Voodoo Time Dot Com

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the origin and purpose of humor. How did it develop? What purpose does it serve? In Isaac Asimov’s short story “Jokester“, a man discovered that the origin of humor could be traced to an experiment on human beings conducted by an alien race. The catch was, if any human ever found out, the experiment would be ceased immediately.

But let’s, for the sake of argument, suppose that humor is not of extraterrestrial origin. Is humor then just a random tangent of evolution? Or, has humor somehow contributed to our success as a species?

I like to think it’s the latter. Humor is an amazingly efficient community-builder. There are few ways to endear oneself to others faster than by making them laugh. After all, in study after study, women cite a well-developed sense of humor as the most highly desirable personality trait in a potential mate. Men also desire a healthy sense of humor in their mate (as a close second to “big boobies”, of course).

On the other hand, I concede that the former theory is just as plausible. In spite of ourselves, one of the funniest things in the world is when someone (else) gets hurt. On the surface, this does not seem conducive to the survival of a species. Like the human tailbone, it could be that humor is purely vestigial; a throwback to a behavior that used to be important to early humanoids for some now unknown reason. Maybe laughter, directed at the village idiot, focused the community’s attention on behaviors that were likely to result in injury - ensuring that they learn from the mistakes of others. Or it could be that humor is an inborn pity response. Since the idiot supplies entertainment to the community, there is a selfish motivation for preserving the safety of the idiot rather than leaving his goofy ass out for the wolves. This would explain the continued existence of idiots over these hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.

So when did humor cease to be the exclusive domain of idiots? I suspect it’s become a social cameleon move. In human society, there are only a few surefire ways to get people to like you:

1. Be beautiful - Good-looking people get attention, and are generally well-liked regardless of personality.

2. Be large - Larger, stronger people are the warriors and protectors. Even if they’re complete jerks, it pays to have one or two on your side.

3. Be a relative - We feel a sort of responsibility to those who share a common bloodline - no matter how stupid they are.

4. Be funny.

Only one of these traits is not inborn. If you are otherwise unremarkable, the best way to get attention is to make people laugh. I suspect that intelligent people eventually picked up on this. Smart cavemen probably did not win a lot of friends by chatting around the fire about quantum physics. Smart people only impress other smart people by being intelligent. Primeval nerds might have understood that talking about idiots evoked the same reaction as actually being one - only without the stigma. Thus the comedian was born.

With this in mind, it seems that all comedy really comes down to the exposure of foolishness. After all, the best jokes are all about misunderstandings that expose foolishness. These can be in the first-, second-, third-person, or hypothetical.

First-person: “A guy came up to me and said, ‘I haven’t had a bite in weeks.’ so I bit him.”

Second-person: “Did you know the word ‘gullible‘ isn’t in the dictionary?”

Third-person: “So, this guy walks into a bar…”

Hypothetical: “I just flew in from New York, and boy, are my arms tired.”

See? All foolishness and absurdity. But there are exceptions. For instance, why are bodily functions funny? A lot of people (our mothers, grandmothers, and wives) like to pretend that they’re not, but in reality, deep down inside, everyone thinks boogers and farts are funny on some level. It might be that the baser boldily functions are funny because only a fool would perform them around others. I’m not sure about that though. I suspect that farts are funny because they’re magic.

So, in the end, humor is all about farts and fools. Kind of like this website.

Bye for now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 26th, 2003 at 2:09 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.