hypothesis jokes

Hypothesis Puns

A list of puns related to "Hypothesis"

He called me an oxymoron.

He won't stop referring to him as Eye-Stick Newton.

This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.

Joke by Terry Pratchett, ‘The Colour of Magic’, Prologue.

A new postman on a route sees that in outgoing mail are several letters he delivered a day before. He thinks it's odd and redelivers them to the right mail boxes. Next day he sees the same letters again and he gets curious and sees that they all were addressed to same street. He redelivers them again to the right mailboxes. Same thing happens on the third day, so he thinks hard and formulates a hypothesis. He wants to confirm it, so he decides to stop his route delivery and wait there rest of the day.

Around 7 pm, he sees 4 men come to the mailbox, take their letters and put them back into the outgoing bin. The postman runs over to them and asks "hey, you guys use Reddit?" - they say "yeah, how did you know?", The postman says "all that reposting is pissing me off guys"

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Statistics Jokes

Well, we've got favourite statistics quotes. What about statistics jokes?

10 $\begingroup$ I made this community wiki as there is no correct answer. $\endgroup$ – Rob Hyndman Commented Aug 6, 2010 at 2:44
6 $\begingroup$ It probably makes sense to leave cartoons in this question: stats.stackexchange.com/questions/423/… $\endgroup$ – Jeromy Anglim Commented Aug 8, 2010 at 11:49
39 $\begingroup$ This is a popular and much-loved thread, even though it does not (on the face of it) seem to conform to SE standards for content. (Just what practical question is being asked here? :-) Some rules benefit from being ... bent ... once in a while. However, please don't use the existence of this thread to justify creating new ones that fall outside our guidelines unless you think there is a very good reason to do so! Questions about site policy are always appropriate in Meta and debate is warmly welcomed in chat . $\endgroup$ – whuber ♦ Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 15:34

80 Answers 80

A guy is flying in a hot air balloon and he's lost. So he lowers himself over a field and shouts to a guy on the ground:

"Can you tell me where I am, and which way I'm headed?" "Sure! You're at 43 degrees, 12 minutes, 21.2 seconds north; 123 degrees, 8 minutes, 12.8 seconds west. You're at 212 meters above sea level. Right now, you're hovering, but on your way in here you were at a speed of 1.83 meters per second at 1.929 radians"

"Thanks! By the way, are you a statistician?" "I am! But how did you know?"

"Everything you've told me is completely accurate; you gave me more detail than I needed, and you told me in such a way that it's no use to me at all!"

"Dang! By the way, are you a principal investigator?"

"Geeze! How'd you know that????"

"You don't know where you are, you don't know where you're going. You got where you are by blowing hot air, you start asking questions after you get into trouble, and you're in exactly the same spot you were a few minutes ago, but now, somehow, it's my fault!

11 $\begingroup$ Love this one!! $\endgroup$ – Adhesh Josh Commented Nov 22, 2011 at 7:47
12 $\begingroup$ This is hilarious and true $\endgroup$ – Macro Commented Jul 6, 2012 at 14:22
11 $\begingroup$ Hilarious. I wonder what the PI and Statistician are doing in in Roseburg, Oregon? ;-) $\endgroup$ – StatsStudent Commented Jan 24, 2019 at 18:27

A statistician's wife had twins. He was delighted. He rang the minister who was also delighted. "Bring them to church on Sunday and we'll baptize them," said the minister. "No," replied the statistician. "Baptize one. We'll keep the other as a control."

STATS: The Magazine For Students of Statistics, Winter 1996, Number 15

10 $\begingroup$ I do not have enough reputation to downvote this! $\endgroup$ – Ηλίας Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 17:41
4 $\begingroup$ @Ηλίας you have enough now $\endgroup$ – Fermat's Little Student Commented May 29, 2018 at 22:20

I saw this posted as a comment on here somewhere:

http://xkcd.com/552/

A: I used to think correlation implied causation. Then I took a statistics class. Now I don't.

B: Sounds like the class helped.

A: Well, maybe.

Title text: Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

George Burns said that "If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age."

68 $\begingroup$ I remember seeing George Burns on TV being interviewed on his 100th birthday. He was puffing on a cigar. The interviewer made some comment about the incongruity of longevity and smoking. George Burns: "Twenty years ago my doctor told me that these cigars were going to kill me" Interviewer: "What does he say now?" George Burns: "I don't know. He's dead" $\endgroup$ – Thylacoleo Commented Aug 7, 2010 at 9:17

Two statisticians were traveling in an airplane from LA to New York. About an hour into the flight, the pilot announced that they had lost an engine, but don’t worry, there are three left. However, instead of 5 hours it would take 7 hours to get to New York.

A little later, he announced that a second engine failed, and they still had two left, but it would take 10 hours to get to New York.

Somewhat later, the pilot again came on the intercom and announced that a third engine had died. Never fear, he announced, because the plane could fly on a single engine. However, it would now take 18 hours to get to New York.

At this point, one statistician turned to the other and said, “Gee, I hope we don’t lose that last engine, or we’ll be up here forever!”

1 $\begingroup$ I think originaly taken from Yihui XIE's Statistics Jokes Slides ( yihui.name/en/attachment.php?f=attachment/jokes_yihui.pdf ) $\endgroup$ – PaulHurleyuk Commented Aug 6, 2010 at 9:57
10 $\begingroup$ that link is broken now; please use yihui.name/en/2007/10/… thanks! $\endgroup$ – Yihui Xie Commented May 28, 2013 at 5:40
$\begingroup$ I don't quite understand. $\endgroup$ – SmallChess Commented Feb 11, 2017 at 18:30
5 $\begingroup$ @SmallChess The statistician is naively extrapolating from previous observations that the number of engines is negatively associated with flight time. In reality, zero engines would quickly leading a crash. $\endgroup$ – Kodiologist Commented Oct 5, 2017 at 23:18
$\begingroup$ @Kodiologist The one statistician who thought the airplane would stay up in the air forever was a Bayesian scholar. His colleague statistician, a well-known frequentist, answered him saying$-$We actually do not know if the airplane will stay in the air or not. $\endgroup$ – Carl Commented Mar 8, 2018 at 6:19

One passed by Gary Ramseyer:

Statistics play an important role in genetics. For instance, statistics prove that numbers of offspring is an inherited trait. If your parent didn't have any kids, odds are you won't either.

9 $\begingroup$ I'd bet on that. $\endgroup$ – naught101 Commented May 2, 2012 at 0:14

From the CMU protest at G20 :

There are other pictures from the protest as well.

11 $\begingroup$ I liked "Map reduce, map reuse, map recycle". $\endgroup$ – Ogaday Commented Mar 9, 2016 at 16:51

Statistics may be dull, but it has its moments.

2 $\begingroup$ hahaha... so simple. Me likey. $\endgroup$ – Patrick Coulombe Commented Aug 29, 2014 at 4:21
3 $\begingroup$ Says a statistican to his friend: "counting on me is pure frequentism". $\endgroup$ – Gottfried Helms Commented Aug 29, 2014 at 5:57

A statistics major was completely hung over the day of his final exam. It was a true/false test, so he decided to flip a coin for the answers. The statistics professor watched the student the entire two hours as he was flipping the coin … writing the answer … flipping the coin … writing the answer. At the end of the two hours, everyone else had left the final except for the one student. The professor walks up to his desk and interrupts the student, saying, “Listen, I have seen that you did not study for this statistics test, you didn’t even open the exam. If you are just flipping a coin for your answer, what is taking you so long?” The student replies bitterly (as he is still flipping the coin), “Shhh! I am checking my answers!”

I've posted a few others on my blog .

A mathematician, a physicist and a statistician went hunting for deer. When they chanced upon one buck lounging about, the mathematician fired first, missing the buck's nose by a few inches. The physicist then tried his hand, and missed the tail by a wee bit. The statistician started jumping up and down saying "We got him! We got him!"

$\begingroup$ It amuses me how it is the statistician that doesn't understand statistics in this joke. $\endgroup$ – Galen Commented Dec 2, 2023 at 0:06

"If you torture data enough it will confess" one of my professors

22 $\begingroup$ Was his name Ronald Coase? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#Quotes $\endgroup$ – onestop Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 20:26

A statistician confidently tried to cross a river that was 1 meter deep on average. He drowned.

15 $\begingroup$ He should have measured the standard deviation. $\endgroup$ – Chthonic Project Commented Jul 3, 2013 at 16:02
46 $\begingroup$ Sounds more like a science journalist to me... $\endgroup$ – Nick Stauner Commented Feb 20, 2014 at 1:23

Yo momma is so mean, she has no standard deviation!

I once asked out a statistician.

She failed to reject me.

If you choose an answer to this question at random, what is the chance you will be correct?

(was published on ANZSTAT mailing list a couple of days ago).

6 $\begingroup$ And it soon got protected on math.SE, Does this question even have an answer? :) $\endgroup$ – chl Commented Nov 2, 2011 at 8:25
7 $\begingroup$ To every simple question there is a simple answer. And it's wrong. $\endgroup$ – zbicyclist Commented Nov 4, 2011 at 4:19
$\begingroup$ @StasK This is brilliant! $\endgroup$ – Graeme Walsh no longer here Commented Jun 19, 2013 at 3:32
3 $\begingroup$ This was subsequently discussed here at stats.stackexchange.com/questions/30325/… . $\endgroup$ – whuber ♦ Commented Jul 24, 2013 at 21:41
3 $\begingroup$ This is easy. The answer is 0. Now, if you replace C) with 0 then you have a real paradox. $\endgroup$ – Bridgeburners Commented Mar 8, 2018 at 19:00

This is actually a quote that (unintendedly) happens to be a joke:

" Every American should have above average income, and my Administration is going to see they get it. " (Bill Clinton on campaign trail)

14 $\begingroup$ Based on Google, this quote sure looks apocryphal. $\endgroup$ – David Robinson Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 16:18
2 $\begingroup$ I'm pretty sure British politicians occasionally fall into this trap, but, alas, I can find no link to back it up $\endgroup$ – Chris Beeley Commented Jun 28, 2013 at 19:16
19 $\begingroup$ One way to make this come to pass is to fine one individual ten trillion dollars. $\endgroup$ – whuber ♦ Commented Jul 24, 2013 at 21:40
$\begingroup$ Related: stats.stackexchange.com/questions/535731/… $\endgroup$ – Galen Commented Jul 26, 2021 at 23:29

Why are open source statistical programming languages the best?

Because they R.

I thought I'd start the ball rolling with my favourite.

"Being a statistician means never having to say you are certain."

13 $\begingroup$ That is certainly true! $\endgroup$ – Tal Galili Commented Aug 6, 2010 at 18:30
3 $\begingroup$ My mom in law said to me that this is based on the line "being in love means you never need to say you are sorry". From a book called "love story" by arik sigall (I think). $\endgroup$ – Tal Galili Commented Aug 6, 2010 at 18:33
1 $\begingroup$ @Tal Galili: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… . (My favorite is the line from What's Up, Doc? ) $\endgroup$ – mmyers Commented Aug 11, 2010 at 19:23
1 $\begingroup$ Unless you're a degenerate! $\endgroup$ – Galen Commented Jul 26, 2021 at 23:30

One day there was a fire in a wastebasket in the office of the Dean of Sciences. In rushed a physicist, a chemist, and a statistician. The physicist immediately starts to work on how much energy would have to be removed from the fire to stop the combustion. The chemist works on which reagent would have to be added to the fire to prevent oxidation. While they are doing this, the statistician is setting fires to all the other wastebaskets in the office. "What are you doing?" the others demand. The statistician replies, "Well, to solve the problem, you obviously need a larger sample size."

Quoted by Steve Simon, www.pmean.com, and attributed to Gary C. Ramseyer's First Internet Gallery of Statistics Jokes at www.ilstu.edu/~gcramsey/Gallery.html.

67% of statistics are made up.

3 $\begingroup$ Is this statistics also made up? ;) $\endgroup$ – Blain Waan Commented Oct 23, 2012 at 19:26
4 $\begingroup$ Related: dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08 $\endgroup$ – JRN Commented Jan 3, 2013 at 13:21
$\begingroup$ Ah, a personal favourite. $\endgroup$ – Ogaday Commented Mar 9, 2016 at 16:54
$\begingroup$ Aw, you can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that. - Homer Simpson $\endgroup$ – meh Commented Oct 5, 2017 at 23:57
$\begingroup$ 114% of statistics are obviously wrong $\endgroup$ – MortimerCat Commented Jan 7, 2022 at 13:23

Here is a list of many fun statistics jokes ( link )

Here are just a few:

Did you hear the one about the statistician? Probably....

It is proven that the celebration of birthdays is healthy. Statistics show that those people who celebrate the most birthdays become the oldest. -- S. den Hartog, Ph D. Thesis Universtity of Groningen.

A statistician is a person who draws a mathematically precise line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.

The average statistician is just plain mean.

And there is also the one from a TED talk :

"A friend asked my wife what I do. She answered that I model. Model what, she was asked - he models genes, she answered."

1 $\begingroup$ That link has since moved to se16.info/hgb/statjoke.htm $\endgroup$ – Henry Commented May 23, 2013 at 22:57

On average, every one of us has one testicle.

14 $\begingroup$ I'd guess that it'd be even less. $\endgroup$ – Roland Commented Mar 6, 2014 at 17:09

What question does the Cauchy distribution hate to be asked?

Got a moment?

9 $\begingroup$ ...to which she replies, "well, at least half of one ." $\endgroup$ – cardinal Commented Sep 17, 2013 at 2:09
$\begingroup$ Related: stats.stackexchange.com/q/569481/69508 $\endgroup$ – Galen Commented Oct 16, 2022 at 5:47

There are two kinds of people in the world:

Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets.
$\begingroup$ Can you please explain it? $\endgroup$ – John M Commented Mar 11, 2016 at 16:37
2 $\begingroup$ @JohnM is it a genuine question? If your mind spontaneously completed with "... and those who cannot", then you are in the first data set. Else you are in the second. $\endgroup$ – Stéphane Gourichon Commented Jan 22, 2021 at 18:48

I found this list of quotes from Gelman's famous Bayesian Data Analysis book on this link . They are more like witty, stand-up one-liners but I enjoyed them a lot. Just a few below to whet your appetite:

1 "As you know from teaching introductory statistics, 30 is infinity." 2 "Suppose there's someone you want to get to know better, but you have to talk to all her friends too. They're like the nuisance parameters." 3 People don't go around introducing you to their ex-wives." (on why model improvement doesn't make it into papers)

Statisticians do it with significance Biostatisticians do it with power Epidemiologists do it with populations Bayesians do it with a posterior

A statistic professor plans to travel to a conference by plane. When he passes the security check, they discover a bomb in his carry-on-baggage. Of course, he is hauled off immediately for interrogation.

"I don't understand it!" the interrogating officer exclaims. "You're an accomplished professional, a caring family man, a pillar of your parish - and now you want to destroy that all by blowing up an airplane!"

"Sorry", the professor interrupts him. "I had never intended to blow up the plane."

"So, for what reason else did you try to bring a bomb on board?!"

"Let me explain. Statistics shows that the probability of a bomb being on an airplane is 1/1000. That's quite high if you think about it - so high that I wouldn't have any peace of mind on a flight."

"And what does this have to do with you bringing a bomb on board of a plane?"

"You see, since the probability of one bomb being on my plane is 1/1000, the chance that there are two bombs is 1/1000000. If I already bring one, the chance of another bomb being around is actually 1/1000000, and I am much safer..."

55 $\begingroup$ This joke falls flat for me because I can't imagine a statistic professor saying this - a student who failed the course, sure. $\endgroup$ – russellpierce Commented Aug 6, 2010 at 19:25
10 $\begingroup$ If we came up with some "other" group who claims to use statistics but does so incorrectly, we could come up with a slur for that group and make dirty jokes (like this one) about them. $\endgroup$ – Avery Richardson Commented Jun 25, 2011 at 4:49
3 $\begingroup$ Not a very good statistician ... since the probability is still 1/1000 of there being another (hence 2) bomb on board $\endgroup$ – tdc Commented Nov 22, 2011 at 9:18

After enough alcohol all statisticians tend to become Bayesians: we start making inferences from our posterior

6 $\begingroup$ This joke hits rock bottom. $\endgroup$ – Nick Cox Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 9:43

Did you hear about the General Motors test for autocorrelation? Or the General Mills test for serial correlation?

Taken from xkcd.com: Cell Phones

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Hypothetically Jokes

This joke may contain profanity. 🤔

Driving home after a hard day at work, a man gets pulled over by a cop. His patience is wearing thin.

What do you call a hypothetically sliced apple, younger son: dad, whats the difference between 'hypothetically' & 'reality', my wife recently asked me: "hypothetically speaking, if you could have sex with any person in the world, whether real or fictional, who would you choose", once there was this judge who just sentenced a man, a non-smoker says to a smoker "excuse me, would you mind smoking somewhere else", two mormon bishops are going for a walk..., grass stains, helium walks into a bar., a guy starts working on an oil rig in newfoundland.

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Statistics Jokes

The following jokes and witticisms about statistics will not only make the course more interesting but also enhance the recall of statistical concepts.

A statistician is a man who comes to the rescue of figures that cannot lie for themselves.

There are no facts only interpretations. - Frederick Nietzsche

A statistician can have his head in an oven and his feet in ice, and he will say that on the average he feels fine.

A statistician is a person whose lifetime ambition is to be wrong 5% of the time.

I asked a statistician for her phone number... and she gave me an estimate.

In God we trust. All others must bring data - Robert Hayden

Numbers are like people; torture them enough and they'll tell you anything.

Why did the AI go to the psychiatrist? It had too many neural issues.

My 6-year-old son proudly announced he learned "R" in school today. My data scientist brain went wild until I remembered the alphabet exists too!

What do you call a p-value that's always significant? A show-off.

Hey Girl, you must be p>.05, because I fail to reject you.

Hey Girl, don't worry about collinearity. I'm independent of my Xs.

Hey Girl, I made a type 1 error. I shouldn't have rejected you.

Hey Girl, sometimes I feel like a null hypothesis. I will never be accepted.

Hey Girl, what's your sine? It must be pi/2 because you are the 1.

To be a statistician is great! You never have to be "absolutely sure" of anything... being "reasonably certain" is enough! - Pavel E. Guarisma

Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. - Aaron Levenstein

You can't prove everything with statistics, but you can always find something good (or bad) to say.

Statistician -- someone who insists on being certain about uncertainty.

Two unbiased estimators are sitting in a bar, having a few beers. The first one says, "How do you like being married?" The second one says, "It's okay, but you lose a degree of freedom!"

Three percent exceeds 2 percent by 50 percent, not by 1 percent. - Edward Denison

You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that.

Homoscedasticity - Homogeneous elasticity between different sizes of rubber bands.

Interpolate - Breeding a statistician with a clergyman to produce the much sought "honest statistician".

Statistics is the art of never having to say you're wrong.

Statistics show that those who celebrate more birthdays live longer.

A statistics student accelerated before crossing every intersection. His passenger finally asked, "Why do you go so fast through intersection?"

The student replied, "Statistically speaking, you're far more likely to have an accident at an intersection, so I try to spend less time there."

Two homeless guys were sitting at a bar, lamenting how poor they were.

"I'm just so dirt poor," one of them said.

Just then, Bill Gates walked into the bar.

"Cheer up," said his friend. "On average, everyone in this bar just became a billionaire.".

A total of 4000 cans are opened around the world every second. Ten babies are conceived around the world every second. Therefore, each time you open a can, you stand a 1 in 400 chance of becoming pregnant.

Logic is a systematic method for getting the wrong conclusion with confidence. Statistics is a systematic method for getting the wrong conclusion with 95 percent confidence.

Q: Did you hear about the statistician who was thrown in jail? A: He now has zero degrees of freedom.

Regression is a powerful tool for forecasting. Economists using it successfully predicted ten out of the last two recessions

Try this simple test: flip a coin, over and over again, calling out "Heads" or "Tails" after each flip. Half the time people will ask you to please stop.

What did the z distribution say to the t distribution?

You may look like me but you're not normal.

Q. How many statisticians does it take to change a light bulb? A. That depends. It is really a matter of power.

P.S. Statisticians know all of the standard deviations.

Don't become a novelist; be a statistician, much more scope for the imagination.

The Statistics professor's failing students found it difficult to live within his means.

Q: How do you statistically test for differences among professional women tennis players? A: Perform an analysis of cornered covariance, known as an ANACORNCOVA (refers to women's tennis player Anna Kournikova)

Q. What do you call a tea party with more than 30 people? A. Z party!!!

I'm not an outlier; I just haven’t found my distribution yet!

When a statistician is pounding a nail with a hammer but misses the nail and hits his thumb, what do we call it?

Sampling Error

When a statistician is pounding a nail with a hammer but misses the nail and hits his thumb 10 CONSECUTIVE times, what do we call it?

A Biased Statistic

50% of marriages end in divorce. Thus if you don’t ﬁle for divorce, your wife will.

Old statisticians never die they just become non-significant.

Arguing with a statistician is a lot like wrestling with a pig. After a few hours you begin to realize. The pig likes it.

The statistician calculates until he gets a correct result about an obviously wrong proposition and concludes NOTHING, because the explanation is the task of the scientist who consulted the statistician.

Deepanshu founded ListenData with a simple objective - Make analytics easy to understand and follow. He has over 10 years of experience in data science. During his tenure, he worked with global clients in various domains like Banking, Insurance, Private Equity, Telecom and HR.

fine collection of jokes....

Statistics Jokes – Lighten Up Your Data Analysis

11 February 2024

No Comments

By Delaney Jameson

Statistics jokes offer a lighthearted entry into the often intricate world of statistical analysis and data interpretation. Who hasn’t felt the twist of confusion when faced with probabilities, standard deviations, or statistical tests?

Yet, what if the complexity of statistics could be unfolded through humor? Jokes about statistics not only provide comic relief but also serve as an unconventional pathway to understanding by highlighting the quirks and idiosyncrasies of this essential field.

By marrying complex concepts with humor, these jokes make the daunting world of statistics more approachable, sparking curiosity and maybe even a chuckle or two among enthusiasts and professionals alike.

As we delve into the realm of statistics jokes, prepare to engage with statistics in a way that’s both enlightening and entertaining, proving that numbers, indeed, have a funny side too.

Funny Statistics Jokes

Why don’t statisticians like to go out in the rain? They can’t handle the p-value drops.

How does a statistician propose? “Will you be the significant other to my variables?”

Why was the statistician so calm during the storm? He calculated the low probability of getting hit by lightning.

How do you comfort a sad statistician? “There, there, your p-value is just experiencing a low moment.”

Why did the statistician break up with the calculator? It couldn’t handle complex relationships.

What’s a statistician’s favorite part of a party? The mode.

Why couldn’t the statistician leave his house? He was stuck in a confidence interval.

How do you make a statistician smile? Show him a bell curve with perfect symmetry.

Why don’t statisticians play hide and seek? Good luck hiding when someone’s excellent at finding the mean.

What’s a statistician’s favorite dance move? The normal distribution shuffle.

Why was the regression analysis so positive? It always finds a good fit.

How do statisticians make their tea? With the perfect standard deviation of temperature.

Why are statisticians great matchmakers? They know how to find significant relationships.

What do statisticians say at weddings? “I’m 95% confident this will work out.”

Why did the statistician get lost driving? He took a wrong turn at the median.

What’s a statistician’s favorite winter sport? Figure skating on thin ice – it’s all about the risk.

How do statisticians decide who’s paying for dinner? They draw a random sample.

Why do statisticians love the beach? They enjoy calculating the high tide’s mean.

What’s a statistician’s favorite type of music? Hip-hop, because of all the sampling.

Why did the data scientist go to therapy? For help dealing with his regression issues.

How do statisticians express affection? “You mean more to me than all the data points in the world.”

Why was the statistician so fit? He always made sure to minimize his error.

What’s a statistician’s favorite board game? Risk – it’s all about probability.

Why do statisticians hate winter? Too much snowfall makes the data all skewed.

How do statisticians solve their problems? They figure out the root mean square.

Why don’t statisticians fear jail? They’re great at finding escape probabilities.

What did the statistician say to the graph? “You’ve got some fine points.”

Why did the statistician refuse to fly? He couldn’t deal with the lack of normality at high altitudes.

How do statisticians stay cool in summer? By calculating the mode of the temperature.

Why did the statistician take up gardening? He heard it was great for growth analysis.

What’s a statistician’s favorite horror movie? “The Normal Distribution Witch Project.”

Why do statisticians make terrible secret agents? They’re too transparent with their findings.

What did the statistician say after dinner? “That was mean, but in a good way.”

Why are statisticians bad at playing soccer? They’re always trying to calculate the odds instead of scoring.

How do statisticians prefer their relationships? Non-linear and without too many outliers.

Why don’t statisticians trust stairs? They’re always up to something skewed.

What’s a statistician’s favorite animal? The average bear – it’s just mean enough.

How do statisticians celebrate New Year’s? By making predictions they’ll test later.

Why did the statistician get an award? For outstanding achievements in the field of averages.

How do statisticians say goodbye? “Let’s hope our paths cross again, at least within a 95% confidence interval.”

Statistics Jokes One Liners

Statistics say 9 out of 10 people love chocolate. The 10th person always lies.

Have you heard about the statistician who drowned crossing a river? It was three feet deep on average.

Why do statisticians make great dancers? They have all the right moves on average.

Statisticians are like toddlers; when they fall, they do it with a standard deviation.

A statistician’s plant died. He forgot to include sunlight in his model.

“How does a statistician cure a bird’s illness?” “With tweetment and error!”

Statisticians love to party because they know how to handle outliers.

Why did the statistician break up with the calculator? It couldn’t handle his range of emotions.

“What’s a statistician’s favorite part of a joke?” “The p-value!”

A statistician can have his cake and eat it too, he just needs to adjust the sample size.

Why don’t statisticians like to go out? They always calculate the risk of leaving their comfort zone.

“Did you know statisticians are great matchmakers?” “They believe in strong correlations!”

A statistician’s diet: If I think it’s a sample, I can eat as much as I want.

Why did the statistician refuse to fly? He couldn’t deal with the high margin of error.

“Why don’t statisticians play hide and seek?” “Good luck hiding when someone uses predictive modeling!”

For a statistician, life is just a series of significant moments.

Why was the statistician so calm during the storm? He calculated the eye of the storm’s mean position.

Statisticians do it with confidence… intervals.

A statistician’s favorite holiday? Thanksgiving. It’s all about pie charts.

Why do statisticians love nature? It’s full of natural logs.

When a statistician goes to the beach, he brings a bar chart to measure the tide.

“What’s a statistician’s favorite game?” “Guess the number, but with a confidence interval.”

Statisticians hate camping because they can’t control the variables.

Why are statisticians bad storytellers? They focus too much on the median and miss the plot.

A statistician’s workout plan: Random walks and variable lifting.

Why don’t statisticians trust stairs? They always find them a bit skewed.

For a statistician, life is not linear; it’s a scatter plot.

Statisticians know how to smooth things over – with a moving average.

Why did the statistician get excited about the winter? He heard there was a 30% chance of snow.

When statisticians go rogue, they start using alternative facts as outliers.

Dirty Statistics Jokes

Why did the statistician break up with the calculator? “You just can’t handle my range!”

Two graphs walk into a bar. One says, “I think I’m having an identity crisis.” The other says, “I can’t be positive, but I feel you’re just not plotting yourself correctly.”

Histogram to Pie Chart: “You’re round and full of slices, but can you handle this distribution?”

Probability said to Random Variable, “Are you committed or just playing the field?” Random Variable replied, “Honestly, I’m just here for the random hook-ups.”

How do statisticians spice up their relationships? With random acts of significance.

A data set walks into a bar. Bartender asks, “What’ll it be?” Data set says, “A scatterplot. I need to spread out.”

Mean said to Median, “We’re quite different, you and I.” Median replied, “True, but at least we’re not as skewed as Mode.”

Why did the regression line break up with the scatterplot? “You’re too scattered, and I can’t predict us anywhere!”

Outlier to Data Point: “You fit in so well.” Data Point replied, “Well, you stand out!”

Sampling said to Population, “You complete me.” Population replied, “Yes, but sometimes you just don’t represent me well.”

“Why don’t we calculate our correlation coefficient?” said one variable to another. “Because I’m afraid we’re inversely related!”

Variance to Standard Deviation: “We’re both about spread, but you always get to be the root of our problems.”

“Why did the data analyst get kicked out of the math party?” “Because he couldn’t stop bringing up old figures!”

Linear Model to Nonlinear Model: “You’re so complex and unpredictable!” Nonlinear Model replied, “And you’re just too straightforward for me.”

“How do statisticians cure their boredom?” “By finding relationships in unrelated data!”

Confidence Interval walked into a room. Everyone noticed its range. “I’m just not that sure about myself,” it said.

A z-score and a t-score were racing. Z-score said, “Why are you so slow?” T-score replied, “Because I’m more about the degrees of freedom!”

“What’s a statistician’s favorite party game?” “Guess the mean!”

Covariance to Correlation: “We’re related, but you always normalize our relationship.”

“Why did the statistician refuse to go out?” “He couldn’t deal with the high level of variance outside his home.”

Percentile to Quartile: “You break things down nicely.” Quartile replied, “And you always know where you stand.”

“Why are histograms terrible liars?” “Because you can always see right through their bins!”

“What did the null hypothesis say to the alternative hypothesis?” “You’ve got some nerve showing up here!”

“Why did the data analyst get lost?” “Because he took the wrong turn at the algorithm!”

R-squared said to Adjusted R-squared, “You always seem to account for everything.” Adjusted replied, “And you always think you explain more than you do.”

“What’s a statistician’s favorite horror movie?” “Night of the Living Deadlines!”

Standard Error to Coefficient: “You’re important, but I’m the measure of how much you can be trusted.”

“Why do statisticians love school reunions?” “They enjoy calculating the changes over time.”

“How does a statistician propose?” “Will you be my significant other?”

“Why was the scatterplot gossiping?” “Because it loved to show relationships!”

Short Statistics Jokes

Data decided to throw a party. Outliers weren’t invited.

Histogram whispers to Pie Chart, “You’re so well-rounded!”

Standard deviation walks into a bar. It finds the mean.

“I have a skewed perspective,” said the outlier.

Regression said to Data, “Let’s not go off on a tangent.”

Mean, Median, and Mode formed a band. They called it “Central Tendency.”

“You’re my type I error,” said the statistician on a date.

Probability to Random Chance: “What are our chances?”

“Feeling normal?” asked the bell curve.

Variance told Standard Deviation, “Spread out!”

“I’m lost,” said the data point. “Try finding your axis,” replied the graph.

Correlation whispered to Causation, “People think we’re the same.”

“I’m feeling positively skewed today,” said the data set.

Pie Chart to Bar Graph: “You’re so blocky.”

Normal Distribution bragged, “I’m the standard!”

Confidence Interval said, “I’m not sure about this.”

“Let’s find our range,” suggested the statistician to his data.

“You complete me,” Histogram said to Data Set.

Linear regression to Dataset: “Let’s stick together.”

“Avoid bias,” warned the survey.

“I’m a bit scattered,” admitted Scatter Plot.

Bell Curve to Outlier: “You stand out.”

“I’m all about the base,” claimed the logarithm.

“You’re so variable,” said the statistician flirtatiously.

Data Cleaning to Dataset: “Time for a scrub.”

“I’m feeling marginal,” said the effect size.

“Let’s make a joint distribution,” suggested one variable to another.

“I’m discrete,” said the data type.

“Let’s plot away,” said the chart.

“Dodge the bias,” advised the statistician.

Flirty Statistics Jokes

Are you a 95% confidence interval? Because you make me feel so secure.

If we were data points, I’d love to be an outlier just to be closer to you.

Our love is like a histogram. Intensely distributed.

You must be the mean, because you balance my life.

Is your name Chi-square? Because you make my degrees of freedom feel limitless.

I must be a skewed distribution, because I lean towards you.

Are we a scatterplot? Because the closer we get, the stronger our correlation.

If I were a line of best fit, I’d pass right through you, because you’re my point of interest.

You’re like a standard deviation. You make my heart beat faster.

Our relationship is like a normal distribution. Perfectly balanced.

Are you a confidence interval? Because you’ve captured my heart.

If love were a dataset, you’d be the standout value.

Can I be your dependent variable? You seem to influence my feelings.

Are we a bimodal distribution? Because I feel dual attraction towards you.

My love for you is like a p-value. Less than 0.05, highly significant.

You must be a box plot, because you show me the range of my feelings.

If we were a hypothesis test, the alternative would be us together.

Are you a logistic regression? Because you’ve got a curve that changes my odds.

Our chemistry is like a correlation coefficient. Strong and positive.

You’re like an upper quartile. Above the rest.

If we were a graph, you’d be the trend I’d follow.

Are you a sample? Because I’d love to take you out.

You must be a pie chart, because you complete my whole.

Are we a time series? Because I see a future with you.

You’re the outlier in my heart. Exceptionally special.

If love were a survey, you’d be my top response.

Are you a histogram? Because you’ve got bars that capture my interest.

Let’s make our data discrete. Just you and me.

If we were statistical data, I’d never plot us apart.

Are you a z-score? Because you’re way above average.

Math Statistics Jokes

Why did the statistician refuse to swim? He couldn’t find the pool’s mean depth.

Pie charts are like dessert. Sweet and easy to divide among friends.

A histogram and a bar graph walked into a cafe. Both ordered “distribution” coffee.

“I’m feeling normal,” said the bell curve at the therapist.

Variance and standard deviation decided to square off. It ended in a root fight.

Probability whispered to Randomness, “What are our chances?”

Two angles met in a bar. They were complementary.

“You’re my one in a million,” said the outlier.

Why was the tangent upset? It couldn’t find its cosine.

A number theorist found love. Sadly, it was irrational.

“Let’s make a scatter plot,” said one point. “We’re already distant,” replied the other.

Mean, median, and mode walked into a bar. It was an average night out.

The algebra book started a band called “Polynomial.” It had its ups and downs.

“I lost my numerator,” said the fraction. “Now I’m improper.”

Geometry and Algebra went on a date. It didn’t add up.

The calculus problem drank too much and derived.

A circle said to a square, “Your corners are so edgy.”

Pi and e went to a party. Pi couldn’t be rational, and e wasn’t natural.

“I feel so divided,” said the fraction to its denominator.

Two parallel lines met. It was never meant to be.

“Why so negative?” asked Zero. “I lost my place,” replied Negative One.

The probability distribution went shopping. It left with a lot in its tails.

“I’m a bit complex,” said the imaginary number. “I can’t even,” replied the integer.

The math book said, “I’ve got my own problems.”

A vector and a scalar went on a walk. Direction mattered only to one.

Linear equations are like teenagers. Always trying to solve their x.

“I’m feeling exponential today,” said Growth to Decay.

The calculator went on a diet. It lost its functions.

Infinity went to a psychic to find its limit.

The equation went to jail. It couldn’t solve its inequality.

Delaney Jameson Author at inspiremymantra

I’m Delaney Jameson, the soul behind inspiremymantra.com! As a healing expert, writer, and self-growth enthusiast, I’ve made it my mission to share my passion for affirmations and personal transformation with the world.

Through life’s ups and downs, I’ve discovered the power of healing and self-discovery. With every challenge, I’ve grown stronger, wiser, and more connected to my authentic self. This journey led me to create inspiremymantra.com, a space where I can share the lessons, love, and light that have transformed my life.

Join me as we explore the magic of affirmations, embrace self-improvement, and create the lives we’ve always dreamed of – one mantra at a time. Let’s grow together and unleash our full potential!

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Good quant finance jokes

Have a good quant joke? Share it here. The principle "should be of interest to quants" trumps.

I would be particularly keen to learn jokes which involve some nontrivial finance/mathematics. I am looking for jokes which make you laugh and think at the same time.

This is a community wiki question: One quant joke or pun per answer please.

soft-question
$\begingroup$ I have some jokes with a mathy bent, some of which are quantish at markjoshi.com/Ashland/Jokes.html $\endgroup$ – Mark Joshi Commented Nov 4, 2014 at 22:56
$\begingroup$ i.pinimg.com/736x/2a/f5/f0/… $\endgroup$ – user29561 Commented Sep 12, 2017 at 5:45
$\begingroup$ The little girl in the bottom right frame should be missing. Just the banker should be at the circus. It makes more sense. $\endgroup$ – user29561 Commented Oct 29, 2017 at 5:29
1 $\begingroup$ This is basically a quant's job. $\endgroup$ – user29561 Commented Nov 7, 2017 at 20:48

15 Answers 15

Efficient Market Hypothesis Joke:

"There is an old joke, widely told among economists, about an economist strolling down the street with a companion when they come upon a 100 dollar bill lying on the ground. As the companion reaches down to pick it up, the economist says ‘Don’t bother — if it were a real 100 dollar bill, someone would have already picked it up’.”

5 $\begingroup$ Which might be viewed as a practical application of the no-arbitrage principle! $\endgroup$ – olaker ♦ Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 0:10

When asked "your money or your life", attempts to calculate the implied volatility.

1 $\begingroup$ That's a nice one! $\endgroup$ – olaker ♦ Commented Apr 6, 2011 at 15:24
$\begingroup$ ROFL :-))) Hilarious! $\endgroup$ – vonjd Commented Apr 6, 2011 at 16:00
$\begingroup$ illiquid options theory required $\endgroup$ – RockScience Commented Apr 7, 2011 at 2:11
4 $\begingroup$ Also assumes quant's life has non-zero value. $\endgroup$ – user59 Commented Apr 7, 2011 at 2:21
4 $\begingroup$ The quant can have negative net worth. $\endgroup$ – olaker ♦ Commented Apr 7, 2011 at 13:27

Adapted from a joke about economists:

A quant(financial engineer), a mechanical engineer, and a chemical engineer are shipwrecked on a deserted island. They are starving, and are tired of eating coconuts. They come upon a can of food on the beach....

The mechanical engineer says, 'let's wdge the can between these 2 palm trees and rig a branch to chop the top of the can off' The other two quickly point out that this will destroy the can and likely send the contents all over the place, wasting them...

The chemical engineer says, 'let's take the sea water and reverse the polarity of the water extracting the salt to make an acid and then burn one end of the can off' The other two quickly point out that while this is clever it will likely ruin the contents of the can.

The quant says, 'let's make a simplifying modeling assumption.... let's begin by assuming that we have a can opener'

Investment bank Dog competition:

A researcher, a risk manager and a trader each bring a dog to a competition.

The first one to display is the researcher's dog. The researcher brought a bottle of milk a bowl and placed it all on the floor. Then he commanded the dog to take the bottle and pour the milk into the bowl until the maximum amount it could hold. And that is exactly what his dog did.

The second one to display is the risk manager's dog. The risk manager's brought a bottle of milk a bowl and placed it all on the floor. Then he commanded the dog to take the bottle and pour the milk into the bowl until two thirds of the maximum it could hold and without spilling any milk during the whole process. And that is exactly what his dog did.

The third one to display is the trader's dog. The trader did not bring anything other than the dog. Then he commanded the dog to do what he taught. The dog stands up and walks in the direction of each one of the bowls and drinks all the milk.

Q. Why do Quants have the best job in the world? A. Because they spend their time looking at MODELS all day.

Two Day-Traders went to go eat (after the market closed of course!). One of the traders orders a steak and has a hard time cutting it. He then asks for a sharper knife... when he unfolds his cutlery the knife hits his plate and falls out of the table and lands right by his foot which was slightly sticking out of the table. The other trader looks at him and says "Why didn't you move your foot when the knife was falling?!" to which he responded, "I thought it was going back up!".

Read it somewhere...

What is the difference between a bond and a bond trader?????

The bond matures.

Here's another.

What is the difference between a hedge fund and a mutual fund?

Mutual funds returns more and are safer.....:)

A Banker explains another banker why he is not getting married ... "She is hot, but not half my fortune hot".

My girlfriend borrowed £100 off of me.

After 3 years when we broke up, she returned £100.

I had no interest in that relationship.

A photographer and a quant have one thing in common, as they both fall in love with their models...

Who is a quant's favourite actor? A) Heston

...starts thinking about sexual encounters in term of their Sharpe Ratios.

There are 10 kinds of people out there. Those who understand binary maths and those who don't.

Why are quants never ripped off in Bangkok?

They are good at pricing exotics.

Why do quants look so happy?

They work on volatility smiles.

What is the difference between a used car salesman and a derivatives salesman?

The used car salesman knows when he's lying.

What is the difference between a quant and a Formula 1 racer?

Quants run Monte Carlo, while F1 racers run through Monte Carlo.

Why is the FX trader unpopoular with the girls?

Because he keeps his dates short.

Quoting Jim Simons,

Those kinds of times… when everyone is running around like a chicken with its head cut off, that's pretty good for us…

meaning good for Renaissance Technologies!

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Hypothesis Jokes

8 hypothesis jokes and hilarious hypothesis puns to laugh out loud. Read jokes about hypothesis that are clean and suitable for kids and friends.

Love a good pun? Discover these hilarious jokes related to null hypothesis, hypothesis tests, sulphur, technetium, and other scientific topics. Get your daily dose of laughter – and science!

Share These Hypothesis Jokes With Friends

Howlingly Hilarious Hypothesis Jokes for All Ages to Enjoy

What is a good hypothesis joke to make people laugh? Check out this list of funny stories that will for sure put a smile on everyones mouth.

My scientist wife decided to test the hypothesis that more s**... would improve our marriage. It's already been a week, and I've concluded...

that I'm in the control group.

I have this theory about my s**... life lately

Actually, it's more of a hypothesis since I have no physical evidence to suggest it even exists.

Why does no one date the null hypothesis?

Because she's a H0.

What do turning down a p**... and accepting an alternate hypothesis have in common?

They both involve rejecting the H0

What did Santa say to a Statistics class?

Null hypothesis Null hypothesis Null hypothesis

When I was in high school, I experimented s**......

The experiment was to never have s**... with anybody - no matter how hard I tried. Success! Hypothesis confirmed.

Modern historians have a new hypothesis for what caused the death of Helen of Troy...

It was the impact trauma from her face launching a thousand ships, long before champagne was invented.

I've found a very elegant proof for the Riemann Hypothesis.

But this text box is too small to contain it.

Joke: The Psychic

A joke for discussing the over-use of hypothesis testing methods. The joke was written in April 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso.

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Laughing at the Null Hypothesis

I’m not sure if this cartoon is funny because I don’t really get it . But it was interesting enough that I started thinking about the null hypothesis, and what it means, and how statistics is changing so quickly that “the null hypothesis” we learned about in our classes may soon feel like an odd artifact of history.

In statistics, the null hypothesis is like our legal maxim “innocent until proven guilty.” We look at data from a sample, and wonder whether a specific pattern we see in the sample reflects the full population it is supposed to represent. The answer is always NO (the null hypothesis) unless that pattern is really strong—that is, unless the evidence is overwhelming. How strong? The convention is that we have to be at least 95% certain the pattern we see could not be a chance event of random sampling.

It sounds simple (sort of) but it’s extremely convoluted, because we are not really calculating the probability that the null hypothesis (or conversely, our alternative hypothesis) is true or false . We are actually calculating the probability that our data could have “happened” assuming the null hypothesis is true.

Along comes Bayesian statistics, which is starting to turn this approach on its head. Now, instead of looking at the probability that our evidence happened by chance, we look at the probability that our hypothesis (null or otherwise) is true or false given the data at hand.

Yikes, this is already getting complicated. Bayesian statistics gets hard for two reasons. First, after so many years of doing statistics and thinking “backwards” in terms of data and hypotheses, Bayesian approaches are actually more intuitive, which gets our thinking completely mixed up. Second, practical use of Bayesian statistics often requires zillions more computations, so it can be challenging to “see” and feel comfortable with all the math behind it.

Fear not. We are pulling together a short primer on the underpinnings of Bayesian statistics for market research to be featured in an upcoming Versta Research newsletter. In the meantime, it’s worth casually mentioning at cocktail parties that you saw a new study that conclusively disproves the null hypothesis. Tell me if you get a laugh.

By Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

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Swearing Off (Humorous) Thought Experiments

You need lab experiments, not jokes, to explain humor..

Posted November 6, 2011

Professor Peter McGraw and writer Joel Warner have teamed up to explore the science of humor on a global expedition. The Humor Code chronicles their adventures, scientific experiments and unintentional comedy along the way. Learn more about McGraw, Warner and their travels at HumorCode.com.

Some of civilization's great thinkers pondered the meaning of humor long and hard. Thomas Hobbes put forth the idea that humor emerges from superiority or "sudden glory" over an enemy. Immanuel Kant believed humor arose from a process of incongruity in which a "strained expectation" is transformed into "nothing."

Unfortunately, these theories and many others, while compelling, haven't withstood the test of time. Superiority, for example, has trouble explaining why the victim of a tickle attack does the laughing (rather than the aggressor). Moreover, whereas incongruity theories seem to do a good job of explaining what is funny, it has trouble explaining what is not funny .

Why have humor theories long fallen short? Maybe it's because thinkers have spent too long thinking about them, and not enough time subjecting them to empirical tests.

It's easy to understand the lure of thought experiments for those trying to figure out what makes things funny. After all, to get at humor's core building blocks, you don't need anything as complicated as reverse transcriptase, cell cultures or a particle accelerator. You just need jokes. To test humor theories, therefore, all you need to do is come up with a lot of jokes and see if they fit, right?

Wrong. Although thought experiments are undoubtedly helpful when other forms of analysis aren't available (Galileo famously used thought experiments to examine the effects of gravity), they have substantial limitations. Although we might like to imagine our minds as pure and unbiased analytical tools, psychological science is littered with examples of how our well-meaning intuition leads us astray. For centuries, philosophers and theologians conjectured that people are inherently good or bad. But as demonstrated by the famous Milgram experiment , in which people were willing to subject others to what they believed were painful electrical shocks because they felt compelled to follow orders from an authority figure, even "good" people can do very bad things indeed.

Here are three reasons why thought experiments will get humorologists only so far:

1) Errors of introspection . Psychologists Richard Nisbett and Tim Wilson compellingly demonstrated the difficulties people have about understanding their own cognitive processes. For example, in one experiment, they presented people an array of nylon pantyhose and asked them to choose which was the best quality, never telling the subjects that the pantyhose were actually all identical. Participants showed a strong tendency to choose the pantyhose on the far right, although none of them believed the positions of the pantyhose had anything to do with their selection.

2) False consensus . Whether you like it or not, you have a tendency to think that others will believe what you believe, value what you value and behave as you behave. The classic experiment on the matter asked people to wear a sandwich board in public that said, "Eat at Joe's." Those wearing the sign were then asked if they would eat at Joe's. Those who said yes expected that a majority of people would also do so. Those who said no expected that a majority of people would say no, too. False consensus is especially problematic in humor research, because people vary widely in what they find funny.

3) Confirmation bias . Thought experiments are often designed not to test a point, but instead prove a point. This is likely the reason why a 2001 Gallup Poll found that about 50 percent of the U.S. population believes in ESP . Since people are much more likely to remember times they correctly predicted the future than the ho-hum times they were wrong, it's easy without careful record keeping of all predictions to come to the mistaken belief that you're the second coming of Nostradamus. In the same way, humor researchers conducting thought experiments are likely to seek out examples that confirm their hypothesis, rather than pit competing hypotheses against each other.

Taken together, our mind's foibles make for a very sloppy laboratory. Errors of introspection limit our ability to notice our thought processes go wrong. False consensus makes it hard to see why things that make you laugh don't make others laugh. And confirmation bias limits the thought experiments to those that are most likely to confirm a hypothesis.

But since humor is such an amorphous and subjective topic, is it really possible to tackle the subject using anything other than thought experiments? Using state-of-the-art technologies and testing procedures, researchers have been doing so for several decades, and in the process shooting full of holes a variety of humor-oriented thought experiments. Take how lay people and humor researchers alike often insist humor involves surprise, that something is only funny if it's unexpected. But in 1974, Howard Pollio and Rodney Mers ran a laboratory study involving two groups of participants. They asked one group to listen to comedy tapes of Bill Cosby and Phyllis Dyler and rate the funniness of the punchlines. Another group heard only the comedians' set-ups, and were asked to predict the punchline. What happened next was both counter-intuitive and fascinating. The punchlines that were rated funniest were also the ones that were most likely to be predicted by the other group. In other words, surprising punchlines were less - not more - funny.

Using jokes and other philosophical ruminations to illustrate humor theories makes for colorful conversations and good cocktail-party chatter. But if we really want to understand what makes things funny, we have to rely on hardcore science. Thankfully for everybody involved, a hadron collider won't be necessary.

Professor Peter McGraw ( @PeterMcGraw ) and journalist Joel Warner ( @JoelmWarner ) have embarked on the Humor Code , an around-the-world exploration of what makes things funny. Follow the Humor Code on Facebook and Twitter.

Peter McGraw, Ph.D., a behavioral economist, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. He directs the Humor Research Lab, is the author of many books, and hosts a podcast on living single, Solo.

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Philosophy of Humor

Although most people value humor, philosophers have said little about it, and what they have said is largely critical. Three traditional theories of laughter and humor are examined, along with the theory that humor evolved from mock-aggressive play in apes. Understanding humor as play helps counter the traditional objections to it and reveals some of its benefits, including those it shares with philosophy itself.

1. Humor’s Bad Reputation

2. the superiority theory, 3. the relief theory, 4. the incongruity theory, 5. humor as play, laughter as play signal, other internet resources, related entries.

When people are asked what’s important in their lives, they often mention humor. Couples listing the traits they prize in their spouses usually put “sense of humor” at or near the top. Philosophers are concerned with what is important in life, so two things are surprising about what they have said about humor.

The first is how little they have said. From ancient times to the 20 th century, the most that any notable philosopher wrote about laughter or humor was an essay, and only a few lesser-known thinkers such as Frances Hutcheson and James Beattie wrote that much. The word humor was not used in its current sense of funniness until the 18 th century, we should note, and so traditional discussions were about laughter or comedy. The most that major philosophers like Plato, Hobbes, and Kant wrote about laughter or humor was a few paragraphs within a discussion of another topic. Henri Bergson’s 1900 Laughter was the first book by a notable philosopher on humor. Martian anthropologists comparing the amount of philosophical writing on humor with what has been written on, say, justice, or even on Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance, might well conclude that humor could be left out of human life without much loss.

The second surprising thing is how negative most philosophers have been in their assessments of humor. From ancient Greece until the 20 th century, the vast majority of philosophical comments on laughter and humor focused on scornful or mocking laughter, or on laughter that overpowers people, rather than on comedy, wit, or joking. Plato, the most influential critic of laughter, treated laughter as an emotion that overrides rational self-control. In the Republic ( 388e), he says that the Guardians of the state should avoid laughter, “for ordinarily when one abandons himself to violent laughter, his condition provokes a violent reaction.” Especially disturbing to Plato were the passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey where Mount Olympus was said to ring with the laughter of the gods. He protested that “if anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less if gods.”

Another of Plato’s objections to laughter is that it is malicious. In Philebus (48–50), he analyzes the enjoyment of comedy as a form of scorn. “Taken generally,” he says, “the ridiculous is a certain kind of evil, specifically a vice.” That vice is self-ignorance: the people we laugh at imagine themselves to be wealthier, better looking, or more virtuous than they really are. In laughing at them, we take delight in something evil—their self-ignorance—and that malice is morally objectionable.

Because of these objections to laughter and humor, Plato says that in the ideal state, comedy should be tightly controlled. “We shall enjoin that such representations be left to slaves or hired aliens, and that they receive no serious consideration whatsoever. No free person, whether woman or man, shall be found taking lessons in them.” “No composer of comedy, iambic or lyric verse shall be permitted to hold any citizen up to laughter, by word or gesture, with passion or otherwise” ( Laws , 7: 816e; 11: 935e).

Greek thinkers after Plato had similarly negative comments about laughter and humor. Though Aristotle considered wit a valuable part of conversation ( Nicomachean Ethics 4, 8), he agreed with Plato that laughter expresses scorn. Wit, he says in the Rhetoric (2, 12), is educated insolence. In the Nicomachean Ethics (4, 8) he warns that “Most people enjoy amusement and jesting more than they should … a jest is a kind of mockery, and lawgivers forbid some kinds of mockery—perhaps they ought to have forbidden some kinds of jesting.” The Stoics, with their emphasis on self-control, agreed with Plato that laughter diminishes self-control. Epictetus’s Enchiridion (33) advises “Let not your laughter be loud, frequent, or unrestrained.” His followers said that he never laughed at all.

These objections to laughter and humor influenced early Christian thinkers, and through them later European culture. They were reinforced by negative representations of laughter and humor in the Bible, the vast majority of which are linked to hostility. The only way God is described as laughing in the Bible is with hostility:

The kings of the earth stand ready, and the rulers conspire together against the Lord and his anointed king… . The Lord who sits enthroned in heaven laughs them to scorn; then he rebukes them in anger, he threatens them in his wrath (Psalm 2:2–5).

God’s spokesmen in the Bible are the Prophets, and for them, too, laughter expresses hostility. In the contest between God’s prophet Elijah and the 450 prophets of Baal, for example, Elijah ridicules them for their god’s powerlessness, and then has them slain (1 Kings 18:21–27). In the Bible, mockery is so offensive that it may deserve death, as when a group of children laugh at the prophet Elisha for his baldness:

He went up from there to Bethel and, as he was on his way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Get along with you, bald head, get along.” He turned round and looked at them and he cursed then in the name of the Lord; and two she-bears came out of a wood and mauled forty-two of them (2 Kings 2:23).

Bringing together negative assessments of laughter from the Bible with criticisms from Greek philosophy, early Christian leaders such as Ambrose, Jerome, Basil, Ephraim, and John Chrysostom warned against either excessive laughter or laughter generally. Sometimes what they criticized was laughter in which the person loses self-control. In his Long Rules , for instance, Basil the Great wrote that “raucous laughter and uncontrollable shaking of the body are not indications of a well-regulated soul, or of personal dignity, or self-mastery” (in Wagner 1962, 271). Other times they linked laughter with idleness, irresponsibility, lust, or anger. John Chrysostom, for example, warned that

Laughter often gives birth to foul discourse, and foul discourse to actions still more foul. Often from words and laughter proceed railing and insult; and from railing and insult, blows and wounds; and from blows and wounds, slaughter and murder. If, then, you would take good counsel for yourself, avoid not merely foul words and foul deeds, or blows and wounds and murders, but unseasonable laughter itself (in Schaff 1889, 442).

Not surprisingly, the Christian institution that most emphasized self-control—the monastery—was harsh in condemning laughter. One of the earliest monastic orders, of Pachom of Egypt, forbade joking (Adkin 1985, 151–152). The Rule of St. Benedict, the most influential monastic code, advised monks to “prefer moderation in speech and speak no foolish chatter, nothing just to provoke laughter; do not love immoderate or boisterous laughter.” In Benedict’s Ladder of Humility, Step Ten is a restraint against laughter, and Step Eleven a warning against joking (Gilhus 1997, 65). The monastery of St. Columbanus Hibernus had these punishments: “He who smiles in the service … six strokes; if he breaks out in the noise of laughter, a special fast unless it has happened pardonably” (Resnick 1987, 95).

The Christian European rejection of laughter and humor continued through the Middle Ages, and whatever the Reformers reformed, it did not include the traditional assessment of humor. Among the strongest condemnations came from the Puritans, who wrote tracts against laughter and comedy. One by William Prynne (1633) was over 1100 pages long and purported to show that comedies “are sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious corruptions; condemned in all ages, as intolerable mischiefes to churches, to republickes, to the manners, mindes, and soules of men.” It encouraged Christians to live sober, serious lives, and not to be “immoderately tickled with mere lascivious vanities, or … lash out in excessive cachinnations in the public view of dissolute graceless persons.” When the Puritans came to rule England in the mid-17 th century, they outlawed comedies.

At this time, too, the philosophical case against laughter was strengthened by Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes. Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651 [1982]) describes human beings as naturally individualistic and competitive. That makes us alert to signs that we are winning or losing. The former make us feel good and the latter bad. If our perception of some sign that we are superior comes over us quickly, our good feelings are likely to issue in laughter. In Part I, ch. 6, he writes that

Sudden glory, is the passion which makes those grimaces called laughter; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleases them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favor by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much laughter at the defects of others, is a sign of pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper works is, to help and free others from scorn; and to compare themselves only with the most able.

A similar explanation of laughter from the same time is found in Descartes’ Passions of the Soul . He says that laughter accompanies three of the six basic emotions—wonder, love, (mild) hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. Although admitting that there are other causes of laughter than hatred, in Part 3 of this book, “Of Particular Passions,” he considers laughter only as an expression of scorn and ridicule.

Derision or scorn is a sort of joy mingled with hatred, which proceeds from our perceiving some small evil in a person whom we consider to be deserving of it; we have hatred for this evil, we have joy in seeing it in him who is deserving of it; and when that comes upon us unexpectedly, the surprise of wonder is the cause of our bursting into laughter… And we notice that people with very obvious defects such as those who are lame, blind of an eye, hunched-backed, or who have received some public insult, are specially given to mockery; for, desiring to see all others held in as low estimation as themselves, they are truly rejoiced at the evils that befall them, and they hold them deserving of these (art. 178–179).

With these comments of Hobbes and Descartes, we have a sketchy psychological theory articulating the view of laughter that started in Plato and the Bible and dominated Western thinking about laughter for two millennia. In the 20 th century, this idea was called the Superiority Theory. Simply put, our laughter expresses feelings of superiority over other people or over a former state of ourselves. A contemporary proponent of this theory is Roger Scruton, who analyses amusement as an “attentive demolition” of a person or something connected with a person. “If people dislike being laughed at,” Scruton says, “it is surely because laughter devalues its object in the subject’s eyes” (in Morreall 1987, 168).

In the 18 th century, the dominance of the Superiority Theory began to weaken when Francis Hutcheson (1750) wrote a critique of Hobbes’ account of laughter. Feelings of superiority, Hutcheson argued, are neither necessary nor sufficient for laughter. In laughing, we may not be comparing ourselves with anyone, as when we laugh at odd figures of speech like those in this poem about a sunrise:

The sun, long since, had in the lap Of Thetis taken out his nap; And like a lobster boil’d, the morn From black to red began to turn.

If self-comparison and sudden glory are not necessary for laughter, neither are they sufficient for laughter. Hutcheson says that we can feel superior to lower animals without laughing, and that “some ingenuity in dogs and monkeys, which comes near to some of our own arts, very often makes us merry; whereas their duller actions in which they are much below us, are no matter of jest at all.” He also cites cases of pity. A gentleman riding in a coach who sees ragged beggars in the street, for example, will feel that he is better off than they, but such feelings are unlikely to amuse him. In such situations, “we are in greater danger of weeping than laughing.”

To these counterexamples to the Superiority Theory we could add more. Sometimes we laugh when a comic character shows surprising skills that we lack. In the silent movies of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton, the hero is often trapped in a situation where he looks doomed. But then he escapes with a clever acrobatic stunt that we would not have thought of, much less been able to perform. Laughing at such scenes does not seem to require that we compare ourselves with the hero; and if we do make such a comparison, we do not find ourselves superior.

At least some people, too, laugh at themselves—not a former state of themselves, but what is happening now. If I search high and low for my eyeglasses only to find them on my head, the Superiority Theory seems unable to explain my laughter at myself.

While these examples involve persons with whom we might compare ourselves, there are other cases of laughter where no personal comparisons seem involved. In experiments by Lambert Deckers (1993), subjects were asked to lift a series of apparently identical weights. The first several weights turned out to be identical, and that strengthened the expectation that the remaining weights would be the same. But then subjects picked up a weight that was much heavier or lighter than the others. Most laughed, but apparently not out of Hobbesian “sudden glory,” and apparently without comparing themselves with anyone.

Further weakening the dominance of the Superiority Theory in the 18 th century were two new accounts of laughter which are now called the Relief Theory and the Incongruity Theory. Neither even mentions feelings of superiority.

The Relief Theory is an hydraulic explanation in which laughter does in the nervous system what a pressure-relief valve does in a steam boiler. The theory was sketched in Lord Shaftesbury’s 1709 essay “An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor,” the first publication in which humor is used in its modern sense of funniness. Scientists at the time knew that nerves connect the brain with the sense organs and muscles, but they thought that nerves carried “animal spirits”—gases and liquids such as air and blood. John Locke (1690, Book 3, ch. 9, para.16), for instance, describes animal spirits as “fluid and subtile Matter, passing through the Conduits of the Nerves.”

Shaftesbury’s explanation of laughter is that it releases animal spirits that have built up pressure inside the nerves.

The natural free spirits of ingenious men, if imprisoned or controlled, will find out other ways of motion to relieve themselves in their constraint; and whether it be in burlesque, mimicry, or buffoonery, they will be glad at any rate to vent themselves, and be revenged upon their constrainers.

Over the next two centuries, as the nervous system came to be better understood, thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud revised the biology behind the Relief Theory but kept the idea that laughter relieves pent-up nervous energy.

Spencer’s explanation in his essay “On the Physiology of Laughter” (1911) is based on the idea that emotions take the physical form of nervous energy. Nervous energy, he says, “always tends to beget muscular motion, and when it rises to a certain intensity, always does beget it” (299). “Feeling passing a certain pitch habitually vents itself in bodily action” (302). When we are angry, for example, nervous energy produces small aggressive movements such as clenching our fists; and if the energy reaches a certain level, we attack the offending person. In fear, the energy produces small-scale movements in preparation for fleeing; and if the fear gets strong enough, we flee. The movements associated with emotions, then, discharge or release the built-up nervous energy.

Laughter releases nervous energy, too, Spencer says, but with this important difference: the muscular movements in laughter are not the early stages of larger practical actions such as attacking or fleeing. Unlike emotions, laughter does not involve the motivation to do anything. The movements of laughter, Spencer says, “have no object” (303): they are merely a release of nervous energy.

The nervous energy relieved through laughter, according to Spencer, is the energy of emotions that have been found to be inappropriate. Consider this poem entitled “Waste” by Harry Graham (2009):

I had written to Aunt Maud Who was on a trip abroad When I heard she’d died of cramp, Just too late to save the stamp.

Reading the first three lines, we might feel pity for the bereaved nephew writing the poem. But the last line makes us reinterpret those lines. Far from being a loving nephew in mourning, he turns out to be an insensitive cheapskate. So the nervous energy of our pity, now superfluous, is released in laughter. That discharge occurs, Spencer says, first through the muscles “which feeling most habitually stimulates,” the muscles of the vocal tract. If still more energy needs to be relieved, it spills over to the muscles connected with breathing, and if the movements of those muscles do not release all the energy, the remainder moves the arms, legs, and other muscle groups (304).

In the 20 th century, John Dewey (1894: 558–559) had a similar version of the Relief Theory. Laughter, he said, “marks the ending … of a period of suspense, or expectation.” It is a “sudden relaxation of strain, so far as occurring through the medium of the breathing and vocal apparatus… The laugh is thus a phenomenon of the same general kind as the sigh of relief.”

Better known than the versions of the Relief Theory of Shaftesbury, Spencer, and Dewey is that of Sigmund Freud. In his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905 [1974]), Freud analyzes three laughter situations: der Witz (often translated “jokes” or “joking”), “the comic,” and “humor.” In all three, laughter releases nervous energy that was summoned for a psychological task, but then became superfluous as that task was abandoned. In der Witz , that superfluous energy is energy used to repress feelings; in the comic it is energy used to think, and in humor it is the energy of feeling emotions. (In this article, we are not using humor in Freud’s narrow sense, but in the general sense that includes joking, wit, the comic, etc.)

Der Witz includes telling prepared fictional jokes, making spontaneous witty comments, and repartee. In der Witz , Freud says, the psychic energy released is the energy that would have repressed the emotions that are being expressed as the person laughs. (Most summaries of Freud’s theory of joking mistakenly describe laughter as a release of repressed emotions themselves.) According to Freud, the emotions which are most repressed are sexual desire and hostility, and so most jokes and witty remarks are about sex, hostility, or both. In telling a sexual joke or listening to one, we bypass our internal censor and give vent to our libido. In telling or listening to a joke that puts down an individual or group we dislike, similarly, we let out the hostility we usually repress. In both cases, the psychic energy normally used to do the repressing becomes superfluous, and is released in laughter.

Freud’s second laughter situation, “the comic,” involves a similar release of energy that is summoned but is then found unnecessary. Here it is the energy normally devoted to thinking. An example is laughter at the clumsy actions of a clown. As we watch the clown stumble through actions that we would perform smoothly and efficiently, there is a saving of the energy that we would normally expend to understand the clown’s movements. Here Freud appeals to a theory of “mimetic representation” in which we expend a large packet of energy to understand something large and a small packet of energy to understand something small. Our mental representation of the clown’s clumsy movements, Freud says, calls for more energy than the energy we would expend to mentally represent our own smooth, efficient movements in performing the same task. Our laughter at the clown is our venting of that surplus energy.

These two possibilities in my imagination amount to a comparison between the observed movement and my own. If the other person’s movement is exaggerated and inexpedient, my increased expenditure in order to understand it is inhibited in statu nascendi , as it were in the act of being mobilized; it is declared superfluous and is free for use elsewhere or perhaps for discharge by laughter (Freud 1905 [1974], 254).

Freud analyzes the third laughter situation, which he calls “humor,” much as Spencer analyzed laughter in general. Humor occurs “if there is a situation in which, according to our usual habits, we should be tempted to release a distressing affect and if motives then operate upon us which suppress that affect in statu nascendi [in the process of being born]… . The pleasure of humor … comes about … at the cost of a release of affect that does not occur: it arise from an economy in the expenditure of affect ” (293). His example is a story told by Mark Twain in which his brother was building a road when a charge of dynamite went off prematurely, blowing him high into the sky. When the poor man came down far from the work site, he was docked half a day’s pay for being “absent from his place of employment.” Freud’s explanation of our laughter at this story is like the explanation above at Graham’s poem about the cheapskate nephew. In laughing at this story, he says, we are releasing the psychic energy that we had summoned to feel pity for Twain’s brother, but that became superfluous when we heard the fantastic last part. “As a result of this understanding, the expenditure on the pity, which was already prepared, becomes unutilizable and we laugh it off” (295).

Having sketched several versions of the Relief Theory, we can note that today almost no scholar in philosophy or psychology explains laughter or humor as a process of releasing pent-up nervous energy. There is, of course, a connection between laughter and the expenditure of energy. Hearty laughter involves many muscle groups and several areas of the nervous system. Laughing hard gives our lungs a workout, too, as we take in far more oxygen than usual. But few contemporary scholars defend the claims of Spencer and Freud that the energy expended in laughter is the energy of feeling emotions, the energy of repressing emotions, or the energy of thinking, which have built up and require venting.

Funny things and situations may evoke emotions, but many seem not to. Consider P. G. Wodehouse’s line “If it’s feasible, let’s fease it.” Or the shortest poem in the English language, by Strickland Gillilan (1927), “Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes”:

Adam Had’em.

These do not seem to vent emotions that had built up before we read them, and they do not seem to summon emotions and then render them superfluous. So whatever energy is expended in laughing at them does not seem to be superfluous energy being vented. In fact, the whole hydraulic model of the nervous system on which the Relief Theory is based seems outdated.

To that hydraulic model, Freud adds several questionable claims derived from his general psychoanalytic theory of the mind. He says that the creation of der Witz —jokes and witty comments—is an unconscious process of letting repressed thoughts and feelings into the conscious mind. This claim seems falsified by professional humorists who approach the creation of jokes and cartoons with conscious strategies. Freud’s account of how psychic energy is vented in joke-telling is also questionable, especially his claim that packets of psychic energy are summoned to repress thoughts and feelings, but in statu nascendi (in the process of being born) are rendered superfluous. If Freud is right that the energy released in laughing at a joke is the energy normally used to repress hostile and sexual feelings, then it seems that those who laugh hardest at aggressive and sexual jokes should be people who usually repress such feelings. But studies about joke preferences by Hans Jürgen Eysenck (1972, xvi) have shown that the people who enjoy aggressive and sexual humor the most are not those who usually repress hostile and sexual feelings, but those who express them.

Freud’s account of “the comic” faces still more problems, particularly his ideas about “mimetic representation.” The psychic energy saved, he says, is energy summoned for understanding something, such as the antics of a clown. We summon a large packet of energy to understand the clown’s large movements, but as we are summoning it, we compare it with the small packet of energy required to understand our own smaller movements in doing the same thing. The difference between the two packets is surplus energy discharged in laughter. Freud’s account of thinking here is idiosyncratic and has strange implications, such as that thinking about swimming the English Channel takes far more energy than thinking about licking a stamp. With all these difficulties, it is not surprising that philosophers and psychologists studying humor today do not appeal to Freud’s theory to explain laughter or humor. More generally, the Relief Theory is seldom used as a general explanation of laughter or humor.

The second account of humor that arose in the 18 th century to challenge the Superiority Theory was the Incongruity Theory. While the Superiority Theory says that the cause of laughter is feelings of superiority, and the Relief Theory says that it is the release of nervous energy, the Incongruity Theory says that it is the perception of something incongruous—something that violates our mental patterns and expectations. This approach was taken by James Beattie, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, and many later philosophers and psychologists. It is now the dominant theory of humor in philosophy and psychology.

Although Aristotle did not use the term incongruity , he hints that it is the basis for at least some humor. In the Rhetoric (3, 2), a handbook for speakers, he says that one way for a speaker to get a laugh is to create an expectation in the audience and then violate it. As an example, he cites this line from a comedy, “And as he walked, beneath his feet were—chilblains [sores on the feet].” Jokes that depend on a change of spelling or word play, he notes, can have the same effect. Cicero, in On the Orator (ch. 63), says that “The most common kind of joke is that in which we expect one thing and another is said; here our own disappointed expectation makes us laugh.”

This approach to joking is similar to techniques of stand-up comedians today. They speak of the set-up and the punch (line). The set-up is the first part of the joke: it creates the expectation. The punch (line) is the last part that violates that expectation. In the language of the Incongruity Theory, the joke’s ending is incongruous with the beginning.

The first philosopher to use the word incongruous to analyze humor was James Beattie (1779). When we see something funny, he says, our laughter “always proceeds from a sentiment or emotion, excited in the mind, in consequence of certain objects or ideas being presented to it” (304). Our laughter “seems to arise from the view of things incongruous united in the same assemblage” (318). The cause of humorous laughter is “two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage, as acquiring a sort of mutual relation from the peculiar manner in which the mind takes notice of them” (320).

Immanuel Kant (1790 [1911], First Part, sec. 54), a contemporary of Beattie’s, did not used the term incongruous but had an explanation of laughter at jokes and wit that involves incongruity.

In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment. Therefore its cause must consist in the influence of the representation upon the body, and the reflex effect of this upon the mind.

Kant illustrates with this story:

An Indian at the table of an Englishman in Surat, when he saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer turned into froth and overflowing, testified his great astonishment with many exclamations. When the Englishman asked him, “What is there in this to astonish you so much?” he answered, “I am not at all astonished that it should flow out, but I do wonder how you ever got it in.”

We laugh at this story, Kant says, “not because we deem ourselves cleverer than this ignorant man, or because of anything in it that we note as satisfactory to the understanding, but because our expectation was strained (for a time) and then was suddenly dissipated into nothing.”

“We must note well,” Kant insists, that it [our expectation] does not transform itself into the positive opposite of an expected object… but it must be transformed into nothing.“ He illustrates with two more jokes:

The heir of a rich relative wished to arrange for an imposing funeral, but he lamented that he could not properly succeed; ‘for’ (said he) ‘the more money I give my mourners to look sad, the more cheerful they look!’ [A] merchant returning from India to Europe with all his wealth in merchandise … was forced to throw it overboard in a heavy storm and … grieved thereat so much that his wig turned gray the same night.”

A joke amuses us by evoking, shifting, and dissipating our thoughts, but we do not learn anything through these mental gymnastics. In humor generally, according to Kant, our reason finds nothing of worth. The jostling of ideas, however, produces a physical jostling of our internal organs and we enjoy that physical stimulation.

For if we admit that with all our thoughts is harmonically combined a movement in the organs of the body, we will easily comprehend how to this sudden transposition of the mind, now to one now to another standpoint in order to contemplate its object, may correspond an alternating tension and relaxation of the elastic portions of our intestines which communicates itself to the diaphragm (like that which ticklish people feel). In connection with this the lungs expel the air at rapidly succeeding intervals, and thus bring about a movement beneficial to health; which alone, and not what precedes it in the mind, is the proper cause of the gratification in a thought that at bottom represents nothing.

On this point, Kant compares the enjoyment of joking and wit to the enjoyment of games of chance and the enjoyment of music. In all three the pleasure is in a “changing free play of sensations,” which is caused by shifting ideas in the mind. In games of chance, “the play of fortune” causes bodily excitation; in music, it is “the play of tone,” and in joking, it is “the play of thought.” In a lively game of chance, “the affections of hope, fear, joy, wrath, scorn, are put in play … alternating every moment; and they are so vivid that by them, as by a kind of internal motion, all the vital processes of the body seem to be promoted.” In music and humor, similarly, what we enjoy are bodily changes caused by rapidly shifting ideas.

Music and that which excites laughter are two different kinds of play with aesthetical ideas, or of representations of the understanding through which ultimately nothing is thought, which can give lively gratification merely by their changes. Thus we recognize pretty clearly that the animation in both cases is merely bodily, although it is excited by ideas of the mind; and that the feeling of health produced by a motion of the intestines corresponding to the play in question makes up that whole gratification of a gay party.

A version of the Incongruity Theory that gave it more philosophical significance than Kant’s version is that of Arthur Schopenhauer (1818/1844 [1907]). While Kant located the lack of fit in humor between our expectations and our experience, Schopenhauer locates it between our sense perceptions of things and our abstract rational knowledge of those same things. We perceive unique individual things with many properties. But when we group our sense perceptions under abstract concepts, we focus on just one or a few properties of any individual thing. Thus we lump quite different things under one concept and one word. Think, for example, of a Chihuahua and a St. Bernard categorized under dog . For Schopenhauer, humor arises when we suddenly notice the incongruity between a concept and a perception that are supposed to be of the same thing.

Many human actions can only be performed by the help of reason and deliberation, and yet there are some which are better performed without its assistance. This very incongruity of sensuous and abstract knowledge, on account of which the latter always merely approximates to the former, as mosaic approximates to painting, is the cause of a very remarkable phenomenon which, like reason itself, is peculiar to human nature, and of which the explanations that have ever anew been attempted, as insufficient: I mean laughter… . The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity (1818/1844 [1907], Book I, sec. 13).

As an example, Schopenhauer tells of the prison guards who allowed a convict to play cards with them, but when they caught him cheating, they kicked him out. He comments, “They let themselves be led by the general conception, ‘Bad companions are turned out,’ and forget that he is also a prisoner, i. e., one whom they ought to hold fast” (Supplement to Book I: Ch. 8). He also comments on an Austrian joke (the equivalent of a Polish joke in the U.S. a few decades ago):

When someone had declared that he was fond of walking alone, an Austrian said to him: “You like walking alone; so do I: therefore we can go together.” He starts from the conception, “A pleasure which two love they can enjoy in common,” and subsumes under it the very case which excludes community.

Creating jokes like these requires the ability to think of an abstract idea under which very different things can be subsumed. Wit, Schopenhauer says, “consists entirely in a facility for finding for every object that appears a conception under which it certainly can be thought, though it is very different from all the other objects which come under this conception” (Supplement to Book I, Ch. 8).

With this theory of humor as based on the discrepancy between abstract ideas and real things, Schopenhauer explains the offensiveness of being laughed at, the kind of laughter at the heart of the Superiority Theory.

That the laughter of others at what we do or say seriously offends us so keenly depends on the fact that it asserts that there is a great incongruity between our conceptions and the objective realities. For the same reason, the predicate “ludicrous” or “absurd” is insulting. The laugh of scorn announces with triumph to the baffled adversary how incongruous were the conceptions he cherished with the reality which is now revealing itself to him (Supplement to Book I, Ch. 8).

With his theory, too, Schopenhauer explains the pleasure of humor.

In every suddenly appearing conflict between what is perceived and what is thought, what is perceived is always unquestionably right; for it is not subject to error at all, requires no confirmation from without, but answers for itself. … The victory of knowledge of perception over thought affords us pleasure. For perception is the original kind of knowledge inseparable from animal nature, in which everything that gives direct satisfaction to the will presents itself. It is the medium of the present, of enjoyment and gaiety; moreover it is attended with no exertion. With thinking the opposite is the case: it is the second power of knowledge, the exercise of which always demands some, and often considerable exertion. Besides, it is the conceptions of thought that often oppose the gratification of our immediate desires, for, as the medium of the past, the future, and of seriousness, they are the vehicles of our fears, our repentance, and all our cares. It must therefore be diverting to us to see this strict, untiring, troublesome governess, the reason, for once convicted of insufficiency. On this account then the mien or appearance of laughter is very closely related to that of joy (Supplement to Book I, Ch. 8).

Like Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard saw humor as based on incongruity and as philosophically significant. In his discussion of the “three spheres of existence,” (the three existential stages of life—the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious), he discusses humor and its close relative, irony. Irony marks the boundary between the aesthetic and the ethical spheres, while humor marks the boundary between the ethical and religious spheres. “Humor is the last stage of existential awareness before faith” (1846 [1941], 448, 259). The person with a religious view of life is likely to cultivate humor, he says, and Christianity is the most humorous view of life in world history ([JP], Entries 1681–1682).

Kierkegaard (1846 [1941], 459–468) locates the essence of humor, which he calls “the comical,” in a disparity between what is expected and what is experienced, though instead of calling it “incongruity” he calls it “contradiction.” For example, “Errors are comical, and are all to be explained by the contradiction involved.” He cites the story of the baker who said to the begging woman, “No, mother, I cannot give you anything. There was another here recently whom I had to send away without giving anything, too: we cannot give to everybody.”

The violation of our expectations is at the heart of the tragic as well as the comic, Kierkegaard says. To contrast the two, he appeals to Aristotle’s definition of the comic in Chapter 5 of The Poetics : “The ridiculous is a mistake or unseemliness that is not painful or destructive.”

The tragic and the comic are the same, in so far as both are based on contradiction; but the tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comical, the painless contradiction… . The comic apprehension evokes the contradiction or makes it manifest by having in mind the way out, which is why the contradiction is painless. The tragic apprehension sees the contradiction and despairs of a way out.

A few decades earlier, William Hazlitt contrasted the tragic and comic this way in his essay “On Wit and Humor”:

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps: for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. We weep at what thwarts or exceeds our desires in serious matters; we laugh at what only disappoints our expectations in trifles… . To explain the nature of laughter and tears, is to account for the condition of human life; for it is in a manner compounded of the two! It is a tragedy or a comedy—sad or merry, as it happens… . Tears may be considered as the natural and involuntary resource of the mind overcome by some sudden and violent emotion, before it has had time to reconcile its feelings to the change of circumstances: while laughter may be defined to be the same sort of convulsive and involuntary movement, occasioned by mere surprise or contrast (in the absence of any more serious emotion), before it has time to reconcile its belief to contrary appearances (Hazlitt 1819 [1907], 1).

The core meaning of “incongruity” in various versions of the Incongruity Theory, then, is that some thing or event we perceive or think about violates our standard mental patterns and normal expectations. (If we are listening to a joke for the second time, of course, there is a sense in which we expect the incongruous punch line, but it still violates our ordinary expectations.) Beyond that core meaning, various thinkers have added different details, many of which are incompatible with each other. In contemporary psychology, for example, theorists such as Thomas Schultz (1976) and Jerry Suls (1972, 1983) have claimed that what we enjoy in humor is not incongruity itself, but the resolution of incongruity. After age seven, Schultz says, we require the fitting of the apparently anomalous element into some conceptual schema. That is what happens when we “get” a joke. Indeed, Schultz does not even call unresolvable incongruity “humor”—he calls it “nonsense.” The examples of humor cited by these theorists are typically jokes in which the punch line is momentarily confusing, but then the hearer reinterprets the first part so that it makes a kind of sense. When, for instance, Mae West said, “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution,” the shift in meanings of “institution” is the incongruity, but it takes a moment to follow that shift, and the pleasure is in figuring out that the word has two meanings. Amusement, according to this understanding of humor, is akin to puzzle-solving. Other theorists insist that incongruity-resolution figures in only some humor, and that the pleasure of amusement is not like puzzle-solving.

As philosophers and psychologists refined the Incongruity Theory in the late 20 th century, one flaw in several older versions came to light: they said, or more often implied, that the perception of incongruity is sufficient for humor. That is clearly false, since when our mental patterns and expectations are violated, we may well feel fear, disgust, or anger and not amusement. James Beattie, the first philosopher to analyze humor as a response to incongruity, was careful to point out that laughter is only one such response. Our perception of incongruity will not excite the “risible emotion,” he said, when that perception is “attended with some other emotion of greater authority” such as fear, pity, moral disapprobation, indignation, or disgust (1779, 420).

One way to correct this flaw is to say that humorous amusement is not just any response to incongruity, but a way of enjoying incongruity. Michael Clark, for example, offers these three features as necessary and sufficient for humor:

A person perceives (thinks, imagines) an object as being incongruous.
The person enjoys perceiving (thinking, imagining) the object.
The person enjoys the perceived (thought, imagined) incongruity at least partly for itself, rather than solely for some ulterior reason (in Morreall 1987, 139–155).

This version of the Incongruity Theory is an improvement on theories which describe amusement as the perception of incongruity, but it still seems not specific enough. Amusement is one way of enjoying incongruity, but not the only way. Mike W. Martin offers several examples from the arts (in Morreall, 1987, 176). Sophocles’ Oedipus the King has many lines in which Oedipus vows to do whatever it takes to bring King Laius’ killer to justice. We in the audience, knowing that Oedipus is himself that killer, may enjoy the incongruity of a king threatening himself, but that enjoyment need not be humorous amusement. John Morreall (1987, 204–205) argues that a number of aesthetic categories— the grotesque, the macabre, the horrible, the bizarre, and the fantastic—involve a non-humorous enjoyment of some violation of our mental patterns and expectations.

Whatever refinements the Incongruity Theory might require, it seems better able to account for laughter and humor than the scientifically obsolete Relief Theory. It also seems more comprehensive than the Superiority Theory since it can account for kinds of humor that do not seem based on superiority, such as puns and other wordplay.

While the Incongruity Theory made humor look less objectionable than the Superiority Theory did, it has not improved philosophers’ opinions of humor much in the last two centuries, at least judging from what they have published. Part of the continued bad reputation of humor comes from a new objection triggered by the Incongruity Theory: If humor is enjoying the violation of our mental patterns and expectations, then it is irrational. This Irrationality Objection is almost as old as the Incongruity Theory, and is implicit in Kant’s claim that the pleasure in laughter is only physical and not intellectual. “How could a delusive expectation gratify?” he asks. According to Kant, humor feels good in spite of, not because of, the way it frustrates our desire to understand. George Santayana (1896, 248) agreed, arguing that incongruity itself could not be enjoyed.

We have a prosaic background of common sense and everyday reality; upon this background an unexpected idea suddenly impinges. But the thing is a futility. The comic accident falsifies the nature before us, starts a wrong analogy in the mind, a suggestion that cannot be carried out. In a word, we are in the presence of an absurdity, and man, being a rational animal, can like absurdity no better than he can like hunger or cold.

If the widespread contemporary appreciation of humor is defensible, then this Irrationality Objection needs to be addressed. To do that seems to require an explanation of how our higher mental functions can operate in a beneficial way that is different from theoretical and practical reasoning. One way to construct that explanation is to analyze humor as a kind of play, and explain how such play can be beneficial.

Remarkably few philosophers have even mentioned that humor is a kind of play, much less seen benefits in such play. Kant spoke of joking as “the play of thought,” though he saw no value in it beyond laughter’s stimulation of the internal organs. One of the few to classify humor as play and see value in the mental side of humor was Thomas Aquinas. He followed the lead of Aristotle, who said in the Nicomachean Ethics (Ch. 8) that “Life includes rest as well as activity, and in this is included leisure and amusement.” Some people carry amusement to excess—“vulgar buffoons,” Aristotle calls them—but just as bad are “those who can neither make a joke themselves nor put up with those who do,” whom he calls “boorish and unpolished.” Between buffoonery and boorishness there is a happy medium—engaging in humor at the right time and place, and to the right degree. This virtue Aristotle calls eutrapelia, ready-wittedness, from the Greek for “turning well.” In his Summa Theologiae (2a2ae, Q. 168) Aquinas extends Aristotle’s ideas in three articles: “Whether there can be virtue in actions done in play,” “The sin of playing too much,” and “The sin of playing too little.” He agrees with Aristotle that humor and other forms of play provide occasional rest:

As bodily tiredness is eased by resting the body, so psychological tiredness is eased by resting the soul. As we have explained in discussing the feelings, pleasure is rest for the soul. And therefore the remedy for weariness of soul lies in slackening the tension of mental study and taking some pleasure… . Those words and deeds in which nothing is sought beyond the soul’s pleasure are called playful or humorous, and it is necessary to make use of them at times for solace of soul (2a2ae, Q. 168, Art. 2).

Beyond providing rest for the soul, Aquinas suggests that humor has social benefits. Extending the meaning of Aristotle’s eutrapelia , he talks about “a eutrapelos , a pleasant person with a happy cast of mind who gives his words and deeds a cheerful turn.” The person who is never playful or humorous, Aquinas says, is acting “against reason” and so is guilty of a vice.

Anything conflicting with reason in human action is vicious. It is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by never showing himself agreeable to others or being a kill-joy or wet blanket on their enjoyment. And so Seneca says, “Bear yourself with wit, lest you be regarded as sour or despised as dull.” Now those who lack playfulness are sinful, those who never say anything to make you smile, or are grumpy with those who do (2a2ae, Q. 168, Art. 4).

In the last century an early play theory of humor was developed by Max Eastman (1936), who found parallels to humor in the play of animals, particularly in the laughter of chimps during tickling. He argues that “we come into the world endowed with an instinctive tendency to laugh and have this feeling in response to pains presented playfully” (45). In humor and play generally, according to Eastman, we take a disinterested attitude toward something that could instead be treated seriously.

In the late 20 th century Ted Cohen (1999) wrote about the social benefits of joke-telling, and many psychologists confirmed Aquinas’ assessment of humor as virtuous. A chapter in the American Psychological Association’s Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification , under “Strengths of Transcendence,” is “Humor [Playfulness].” Engaging in humor can foster a tolerance for ambiguity and diversity, and promote creative problem-solving. It can serve as a social lubricant, engendering trust and reducing conflict. In communications that tend to evoke negative emotions--announcing bad news, apologizing, complaining, warning, criticizing, commanding, evaluating--humor can provide delight that reduces or even blocks negative emotions. Consider this paragraph from a debt-collection letter:

We appreciate your business, but, please, give us a break. Your account is overdue ten months. That means we’ve carried you longer than your mother did (Morreall 2009, 117).

Play activities such as humor are not usually pursued in order to achieve such benefits, of course; they are pursued, as Aquinas said, for pleasure. A parallel with humor here is music, which we typically play and listen to for pleasure, but which can boost our manual dexterity and even mathematical abilities, reduce stress, and strengthen our social bonds.

Ethologists (students of animal, including human, behavior) point out that in play activities, young animals learn important skills they will need later on. Young lions, for example, play by going through actions that will be part of hunting. Humans have hunted with rocks and spears for tens of thousands of years, and so boys often play by throwing projectiles at targets. Marek Spinka (2001) observes that in playing, young animals move in exaggerated ways. Young monkeys leap not just from branch to branch, but from trees into rivers. Children not only run, but skip and do cartwheels. Spinka suggests that in play young animals are testing the limits of their speed, balance, and coordination. In doing so, they learn to cope with unexpected situations such as being chased by a new kind of predator.

This account of the value of play in children and young animals does not automatically explain why humor is important to adult humans, but for us as for children and young animals, the play activities that seem the most fun are those in which we exercise our abilities in unusual and extreme ways, yet in a safe setting. Sports is an example. So is humor.

In humor the abilities we exercise in unusual and extreme ways in a safe setting are related to thinking and interacting with other people. What is enjoyed is incongruity, the violation of our mental patterns and expectations. In joking with friends, for example, we break rules of conversation such as these formulated by H. P. Grice (1975):

Do not say what you believe to be false.
Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Avoid obscurity of expression.
Avoid ambiguity.

We break Rule 1 when for a laugh we exaggerate wildly, say the opposite of what we think, or “pull someone’s leg.” We break Rule 2 when we present funny fantasies as if they were facts. Rule 3 is broken to create humor when we reply to an embarrassing question with an obviously vague or confusing answer. We violate Rule 4 in telling most prepared jokes, as Victor Raskin (1984) has shown. A comment or story starts off with an assumed interpretation for a phrase, but then at the punch line, switches to a second, usually opposed interpretation. Consider the line “I love cats. They taste a lot like chicken.” Rule 5 is broken when we turn an ordinary complaint into a comic rant like those of Roseanne Barr and Lewis Black.

Humor, like other play, sometimes takes the form of activity that would not be mistaken for serious activity. Wearing a red clown nose and making up nonsense syllables are examples. More often, however, as in the conversational moves above, humor and play are modeled on serious activities. When in conversation we switch from serious discussion to making funny comments, for example, we keep the same vocabulary and grammar, and our sentences transcribed to paper might look like bona-fide assertions, questions, etc. This similarity between non-serious and serious language and actions calls for ways that participants can distinguish between the two. Ethologists call these ways “play signals.”

The oldest play signals in humans are smiling and laughing. According to ethologists, these evolved from similar play signals in pre-human apes. The apes that evolved into Homo sapiens split off from the apes that evolved into chimpanzees and gorillas about six million years ago. In chimps and gorillas, as in other mammals, play usually takes the form of mock-aggression such as chasing, wrestling, biting, and tickling. According to many ethologists, mock-aggression was the earliest form of play, from which all other play developed (Aldis 1975, 139; Panksepp 1993, 150). In mock-aggressive play, it is critical that all participants are aware that the activity is not real aggression. Without a way to distinguish between being chased or bitten playfully and being attacked in earnest, an animal might respond with deadly force. In the anthropoid apes, play signals are visual and auditory. Jan van Hooff (1972, 212–213) and others speculate that the first play signals in humans evolved from two facial displays in an ancestor of both humans and the great apes that are still found in gorillas and chimps. One was the “grin face” or “social grimace”: the corners of the mouth and the lips are retracted to expose the gums, the jaws are closed, there is no vocalization, body movement is inhibited, and the eyes are directed toward an interacting partner. This “silent bared-teeth display,” according to van Hooff (1972, 217), evolved into the human social smile of appeasement.

In the other facial display, the lips are relaxed and the mouth open, and breathing is shallow and staccato, like panting. This vocalization in chimpanzees is on the in-breath: “Ahh ahh ahh.” According to van Hooff, this “relaxed open-mouth display” or “play face” evolved into human laughter. The relaxed mouth in laughter contrasts with the mouth in real aggression that is tense and prepared to bite hard. That difference, combined with the distinctive shallow, staccato breathing pattern, allows laughter to serve as a play signal, announcing that “This is just for fun; it’s not real fighting.” Chimps and gorillas show that face and vocalization during rough-and-tumble play, and it can be elicited in them by the playful grabbing and poking we call tickling (Andrew 1963).

As early hominin species began walking upright and the front limbs were no longer used for locomotion, the muscles in the chest no longer had to synchronize breathing with locomotion. The larynx moved to a lower position in the throat, and the pharynx developed, allowing early humans to modulate their breathing and vocalize in complex ways (Harris 1989, 77). Eventually they would speak, but before that they came to laugh in our human way: “ha ha ha” on the out-breath instead of “ahh ahh ahh” on the in-breath.

In the last decade, thinkers in evolutionary psychology have extended van Hooff’s work, relating humor to such things as sexual selection (Greengross 2008; Li et al. 2009). In the competition for women to mate with, early men may have engaged in humor to show their intelligence, cleverness, adaptability, and desire to please others.

The hypothesis that laughter evolved as a play signal is appealing in several ways. Unlike the Superiority and Incongruity Theories, it explains the link between humor and the facial expression, body language, and sound of laughter. It also explains why laughter is overwhelmingly a social experience, as those theories do not. According to one estimate, we are thirty times more likely to laugh with other people than when we are alone (Provine 2000, 45). Tracing laughter to a play signal in early humans also accords with the fact that young children today laugh during the same activities—chasing, wrestling, and tickling—in which chimps and gorillas show their play face and laugh-like vocalizations. The idea that laughter and humor evolved from mock-aggression, furthermore, helps explain why so much humor today, especially in males, is playfully aggressive.

The playful aggression found in much humor has been widely misunderstood by philosophers, especially in discussions of the ethics of humor. Starting with Plato, most philosophers have treated humor that represents people in a negative light as if it were real aggression toward those people. Jokes in which blondes or Poles are extraordinarily stupid, blacks extraordinarily lazy, Italians extraordinarily cowardly, lawyers extraordinarily self-centered, women extraordinarily unmathematical, etc. have usually been analyzed as if they were bona fide assertions that blondes or Poles are extraordinarily stupid, blacks extraordinarily lazy, etc. This approach is announced in the title of Michael Philips’ “Racist Acts and Racist Humor”(1984). Philips classifies Polish jokes as racist, for example, but anyone who understands their popularity in the 1960s, knows that they did not involve hostility toward Polish people, who had long been assimilated into North American society. Consider the joke about the Polish astronaut calling a press conference to announce that he was going to fly a rocket to the sun. When asked how he would deal with the sun’s intense heat, he said, “Don’t worry, I’ll go at night.” To enjoy this joke, it is not necessary to have racist beliefs or attitudes towards Poles, any more than it is necessary to believe that Poland has a space program. This is a fantasy enjoyed for its clever depiction of unbelievable stupidity.

While playing with negative stereotypes in jokes does not require endorsement of those stereotypes, however, it still keeps them in circulation, and that can be harmful in a racist or sexist culture where stereotypes support prejudice and injustice. Jokes can be morally objectionable for perpetuating stereotypes that need to be eliminated. More generally, humor can be morally objectionable when it treats as a subject for play something that should be taken seriously. (Morreall 2009, ch. 5). Here humor often blocks compassion and responsible action. An egregious example is the cover of the July 1974 National Lampoon magazine, titled the “Dessert Issue.” A few years earlier George Harrison and other musicians had organized a charity concert to benefit the victims of a famine in Bangladesh. From it they produced the record album Concert for Bangladesh . The album cover featured a photograph of a starving child with a begging bowl. The photo on the cover of National Lampoon ’s “Dessert Issue” was virtually the same, only it was of a chocolate sculpture of a starving child, with part of the head bitten off.

Having sketched an account of humor as play with words and ideas, we need to go further in order to counter the Irrationality Objection, especially since that play is based on violating mental patterns and expectations. What must be added is an explanation of how playfully violating mental patterns and expectations could foster rationality rather than undermine it.

Part of rationality is thinking abstractly—in a way that is not tied to one’s immediate experience and individual perspective. If at a dinner party I spill a blob of ketchup on my shirt that looks like a bullet hole, I could be locked into a Here/Now/Me/Practical mode in which I think only about myself and my soiled shirt. Or I could think about embarrassing moments like this as experienced by millions of people over the centuries. More abstract still would be to think, as the Buddha did, about how human life is full of problems.

In the lower animals, mental processing is not abstract but tied to present experience, needs, and opportunities. It is about nearby predators, food, mates, etc. When something violates their expectations, especially something involving a potential or actual loss, their typical reaction is fear, anger, disgust, or sadness. These emotions evolved in mammals and were useful for millions of years because they motivate adaptive behavior such as fighting, fleeing, avoiding noxious substances, withdrawing from activity, and avoiding similar situations in the future.

Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness are still sometimes adaptive in humans: A snarling dog scares us, for example, and we move away quickly, avoiding a nasty bite. We scream and poke the eyes of a mugger, and he runs off. But if human mental development had not gone beyond such emotions, with their Here/Now/Me/Practical focus, we would not have become rational animals. What early humans needed was a way to react to the violation of their expectations that transcended their immediate experience and their individual perspective. Humorous amusement provided that. In the humorous frame of mind, we experience, think about, or even create something that violates our understanding of how things are supposed to be. But we suspend the personal, practical concerns that lead to negative emotions, and enjoy the oddness of what is occurring. If the incongruous situation is our own failure or mistake, we view it in the way we view the failures and mistakes of other people. This perspective is more abstract, objective, and rational than an emotional perspective. As the theme song of the old Candid Camera television program used to say, we “see ourselves as other people do.” Instead of tensing up and preparing to run away or attack, we relax and laugh. In laughter, as Wallace Chafe said in The Importance of Not Being Earnest (2007), not only do we not do anything, but we are disabled as we lose muscle control in our torsos, arms, and legs. In extremely heavy laughter, we fall on the floor and wet our pants.

The nonpractical attitude in humor would not be beneficial, of course, if I were in imminent danger. If instead of ketchup, I spilled sulfuric acid on my shirt, the Here/Now/Me/Practical narrow focus of fear would be preferable to the disengaged, playful attitude of humor. When immediate action is called for, humor is no substitute. But in many situations where our expectations are violated, no action would help. In the Poetics (5, 1449a) Aristotle said that what is funny is “a mistake or unseemliness that is not painful or destructive.” But people have joked about problems as grave as their own impending death. As he approached the gallows, Thomas More asked the executioner, “Could you help me up. I’ll be able to get down by myself.” On his deathbed, the story goes, Oscar Wilde said: “This wallpaper is atrocious. One of us has to go.”

Not only does such joking foster rationality and provide pleasure, but it reduces or eliminates the combination of fear and/or anger called “stress,” which is at epidemic levels in the industrialized world. In fear and anger, chemicals such as epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol are released into the blood, causing an increase in muscle tension, heart rate, and blood pressure, and a suppression of the immune system. Those physiological changes evolved in earlier mammals as a way to energize them to fight or flee, and in early humans, they were usually responses to physical dangers such as predators or enemies. Today, however, our bodies and brains react in the same way to problems that are not physically threatening, such as overbearing bosses and work deadlines. The increased muscle tension, the spike in blood pressure, and other changes in stress not only do not help us with such problems, but cause new ones such as headaches, heart attacks, and cancer. When in potentially stressful situations we shift to the play mode of humor, our heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension decrease, as do levels of epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol. Laughter also increases pain tolerance and boosts the activity of the immune system, which stress suppresses (Morreall 1997, ch. 4; Morreall 2016, ch. 5–6).

A century ago, when psychologists still talked like philosophers, an editorial in the American Journal of Psychology (October 1907) said of humor that “Perhaps its largest function is to detach us from our world of good and evil, of loss and gain, and to enable us to see it in proper perspective. It frees us from vanity, on the one hand, and from pessimism, on the other, by keeping us larger than what we do, and greater than what can happen to us.”

While there is only speculation about how humor developed in early humans, we know that by the late 6 th century BCE the Greeks had institutionalized it in the ritual known as comedy, and that it was performed with a contrasting dramatic form known as tragedy. Both were based on the violation of mental patterns and expectations, and in both the world is a tangle of conflicting systems where humans live in the shadow of failure, folly, and death. Like tragedy, comedy represents life as full of tension, danger, and struggle, with success or failure often depending on chance factors. Where they differ is in the responses of the lead characters to life’s incongruities. Identifying with these characters, audiences at comedies and tragedies have contrasting responses to events in the dramas. And because these responses carry over to similar situations in life, comedy and tragedy embody contrasting responses to the incongruities in life. (Morreall 1999, ch. 1–4).

Tragedy valorizes serious, emotional engagement with life’s problems, even struggle to the death. Along with epic, it is part of the Western heroic tradition that extols ideals, the willingness to fight for them, and honor. The tragic ethos is linked to patriarchy and militarism—many of its heroes are kings and conquerors—and it valorizes what Conrad Hyers (1996) calls Warrior Virtues—blind obedience, the willingness to kill or die on command, unquestioning loyalty, single-mindedness, resoluteness of purpose, and pride.

Comedy, by contrast, embodies an anti-heroic, pragmatic attitude toward life’s incongruities. From Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 , comedy has mocked the irrationality of militarism and blind respect for authority. Its own methods of handling conflict include deal-making, trickery, getting an enemy drunk, and running away. As the Irish saying goes, you’re only a coward for a moment, but you’re dead for the rest of your life. In place of Warrior Virtues, it extols critical thinking, cleverness, adaptability, and an appreciation of physical pleasures like eating, drinking, and sex.

Along with the idealism of tragedy goes elitism. The people who matter are kings, queens, and generals. In comedy there are more characters and more kinds of characters, women are more prominent, and many protagonists come from lower classes. Everybody counts for one. That shows in the language of comedy, which, unlike the elevated language of tragedy, is common speech. The basic unit in tragedy is the individual, in comedy it is the family, group of friends, or bunch of co-workers.

While tragic heroes are emotionally engaged with their problems, comic protagonists show emotional disengagement. They think, rather than feel, their way through difficulties. By presenting such characters as role models, comedy has implicitly valorized the benefits of humor that are now being empirically verified, such as that it is psychologically and physically healthy, it fosters mental flexibility, and it serves as a social lubricant. With a few exceptions like Aquinas, philosophers have ignored these benefits.

If philosophers wanted to undo the traditional prejudices against humor, they might consider the affinities between one contemporary genre of comedy—standup comedy—and philosophy itself. There are at least seven. (Morreall 2009, ch. 7). First, standup comedy and philosophy are conversational: like the dialogue format that started with Plato, standup routines are interactive. Second, both reflect on familiar experiences, especially puzzling ones. We wake from a vivid dream, for example, not sure what has happened and what is happening. Third, like philosophers, standup comics often approach puzzling experiences with questions. “If I thought that dream was real, how do I know that I’m not dreaming right now?” The most basic starting point in both philosophy and standup comedy is “X—what’s up with that ?” Fourth, as they think about familiar experiences, both philosophers and comics step back emotionally from them. Henri Bergson (1900 [1911]) spoke of the “momentary anesthesia of the heart” in laughter. Emotional disengagement long ago became a meaning of “philosophical”—“rational, sensibly composed, calm, as in a difficult situation.” Fifth, philosophers and standup comics think critically. They ask whether familiar ideas make sense, and they refuse to defer to authority and tradition. It was for his critical thinking that Socrates was executed. So were cabaret comics in Germany who mocked the Third Reich. Sixth, in thinking critically, philosophers and standup comics pay careful attention to language. Attacking sloppy and illogical uses of words is standard in both, and so is finding exactly the right words to express an idea. Seventh, the pleasure of standup comedy is often like the pleasure of doing philosophy. In both we relish new ways of looking at things and delight in surprising thoughts. Cleverness is prized. William James (1911 [1979], 11) said that philosophy “sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar.” The same is true of standup comedy. Simon Critchley has written that both ask us to “look at things as if you had just landed from another planet” (2002, 1).

One recent philosopher attuned to the affinity between comedy and philosophy was Bertrand Russell. “The point of philosophy,” he said, “is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it” (1918, 53). In the middle of an argument, he once observed, “This seems plainly absurd: but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities” (2008 [1912], 17).

Often writing for popular audiences, Russell had many quips that would fit nicely into a comedy routine:

The fundamental cause of trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt“ (1998, 28).
Most people would die sooner than think—in fact they do so” (1925a, 166).
Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents“ (1950, 71).
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true” (1925b, 75).

For more examples of the affinities between comedy and philosophy, there is a series of books on philosophy and popular culture from Open Court Publishing that includes: Seinfeld and Philosophy (2002), The Simpsons and Philosophy (2001), Woody Allen and Philosophy (2004), and Monty Python and Philosophy (2006). Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein have written Plato and a Platypus Walked into a Bar … : Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (2008), and Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between (2009). In philosophy of mind, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams (2011) have used humor to explain the development of the human mind. In aesthetics, Noël Carroll (1999, 2003, 2007, 2013) has written about philosophical implications of comedy and humor, and about their relationships with the genre of horror. The journals Philosophy East and West (1989), the Monist (2005), and Educational Philosophy and Theory (2014) have published special issues on humor. The ancient prejudices against humor that started with Plato are finally starting to crumble.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Humor , article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
Noël Carroll on humor , in Philosophy Bites .
Philosophical Humour , links on Philosophy Now website.
The Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling , by George Vasey, 1875; a Victorian attack on laughter. (There are also links to William Hazlitt’s “On Wit and Humour” (1818) and Benjamin Franklin’s Fart Proudly (1781).).

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Getting the Joke: Insight during Humor Comprehension – Evidence from an fMRI Study

1 Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, China

2 Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

Wenfeng Zhu

Arne dietrich.

3 Department of Psychology, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

Qinglin Zhang

Wenjing yang, qunlin chen, jiangzhou sun, guikang cao.

As a high-level cognitive activity, humor comprehension requires incongruity detection and incongruity resolution, which then elicits an insight moment. The purpose of the study was to explore the neural basis of humor comprehension, particularly the moment of insight, by using both characters and language-free cartoons in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. The results showed that insight involving jokes elicited greater activation in language and semantic-related brain regions as well as a variety of additional regions, such as the superior frontal gyrus (SFG), the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), the middle temporal gyrus (MTG), the superior temporal gyrus (STG), the temporoparietal junctions (TPJ), the hippocampus and visual areas. These findings indicate that the MTG might play a role in incongruity detection, while the SFG, IFG and the TPJ might be involved in incongruity detection. The passive insight event elicited by jokes appears to be mediated by a limited number of brain areas. Our study showed that the brain regions associated with humor comprehension were not affected by the type of stimuli and that humor and insight shared common brain areas. These results indicate that one experiences a feeling of insight during humor comprehension, which contributes to the understanding of humor comprehension.

Introduction

As an important high-level cognitive activity, humor plays a crucial role in human social life. Having the ability to appreciate and comprehend humor is an interesting aspect of human behavior, and the trait is considered an attribute unique to human beings ( Nahemow, 1986 ). Suls (1972) proposed incongruity-resolution theory and suggested that the cognitive processing aspects of a joke (humor) could be divided into two stages: incongruity detection and incongruity resolution. In humor comprehension, incongruity means that two or more incompatible schemas are activated in the same situation simultaneously, and incongruity detection means that subjects notice the existence of incompatible schemas, that is, the uncertainty of selective activation of multiple schemas in a given concept. In addition, the process of extracting appropriate schema from multiple schemas according to the current situation is incongruity resolution ( Wyer and Collins, 1992 ). Thus, the process of humor comprehension is processed in a step-by-step procedure ( Coulson, 2001 ).

In incongruity detection, uncertainty may lead to surprise, which consists of a series of immediate reactions, such as cognition interruption, attention assignments, and more systematic handling of surprising things ( Meyer et al., 1997 ; Topolinski and Strack, 2015 ). Surprise can interrupt ongoing activities and thinking patterns, requiring an increase in processing depth to cognitively master unexpected events (surprising stimulus) ( Meyer et al., 1997 ; Topolinski and Strack, 2015 ). Such interruptions tend to cause negative feelings ( Noordewier and Breugelmans, 2013 ) because uncertainty means that one has failed to predict future events ( Huron, 2006 ). However, in incongruity resolution, people can feel pleasant once the surprising outcome is understood ( Noordewier et al., 2016 ). That is, the punchline of a joke elicits a moment of insight, and the ease of this insight can make people feel funnier and experience more enjoyment ( Topolinski, 2014 ).

Bekinschtein et al. (2011) claimed that jokes appear to involve executive functions, such as thought organizing, insight development, information disambiguating, schema shifting and bridging inferences to re-establish a new context. To ensure a joke works well, the first part of the joke (incongruity detection) creates a context (C1), which can induce the subject to assume a hypothesis (H1). The subjects may formulate several hypotheses because the joke is relatively ambiguous. It is necessary for the subjects to go back and reprocess the first part of the joke to find an alternative explanation, which leads to the second hypothesis (H2) ( Jodłowiec, 1991 ). The punchline of a joke induces an insight that comes from the re-comprehension or reinterpretation of the context and the problem. Thus, humor comprehension could be regarded as a problem-solving task ( Suls, 1972 ). When the problem or the incongruity is resolved, the old frame will be shifted to a new one ( Oakley and Coulson, 2000 ). Subjects gain a new perspective for perceiving the problem and understand it; thus, the new perspective leads to a feeling of insight.

Several previous imaging studies have examined the neural basis of humor comprehension using two types of materials: visual materials (cartoons, visual puns and short movie clips or verbal materials (phonological and semantic) ( Azim et al., 2005 ; Bartolo et al., 2006 ; Bekinschtein et al., 2011 ; Chan et al., 2012 , 2013 ; Amir et al., 2013 ). In comparing non-funny or nonsense conditions with funny visual stimulus conditions, the activated regions observed under funny visual conditions included the middle temporal gyrus (MTG), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), superior frontal gyrus (SFG), middle frontal gyrus (MFG), and the temporoparietal junctions (TPJ) during humor comprehension ( Azim et al., 2005 ; Bartolo et al., 2006 ; Kohn et al., 2011 ; Marinkovic et al., 2011 ; Neely et al., 2012 ). For verbal jokes, the main activated regions have been detected in the MTG, ITG, SFG, IFG, and TPJ ( Bekinschtein et al., 2011 ; Chan et al., 2012 ). Several common regions under visual and verbal conditions include the TPJ, MTG, ITG, IFG, SFG, and MFG ( Vrticka et al., 2013 ). However, only one type of experimental material (visual material or verbal material) has been used in previous studies about humor; therefore, it is difficult to compare the brain regions associated with different conditions in a study.

Gestalt theorists note that the reconstruction of certain changes during humor comprehension may lead to a higher level of cognition ( DERKS, 1987 ; Gick and Lockhart, 1995 ) and that the cognitive processes involved in humor comprehension likely share certain features with those involved in insight ( Gick and Lockhart, 1995 ). Insight occurs in a particular problem situation, and there is no inner speech at the critical moment ( Schooler et al., 1993 ; Gick and Lockhart, 1995 ). Reconstruction, the shift in problem representation, is the essential characteristic of insight. Ohlsson (1984) indicated that reconstruction occurs during problem solving, but reconstruction does not necessarily promote problem solving. In addition, it is more likely to be the depth analysis of problems and the goals that often must break from the process of chunk decomposition. Chunks consist of different types of elements and are gradually formed in people’s daily life. Whether a problem representation can be effectively converted depends on the proximity of the elements in the associated chunk. As such, an insight experience may lead to perception, problem solving, language comprehension and other domains of cognition ( Ohlsson, 1992 ; Cunningham et al., 2009 ). Amir et al. (2013) conducted an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to explore the neural differences between humor comprehension and insight. The results indicated that the brain regions associated with insight interpretation overlapped with the regions related to humor interpretation. Therefore, the study of insight during humor comprehension could contribute to the understanding of insight and humor.

Several previous studies have examined the neural basis of insight using traditional problem-solving tasks. The results have shown increased activation in the superior temporal gyrus (STG), prefrontal cortex (PFC), cingulate cortex (ACC), hippocampus and temporoparietal cortices ( Luo and Niki, 2003 ; Bechtereva et al., 2004 ; Luo et al., 2004 ; Qiu et al., 2008a , b ; Aziz-Zadeh et al., 2009 ; Dietrich and Kanso, 2010 ). In a study of verbal tasks, many types of problems, such as riddles, anagrams, the Remote Associates Test (RAT) and other forms of insight problems, were used as verbal materials ( Mednick, 1962 ). The RAT was developed by Mednick (1962) and has since been considered a valid tool for measuring creativity. Each RAT question presents three cued words that are linked by a fourth word, which is the correct answer (for the triad “athletes, web and rabbit,” the answer is “food”). Many spatial insight problems, such as the 4-dot problem, the figure problem and the pennies problem, have been used as visual materials in the study of visual tasks. The experimental paradigm and conclusions of these studies have been criticized ( Dietrich and Kanso, 2010 ; Weisberg, 2013 ). The reasons for this phenomenon are as follows. First, the brain regions associated with insight appeared to be more diverse. Second, a large number of different types of insight problems were used in these studies, but some did not meet the criteria of insight problems ( Dietrich and Kanso, 2010 ).

To date, many studies have studied the neural basis of humor comprehension. However, only a single type of material has been used in those studies, such as visual materials (cartoons and visual puns) or verbal materials (phonological and semantic), without directly comparing visual materials vs. verbal materials. Although humor and insight have much in common in cognitive processing and neural mechanisms, previous studies have addressed these topics separately; indeed, no study has addressed both humor and insight. Therefore, using two different types of materials represents an improvement over current research. In the present study, our aim was to explore the neural basis of humor comprehension using two types of materials including a character condition (verbal) and a language-free cartoon condition (visual). In particular, our objective was to examine whether the brain regions activated in humor comprehension were affected by the different materials. In addition, we set out to study whether the punchline of a joke can elicit a moment of insight during humor comprehension. We speculated that, first, there might be overlaps in the activated brain regions under different conditions because previous studies of humor (using verbal materials or visual materials) found overlapping brain regions; second, we speculated that the participants might have a feeling of insight when they read the jokes and that humor shares some brain regions in common with insight.

Materials and Methods

As paid volunteers, 33 participants (17 females, 16 males) aged 18–25 years (mean age, 21.03 years) from Southwest University in China were involved in the experiment. Nine participants were excluded because of head motion > 3 mm maximum translation or 3° rotation during fMRI scanning. The final sample consisted of 24 participants (11 females, 13 males) aged 19–25 years (mean age, 21.13 years). All participants were native Chinese speakers who had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and reported no present or past neurological or psychiatric disorders. The experiment was approved by the Academic Committee of the School of Psychology and the local ethics committee of the School of Psychology, Southwest University in China. All participants signed informed consent forms before participating in the study.

Design and Materials

A 2 (ending presentation: pure character vs. pure picture) × 2 [conditions: humorous (HU) vs. non-humorous (NH)] within-subjects design was used. Two pictures made up a story. Picture 1 (pic 1) was the situation background (setup) of the story, and picture 2 (pic 2) was the ending of the story. The pictures were shown in Figure Figure1 1 . For each group, half were in the HU condition and the rest were in the NH condition.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is fpsyg-08-01835-g001.jpg

Prior to the experiment, 220 jokes were selected from the Internet, books and previous research ( Tu et al., 2014 ). Half of the joke endings were presented purely in characters, and the other half were presented purely in pictures. All jokes had two parts. The first part was the situation background; the second part was the ending, which included the punchline. Whether a joke was humorous mainly depended on its surprising ending and the punchline. All collected stories were humorous jokes. However, to ensure the consistency of the situation background, we prepared a corresponding non-humorous ending for each joke; that is, the first part of every joke did not change, and the second part had one of two endings (humorous or non-humorous). For example, the first part of the story (situation background) was “A man wants to buy a videotape at a store and the salesman asks him if he want to buy the light music. He says that both the light and the weight are OK.” The humorous ending was “I drive my car,” and the non-humorous ending was “I love it.” The other 23 subjects (13 females, 10 males), aged 18–24 years (mean age, 20.79 years), did not join the fMRI experiment and were similar in age and education background. We asked these subjects to rate each story on a scale of 1 to 4 (1 = incomprehension, 2 = non-humorous, 3 = a little humorous, 4 = humorous). We analyzed the data with SPSS. We also referred to the principles used in a previous study to select the materials ( Tu et al., 2014 ). The stories rated more than 16 times were considered humorous, and the stories rated fewer than 3 times were considered non-humorous. Ultimately, 60 stories (HU vs. NH) comprised our experiment materials, including 30 stories involving only pictures and 30 stories involving only characters. We checked materials several times to ensure that there were no grammatical errors in the text of these stories. In addition, sentence length and the familiarity of the words were matched because we believed that if the length and familiarity were not appropriate, the credibility of the experimental data would be reduced. All these processes were designed to ensure the quality of the experimental data collected in the following fMRI experiment.

We expected the reliability and validity of the experimental materials to be high. More specifically, the majority of the HU trials were rated as humorous and surprising by participants, and the majority of the NH trials were rated as non-humorous and non-surprising by participants.

To make the participants familiar with the task, all participants were asked to complete a brief set of trials in each condition. They were asked not to move their heads during the scanning; imaging data were then recorded. A flow chart of the formal experiment is shown in Figure Figure2 2 . First, a white fixation point (+) appeared in the center of the black screen; the black screen remained once the white fixation point disappeared. Then, the first part of the story (pic 1), that is, the situation background, was presented, and the participants were asked to press the “1” button immediately once they understood it; however, pic 1 did not disappear until the presentation time (8, 10, or 12 s), which was set according to the results of a pilot study. Second, the second screen of the story (pic 2) followed the first screen. Participants were again instructed to press the “1” button once they understood the story. The picture did not disappear until the presentation time (6, 8, or 10 s). Finally, two evaluation questions were presented. The evaluation questions did not disappear when the participants gave a response, and the question was displayed for a fixed duration of 4 s. The questions were as follows: “Do you think the story is humorous?” (1 = incomprehension, 2 = non-humorous, 3 = a little humorous, 4 = humorous) and “Do you think the story is surprising?” (1 = not surprising, 2 = a little surprising, 3 = surprising). A fixation point (+) signaled the next trial. The presentation time of the fixation point (+) and the blank black screen were randomly set within the range 0.5 s ∼ 4.5 s.

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A flow chart of stimulus presentation in each trial.

All stories were divided into 6 blocks, each of which included 20 trials; thus, there were 120 trials in total. In the first 3 blocks, pic 2 was presented with only images, while in the latter 3 blocks pic 2 was presented with only characters. Each trial was presented in a pseudo-random order and only once in each block. To ensure the quality of the behavioral data and brain imaging data, we asked each participant to answer four questions after the scanning sessions. The first two questions were as follows: “Were you in a good mental state when you lay in the scanner?” and “Does lying in the instrument affect your judgement?” We also asked the participants “Did you have a feeling of insight when you understood the ending of the story?” We believe the question was consistent with the purpose of our experiment and could help us determine whether the participant experienced insight during humor comprehension. Finally, to collect information about the frequency with which each participant read jokes in their daily life, we asked the following question: “Do you often read jokes?” The purpose of asking these questions was to ensure the quality of the experimental data for the fMRI data that we acquired because the quality the brain imaging data and the performance in the experiment would be effected by the mental state of the participant.

fMRI Data Acquisition

All images were collected with a Siemens 3T scanner (Siemens Magnetom Trio TIM, Erlangen, Germany). Head movement was minimized by restraining the participant’s head using a vacuum cushion. Participants were also instructed to keep still. A screen was located at the rear of the scanner, and the participants could see the stimulus displayed on the screen through a mirror mounted on the standard head coil. In all sessions, to eliminate the magnetic saturation effect, the first five time points were removed.

BOLD images were obtained using an Echo Planar Imaging (EPI) sequence [slices = 32, voxel size = 3.4 mm × 3.4 mm × 4 mm; TR = 2000 ms; TE = 30 ms; field of view (FOV) = 200 mm × 200 mm; flip angle = 90°; thickness = 3 mm; slice gap = 1 mm]. T1-weighted high resolution anatomical images were collected for each participant (slices = 176; voxel size = 1 mm × 1 mm × 1 mm; TR = 1,900 ms; TE = 2.52 ms; FOV = 256 mm × 256 mm; flip angle = 90°; thickness = 1 mm).

fMRI Data Analysis

We analyzed brain imaging data with SPM8 software 1 (Welcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, London, United Kingdom). First, functional images were corrected for the slice acquisition time of each volume and by rearranging the first volume to correct for head motion. Participants who exhibited head motion exceeding 3 mm of maximum translation or 3.0° of rotation were excluded. Then, these images were normalized to the MNI EPI template (voxel size, 3 mm × 3 mm × 3 mm). The normalized data were spatially smoothed with a Gaussian kernel, and the full width at half-maximum (FWHM) was specified as 8 mm × 8 mm × 8 mm. A high-pass filter was implemented with a cut-off period of 128 s to remove low-frequency drift from the time series.

After pre-processing, the data for each participant were analyzed with the general linear model (GLM). The movement correction parameters were added as covariance of no interest. Using a canonical haemodynamic response function, the BOLD signal was modeled by convolving the design matrix. The design matrix contained six sessions. Each session consisted of three conditions: NH, HU, and Fix. We analyzed the trials in which the participants chose the appropriate response and the inappropriate response (humorous for the HU condition and non-humorous for the NH condition, and Fix referred to the screen of the fixation point). The onsets of these three conditions for each participant were modeled, and each trial was treated as an independent event. We analyzed the time window spanning from the beginning of the presentation of the second screen (picture 2) to the response made by the participant and the BOLD signal during this period. In addition, six realignment parameters for each participant were modeled as confounding factors.

Next, a second-level analysis was performed, which included 24 participants. The first-level analysis of each participant produced three contrast images (NH, HU, and Fix) related to each condition modeled. The results of the first-level analysis were analyzed using a paired t -test to estimate the different activations between HU and HU. For all the analyses, the threshold was set to p < 0.05 (FDR corrected) cluster sizes = 100. FDR (false discovery rate) correction was performed at the voxel level. FDR did not control the type I error rate ( Finner and Roters, 2001 ).

Behavioral Results

Approximately 79.0 ± 12.7% of the HU trials were rated humorous and surprising by the participants, and approximately 70.8 ± 12.3% of the NH trials were rated non-humorous and no-surprise by the participants. The scores pertaining to humor and surprise for the subjects in the HU and NH conditions are shown in Table Table1 1 . The mean scores for humor in the HU and NH conditions were significantly different [ t (23) = 28.11, p < 0.0001, 1-β > 0.8], and the mean scores for surprise in the HU and NH conditions were significantly different [ t (23) = 12.65, p < 0.0001, 1-β > 0.8].

The mean and standard deviation of humorous and surprise scores.

	Ending	Number	Mean
Humor	Humorous ending	24	3.449	0.252
	Non-Humorous ending	24	2.000	0.010
Surprise	Surprise ending	24	2.278	0.326
	No-Surprise ending	24	1.284	0.205

We also analyzed the post-scan questions, and the results were as follows: 95% of participants said that they were in a good mental state during the scanning and that their judgements were not affected by the scanner. Moreover, 75% of participants said that they experienced insight when they read the jokes. The result was consistent with our expectation that there is a moment of insight during humor comprehension. Furthermore, 62.5% of the participants reported that they often read jokes. This result provided a reference value for this study, but we do not discuss this result here in because our goal was to collect information about the frequency with which the participants read jokes in their daily life.

Imaging Data

Whole-brain analysis.

We focused on brain activation during the presentation of pic 2. We tested brain activity by contrasting HU with NH. In the character condition, in contrast to NH, HU showed increased activation in regions such as the left SFG, right MFG, left IFG, bilateral MTG, right STG, left TPJ, bilateral MOG, left precentral, posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) and hippocampus ( Figure Figure3 3 and Table Table2 2 ).

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In contrast to NH, HU showed increased activation in region such as the (A) left superior frontal gyrus (SFG) and medial orbital frontal gyrus (MFO) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (B) left middle temporal gyrus (MTG) (C) left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) (D) left superior occipital gyrus (SOG) (E) right superior temporal gyrus (STG) (F) right middle frontal gyrus (MFG) (G) right superior occipital gyrus (SOG) (H) right middle temporal gyrus (MTG) (I) left middle occipital gyrus (MOG) (J) posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) (K) the prefrontal cortex (PFC) (L) hippocampus (M) subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) (N) hippocampus (O) posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) (P) right middle occipital gyrus (MOG).

Regions of significant activation p < 0.05 (FDR corrected).

Brain regions	BA	MNI coordinates			-value	Cluster size


R. Middle temporal gyrus		57	-9	-12	4.40	343
L. Middle temporal gyrus		-57	-3	-12	5.87	806
R. Superior temporal gyrus		57	-51	21	5.04	500
R. Middle frontal gyrus		24	27	42	5.95	183
L. Superior frontal gyrus		-24	42	42	3.90	327
L. Temporo-parietal junction (TPJ)		-51	-60	27	6.59	257
L. Precentral		-39	-18	51	6.35	594
L. Middle occipital gyrus		-27	-84	3	3.46	534
R. Middle occipital gyrus	19	42	-75	3	3.87	138
Posterior cingulate cortex		-6	-57	18	6.07	309
Subgenual anterior cingulate cortex		3	27	-9	4.94	313
hippocampus		-24	-12	-12	5.48	201

L. Superior temporal gyrus		-60	0	-12	6.63	212
L. Middle temporal gyrus	39	-45	-63	18	6.00	695
R. Middle temporal gyrus		54	-51	15	5.99	337
L. Triangle inferior frontal gyrus		-54	39	12	4.68	116
L. Superior frontal gyrus		-9	51	33	4.90	114
L. Fusiform		-27	-36	-21	4.78	122
R. ParaHippocampal		33	-27	-18	5.04	160
R. Calcarine	18	15	-84	15	-6.90	144

In the picture condition, in contrast to NH, HU showed increased activation in regions such as the left SFG, left triangle IFG, bilateral MTG, left STG, left fusiform gyrus, and parahippocampal and calcarine regions ( Figure Figure4 4 and Table Table2 2 ).

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In contrast to NH, HU showed increased activation in regions such as the (A) left SFG and left triangle (IFG) (B) left MTG and STG (C) left TPJ and left fusiform gyrus (D) left SOG (E) right SOG (F) right MOG (G) right MTG (H) angular gyrus (I) left parahippocampal region (J) left prefrontal cortex (PFC) (K) right prefrontal cortex (PFC) (L) right parahippocampal region (M) left calcarine region (N) right calcarine region.

The Common Regions between Character and Picture

Whole-brain analysis showed that certain regions were activated by both types of stimuli. Several of these regions were also identified in many of the studies previously reviewed. We conducted a conjunction analysis between the character (HU > NH contrast) and picture (HU > NH contrast) conditions to identify these common regions ( Figure Figure5 5 ). The common regions were the left SFG, left triangle IFG, left TPJ, bilateral MTG, bilateral PFC and right parahippocampal region.

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Object name is fpsyg-08-01835-g005.jpg

The common regions activated in both the character condition and the language-free condition. (A) left SFG and left triangle IFG (B) left MTG and STG (C) left TPJ and left fusiform gyrus (D) right MOG (E) right MTG (F) left SOG (G) left PFC (H) left MOG (I) hippocampus (J) right PFC (K) PCC (L) right parahippocampal region (M) right MOG.

Humor comprehension and its neural mechanisms have been widely studied, yet no consistent conclusions have been drawn—for several reasons. First, previous studies have used different types of stimuli and problems involving multiple cognitive processes, such as incongruity detection, incongruity resolution and insight processing. Second, brain areas related to the character condition (verbal problem) are not directly comparable to brain areas related to the picture condition (visual problem) because only one type of problem (visual or verbal) has been used in previous separate studies. Third, many studies have not addressed the insight involved in humor comprehension and have not provided suitable conditions in their experiments. Therefore, the improvement provided by the current study was using two different types of experimental materials to study the neural basis of humor comprehension. Furthermore, we studied insight during humor comprehension.

The behavioral results were consistent with what we expected, indicating that the reliability and validity of our experimental materials were high. In addition, 79.0 ± 12.7% of the HU trials were rated humorous and surprising by the participants, indicating that the participants were likely surprised by the humorous ending and not surprised by the non-humorous ending. Among the participants, 75% said that they experienced insight when they read the jokes. We inferred that insight may be involved in humor comprehension. Our fMRI results indicated that in the character condition, in contrast to NH, HU showed increased activation in regions such as the left SFG, right MFG, left IFG, left precentral, bilateral MTG, right STG, left TPJ, bilateral MOG, PCC, sgACC, and hippocampus. In the picture condition, however, in contrast to NH, HU showed increased activation in regions such as the left SFG, left triangle IFG, bilateral MTG, left STG, left fusiform gyrus, and parahippocampal and calcarine regions. In line with the previous literature, we suggest that the MTG, SFG, IFG, and TPJ are involved in humor comprehension. As stated in our hypothesis, the key brain areas associated with humor comprehension are not affected by the types of experimental materials used.

The activation of the MTG has been observed in many studies related to incongruity detection ( Cui et al., 2013 ), social signaling ( Sugiura et al., 2013 ) and joke comprehension, particularly the right MTG in two (visual or verbal) conditions ( Goel and Dolan, 2001 ; Moran et al., 2004 ; Chan et al., 2012 ; Shibata et al., 2014 ). In addition, the right MTG has been associated with semantic violations of language processing ( Kuperberg et al., 2000 ; Ni et al., 2000 ; Newman et al., 2001 ). Lambon Ralph et al. (2010) suggested that the MTG is activated in detecting incongruity because it’s functions in recognizing and categorizing stimuli, and Chan and Lavallee (2015) reported that the MTG is associated with the process of bridging-inference joke comprehension. In light of previous results, we inferred that MTG is a key region involved in incongruity detection.

Recent studies have suggested that the left SFG might contribute to the connection of a joke’s setup to its punchline ( Samson et al., 2009 ; Bekinschtein et al., 2011 ; Shibata et al., 2014 ); thus, it might play a key role in the integration of humor comprehension. The left SFG is also related to cognitive processes such as organizing ideas, obtaining insights, and successfully solving ambiguous sentences ( Samson et al., 2008 , 2009 ). The results of Samson et al. (2009) and Chan et al. (2012) suggest that the main reason for the activation of the left SFG is that incongruity resolution requires more coherence building, more mental manipulation and the re-organization of context. The left SFG functions in attempting to “make sense” or “make attribution” during humor comprehension ( Samson et al., 2008 ). Furthermore, the left SFG contributes to improving cognitive functions, particularly working memory ( Owen, 2000 ; Petrides, 2000 ). In the current study, in contrast to the NH, the HU required more executive processing and mental manipulation during humor comprehension.

The present study also revealed increased activation of the IFG in humor comprehension. Previous studies have found that the left IFG is involved in semantic comprehension, humor detection and the resolution of semantic ambiguities ( Moran et al., 2004 ; Azim et al., 2005 ; Bekinschtein et al., 2011 ). Bilateral IFG also plays an important role in the construction of a situation model, the presentation of an ambiguous statement, exaggeration jokes, and ambiguity jokes ( Ferstl et al., 2005 ; Rodd et al., 2005 ; Zempleni et al., 2007 ; Menenti et al., 2009 ), and these tasks are associated with executive control processes, such as language-based decoding and retrieval from episodic memory ( Chan and Lavallee, 2015 ). One study discovered greater activation of the IFG in switching compared with self-reported clustering and free generation ( Hirshorn and Thompson-Schill, 2006 ). In incongruity detection, the subjects of a separate study realized that there were two or more incompatible schemas ( Wyer and Collins, 1992 ). Incompatible schemas entail cognitive disfluency and lead to immediate negative affect ( Topolinski and Strack, 2015 ). When the punchline appears, the IFG subserves the switching mechanism; it can promote semantic fluency. Consequently, this fluency helps the core mechanism of incongruity resolution, thus increasing the funniness of a joke ( Leavitt and Christenfeld, 2011 ; Topolinski, 2014 ). Therefore, we tended to believe that the IFG is crucial to language-related humor ( Chan et al., 2012 ; Shibata et al., 2014 ).

The activation of the TPJ might be related to the process of inferring knowledge, the integration of multi-sensory information and coherence building ( Gick and Lockhart, 1995 ; Ferstl and von Cramon, 2002 ). The TPJ has been associated with both high-level social-cognitive processes and low-level computational processes (e.g., attention orientation) ( Decety and Lamm, 2007 ), and it is also a key region in insight studies ( Starchenko et al., 2003 ; Bechtereva et al., 2004 ; Kounios et al., 2006 ). As previously mentioned, a series of studies reported that the TPJ is closely related to incongruity resolution during the semantic processing of jokes, the integration of large amounts of information and the funniness of a joke ( Goel and Dolan, 2001 ; Mobbs et al., 2003 ; Samson et al., 2008 , 2009 ; Amir et al., 2013 ). By generating, testing and correcting internal predictions about external sensory events, the TPJ helps make sense of an incongruity. Therefore, the activation of the TPJ in our study could be explained by its function in generating and integrating information.

Our fMRI experiment also allowed for the investigation of the insight element during humor comprehension. The results support our hypothesis that (a) the STG, MTG, IFG, and TPJ are activated in character (verbal) or language-free cartoon (visual) conditions simultaneously. These regions appear to be involved in incongruity detection and resolution; (b) the common brain regions activated in both verbal and visual conditions are the MTG, STG, cingulate gyrus, fusiform gyrus, and IFG. These regions appear to be critical regions in detection and resolution of the incongruity. These findings indicate that the insight moment experienced during humor comprehension is universal regardless of the type of stimulus.

We also observed the activation of the sACC in humor comprehension. Previous studies have shown that the sACC is related to negative emotions. For example, a review of brain imaging against the background of the four-region model showed significant activation of the sACC during sad events ( Vogt et al., 2003 ). In addition, one of the first brain imaging studies discovered that the activation of the sACC subregion is associated with negatively valenced affect in fit women ( George et al., 1995 ). In our study, when participants were confronted with incompatible schemas in humor detection, the unexpected events sometimes led to surprise ( Wyer and Collins, 1992 ). Surprise could be regarded as an interruption mechanism ( Meyer et al., 1997 ), and such interruptions not only affect one’s cognitive processes but also one’s mood (e.g., fear, sadness, and surprise) ( Noordewier and Breugelmans, 2013 ). Moreover, one study discovered that higher corrugator activity is elicited by more surprising trivia compared with less surprising trivia, and higher corrugator activity indicates more mental effort and negative effect ( Topolinski and Strack, 2015 ). Noordewier et al. (2016) also found that instant cognitive interruption triggers negative effect in the process of surprise. Hence, we believe that the activation of the sACC in humor comprehension might be related to negative feelings, which are produced when thought is interrupted by unexpected events.

Our results also showed the activation of brain regions often implicated in (non-humorous) insight tasks, such as the PFC, STG, and TPJ. According to our study, we could conclude that the type of (joke) stimuli we presented did function as a type of insight task. The activated brain regions observed in our study, such as the PFC, STG, and TPJ, are in agreement with those reported in previous studies about insight. We could infer that the task we presented in the experiment is similar to previous insight tasks. Luo and Niki (2003) , Luo et al. (2004) explored the neural basis of insight by presenting a trigger (the solution) to catalyze the process of solving insight problems; the exercise was a passive insight task in which the resolution was presented rather than formulated by the participant ( Dietrich and Kanso, 2010 ). The results indicate that certain regions, such as the PFC, MTG, posterior parietal cortex and hippocampus, are involved in insightful riddle-solving. Other researchers have discovered that the PFC contributes to conflict resolution of working memory, semantic selection and the shift in cognitive set ( Thompson-Schill et al., 1997 ; Jonides et al., 1998 ; Monchi et al., 2001 ), while the function of the PFC in breaking a mental impasse (insight process) might be related to conflict resolution ( Luo et al., 2004 ). Moreover, the involvement of the hippocampus in the insight process implies that a navigation-like process might occur during problem solving ( Luo and Niki, 2003 ). EEG and fMRI studies have also indicated that insight moments are activated in the STG and TPJ, suggesting that the TPJ might play an important role in flexibility of thinking (e.g., switching and planning), formation of rich association and imagination, which might be related to the early stages of creativity ( Starchenko et al., 2003 ; Kounios et al., 2006 ; Qiu et al., 2008a ). These results are in line with our hypotheses suggesting that humor and insight share certain activated brain regions in common.

To conclude, no consistent conclusions about the neural basis of humor comprehension and insight have been drawn for several reasons. First, most researchers have used only one stimulus in their study, preventing them directly comparing visual materials with verbal materials. Second, previous studies about humor and insight have treated the two topics separately although they have some similarities with respect to cognitive processing and neural mechanisms; indeed, no study has addressed both humor and insight. Therefore, using two different kinds of materials to study the insight during humor comprehension were the improvement of present study. The results of our behavioral experiment showed that the experimental materials pertaining to humor are reliable. The results of our fMRI experiment are consistent with our assumptions that the activation of different brain region is not affected by the type of material presented and that the brain regions we identified in humor comprehension overlap with those reported in previous studies about insight. However, our conclusions were drawn from a sample of only dozens of people by using visual materials and verbal materials. The conclusions must be confirmed in a larger sample in future studies to better understand the neural basis of humor comprehension.

Author Contributions

FT and YH contributed significantly to analysis and manuscript preparation. QJ, QZ, GC, and AD contributed to the conception of the study. YH, WZ, and WY contributed to the fMRI data acquisition. QC and JS contributed to the fMRI data analysis.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31470981; 31600878; 31571137; 31500885), National Outstanding young people plan, the Program for the Top Young Talents by Chongqing, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (20700910, SWU1509451, SWU1609177), Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing (cstc2015jcyjA10106), Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation (151023), General Financial Grant from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2015M572423, 2015M580767), Special Funds from the Chongqing Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Xm2015037, Xm2016044), Key research for Humanities and social sciences of Ministry of Education (14JJD880009).

1 http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/

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Watch Megan Mullally warn Susan Sarandon about having sex with her cat in The Fabulous Four trailer

Bette Midler and Sheryl Lee Ralph also star in the upcoming ensemble comedy.

Baby boomer girls trip movies are all the rage — and now, Bette Midler , Susan Sarandon , Sheryl Lee Ralph , and Megan Mullally have booked a cinematic vacation together.

The actresses join forces in the first trailer for The Fabulous Four , which sees the quartet of multihyphenates embark on a getaway to Key West, Fla., together. "Look at us! The old gang back together again!" Marilyn (Midler) says as she greets her college buddies Lou (Sarandon), Kitty (Ralph), and Alice (Mullally). "Oh my God, so glad you're here."

Courtesy Bleecker Street

We immediately get a sense of each friend’s personality. Alice is the stoner goof of the group, repeatedly making jokes about and requests for weed, while Kitty seems more focused on sensual pleasures (when she finds a kegel ball, she asks if it vibrates).

Lou appears to be the squarest of the crew, as she’s mocked for FaceTiming her cats. "You're gonna be an old cat lady, and you're gonna be alone, and you're gonna have to have sex with your cats!" Alice warns. "People do it."

Marilyn loves attention — she's really into TikTok, and, more crucially, she surprises the group with the news that she's marrying someone new just two months following the death of her previous husband. "She got out there kinda quick," Kitty says after Marilyn asks the group to join her bridal party. "Takes longer to cancel a gym membership!" Lou retorts.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

The strongest tension within the group is between Lou and Marilyn, who beefed about a boy decades ago. "Why was Lou so mad at you?" a young woman says at what appears to be a bachelorette party. "You stole her man?"

Marilyn rejects her hypothesis, but Kitty chimes in: "Yes, you did, back in the day!" Marilyn doesn't fight back. "I couldn’t make a bed, but I could break a bed," she says.

Later, we see Lou headshot a burglar on a bicycle using a kegel ball (don't ask), which goes viral on TikTok, much to Marilyn's chagrin. "TikTok was mine! You stole it from me," Midler's character yells. They tear each other’s clothing out of spite. "Is it just me, or do we need some champagne?" Alice suggests.

The Fabulous Four hits theaters July 26. Watch the full trailer above.

IBKR says it saw 'massive' net buying in Nvidia following AI chipmaker's 10:1 stock split

Business Investor buying stock ,cryptocurrency,bitcoin, through a mobile app and analysis with chart after coronavirus crisis stockmarket going to uptrend market stage

primeimages/E+ via Getty Images

Interactive Brokers (IBKR) said it saw heavy activity in Nvidia ( NVDA ) on its trading platform following the AI chipmaker’s recent stock split, while a “newly resurgent” Apple ( AAPL ) moved higher on its weekly list of the most-active symbols.

“We’ve often asserted that ‘it’s NVDA’s market, and we’re all just trading in it,’ and this week is no exception,” IBKR’s Chief Strategist Steve Sosnick said in a weekly update Tuesday. Tuesday also saw Nvidia ( NVDA ) reach a value of $3.3 trillion, surpassing Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Apple ( AAPL ) to become the highest valued company in the world .

In IBKR’s update, it said Nvidia ( NVDA ) had gross 571.3K trades across its stock and options over the past five trading sessions, outpacing Tesla ( TSLA ) activity. Nvidia "remains atop the top 25 [most-active symbols] list with a massive amount of net buying activity – undoubtedly boosted by the recent 10:1 split,” he said.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) opened June 10th on a 10-to-1 split-adjusted basis. Its shares were above $1,200 before the split. Splits can make buying a corporate stock more affordable to purchase for retail investors. On Tuesday, Nvidia ( NVDA ) shares rose +3% to $135.63.

Sosnick pointed out GraniteShares 2x Long NVDA Daily ETF ( NVDL ) showing up in the 19th spot on its list. The exchange-traded fund seeks 2 times the daily percentage change of Nvidia’s ( NVDA ) common stock.

Apple ( AAPL ) moved up one notch to the fourth spot on IBKR’s most-active list, with gross 284.1K gross trades across its stock and options. The stock price recently hit a record high above $220 after the company unveiled its Apple Intelligence AI system .

Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives said at the Seeking Alpha Investing Summit on Tuesday that Apple’s ( AAPL ) AI capabilities will ignite a move in the iPhone-maker to a $4T market capitalization within a year.

See below for the full data on the IBKR 25 most-active list:

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Hypothesis Jokes
He got Lucky on women's day. A professor walks in to a class. He has a hypothesis. He claims the people who have sex most often are the happiest. To prove, he divides the class in to three groups. People having sex once a month are put to one corner. They are the least happy.
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A list of 4 Hypothesis puns! Hypothesis Puns. A list of puns related to "Hypothesis" I proposed a non-falsifyable hypothesis to my professor. He called me an oxymoron. ... This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis. Joke by Terry Pratchett, 'The Colour of Magic', Prologue. 👍︎ 11. 💬︎ 1 comment. 👤︎ u/WatashiStickKid. 📅︎ Sep ...
Hypothetical Jokes
Try to think of a world without hypotheticals. You can't. upvote downvote report. This joke may contain profanity. 🤔. I am over 18. A Joke Walks into a Bar. [OC] A Joke walks into a bar and the Bartender says "Wait... this isn't right." The Joke says "Listen, quickly!
references
75. A mathematician, a physicist and a statistician went hunting for deer. When they chanced upon one buck lounging about, the mathematician fired first, missing the buck's nose by a few inches. The physicist then tried his hand, and missed the tail by a wee bit.
Guys we can't make jokes about the riemann hypothesis its ...
Proof by tautology: Assume that Bernhard Riemann was in his prime when he formed that conjecture. Then, it follows that Bernhard Riemann was in his prime when he formed that conjecture. NOOOOO!!! ITS AN IMPORTANT CONJECTURE DOMT JOKE ABOUT IT 😡😡😡😡😡.
Physics Jokes Every Science Lover Will Appreciate
If you're sick of physics jokes, don't miss these hilarious chemistry jokes. Submit your best joke here and get $25 if Reader's Digest runs it. Originally Published: March 26, 2024
Recent Hypothesis Jokes
The mathematician: "Three is a prime, five is a prime, seven is a prime, but nine is not a prime. Therefore, the hypothesis is false." The physicist: "Three is a prime, five is a prime, seven is a prime, nine is not a prime, eleven is a prime, and thirteen is a prime. Hence, five out of six experiments support the hypothesis. It must be true."
Hypothetically Jokes
Driving home after a hard day at work, a man gets pulled over by a cop. His patience is wearing thin. "Tell me, officer: would it be a crime for me to insult you? Hypothetically speaking, of course - I think the police are wonderful - but in theory, could you arrest me if I said you were a cunt?" "Yes sir.
I think i just solved the Riemann Hypothesis. : r/mathmemes
Private in protest of the new API policy. Whoosh: Single word exclamation, accompanied by a gesture where the hand is swept palm down over the head from [front to back] with about three inches [clearance]. Indicates that the joke just told was too sophisticated for the listener and has gone "way over their head".
I'm not good with math, what does this mean? : r/ExplainTheJoke
This is a statistics joke. Ho is the null hypothesis, normally the status quo. For example if you were trying to see if a company underfills their bag of potato chips, Ho is that they don't underfill them/ the weight of the bag is what they claim. Ha is the alternate hypothesis, which is the opposite of the null typically.
Statistics Jokes
The following jokes and witticisms about statistics will not only make the course more interesting but also enhance the recall of statistical concepts. A statistician is a man who comes to the rescue of figures that cannot lie for themselves. There are no facts only interpretations. - Frederick Nietzsche. A statistician can have his head in an ...
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Short Statistics Jokes. Data decided to throw a party. Outliers weren't invited. Histogram whispers to Pie Chart, "You're so well-rounded!". Standard deviation walks into a bar. It finds the mean. "I have a skewed perspective," said the outlier. Regression said to Data, "Let's not go off on a tangent.". Mean, Median, and Mode ...
Good quant finance jokes
Efficient Market Hypothesis Joke: "There is an old joke, widely told among economists, about an economist strolling down the street with a companion when they come upon a 100 dollar bill lying on the ground. As the companion reaches down to pick it up, the economist says 'Don't bother — if it were a real 100 dollar bill, someone would ...
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8 hypothesis jokes and hilarious hypothesis puns to laugh out loud. Read jokes about hypothesis that are clean and suitable for kids and friends. Love a good pun? Discover these hilarious jokes related to null hypothesis, hypothesis tests, sulphur, technetium, and other scientific topics. Get your daily dose of laughter - and science!
Joke: The Psychic
A joke for discussing the over-use of hypothesis testing methods. The joke was written in April 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso.
Laughing at the Null Hypothesis
In statistics, the null hypothesis is like our legal maxim "innocent until proven guilty." We look at data from a sample, and wonder whether a specific pattern we see in the sample reflects the full population it is supposed to represent. The answer is always NO (the null hypothesis) unless that pattern is really strong—that is, unless ...
Swearing Off (Humorous) Thought Experiments
In the same way, humor researchers conducting thought experiments are likely to seek out examples that confirm their hypothesis, rather than pit competing hypotheses against each other.
Philosophy of Humor (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The hypothesis that laughter evolved as a play signal is appealing in several ways. Unlike the Superiority and Incongruity Theories, it explains the link between humor and the facial expression, body language, and sound of laughter. ... Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (2008), and Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates ...
Joke Sample and Main Hypothesis
Download scientific diagram | Joke Sample and Main Hypothesis from publication: Computer, Tell Me a Joke ... but Please Make it Funny: Computational Humor with Ontological Semantics ...
What's the best medical joke you've heard? : r/medicalschool
You have to tell the full joke (and variations thereof) A elderly gentleman dies and his funeral is held. His family and friends attend and he is soon buried. Word spreads about the man's death and eventually the patient's oncologist hears this. Disturbed, the oncologist goes to the graveyard in search of his patient, with 2 bags of doxorubicin ...
PDF Are Benign Violations Necessary for Humor? Mitch Earleywine, Ph.D
The benign-violation hypothesis is one of the few models of humor to specify necessary and sufficient conditions for laughter or amusement. Proponents of the ... Keywords: humor, benign violation hypothesis, jokes, funniness ratings, necessity . 3" " 4" " 1. INTRODUCTION. Humor, a key component to social interaction, courtship, and creativity, has
Hypothesis Jokes
A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are asked to test the following hypothesis: All odd numbers greater than one are prime. The mathematician: "Three is a prime, five is a prime, seven is a prime, but nine is not a prime. Therefore, the hypothesis is false." The physicist: "Three is a prime, five is a prime, seven is a prime, nine is ...
Getting the Joke: Insight during Humor Comprehension
To ensure a joke works well, the first part of the joke (incongruity detection) creates a context (C1), which can induce the subject to assume a hypothesis (H1). The subjects may formulate several hypotheses because the joke is relatively ambiguous. It is necessary for the subjects to go back and reprocess the first part of the joke to find ...
See Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon in 'The Fabulous Four' trailer
Susan Sarandon gets in on the joke with son's 'Day in the life of a nepo baby' video. Marilyn rejects her hypothesis, but Kitty chimes in: "Yes, you did, back in the day!" Marilyn doesn't fight back.
Political Scientists Want to Know Why We Hate Each Other This Much
A poster child for this phenomenon was Justine Sacco, who tweeted a racist joke on Twitter in 2013. Historically a transgression like this might be handled with social sanctions from close others ...
IBKR says it saw 'massive' net buying in Nvidia following AI chipmaker
Interactive Brokers (IBKR) said it saw heavy activity in Nvidia (NVDA) on its trading platform following the AI chipmaker's recent stock split, while a "newly resurgent" Apple (AAPL) moved ...

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