Reddit mentions of Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (The MIT Press)

Inside Jokes by Daniel Dennett, Matthew M. Hurley, and Reginald B. Adams

Also, from a research standpoint, do some googling on "Benign Violation Theory" and see where the rabbit hole takes you

Speaking of Dennet, I think his (and Hurley's and Adams's) theory of humor is promising. That book also introduced me to the concept of "epistemic emotions," which seems ready-made for Rationalists to adopt. (The citation was to Alison Gopnik's Explanation as Orgasm, which is pretty on-the-nose for people who talk about "insight porn.")

You might be interested in a book that Dan Dennett just co-wrote with a couple other people on humor. I have not read it, and, given the origins, it will be very cog sci-y and less "traditional" philosophy, which will probably make most people think it is more difficult. It also is more about what makes something funny than anything else.

From a science-y point of view, I'm reading a book about this now. From the description:

>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.

Essentially, non-obvious information makes something funny, whether that be a non sequitur or a clever pun or an unexpected turn in a story.

I'm reading this: Inside Jokes - Using Humor to Reverse Engineer the Mind. It's about exactly this and it's very good (Dennett is one authors). Highly recommended.

The Amazon blurb:
>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.

dennett published a book recently about this topic: http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Jokes-Using-Humor-Reverse-Engineer/dp/0262518694