[pessimizer]

I take a view that is pretty close to my HN username. Comedy is about pointing out weakness, and laughing is a reflex that you have when you recognize prey. PC comedy is about self-deprecation, where you pretend to be prey yourself in order to stimulate the audiences hunting instinct, rather than telling stories about prey or picking members of the audience to make look like prey.

The humor is in the hyperbole about how weak the prey is. The setup of a joke sets people up as a familiar level of prey, and the punchline is about someone (or everyone) in the joke being far weaker than you could have predicted. The punchline in this joke is about Jimmy Carr being stupid in a way that you wouldn't imagine someone could actually be.

[ineptech]

This doesn't sound even a little right to me. That punchline is based on inversion of expectations, not self-deprecation. Certainly there seems to be some connection between laughter and an interrupted defense mechanism, but your version of it ("laughing is a reflex that you have when you recognize prey") doesn't make much sense. Why would we need a mechanism to avoid biting prey?

It would be much more plausibly viewed as a mechanism to avoid fighting rivals. As in: monkey A steals monkey B's banana, and monkey B bares his teeth to attack, but then, recognizing that monkey A is bigger and will kill him, monkey B evolves the behavior of laughing instead, as a way to dissipate the aggression and avoid a fight he will lose. Later, lower-status monkeys use humor as a way to gain status, because since laughter is equivalent to not-fighting, you can win or avoid a fight with a higher-status monkey by making him laugh.

That sounds a lot more believable, and it kinda-sorta comports with observation (e.g. it maps very neatly to medieval jesters getting away with making jokes about the King, or schoolyard bullying victims 'winning' if they can get the crowd laughing at the bully). But it's still a just-so story about evolutionary behavior, and by definition suspect as those are famously easy to gin up.

[pessimizer]

> That punchline is based on inversion of expectations, not self-deprecation.

The expectation is that Jimmy Carr is of normal intelligence and awareness. The joke that he is making is that he is not.

I don't buy the monkey story because laughing isn't generally defensive. If somebody attacks you and you laugh, they will attack you harder. To defend yourself with laughter, you point at a third-party and laugh, so maybe they'll think the third party is weaker than you.

[bluefirebrand]

> The expectation is that Jimmy Carr is of normal intelligence and awareness. The joke that he is making is that he is not.

I'm pretty sure the joke is that you aren't going to get much done in "a moment" of Cancer Research.

Not that he's too stupid to do the research. He could be the world's foremost expert on Cancer Research and the joke is still funny.

[ineptech]

You've misunderstood the monkey story. Laughter isn't the defense mechanism, it's the thing that interrupts the defense mechanism. The involuntary grin response doesn't happen when someone punches you, it happens when you feel attacked but also feel as if you can't react aggressively because of the social situation you're in.

Dissecting jokes is tedious and subjective but the sheer number of people disagreeing with you is telling. Jimmy Carr does a fair bit of self-deprecating humor but this one is pure "punchline subverts the expectation of the setup". It feels like you're working really hard to force this "woke=weak" thing in to a place where it doesn't remotely fit.

edit to add: and in cases where humor is aggressive or dismissive (e.g. jokes about gays, Polish people, blondes, etc) I think you'll find that "ingroup vs. outgroup" is a much better model than "predator vs. prey".

[jackblemming]

You’re welcome to your interpretation. You’re right because it’s your perspective and reality, but you should know, most people don’t think this way and it may have negative long term effects on your life and health.

[pessimizer]

That's condescending.

[jackblemming]

Do you have any suggestions on how to write it in a less condescending tone?

[hollasch]

That's a very good observation.

[bozhark]

and true

[pessimizer]

It's true that people on the internet can't have light conversations about the nature of comedy without larping as psychologists, diagnosing people over the internet as severely damaged for having an opinion that they disagree with. We should really be able to have grown-up conversations without attempting to disqualify each other.

[altruios]

This does not resonate with me. I think this is more indicative of your internal psychology than any psychology of humor.

It sounds to me like you think in terms of prey and predator as a default metaphor: which informs me of how I should handle you as an agent - carefully.

If you reduce everything to animalistic tendencies - you start reacting that way: then people start treating you that way based on your actions... self fulfilling prophecy.

You might want to update you mental model of comedy - or provide a significantly more cogent argument for your view, as it was far from convincing - and frankly worrisome.

All in all it sounds like you are telling us how you respond to people you perceive as prey... which is... concerning that you view ANY human as prey...

[pessimizer]

Every comment in this subthread is fucking weird. Stop making up a life for me in your head.

[noSyncCloud]

This seems rather reductive, honestly. What about anti-humor? That's still comedy. What about math jokes?

[pessimizer]

I don't know what anti-humor is, but I'm a big fan of Neil Hamburger. The joke is that he's a terrible comedian who also has a bad temper and a bad personal life.

[teddyh]

Some of the more ancient philosophers might agree with you, but most don’t.

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/355

[bluGill]

That is one type of humor, and it does get great laughs when done well. However it also backfire getting you run out of town.

Notice that most of the examples of humor in this discussion are not that type.

[pessimizer]

I'd argue that they all are. The target of every joke is someone painted as comically inept or weak. The only ways to subvert that is to aim it at yourself (which endears you to people), to aim it at the audience (which makes the audience feel that you are superior to them), or to aim it at the world in general (which makes you and the audience comrades against a stupid world.)

[skrebbel]

Who's the prey in a good pun?

[rrauenza]

Not sure who the prey is, but everyone is the victim. :)

[pessimizer]

Sorry, I laughed. I'm astounded by how much the British like puns as opposed to Americans. I've heard British audiences audibly gasp at the high quality of a pun, like it took their breaths away.

Reductively I'd say the prey is the audience in that case, for not being smart enough to see it coming. The best puns are heavily telegraphed yet somehow totally unpredictable. They're clever mirrorings of things everyone is already familiar with, but still didn't see coming.

[gattilorenz]

So… Prey tell?

Bad puns aside, there’s many theories in the scientific literature (from cognitive psychology, linguistics and AI) that describe the mechanisms of puns (and many other types of jokes, really), and they mostly talk about deviations from a script/subverting expectations and norms (Hanks’ theory of norms)/accessing a non-default interpretation that is different from the default one (Giora’s optimal innovation hypothesis).

For the interested reader, i suggest starting with Raskin https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110198492...

[pessimizer]

I don't think that unexpected things are necessarily funny. Unexpected stupidity or weakness is funny. Unexpected cancer isn't funny. To make it funny, you have to make someone stupid.

[gattilorenz]

As you could imagine, the theories have that as a core idea, but are more detailed than that. Nobody ever thought that unexpected = fun. Among other things, there’s different level of unexpected, something that bends the laws of physics (the cartoon character suspended in the air for a while before falling down) is more funny than, say, the character speaking japanese. To criticise a theory it might help to read it first…