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Inside jokes : using humor to reverse-engineer the mind /

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, Mat...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Clasificación:Libro Electrónico
Autor principal: Hurley, Matthew M., 1977-
Otros Autores: Dennett, D. C. (Daniel Clement), Adams, Reginald B.
Formato: Electrónico eBook
Idioma:Inglés
Publicado: Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, ©2011.
Temas:
Acceso en línea:Texto completo
Descripción
Sumario: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.
Descripción Física:1 online resource (xiii, 359 pages) : illustrations
Bibliografía:Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-328) and index.
ISBN:9780262303552
0262303558
1299284302
9781299284302