ISBN: 0262303558 9780262303552

Category: FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS

Page count: 374

<b>An evolutionary and cognitive account of the addictive mind candy that is humor.</b> <p>Some things are funny--jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, <i>The Far Side</i>, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed--but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching <i>The Simpsons</i>? In <i>Inside Jokes</i>, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature--aka natural selection--cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.</p>