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kens 5 days ago

If you're interested in the theory behind humor, I recommend "Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind"; cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett is a co-author. It makes a mostly convincing case that humor evolved to encourage people to detect cognitive error. The book also ties this in with (pre-LLM) artificial intelligence. The basic idea is that humor depends on errors in reasoning and the punchline causes you to reevaluate your reasoning and discover your error. Humor evolved to be enjoyable to encourage the discovery of errors.