# What is a "joke"? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 16, 2004, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486 "2004-05-16T21:59:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Scarf-Ace](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bc79bd/32.png) [@Scarf-Ace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scarf-Ace)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2004, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/1 "2004-05-16T21:59:09Z")
Also, what makes a joke funny? ---
**Author:** ![grimpixie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ecb155/32.png) [@grimpixie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/grimpixie)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2004, 7:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/2 "2004-05-17T07:09:21Z")
“True wit is nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” Alexander Pope ---
**Author:** ![j\_sum1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/8baadc/32.png) [@j\_sum1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/j_sum1)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2004, 11:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/3 "2004-05-17T11:49:04Z")
The juxtaposition of two normally disassociated thoughts. (My thoughts. At least now we have something to debate.) ---
**Author:** ![One\_And\_Only\_Wanderers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/838e76/32.png) [@One\_And\_Only\_Wanderers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/One_And_Only_Wanderers)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2004, 11:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/4 "2004-05-17T11:52:33Z")
For me to find a joke funny, there has to be an unexpected element involved. This is probably why the ‘Knock Knock’ variety of jokes seem to be funny to children, but not to adults, who know what answer to expect. YMMV ---
**Author:** ![Go\_You\_Big\_Red\_Fire\_Engine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/eada6e/32.png) [@Go\_You\_Big\_Red\_Fire\_Engine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Go_You_Big_Red_Fire_Engine)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2004, 11:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/5 "2004-05-17T11:59:22Z")
> [@One And Only Wanderers](#): > > For me to find a joke funny, there has to be an unexpected element involved. This is probably why the ‘Knock Knock’ variety of jokes seem to be funny to children, but not to adults, who know what answer to expect. > > YMMV Which is why I find this funny. "Two ducks are sitting in a bath, one sais to the other, “Can you pass me the soap?” and the other one sais, “What do I look like, a toaster?” ---
**Author:** ![citrus\_x\_paradisi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6f9a4e/32.png) [@citrus\_x\_paradisi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/citrus_x_paradisi)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2004, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/6 "2004-05-17T12:09:26Z")
I agree. I usually phrased humor as being our way of dismissing something unusual, and jokes as unusual situations created for our amusement. Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![raindog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2bfe46/32.png) [@raindog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/raindog)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2004, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/7 "2004-05-17T12:20:57Z")
One canibal says to another while eating a clown, “Does this taste funny to you?” ---
**Author:** ![Scarf-Ace](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bc79bd/32.png) [@Scarf-Ace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scarf-Ace)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2004, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/8 "2004-05-17T19:21:27Z")
I don’t have the first idea myself, but for the purposes of stimulating a better debate let me rephrase the OP to: What is the sense of humour, and how is it stimulated? ---
**Author:** ![Cornelius\_Tuggerson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/13edae/32.png) [@Cornelius\_Tuggerson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cornelius_Tuggerson)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2004, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/9 "2004-05-17T20:29:19Z")
Two tomatoes are sitting in a fridge Tomato1: “Damn its cold in here” Tomato2: “AAAAAHHHH Holy shit!!! :eek: A talking tomato” ---
**Author:** ![SSgtBaloo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ac91a4/32.png) [@SSgtBaloo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SSgtBaloo)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2004, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/10 "2004-05-17T21:41:52Z")
I recall seeing a show called “Baby Watching”, narrated by Desmond Morris. In it, he noted that a baby first laughs when its mother does something that, if it were done by anybody else, would be scary. However, this is mommy, so it’s “safe”. It’s scary but safe, two concepts that, up till now the child did not anticipate could go together. This kind of fits in with the “unexpected” element that most humor requires. Even slapstick must be exaggerated, or it isn’t funny. I’ve always thought that verbal (and written) humor relies on engaging the person being told the joke in a train of thought which, at the punchline, is derailed, but in a logical, if unexpected direction. Of course, given the duck/toaster joke above, perhaps this does not necessarily apply to everyone. Example:Two cannibals are sitting down to dinner. One of them heaves a big sigh. The other asks “What’s wrong?” The first says “Oh, I just can’t _stand_ my mother-in-law.” The second one says “So? Then just eat the vegetables.” [Note – this was probably a lot funnier when mother-in-law jokes were in vogue. I have enclosed the deconstruction in a spoiler box for those who insist that explaining a joke makes it less funny.] Except that the speakers are cannibals, the conversation up to the punch line is not unusual for people familiar with western cultures. This misdirects the listener’s thoughts away from the fact that he was just told that these are two cannibals having dinner. The punch-line is also a common saying we are used to hearing (at least in the english-speaking world), but definitely not in the context of the set-up. There is a momentary disconnect between the two phrases until you recall that the speakers are cannibals. Then the punchline makes sense, and you laugh (or chuckle, or tell the person who told you the joke it was in poor taste). –SSgtBaloo ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2004, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/11 "2004-05-18T04:51:36Z")
It is not just that “the element”, aka punchline, is unexpected, but that it forces a reorientation to all of the previous material (the set up) … that it fits the set up at least as well as how we had been interpreting it, maybe better. We are forced to reinterpret the meaning of what we had been perceiving as one thing in light of the new information (the punchline) and recognize that there is a different way of seeing it. A higher order figure ground reversal (you know when it switches from two faces to a vase and back). A sense of humor is that ability to parallel process in the background and to let those streams surface if they a find an unexpectedly good fit, and to turn the anxiety that such a surprise produces into laughter rather than upset. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2004, 4:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/12 "2004-05-18T04:52:42Z")
A related example: A missionary sojourning in darkest Africa is captured by a local tribe. Next thing he knows, he’s tied up and plunked in a big iron cauldron of water. He’s sure he’s done for, but then he sees one of the tribesmen – fatter and better ornamented than the rest, obviously the chief – kneeling by the pot, head bowed and hands clapses. Seeing a ray of hope, he asks: “Pardon me, brother, but are you, by chance, a Christian?” The chief looks up and snaps, “I certainly am! And please don’t interrupt me while I’m saying grace!” ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2004, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/13 "2004-05-18T05:33:28Z")
From George Orwell’s essay, “The Art of Donald McGill,”\* published in _Horizon,_ September 1941: > [@](#): > > What they [McGill’s postcards] are doing is to give expression to the Sancho Panza view of life, the attitude to life that Miss Rebecca West once summed up as “extracting as much fun as possible from smacking behinds in basement kitchens”. The Don Quixote-Sancho Panza combination, which of course is the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form, recurs more frequently in the literature of the last four hundred years than can be explained by mere imitation. It comes up again and again, in endless variations, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus, Holmes and Watson (the Holmes-Watson variant is an exceptionally subtle one, because the usual physical characteristics of two partners have been transposed). Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our civilisation, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a “pure” state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in nearly every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with “voluptuous” figures. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth. Whether you allow yourself to be influenced by him is a different question. But it is simply a lie to say he is not part of you, just as it is a lie to say that Don Quixote is not part of you either, though most of what is said and written consists of one lie or the other, usually the first. > > But though in varying forms he is one of the stock figures of literature, in real life, especially in the way society is ordered, his point of view never gets a fair hearing. There is a constant world-wide conspiracy to pretend that he is not there, or at least that he doesn’t matter. Codes of laws and morals, or religious systems, never have much room in them for a humorous view of life. **Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of jokes centre round obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival, have to insist on a fairly high standard of sexual morality. A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.** So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage. Society always has to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. It has to demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assumE that men think it glorious to die on the battlefield and women want to wear themselves out with child-bearing. The whole of what one may call official literature is founded on such assumptions. I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of feuhrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, national anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal. Nevertheless the high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash. It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally. \*This was an essay on comical cartoon postcards that at the time were offered for sale in some British newsstands. I’ve never seen one of these postcards, but, based on Orwell’s vivid descriptions, they were very similar in tone to the humor of _The Benny Hill Show,_ except that Benny Hill touched on subjects McGill never would, such as adultery and homosexuality. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2004, 8:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/14 "2004-05-18T08:10:47Z")
I think the thing that makes _some_ jokes funny is similar to the thing that makes a good story; the audience is led along a familiar and comfortable train of thought, then, some aspect of an element is revealed that causes them to look around and discover that not only are they suddenly in an unfamiliar place, but that the familiarity and comfort on the journey to this place was actually a delusion. I suppose this could be called a plot twist, but not all plot twists are this good - some of them just consist of surprising people a new and unexpected element that they could not possibly have anticipated and that wasn’t even hinted at, but a _good_ one would be one of those things that is blindingly obvious in retrospect because it had been built up all along. ---
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2004, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/15 "2004-05-18T08:16:20Z")
(From memory as I can’t find the script online). In a ‘joke masterclass’ sketch by Fry and Laurie, a joke is defined as: "1. Logic gone awry. 2. A blurring or slipping of moral categories. “On your balls, Hugh, beckon the audience… and tongue the joke in.” - “I won’t say it was a small town… but the speed limit signs were back to back!” ---
**Author:** ![SSgtBaloo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ac91a4/32.png) [@SSgtBaloo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SSgtBaloo)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2004, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/16 "2004-05-19T02:11:47Z")
> [@jjimm](#): > > “I won’t say it was a small town… but the speed limit signs were back to back!” Er… Hmmm… I believe that should be “_city limits signs_”. (JMO). ---
**Author:** ![sleeping](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/839c29/32.png) [@sleeping](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sleeping)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2004, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/17 "2004-05-19T03:58:22Z")
> [@Meta-Gumble](#): > > What is the sense of humour, and how is it stimulated? From [here](http://www.solohq.com/Articles/Madden/Humor_Against_the_State.shtml): > [@](#): > > “Humor is the denial of metaphysical importance to that which you laugh at… Therefore, humor is a destructive element - which is quite all right, but its value and its morality depend on what it is that you are laughing at. If what you are laughing at is the evil in the world (provided that you take it seriously, but occasionally you permit yourself to laugh at it), that’s fine.” (Ayn Rand, quoted in The Ayn Rand Lexicon, p. 207.) > [@](#): > > “Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice.” (Rand, “Bootleg Romanticism,” in The Romantic Manifesto, p. 133.) ---
**Author:** ![Scarf-Ace](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bc79bd/32.png) [@Scarf-Ace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scarf-Ace)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2004, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/18 "2004-05-19T15:22:15Z")
I’m none the wiser for reading any of that… IMHO something can be totally expected and still be funny, consider slapstick for example. You see the manhole, the guy reading the paper, but its still funny. Why? Who knows? A lot of jokes I think, are concerned with expressing truth in an absurd way as in jjimm’s example: “I won’t say it was a small town… but the speed limit signs were back to back!”. There you have the truth, and the absurdity that points to the truth. But IMHO, there are many different types of joke, things that can make us laugh, but they don’t seem to have any common element at all. ---
**Author:** ![dalovindj](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/65b543/32.png) [@dalovindj](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dalovindj)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2004, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/19 "2004-05-19T15:52:25Z")
> [@](#): > > Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. > **~ E. B. White** Q. What do you call a hooker with no eyes? A. Blind date. DaLovin’ Dj ---
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2004, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486/20 "2004-05-19T15:54:54Z")
> [@SSgtBaloo](#): > > Er… Hmmm… I believe that should be “_city limits signs_”. (JMO). Nope, it’s definitely speed limit signs in the original sketch. We don’t call towns ‘cities’ in England. And they tend to have speed limit signs on the entrance and exit to the town. It’s an utterly shit joke too, though, so improving it would be gilding the turd, rather. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-a-joke/245486.md?page=2)