Joke Totally Explained

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A joke is a short story or ironic depiction of a situation communicated with the intent of being humorous. These jokes will normally have a punch line that will end the sentence to make it humorous. A joke can also be a single phrase or statement that employs sarcasm. The word joke can also be used as a slang term for a person or thing which isn't taken seriously by others in general or is known as being a failure. A practical joke or prank differs from a spoken one in that the major component of the humour is physical rather than verbal (for example placing salt in the sugar bowl).
Jokes are typically for the entertainment of friends and onlookers. The desired response is generally laughter; when this doesn't happen the joke is said to have "fallen flat".

Anthropology of jokes

In 1975 anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that "Joking as one mode of expression has yet to be interpreted in its total relation to other modes of expression"; scholar Seth Graham remarked that 30 years later this statement remains largely valid.

Psychology of jokes

Why we laugh has been the subject of serious academic study, examples being:

Immanuel Kant, in Critique of Judgement (1790) states that "Laughter is an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing." Here is Kant's 218-year old joke and his analysis:

"An Englishman at an Indian's table in Surat saw a bottle of ale being opened, and all the beer, turned to froth, rushed out. The Indian, by repeated exclamations, showed his great amazement. - Well, what's so amazing in that? asked the Englishman. - Oh, but I'm not amazed at its coming out, replied the Indian, but how you managed to get it all in. - This makes us laugh, and it gives us a hearty pleasure. This isn't because, say, we think we're smarter than this ignorant man, nor are we laughing at anything else here that it's our liking and that we noticed through our understanding. It is rather that we'd a tense expectation that suddenly vanished..."
Henri Bergson, in his book Le rire (Laughter, 1901), suggests that laughter evolved to make social life possible for human beings.
Sigmund Freud's "Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious". (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten).
Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation (1964), analyses humour and compares it to other creative activities, such as literature and science.
Marvin Minsky in Society of Mind (1986). ť Marvin Minsky suggests that laughter has a specific function related to the human brain. In his opinion jokes and laughter are mechanisms for the brain to learn nonsense. For that reason, he argues, jokes are usually not as funny when you hear them repeatedly.
Edward de Bono in "The Mechanism of the Mind" (1969) and "I am Right, You are Wrong" (1990). ť Edward de Bono suggests that the mind is a pattern-matching machine, and that it works by recognizing stories and behaviour and putting them into familiar patterns. When a familiar connection is disrupted and an alternative unexpected new link is made in the brain via a different route than expected, then laughter occurs as the new connection is made. This theory explains a lot about jokes. For example:

*Why jokes are only funny the first time they're told: once they're told the pattern is already there, so there can be no new connections, and so no laughter. ť *Why jokes have an elaborate and often repetitive set up: The repetition establishes the familiar pattern in the brain. A common method used in jokes is to tell almost the same story twice and then deliver the punch line the third time the story is told. The first two tellings of the story evoke a familiar pattern in the brain, thus priming the brain for the punch line.

*Why jokes often rely on stereotypes: the use of a stereotype links to familiar expected behaviour, thus saving time in the set-up. ť *Why jokes are variants on well-known stories (eg the genie and a lamp and a man walks into a bar): This again saves time in the set up and establishes a familiar pattern.
In 2002, Richard Wiseman conducted a study intended to discover the world's funniest joke (External Link).
Humour and Jokes have also been concluded to be logic that's completely random or vice versa.

Laughter, the intended human reaction to jokes, is healthy in moderation, uses the stomach muscles, and releases endorphins, natural "feel good" chemicals, into the brain.

Rules

The rules of humour are analogous to those of poetry. These common rules are mainly precision, synthesis and rhythm. French philosopher Henri Bergson has said in an essay: "In every wit there's something of a poet." In this essay Bergson views the essence of humour as the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living. He used as an instance a book by an English humourist, in which an elderly woman who desired a reputation as a philanthropist provided "homes within easy hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of their failing, etc." This idea seems funny because a genuine impulse of charity as a living, vital impulse has become encrusted by a mechanical conception of how it should manifest itself.

Precision

To reach precision, the comedian must choose the words in order to provide a vivid, in focus image, and to avoid being generic as to confuse the audience, and provide no laughter. To properly arrange the words in the sentence is also crucial to get precision. An example by Woody Allen (from Side Effects, "A Giant Step for Mankind" story (External Link

)):
Synthesis As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, "Brevity is the soul of wit". Meaning that a joke is best when it expresses the maximum level of humour with a minimal number of words; this is today considered one of the key technical elements of a joke. An example from Woody Allen:
Though, the familiarity of the pattern of "brevity" has led to numerous examples of jokes where the very length is itself the pattern breaking "punchline". Numerous examples from Monty Python exist, for instance, the song "I Like Traffic Lights", and more modernly, Family Guy contains numerous such examples, most notably, in the episode Wasted Talent, Peter Griffin bangs his shin, a classic slapstick routine, and tenderly nurses it whilst inhaling and exhaling to quiet the pain. This goes on for considerably longer than expected. Certain versions of the popular vaudevillian joke The Aristocrats can go on for several minutes, and it's considered an anti-joke, as the humor is more in the set-up than the punchline.

Rhythm

The joke's content (meaning) isn't what provokes the laugh, it just makes the salience of the joke and provokes a smile. What makes us laugh is the joke mechanism. Milton Berle demonstrated this with a classic theater experiment in the 1950s: if during a series of jokes you insert phrases that are not jokes, but with the same rhythm, the audience laughs anyway. A classic is the ternary rhythm, with three beats: introduction, premise, antithesis (with the antithesis being the punch line).
In regards to the Milton Berle experiment, they can be taken to demonstrate the concept of "breaking context" or "breaking the pattern". It isn't necessarily the rhythm that caused the audience to laugh, but the disparity between the expectation of a "joke" and being instead given a non-sequitur "normal phrase." This normal phrase is, itself, unexpected, and a type of punchline.

Conclusions

When a technically good joke is referred changing it with paraphrasing, it isn't laughable any more; this is because the paraphrase, changing some term or moving it within the sentence, breaks the joke mechanism (its vividness, brevity and rhythm), and its power and effectiveness are lost. Douglas Adams described sentences where the joke word is the final word as "comically weighted." This saves the "payoff" until the last possible moment, allowing the expectation for surprise to reach its highest point, while the mind is more firmly rooted in the pattern established by the rest of the sentence.

Comic

In the comic field plays the 'economy of ideative expenditure'; in other words excessive energy is wasted or action-essential energy is saved. The profound meaning of a comic gag or a comic joke is "I'm a child"; the comic deals with the clumsy body of the child. Laurel and Hardy are a classic example. An individual laughs because he recognizes the child that's in himself. In clowns stumbling is a childish tempo. In the comic, the visual gags may be translated into a joke. For example in Side Effects (By Destiny Denied story) by Woody Allen:
The typical comic technique is the disproportion.

Wit

In the wit field plays the "economy of censorship expenditure"(Freud literally calls it "the economy of psychic expenditure".); usually censorship prevents some 'dangerous ideas' from reaching the conscious mind, or helps us avoid saying everything that comes to mind; adversely, the wit circumvents the censorship and brings up those ideas. Different wit techniques allow one to express them in a funny way. The profound meaning behind a wit joke is "I have dangerous ideas". An example from Woody Allen:
Or, when a bagpipe player was asked "How do you play that thing?" his answer was:
Wit is a branch of rhetoric, and there are about 200 techniques (technically they're called tropes, a particular kind of figure of speech) that can be used to make jokes. Irony can be seen as belonging to this field.

Humour

In the comedy field, humour induces an "economized expenditure of emotion" (Freud literally calls it "economy of affect" or "economy of sympathy". Freud produced this final part of his interpretation many years later, in a paper later supplemented to the book.). In other words, the joke erases an emotion that should be felt about an event, making us insensitive to it.e.g: "yo momma" jokes. The profound meaning of the void feeling of a humour joke is "I'm a cynic". An example from Woody Allen:
This field of jokes is still a grey area, being mostly unexplored. Extensive use of this kind of humour can be found in the work of British satirist Chris Morris, like the sketches of the Jam television program. Black humour and sarcasm belong to this field.

Cycles

Folklorists, in particular (but not exclusively) those who study the folklore of the United States, collect jokes into joke cycles. A cycle is a collection of jokes with a particular theme or a particular "script". (That is, it's a literature cycle.) Folklorists have identified several such cycles:

the elephant joke cycle that began in 1962

the Helen Keller Joke Cycle that comprises jokes about Helen Keller

viola jokes

the NASA, Challenger, or Space Shuttle Joke Cycle that comprises jokes relating to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster

the Chernobyl Joke Cycle that comprises jokes relating to the Chernobyl disaster

the Polish Pope Joke Cycle that comprises jokes relating to Pope John Paul II

the Essex girl and the Stupid Irish joke cycles in the United Kingdom

the Dead Baby Joke Cycle

the Newfie Joke Cycle that comprises jokes made by Canadians about Newfoundlanders

the Little Willie Joke Cycle, and the Quadriplegic Joke Cycle

the Jew Joke Cycle and the Polack Joke Cycle

the Rastus and Liza Joke Cycle, which Dundes describes as "the most vicious and widespread white anti-Negro joke cycle"

the Jewish American Princess and Jewish American Mother joke cycles

the Wind-Up Doll Joke Cycle

Chuck Norris jokes

Tom Swifties Gruner discusses several "sick joke" cycles that occurred upon events surrounding Gary Hart, Natalie Wood, Vic Morrow, Jim Bakker, Richard Pryor, and Michael Jackson, noting how several jokes were recycled from one cycle to the next. For example: A joke about Vic Morrow ("We now know that Vic Morrow had dandruff: they found his head and shoulders in the bushes") was subsequently recycled about Admiral Mountbatten after his murder by Irish Republican terrorists in 1980, and again applied to the crew of the Challenger space shuttle ("How do we know that Christa McAuliffe had dandruff? They found her head and shoulders on the beach.").
Berger asserts that "whenever there's a popular joke cycle, there generally is some widespread kind of social and cultural anxiety, lingering below the surface, that the joke cycle helps people deal with".

Types of jokes

Jokes often depend on the humour of the unexpected, the mildly taboo (which can include the distasteful or socially improper), or playing off stereotypes and other cultural beliefs. Many jokes fit into more than one category.

Subjects

Political jokes are usually a form of satire. They generally concern politicians and heads of state, but may also cover the absurdities of a country's political situation. A prominent example of political jokes would be political cartoons. Two large categories of this type of jokes exist. The first one makes fun of a negative attitude to political opponents or to politicians in general. The second one makes fun of political clichés, mottos, catch phrases or simply blunders of politicians. Some, especially the you have two cows genre, derive humour from comparing different political systems. Professional humour includes caricatured portrayals of certain professions such as lawyers, and in-jokes told by professionals to each other. Mathematical jokes are a form of in-joke, generally designed to be understandable only by insiders. Ethnic jokes exploit ethnic stereotypes. They are often racist and frequently considered offensive.
   For example, the British tell jokes starting "An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman..." which exploit the supposed parsimony of the Scot, stupidity of the Irish, or some combination. Such jokes exist among numerous peoples.
   Racially offensive humour is increasingly unacceptable, but there are similar jokes based on other stereotypes such as blonde jokes.
   Religious jokes fall into several categories:

Jokes based on stereotypes associated with people of religion (for example nun jokes, priest jokes, or rabbi jokes)

Jokes on classical religious subjects: crucifixion, Adam and Eve, St. Peter at The Gates, etc.

Jokes that collide different religious denominations: "A rabbi, a medicine man, and a pastor went fishing..."

Letters and addresses to God. Self-deprecating or self-effacing humour is superficially similar to racial and stereotype jokes, but involves the targets laughing at themselves. It is said to maintain a sense of perspective and to be powerful in defusing confrontations. Probably the best-known and most common example is Jewish humour. The egalitarian tradition was strong among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe in which the powerful were often mocked subtly. Prominent members of the community were kidded during social gatherings, part a good-natured tradition of humour as a leveling device. A similar situation exists in the Scandinavian "Ole and Lena" joke.
   Self-deprecating humour has also been used by politicians, who recognize its ability to acknowledge controversial issues and steal the punch of criticism - for example, when Abraham Lincoln was accused of being two-faced he replied, "If I'd two faces, do you think this is the one I’d be wearing?". Dirty jokes are based on taboo, often sexual, content or vocabulary.
   Other taboos are challenged by sick jokes and gallows humour; to joke about disability is considered in this group.
   Surrealist or minimalist jokes exploit semantic inconsistency, for example: Q: What's red and invisible? A: No tomatoes.. Anti-jokes are jokes that are not funny in regular sense, and often can be decidedly unfunny, but rely on the let-down from the expected joke to be funny in itself.
An elephant joke is a joke, almost always a riddle or conundrum and often a sequence of connected riddles, that involves an elephant.
   Jokes involving non-sequitur humour, with parts of the joke being unrelated to each other; for example "My uncle once punched a man so hard his legs became trombones", from the Mighty Boosh TV series.

Styles

The question / answer joke, sometimes posed as a common riddle, has a supposedly straight question and an answer which is twisted for humorous effect; puns are often employed. Of this type are knock-knock joke, light bulb joke, the many variations on "why did the chicken cross the road?", and the class of "What's the difference between..." joke, where the punch line is often a pun or a spoonerism linking two apparently entirely unconnected concepts.
Some jokes require a double act, where one respondent (usually the straight man) can be relied on to give the correct response to the person telling the joke. This is more common in performance than informal joke-telling.
A shaggy dog story is an extremely long and involved joke with an intentionally weak or completely non-existent punchline. The humour lies in building up the audience's anticipation and then letting them down completely. The longer the story can continue without the audience realising it's a joke, and not a serious anecdote, the more successful it is. Shaggy jokes appear to date from the 1930s, although there are several competing variants for the "original" shaggy dog story. According to one, an advertisement is placed in a newspaper, searching for the shaggiest dog in the world. The teller of the joke then relates the story of the search for the shaggiest dog in extreme and exaggerated detail (flying around the world, climbing mountains, fending off sabre-toothed tigers, etc); a good teller will be able to stretch the story out to over half an hour. When the winning dog is finally presented, the advertiser takes a look at the dog and states: "I don't think he's so shaggy."

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