Why are certain sentences funny?

Irony

Typos.

I don’t know, but the ones you make are pretty hilarious.

Syntactic ambiguity. For example: “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.”—Groucho Marx

It depends on what you are being sentenced for.

The Funny Sentence Program

erichw1504: English is clearly not their first language. No need to be an ass.

@asmonet And you weren’t?

@buckyboy28
but for evolutionary reasons why is that funny?

I don’t think so. :)

@hghgbvvn I guess I don’t quite understand the question, but I find those types of sentences humorous because they force us to go back and re-read what we read before.

I recognize this. I usually find the sentences spoken by Sarah Palin, for example, quite amusing. Why? They are so nonsensical as to be ludicrous. In other words, they inspire a total WTF? reaction.

@buckyboy28 does that joke have any sense to it? i fell stupid for not getting it…

oh crap, what is that called when you switch the first two letters of a word? Like… beanut putter? Because as far as sentences go, to me, they don’t get much funnier than when that happens.

@iRemy_y You have to look at it in two parts. The first part, “time flies like an arrow” means “time goes by quickly, much like an arrow does”. The second part “fruit flies like a banana” is referring to fruit flies (the animal) having an affinity to bananas.

The humor comes from the fact that the sentence uses two different meanings of the word “flies” which throws the reader off because you are expecting the second part to be related to the first part, when in fact they have nothing to do with one another.

One theory is that laughter (hence humor) evolved among primates as a method of communicating to one’s group that what appeared to be a threatening situation has resolved in a non-threatening way, as when what appeared to be a snake turns out to be a vine. Humor, in other words, is the release of psychic tension that occurs when a serious situation takes a sudden whimsical turn, and laughter is our primate way of signaling that turn of events to everyone around us (“Dude, check this out…it’s just a vine! OK, everybody chill”).

Studies have shown that laughter is primarily a social phenomenon. The same joke or gag is much funnier when shared than when you’re alone. This lends credence to the idea that this evolved as a shared experience, a communication.

Semantic humor taps into the same mechanism by leading us to expect one outcome, then veering sharply off into the absurd.

@Harp Sounds like a “no soap radio” situation to me.

They wear clown noses.

It seems laughter is a shared primate trait. →# Supporting @Harp ‘s comment.

Humor also seems to depend on the level of intellect. A small child will often not understand jokes, even if they understand the situation and the meaning of the words. They can pick up that it is funny, but they don’t get why. Irony and sarcasm is something that comes with experience and maturity.

Here’s a joke that demonstrates this humor-as-misdirection phenomenon:

Two old, old gentlemen friends are relaxing at the dinner table as their wives clear the dishes away.

One says, “Hey, we found a decent restaurant the other night. Good food, not too expensive”

“Yeah?” says the other guy, “What’s the name of the place?”

His friend furrows his brow and stares up at the ceiling awhile, trying to remember. Finally he says, “I’m drawing a blank here…what do you call those flowers with the thorns?”

“You mean a rose?”

“Oh yeah” he says, then turns and shouts toward the kitchen, “Hey Rose, what was the name of that place we ate the other night?”

Incongruity.

I think the place to look for the answer is not in the sentences, which are a small subset of the things that make us laugh. I think the more pertinent (and interesting) question is why we laugh at anything. As usual, I bow to @Harp‘s explanation.

Have you seen Quest for Fire? This 1981 movie has three cavemen searching for a new source of fire for their tribe after their precious communal flame goes out. One interesting scene involves an encounter with a member of a slightly more advanced tribe who laughs when something comical happens, while the three just stare at her in befuddlement. The implication is that laughter is a learned behavior and that their culture has not yet reached the stage of being able to perceive humor.

@Harp That is one of my favorite jokes lately. Everyone my age I tell it to laughs bitterly.

Are we talking funny “haha”, or funny “weird”?

With all due respect to @Harp, whose opinion I value highly, that explanation for laughter does not seem to me to be adequate.

There are really two questions here. Firstly, what is the nature of humor? And secondly, why do we find it so pleasurable?

It is hard to pin down the exact definition of humor, but one requirement is that there have to be two different ways of looking at something. For example, in Harp’s joke the name rose is used in two different ways. The ability to see things in more than one way has obvious advantages, but it is not clear to me what evolutionary reason there can be for this causing us to take particular pleasure in it and why we have a special laughter mechanism. Maybe laughter is simply tied into pleasure and would be a totally separate issue.

@poofandmook Thats a spoonerism.

@LostInParadise No, I don’t find it very compelling either, but it’s the only explanation I’ve ever seen that approaches the subject from an evolutionary angle.

I read this paper over a year ago and I can’t find it now, but I did just find an old Fluther post where I summarized it shortly after reading it. I’ll paste it here, because it has more interesting detail:

I recently read a paper by a Russian physicist who has been working on the problem of getting computers to recognize humor. The paper itself is about the un-funniest thing you’ll ever read, but the hypothesis on which this guy bases his algorithms is interesting. I’ll try to sum up what my layman’s mind was able to glean from it.

Essentially, he sees humor as being the brain’s way of redirecting energy when it is forced to abruptly negate a misconception in response to a specific malfunction of the information processing system.

In practice, this means that the brain is sent off on one trajectory by predicting the probable meaning of a set of variables but then is faced with an incompatible version which necessitates the immediate cancellation of the first trajectory.

He suggests that there’s survival benefit in our mental habit of making probabilistic assumptions based on given information, rather than waiting until all data is available to avoid ambiguity. But this habit results in having to occasionally stop dead in our mental tracks when we realize our assessment was completely wrong.

He frames this neural activity in terms of energy, so that as the neural momentum of the false trajectory is canceled, that energy has to be redirected. This, he thinks, is the role of laughter; it’s a redirection of the neural energy into the motor cortex, where it finds expression as the muscular contractions of laughter. Laughter, then, is the blowing off of the energy generated by putting the brakes on that false trajectory. He thinks that if the neural energy is redirected to the emotions (e.g. pity, shame, anger…) instead of the motor cortex, the humor effect is reduced or eliminated.

Others have used this research to speculate on the evolutionary role of laughter as a way of communicating to a group that what seemed like a threat was, in fact, a non-issue. Much humor resolves to this: a tense situation suddenly becomes a non-issue. Laughter is the primate way of communicating that message to the clan.

@Harp , As usual, you have put a lot of thought and effort into answering the question. The problem with these explanations is that they do not explain why we enjoy humor and try to induce it by doing things like telling jokes. I suppose it could also be said that we like to hear sad stories sometimes, but most of us have much less of a capacity for listening to things that are sad.

Maybe humor can be seen as an extension of playing. We enjoy arranging words or objects in various incongruous ways. I do not see why the same could not hold for other primates.

By the way, a good reference film for this discussion is The Aristocrats

One possible source of analytic thinking on this subject might be the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation and whatever resources they used. Nobody has put more effort than Data into understanding the mechanics of humor among humans and trying to reproduce it by a formula.

@papaleo, have you seen this thread?

@Jeruba Thanks for the reference. No, hadn’t seen