[HPsquared]

Of course, animals are conscious and enjoy things and feel pain too. Just less intelligent and with less language ability than humans. Chimps and dogs certainly understand humour. I wouldn't be surprised if elephants do too, being social creatures.

[thanksgiving]

I think it is also important to note here that apparently not all humans understand humor either or understand it differently or something.

[roenxi]

Humour often involves saying something that isn't true (why don't ants catch colds? Because of they have anty bodies - great joke but not true on a number of levels). A surprising number of humans don't have the mental cycles available to consider counterfactuals, hypotheticals or entertain ideas that aren't directly rooted in reality. I suspect that means they can't process humour and they just laugh if the crowd is.

It goes beyond humour, you can see it in a lot of scenarios and it ruins politics. There are people who appear literally unable to consider hypothetical scenarios. Not in a nasty way, they're sometimes wonderful people to have on hand. They simply only deal in reality as they see it. You can walk them slowly through a "and what if ... happens?" and they can't do it.

[bongodongobob]

I once dated someone who couldn't consider hypotheticals or how they could be used as a reasoning tool. Disagreements were the most frustrating thing ever because I couldn't play devils advocate or steelman. She thought I was agreeing with her intermittently to make her mad. She had no concept of walking in someone else's shoes or arguing a position you don't actually hold. It blew my mind.

[hackable_sand]

So you were playing games with her instead of developing a solution together?

Yeah. I don't blame her for getting mad.

[bongodongobob]

No, I was trying to explain things. It was difficult to get to solutions because I couldn't get her to see different points of view.

[hackable_sand]

Experience gained, I suppose.

[berkes]

(Human) Humor is a far broader spectrum than you describe here too. It can range from "ROFTL because someone accidentally stepped in poop" to deeply layered liguistic jokes like you describe.

[leftbit]

One aspect of humor depends on cognitive flexibility. Puns work that way.

So if you're not able to make the right mental context switch at the right moment, you won't get the joke.

[berkes]

> One aspect of humor depends on cognitive flexibility

All humor? (Honest question)

I was under the presumption that e.g. slapstick or schadenfreude humor doesn't need linguistics, and is therefore seen in many animals. Animals that don't have any form of language but do have rather intricate social systems or even ranks and caste systems. but do have humor. E.g. where breaking or pushing those systems is the humor.

E.g. "boss gorilla slips on a banana peel haha".

[socksy]

Just because you don’t understand the Germans’ humour doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist ;)

[leftbit]

It's difficult to reason about intelligence in this context.

Human intelligence is defined by behavior we humans value. Intelligence tests are geared to measuring these aspects.

Intelligence tests devised by animals would look totally different - and it's quite thinkable humans wouldn't do too well taking them.

Wouldn't assume that animals have less language ability than we humans, unless we totally figured out what other species are really talking about. Unless we do this is just an assumption.