[yboris]

One of my favorite books is Inside Jokes Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind.

The gist is that humor is the "joy of debugging". Our brains are inference machines and make a lot of conclusions that might eventually end up being incorrect. If we didn't have a joy-bringing mechanism in our brains to clean up the erroneous cruft we would less-likely perform this important maintenance.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inside-jokes