli", it could come from people learning to hack this mechanism, making the sensation more intense. The way people add more sugar/fat to the food to make taste more intense, or learned to masturbate to fake sex, maybe people found a way to trick their minds into feeling they've learned something super insightful? But what does that have to do with laughter? Some sort of error-correction process? When you learn a new idea, your brain corrects your old wrong world model, "erasing" mistaken beliefs. Another way to describe absurd is an "obvious error". Maybe there's something to it... ---- It's easier to make jokes on taboo subjects because there's an absurd gap between the seriousness of a taboo subject and a lighthearted goofiness of a joke.
thedailymail 8y ago
The article is not great but the Buster Keaton scenes the author links to are great, especially the second one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZSTM3knaao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZSTM3knaao
hirundo 8y ago
So jokes share much with sex even when they're not sex jokes. An instinct to focus on supernormal stimuli would also help explain the fascination with over sized and contrasting genitalia, makeup to exaggerate signals of arousal, various modes of sexual harassment, etc. They're variations on Tinbergen’s stickleback mandible spots.
RichardHeart 8y ago
If you enjoyed the article, you'll probably also really enjoy this comic titled "Supernormal Stimuli" http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/supernormal-stimuli/ http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/supernormal-stimuli/

106 points by samclemens 8y ago

There is a reason that it became common practice for an introduction to give a broad overview of the topic. It seriously detracts from the writing when the first paragraph plunges you into deep background, and you don't get a hint as to the supposed topic until halfway through.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
baxtr 8y ago
+1 I find myself regularly scrolling heavily until I find the “meat” of the article teasered in the title. I guess someone told them before “you need to tell a story” or they do it for SEO reasons.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
SonicSoul 8y ago
seems that most posts dedicate first 1-n paragraphs for unnecessary background and/or rehashing of the title. it's as if writers feel the need to ease into the topic as if it was a bucket of ice water for the reader to avoid being startled by
- Swizec 8y ago
  It’s actually just a mark of bad writing. Lots of books do it too, but it’s less common coz you get a lot of practice before you attempt a book. First rule of good writing: Start the story as late as you can get away with. Preferably right before the punchline. Compare: 1) I woke up that morning, showered, put on my shoes, and went on a hike. It was a beautiful day the sun was shining the bees were buzzing. I walked for 30 minutes when I happened upon a bear in the road. 2) Shit, is that a bear!? I was on a hike in the Rocky mountains in the middle of nowhere and there’s this bear rught in front of me. Now what do i do? Ok I’m not doing these examples justice but think of your favorite stories: Do they start with the action or with the long wind up? In modern storytelling the windup usually comes during/after the action as backstory. A counter example are horror movies and thrillers where you want to build suspense first.
  - gumby 8y ago
    But there's a difference between a story for the purpose of entertainment vs an expository story. The former are quite rare on HN.
    - Swizec 8y ago
      Same rules apply. Writing is better when you start with the conclusion then expand on the supporting argument. Unless you want to bring the reader along for the ride of discovery.
      - kbutler 8y ago
        > bring the reader along for the ride That's the point of long form story telling in the Atlantic. Sometimes it is well done, this isn't a good example of it (the ride isn't worth it).
phalangion 8y ago
I wonder if writing like this, where you don't really get to what the article is about until you're well into it, are because of advertising. I imagine people are more likely to spend more time on the page if they can't it all out of the intro.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I believe so. I think that's why the "inverted pyramid" is so highly regarded, and yet so rarely used in practice. It's because if you go with it, you quickly shed readers who found all the info they wanted partway, and go out to do other things. Which is great if you care about delivering value to readers - and that is not what most ad-driven publications really care about.
CPLX 8y ago
This has been how storytelling has been done for centuries, it’s a a mark of thoughtful feature writing. The Atlantic is over 100 years old and extremely prestigious, it’s resonable to assume that at least from a technical writing standpoint they know what they are doing and do it on purpose. It’s not writing intended for a textbook or academic paper. It’s a story. You’re supposed to read it and get introduced to things and discover the themes of the story gradually. I see a variation of this criticism of a long form feature about every week or so on HN. It’s sort of equivalent to a person walking into a modern art museum and asking why the artists didn’t just paint the pictures so they look exactly like the thing the artist was looking at when he painted the picture.
- iscrewyou 8y ago
  In the age of tweets, memes, and captions, it has simply become such criticism to even surface to the top. I usually ignore critiques of long form story telling.
- torstenvl 8y ago
  I believe you're thinking of an attention step, an immersion into a human interest aspect of the story before the formulaic structure of a traditional introduction. I have no problem with an attention step. I'm using one right now in a paper I hope to have published. What I object to is an article ostensibly on Topic A that spends the first 60% completely ignoring Topic A in favor of Topic B, only to draw the most fleeting and hand-wavy of analogies between the two, and subsequently pretending as if the author had presented some work of scholarship on Topic A. "Until halfway through" was not an exaggeration in my original comment.
  - hexane360 8y ago
    >spends the first 60% completely ignoring [biology] Only if you ignore the literal second paragraph: >Even neurons are formed by habit. When continuously exposed to a fixed stimulus, neurons become steadily less sensitive to that stimulus—until they eventually stop responding to it altogether.
cbhl 8y ago
This article is literally an advertisement for a book. From the fine article: "This piece was adapted from James Geary’s new book, Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It." Seen under that light, the article works perfectly. It contains a headline with seemingly simple question, meanders along with some anecdotes, and then at the end -- if you're still reading -- it tells you that you can go buy the book if you want to know the answer.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

baron816 8y ago

1000% if my jokes are exaggeration jokes.

tabtab 8y ago
97.471% of my jokes are about pedanticy.
- jfk13 8y ago
  I think you mean "pedantry".
  - gammateam 8y ago
    Meant
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      Do they no longer mean "pedantry"? Seems that they meant it and mean it.
      - groestl 8y ago
        All of you have a mean pedantry going on.
        gammateam 8y ago
        thats the joke
        groestl 8y ago
        64.3% of it. 14.3% is a wordplay, and 21.4% is explaining the joke, if you count this post fifty-fifty.
        TrustAndSafety 8y ago

gnicholas 8y ago

I felt like this article over-promised and under-delivered. There was a lot of ink spilled on the animal kingdom, and a weak/unconvincing analogy to human humor.

ncr100 8y ago
In my understanding, humor is surprise. The article talks about wit because the article is an excerpt from a book on wit. Maybe that section was not fit to be an article with such a specific title?
- rayalez 8y ago
  Why are new insightful ideas, scientific inventions, plot twists, jump-scares, shocking news aren't funny?
  - labster 8y ago
    Surprise is only one element. Humor is about the inherent conflict between our expectations and reality, the conflict is only intensified when we don't expect it. There are a lot of jokes I see coming a mile away, but there's a grade of execution for comedians too. If the timing is tight, even the most expected joke can still earn a laugh.
zyngaro 8y ago
I expected more too
TaupeRanger 8y ago
All articles that purport to explain how some aspect of the human mind works (in this case, why exaggeration jokes trigger the emotional response they do) inevitably fail miserably. This is simply due to the fact that science has basically nothing meaningful to say about human experience, other than to draw vague correlations between it and fMRI scans or lesion studies. For god's sake, we don't even know why/how Ibuprofen works...what kind of moronic hubris makes an Atlantic writer think they can illuminate anything worthwhile about something as complex as humor?

ryanmarsh 8y ago

For just once could we not downvote jokes here? The topic is humor. One HN thread of jokes won’t turn this place into reddit.

andai 8y ago
Should have phrased it as a joke!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
TeMPOraL 8y ago
That's what they all say. You let one joke in, and the next day you have to scroll through thousands of pictures of Pepe the Frog on a bloated app that tracks your every scroll. If you want to avoid that, you have to nuke all humor from orbit. That's the only way to be sure.
- labster 8y ago
  Don't worry, if Pepe shows up, I'll call in Gritty to take him down a peg or two.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

a11595 8y ago

light on content, not sure what the point of the article is besides filler (I stopped reading half way through), so I'll go by the title. This must be a story about a guy with a liberal arts degree, who exaggerated on his resume, got hired as a joke, didn't get the joke (due to lack of iq), and just started writing crap. James Geary mesdames et messieurs. Calling his work and career a joke would be an exaggeration.

PavlovsCat 8y ago

> The same principle is at work in verbal wit. The English film director Anthony Asquith, for example, once introduced Jean Harlow, the platinum-blond 1930s Hollywood star, to his mother, Lady Margot Asquith, the author and wife of the longtime British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith. Harlow mispronounced Lady Margot’s first name, sounding the final t, as in forgot. “The t is silent, my dear,” Asquith snipped, “as in Harlow.” Lady Margot isolated and exaggerated the significance of the simple t, just as Tinbergen isolated and exaggerated the herring gull’s orange spot, thereby dramatically enhancing its impact. Is that a way of saying "she called her a harlot" that went over my head? Or did the author not catch that she called her a harlot? At any rate, I don't see the wit there (a smart person wouldn't betray their pettyness, cruelty and insecurity like that at "hello"), and I noticed how it's all in the setup, in "platinum-blonde" vs "the author and wife of longtime prime minister". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margot_Asquith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margot_Asquith > she accused her shell-shocked stepson Herbert of being drunk. Jesus Christ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Harlow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Harlow ... hey wait a second ... I don't know these people. But neither did the author, so here goes nothing: > A totally different principle is at work in psychological abuse. The English film director Anthony Asquith, for example, once introduced Jean Harlow, the young, beautiful and warmhearted 1930s Hollywood star, to his mother, Lady Margot Asquith, a woman of a remarkable lack of any endearing features, who had developed an especially cruel looking mouth. Harlow mispronounced Lady Margot’s first name, sounding the final t, as in forgot, though she meant nothing by it. “The t is silent, my dear,” Asquith snipped, “as in Harlow.”, marking the beginning of an evening that to the young people felt like trying to have a picnic while being harrassed by a flock of old sea gulls that seemed more intent on shitting on the food than stealing any. > They didn't talk back, laughed politely, because it seemed clear Margot was not just unhappy, she didn't even remember happiness, and this was her way to get back at all what that had broken her heart when she was younger. Harlow knew Margot think she meant her, but that she didn't, didn't even see her, couldn't see her, saw only the light playing on her hatred for herself... so she came to feel deep compassion for this person. In the picnic analogy, she simply decided that they weren't going to get to eat a bite anyway, and that they may as well watch the acrobatics of the shitting birds... for even the ugliest human is beautiful, if you look at them careful enough, listen well enough. What seems ugly, what seems like chaos, is just as causally ordered, that order is just hidden from casual glance. Beauty is symmetric, and that's sublime, but uglyness is complex, and that is sublime too, and sneaking these kind of bald claims into stories is probably what makes writing them so fun. > Later that night, when they were alone, Harlow said "you said it was bad, but I had no idea" and made sweet pity love to Anthony Asquith, which totally blew his mind. [actually looking at his bio he was homosexual, which both makes that ending unlikely, and gives the scene a whole other level of oppressive atmosphere, at least in my mind: his mother calling a person she literally just met a harlot for being pretty and an actress, makes it seem unlikely she would have approved of his homosexuality, so maybe they were relieved she called her harlot, since that meant she had no clue of his homosexuality and they gladly played along]

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bambax 8y ago

Very weak article, as pointed out by other comments. There isn't even the beginning of a proof of a connection between wit and exaggeration, and the examples don't help.

rayalez 8y ago

Jokes are "absurd associations". Our brain thinks in patterns. When you put together two patterns(ideas) that don't belong together, it creates the feeling of absurdity, the less patterns belong together, the less they fit together, the more absurd they will feel. ("A man on a bicycle" is not absurd, "a man on a unicycle" is a little bit absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle" is very absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle while wearing a white dress and juggling fish" is absurd as fuck). Comedy is the art of finding connections between patterns. You "connect the dots" between two ideas, find an overlap(an association) between two patterns that are far apart, and you put them together. The more absurd(less compatible) the two ideas are, and the stronger the connection(the more it makes sense), the funnier the joke will be. A longer post on this: https://medium.com/@rayalez/comedy-theory-fd142076657e https://medium.com/@rayalez/comedy-theory-fd142076657e ---- I can analyze about 80% of the jokes this way and find two different patterns with clear connection between them, remaining 20% are what I call "purely absurd" jokes, they don't have two connected patterns, they're just ideas that make as little sense as possible. I don't know how to explain both types with some common underlying mechanism. Just as an example, here's a "dot-connect" comedy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT6jS_X4NaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT6jS_X4NaY (Pattern 1 is clouds, common recognizer is "cloud that looks like a mushroom", pattern 2 is nuclear explosion). And here's a "pure absurd" comedy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQfvSLxTsEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQfvSLxTsEs (no two distinct but connected patterns that I can discern, just an absurd idea that makes as little sense as possible) - Puns are the simplest example of dot-connect jokes ("this word sounds like this other word"). Pranks too (the same situation means one thing to the person who's doing the prank, and another to the person who's being pranked). - Metaphors are associations that aren't absurd enough to be funny, if a metaphor is absurd/weird enough it becomes a joke. - Exaggeration/reversal jokes are closer to "pure absurd" jokes, you're taking a normal idea and making it make less sense by exaggerating a part of the pattern, or replacing it with it's opposite. ---- Animals seem to laugh when playing, another way to put it - "fake fighting". Play makes sense evolutionarily because kids are practicing fighting, and laughter seems like a signal that "I'm not actually trying to hurt you". I couldn't figure out how to reconcile it with the idea of absurdity, they seem vaguely similar, but I can't expain how comedy works from evolutionary standpoint. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_in_animals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_in_animals To understand humor from evolutionary perspective, it would be interesting to analyze the jokes babies and kids find funny. Why do babies laugh at peekaboo? Here's a fascinating video about the first jokes Hank Green's kid has came up with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q9AEu27NAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q9AEu27NAg Interestingly, two of them are "pure absurd" jokes (blue baby, police bus), and three of them are "dot-connect" jokes(mam-da, papa pants, coconut baby). ---- Laughter and humor are not the same thing. Tickling isn't funny, "social signaling" laughter isn't funny (like when girl giggles when she's attracted to a guy). ---- It would make sense if brains evolved to reward novelty. When you learn something insightful about the world, you get a pleasant dopamine hit. If comedy is "supernormal stimuli", it could come from people learning to hack this mechanism, making the sensation more intense. The way people add more sugar/fat to the food to make taste more intense, or learned to masturbate to fake sex, maybe people found a way to trick their minds into feeling they've learned something super insightful? But what does that have to do with laughter? Some sort of error-correction process? When you learn a new idea, your brain corrects your old wrong world model, "erasing" mistaken beliefs. Another way to describe absurd is an "obvious error". Maybe there's something to it... ---- It's easier to make jokes on taboo subjects because there's an absurd gap between the seriousness of a taboo subject and a lighthearted goofiness of a joke.

thedailymail 8y ago

The article is not great but the Buster Keaton scenes the author links to are great, especially the second one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZSTM3knaao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZSTM3knaao

hirundo 8y ago

So jokes share much with sex even when they're not sex jokes. An instinct to focus on supernormal stimuli would also help explain the fascination with over sized and contrasting genitalia, makeup to exaggerate signals of arousal, various modes of sexual harassment, etc. They're variations on Tinbergen’s stickleback mandible spots.

RichardHeart 8y ago

If you enjoyed the article, you'll probably also really enjoy this comic titled "Supernormal Stimuli" http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/supernormal-stimuli/ http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/supernormal-stimuli/