8 ms·
I believe that jokes/humor is way older than human language. Totally non-scientific, but my dog seems to be "happy" when something that she thinks is one way i
by rland 5y ago
I believe that jokes/humor is way older than human language.
Totally non-scientific, but my dog seems to be "happy" when something that she thinks is one way is actually the other. Like when I am totally silent, not looking at her, and then all of the sudden make a noise at her or look at her. She loves it.
I think that's the essence of humor, it's when your brain experiences something it didn't expect in a low-stakes way.
- paleotrope 5y agoSubversion of expectations is the root of humor.
- agumonkey 5y agoAnd probably intelligence somehow. Overlapping substructures and recombinations.. also music.
- tremon 5y agoI'd say that expectations require intelligence.
- agumonkey 5y agoI'd argue that they only require memory
- 10000truths 5y agoIt requires both. You need memory in order to retain data, and you need intelligence to recognize patterns within that data and make inferences.
- bitwize 5y agoThere's an evo-psy theory which says that humor originated in the relief we feel when something we perceive is threatening turns out not to be. The boggart turns into something innocuous, and we laugh at the thing that started to scare us but failed.
- idiotsecant 5y agoWhich makes an awful lot of sense! Its a pretty effective way of 'infecting' others with the knowledge that the situation is not dangerous without the burden of having to develop a language.
- neilv 5y agoThat's an interesting theory. A related-sounding interesting one I heard (in Marvin Minsky's class, as part of a larger model of the human mind) is that the humor response might have evolved to encourage the brain to identify nonsense, and to inhibit learning of nonsense. I guess that that the learning aspect could fit even better with primitive threat identification than with general learning? (What inputs initially seemed like a threat, turned out not to be, so don't over-learn from initial mistaken emotional reaction to that incident that "inputs => threat"? Or have the enjoyable "good" of the eventual reaction counteract the initial "bad" reaction in primitive learning?) (I'm not representing the theory well, and I know very little of whatever applicable psych/cogsci research.)
- mod 5y agoOff-topic, but I want to ask because you seem like someone who might have heard a theory: Why do we appreciate beauty? As in natural beauty. A sunset, a rolling field, the stars, a colorful flower, etc.
- neilv 5y agoI'm sorry I don't recall at the moment (4am break from work :) what Minsky said about that. His last book was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emotion_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emotion_Machine (Incidentally, it's a huge loss that Minsky is no longer with us, but I'm glad I got a chance to at least take his class before he passed. Each session, he'd just talk about what he had been working on earlier that day, for The Emotion Machine. One of his PhD students, Push Singh (a great person, who tragically passed way too soon, after an injury), once told me a significant part of his studies was simply talking with Minsky, and Push thought that was pretty great. He also once mentioned that Minsky wanted 10-year grad students, when the norm in the lab was maybe 4-5. I suppose we can still be inspired by some of Minsky's scholarly practices and endless curiosity, as we can find and make the time.) Also, I'm sure others on HN know much more of the science and philosophy of natural beauty than the tidbits I do, and this seems like it could be a good "Ask HN". Maybe not just look at natural beauty, but also human beauty, and music? (An evolutionary basis for a sense of beauty of the human face and form seems too obvious. But maybe there are related simple evolutionary explanations for some of natural beauty, like attraction to advantageous settings and resources? Or maybe it's less obvious, like music?)
- idiotsecant 5y agoI don't think that is the same response - I think your dog is getting excited because you're signaling you want to play. If you pretend to put a treat under a cup and lift the cup to show no treat is present the dog won't be amused, they will be annoyed. I'm not sure dogs have a sense of humor in the same way primates do.
- mod 5y agoI don't think that would be humorous to a human, either. Intriguing perhaps, but then I expect most dogs would be intrigued as well.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoBut if you have two dogs, and one dog is contentedly chewing on a bone, and then you trick the other one - will the contented dog be amused?
- cbogie 5y agothat’s not really low stakes for a dog, or anyone hungry for that matter.
- mellosouls 5y agoI obviously don't know your relationship with dogs, but my initial reaction was that anybody who knows them well would disagree; not only do they have a sense of humour but they will also grin to show it. Admittedly, this is can be somewhat off-putting because the smile doesn't reach their eyes, so perhaps they are just mimicking us, but whatever it is they are indicating an understanding that a joke is intended, beyond normal happiness and play.
- Mordisquitos 5y agoOn the one hand, we cannot assume that animal expressions have any relation to similar expressions in humans. See for example how the misunderstanding of facial expressions between great apes and humans (in both directions) has often lead to violence, and they're our closest relatives. However, I have a pet* theory that the long evolutionary history of dogs with humans has little by little made their facial expressions converge towards reasonable approximations of human expressions. Which of the ancestors of modern dogs were more likely to survive in the company of humans: those whose expression looked human-happy when the dog was feeling a positive canine emotion? Or those whose expression looked human-happy when they were feeling aggressive, fearful, disappointed, etc? * No pun intended
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoYep. There are plenty of videos of non-human primates appearing to be amused by a trick or even the error of another. It's nice to see humor that can cross the boundaries of species.
- dragonwriter 5y agoYou describe (what might be) a perception of humor. But that’s not the same as a joke, which even defined broadly enough not to require language, is an deliberate act chosen to appeal to such a perception.
- lordnacho 5y agoBlowing raspberries on a baby is essentially a fart joke that they understand.
- onion2k 5y agoThat's a bit of a leap. They might enjoy the sensation, or the human contact, or the noise. Is there any reason to think they're making a cognitive connection between that and farting?
- goodcanadian 5y agoI, too, am sceptical of the raspberry-fart connection. However, both of my children would fart and then laugh when they were tiny infants, so I definitely believe that there is a near instinctual fart humour.
- dataviz1000 5y agoI've seen non speaking babies giggle and smile hearing a fart. I suspect fart jokes go back much farther than that. However, this article is about the oldest recorded joke.
- scrapcode 5y agoI just took a 300 level course on the psychology of humor that hit on a few theories of humor. What you describe with your doggo would fit mostly within the "incongruity theory," if you're interested in looking it up. Pretty fascinating stuff!
- sebastialonso 5y agowhere did you take the course?
- scrapcode 5y agoPark University, a small private uni in Parkville, Missouri.