Inside Jokes by Matthew M Hurley
An evolutionary and cognitive account of the addictive mind candy that is humor.Some things are funny--jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed--but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature--aka natural selection--cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780262015820 |
| ISBN 10 | 026201582X |
| Title | Inside Jokes |
| Author | Matthew M Hurley |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | MIT Press Ltd |
| Year published | 2011-03-04 |
| Number of pages | 376 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |