> So why does humor exist? Because it’s our checksum on reality. Dan Dennett would call it "debugging" [1]. It is interesting to see that in our society we're

> So why does humor exist? Because it’s our checksum on reality. Dan Dennett would call it "debugging" [1]. It is interesting to see that in our society we're so inundated with humour that sometimes pointing at something mundane or downright horrible and calling it humour (or laughing at it) is enough to make it humorous indeed (meta-humorous? I don't like that prefix) [2]. But I think the analysis falls short here, because it forgoes addressing the subject of horror. Not repulsion [3], but horror. We entertain horror like we entertain humour. They're both triggered by novelty or breakage [4], they both seem to incite the same checksum/debugging attitude from the audience, they evoke passionate reactions... and yet we perceive them as absolutely opposite to each other. (One of these days I was being philosophical about why that might be — why humour and horror, while being so similar, are perceived as such opposites — and someone recommended to me a book called Biology of Horror which apparently sets off from that point. I haven't read it. Just passing along the recommendation.) > Thus, the reason why humor subjectively feels good is probably because when others laugh at your jokes it shows that they respect you as a person and agree with your ideas. There are studies [5] which indicate that humour even has a role in sexual selection, which to me feels like taking the points made in this article to the extreme. One might among other things measure social fitness in a potential partner by their shared sense of humour: that's amazing. [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_cute_sexy_sweet_funny.html http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_cute_sexy_sweet_funny.h... [2] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeadBabyComedy http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeadBabyComedy and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-joke http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-joke [3] Yours truly, elsewhere in this page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807137 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807137 [4] Concerning this "breakage" of "mental schemata", the law of leaky abstractions comes to mind: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm... [5] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-humor-gap http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-humor-g...