Inside Jokes

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