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How to Build a Joke (No joking, I’m serious.)
From the book: Chum for Thought: Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters by David Satterlee
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| Chum For Thought: Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters |
How to Build a Joke (No joking, I’m serious.)
For most people, a good joke is like pornography or the
Tao—they cannot give you a good definition, but they know it when they see it.
Building good jokes requires attention to context, discrimination,
structure, and activation of a special set of neural responses. So, the first
thing I need to do is explain how a joke works. After all, how are you going to
create an original version of something if you do not have a grasp of the
fundamental internal mechanisms, the secret ingredients in the special sauce?
There is something wrong with a good joke. A good joke
produces immediate, obvious, and alarming symptoms of acute pathology. The
victim’s face contorts and begins involuntary convulsions that may spread to
the entire body. Respiration becomes disrupted and spastic. Blood pressure and
heart rate go up suddenly. Food may be aspirated and beverages may be expelled
from the nose. If you were not aware of the stimulus, the physiological reaction
might lead you to assume overt acute pathology.
As it happens, strokes and certain other brain lesions have
been known to trigger what is known in medical literature as “pathological
laughter and crying” (PLC). Oddly, the same small brain area is responsible for
both laughing and crying. This is consistent; we have all known, and possibly
been offended by, someone who laughed suddenly when
