Why Exaggeration Jokes Work | Hacker News Reader

Why Exaggeration Jokes Work

theatlantic.com

106 pointssamclemens64 comments

There is a reason that it became common practice for an introduction to give a broad overview of the topic. It seriously detracts from the writing when the first paragraph plunges you into deep background, and you don't get a hint as to the supposed topic until halfway through.

+1 I find myself regularly scrolling heavily until I find the “meat” of the article teasered in the title. I guess someone told them before “you need to tell a story” or they do it for SEO reasons.

seems that most posts dedicate first 1-n paragraphs for unnecessary background and/or rehashing of the title. it's as if writers feel the need to ease into the topic as if it was a bucket of ice water for the reader to avoid being startled by

It’s actually just a mark of bad writing. Lots of books do it too, but it’s less common coz you get a lot of practice before you attempt a book.

First rule of good writing: Start the story as late as you can get away with. Preferably right before the punchline.

Compare:

1) I woke up that morning, showered, put on my shoes, and went on a hike. It was a beautiful day the sun was shining the bees were buzzing. I walked for 30 minutes when I happened upon a bear in the road.

2) Shit, is that a bear!? I was on a hike in the Rocky mountains in the middle of nowhere and there’s this bear rught in front of me. Now what do i do?

Ok I’m not doing these examples justice but think of your favorite stories: Do they start with the action or with the long wind up? In modern storytelling the windup usually comes during/after the action as backstory.

A counter example are horror movies and thrillers where you want to build suspense first.

But there's a difference between a story for the purpose of entertainment vs an expository story. The former are quite rare on HN.

Same rules apply. Writing is better when you start with the conclusion then expand on the supporting argument.

Unless you want to bring the reader along for the ride of discovery.

> bring the reader along for the ride

That's the point of long form story telling in the Atlantic. Sometimes it is well done, this isn't a good example of it (the ride isn't worth it).

I wonder if writing like this, where you don't really get to what the article is about until you're well into it, are because of advertising. I imagine people are more likely to spend more time on the page if they can't it all out of the intro.

I believe so. I think that's why the "inverted pyramid" is so highly regarded, and yet so rarely used in practice. It's because if you go with it, you quickly shed readers who found all the info they wanted partway, and go out to do other things. Which is great if you care about delivering value to readers - and that is not what most ad-driven publications really care about.

This has been how storytelling has been done for centuries, it’s a a mark of thoughtful feature writing. The Atlantic is over 100 years old and extremely prestigious, it’s resonable to assume that at least from a technical writing standpoint they know what they are doing and do it on purpose.

It’s not writing intended for a textbook or academic paper. It’s a story. You’re supposed to read it and get introduced to things and discover the themes of the story gradually.

I see a variation of this criticism of a long form feature about every week or so on HN. It’s sort of equivalent to a person walking into a modern art museum and asking why the artists didn’t just paint the pictures so they look exactly like the thing the artist was looking at when he painted the picture.

In the age of tweets, memes, and captions, it has simply become such criticism to even surface to the top. I usually ignore critiques of long form story telling.

I believe you're thinking of an attention step, an immersion into a human interest aspect of the story before the formulaic structure of a traditional introduction. I have no problem with an attention step. I'm using one right now in a paper I hope to have published.

What I object to is an article ostensibly on Topic A that spends the first 60% completely ignoring Topic A in favor of Topic B, only to draw the most fleeting and hand-wavy of analogies between the two, and subsequently pretending as if the author had presented some work of scholarship on Topic A.

"Until halfway through" was not an exaggeration in my original comment.

>spends the first 60% completely ignoring [biology]

Only if you ignore the literal second paragraph:

>Even neurons are formed by habit. When continuously exposed to a fixed stimulus, neurons become steadily less sensitive to that stimulus—until they eventually stop responding to it altogether.

My dear friend, I'm afraid you've misread either my comment or the article. Topic A, the ostensible subject of the article, is not "biology." Cheers!

It’s not writing intended for a textbook or academic paper. It’s a story. You’re supposed to read it and get introduced to things and discover the themes of the story gradually.

I didn't discover crap.

Lost my attention way before I skimmed over to the near-end where they started making the connection to exaggeration. Not because my attention span is that low but, rather, 99% of newspaper articles and columns are without much substance and I really need some assurance that the long story is worth reading.

But, generally, if I want a story I'll read a novel.

For anything else, give me the point. If the point is really good, you'll probably have me hooked for listening in for more.

So you're saying that all stories, no matter their natural size or content, should be padded out to novel length and published as a book?

If you want short form bare facts soulless prose, you shouldn't leave twitter

Why are you putting words in their mouth? That’s rude. So is the recommendation that someone should only read Twitter if they thought this article under delivered. Wikipedia is a great example of high information density and easy navigation to the matter you’re interested in.

>Why are you putting words in their mouth?

Because when we say X we don't just say X, we also signal and imply a lot of other things.

> That's rude.

Whereas the response "I didn't discover crap" is polite?

As someone who's first language is not English it comes off more as a mark of pedant writing. Some folks might enjoy the "storytelling", but it's really annoying when the author goes in circles and gets nowhere until you've read more than half of the text. Like that joke that goes on forever and ends without a punchline, that some people tell when they just want to pull your leg. And whether it's done by the centuries-old extremely-prestigious my-dad-is-very-important The Atlantic or some random person's blog it's just as annoying.

There’s certainly no judgment made, in the sense that I think people should consume whatever media they prefer. If you don’t enjoy long form feature writing in English you shouldn’t read it.

My comment is intended to point out the genre. The comments on this article are like people complaining that rap music doesn’t have enough melody, or jazz music isn’t catchy enough, or whatever.

It’s an unwillingness to understand the concept. Some of us are pretty damn glad The Atlantic, Harpers, and The New Yorker, among others, are still around. The world isn’t running short of thinly narrated to-the-point content.

Also I believe the term they use for this kind of runaround is to 'bury the lede'. There was a bit of discussion on it on HN earlier in the year.

A lot of writing in english is designed for people who _are_ comfortable reading it.

This article is literally an advertisement for a book.

From the fine article:

"This piece was adapted from James Geary’s new book, Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It."

Seen under that light, the article works perfectly. It contains a headline with seemingly simple question, meanders along with some anecdotes, and then at the end -- if you're still reading -- it tells you that you can go buy the book if you want to know the answer.

I felt like this article over-promised and under-delivered. There was a lot of ink spilled on the animal kingdom, and a weak/unconvincing analogy to human humor.

In my understanding, humor is surprise.

The article talks about wit because the article is an excerpt from a book on wit. Maybe that section was not fit to be an article with such a specific title?

Why are new insightful ideas, scientific inventions, plot twists, jump-scares, shocking news aren't funny?

Surprise is only one element. Humor is about the inherent conflict between our expectations and reality, the conflict is only intensified when we don't expect it.

There are a lot of jokes I see coming a mile away, but there's a grade of execution for comedians too. If the timing is tight, even the most expected joke can still earn a laugh.

I expected more too

All articles that purport to explain how some aspect of the human mind works (in this case, why exaggeration jokes trigger the emotional response they do) inevitably fail miserably. This is simply due to the fact that science has basically nothing meaningful to say about human experience, other than to draw vague correlations between it and fMRI scans or lesion studies. For god's sake, we don't even know why/how Ibuprofen works...what kind of moronic hubris makes an Atlantic writer think they can illuminate anything worthwhile about something as complex as humor?

> For god's sake, we don't even know why/how Ibuprofen works...

I bet physicists also assert that bumblebees cannot possibly fly, right? For God’s sake...

“NSAIDs such as ibuprofen work by inhibiting the cyclooxygenase (COX) enzymes, which convert arachidonic acid to prostaglandin H2 (PGH2). PGH2, in turn, is converted by other enzymes to several other prostaglandins (which are mediators of pain, inflammation, and fever) and to thromboxane A2 (which stimulates platelet aggregation, leading to the formation of blood clots).”

You just explained my point for me by giving a perfect example. We have no idea why any of these correlations hold or why they would lead to any particular change in pain experiences. For god's sake indeed.

This explanation of "why" ibuprofen works is as good as the article's explanation of "why" exaggeration jokes work. It's so unfortunate that otherwise rational people have been made incurious by modern education, enough to believe that "there is a change in the level of one neurotransmitter" is a good explanation for "why a pain medicine works".

You defend your claim that “we don't even know why/how Ibuprofen works” by pretending that Wikipedia’s incomplete description of COX mechanics are proof that we “have no idea” how any of this works. You’re not pointing out meaningful gaps in our knowledge. You’re passionately arguing that incomplete knowledge is equivalent to complete ignorance.

Boo. This is lazy and anti-intellectual, akin to “debunking” climate change by claiming that since we don’t know everything that influences climate, we don’t know anything at all. Someone who complains of “incuriousity” should do better than this.

I guess they mean that there is still the gap between molecules and perception. There is no concept for pain and thus no explanation of how Ibuprofen changes the perception of pain. That said, how do you exactly point out that an explanation is not sufficient? It's like describing a hole, you can only point at the borders.

“There is no concept for pain” is only true if you believe that human experiences do not map to the physical world. Otherwise pain is entirely a manifestation of physical chemical interactions. Pain is actually a pretty well understood phenomenon. Perfectly understood? No, but that’s typical of most things.

As for pointing out that an explanation is not sufficient, it is perfectly reasonable to point out the gaps in our knowledge. If those gaps are extremely large, it’s reasonable to call that out as well. It’s not reasonable to claim that the knowledge we do have is meaningless simply because there are still gaps in our knowledge. We don’t understand the origin of the universe, and yet we still manage to fly rockets pretty well. We managed to predict eclipses with perfect accuracy long before modern astronomy existed. The gaps in our knowledge don’t prevent the existing knowledge from being useful or accurate.

Very weak article, as pointed out by other comments. There isn't even the beginning of a proof of a connection between wit and exaggeration, and the examples don't help.

1000% if my jokes are exaggeration jokes.

97.471% of my jokes are about pedanticy.

I think you mean "pedantry".

Meant

Do they no longer mean "pedantry"? Seems that they meant it and mean it.

All of you have a mean pedantry going on.

thats the joke

64.3% of it. 14.3% is a wordplay, and 21.4% is explaining the joke, if you count this post fifty-fifty.

a mean pedantry is not necessarily a median pedanticity

But both are preferable to a mean pediatrician.

I just assume that, in order to qualify as an exaggeration joke, it had to be both an exaggeration and a joke.

Joke is usually a lie in disguise

-Alex

So jokes share much with sex even when they're not sex jokes. An instinct to focus on supernormal stimuli would also help explain the fascination with over sized and contrasting genitalia, makeup to exaggerate signals of arousal, various modes of sexual harassment, etc. They're variations on Tinbergen’s stickleback mandible spots.

The article is not great but the Buster Keaton scenes the author links to are great, especially the second one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZSTM3knaao

If you enjoyed the article, you'll probably also really enjoy this comic titled "Supernormal Stimuli" http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/supernormal-stimuli/

> The same principle is at work in verbal wit. The English film director Anthony Asquith, for example, once introduced Jean Harlow, the platinum-blond 1930s Hollywood star, to his mother, Lady Margot Asquith, the author and wife of the longtime British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith. Harlow mispronounced Lady Margot’s first name, sounding the final t, as in forgot. “The t is silent, my dear,” Asquith snipped, “as in Harlow.” Lady Margot isolated and exaggerated the significance of the simple t, just as Tinbergen isolated and exaggerated the herring gull’s orange spot, thereby dramatically enhancing its impact.

Is that a way of saying "she called her a harlot" that went over my head? Or did the author not catch that she called her a harlot?

At any rate, I don't see the wit there (a smart person wouldn't betray their pettyness, cruelty and insecurity like that at "hello"), and I noticed how it's all in the setup, in "platinum-blonde" vs "the author and wife of longtime prime minister".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margot_Asquith

> she accused her shell-shocked stepson Herbert of being drunk.

Jesus Christ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Harlow

... hey wait a second ... I don't know these people. But neither did the author, so here goes nothing:

> A totally different principle is at work in psychological abuse. The English film director Anthony Asquith, for example, once introduced Jean Harlow, the young, beautiful and warmhearted 1930s Hollywood star, to his mother, Lady Margot Asquith, a woman of a remarkable lack of any endearing features, who had developed an especially cruel looking mouth. Harlow mispronounced Lady Margot’s first name, sounding the final t, as in forgot, though she meant nothing by it. “The t is silent, my dear,” Asquith snipped, “as in Harlow.”, marking the beginning of an evening that to the young people felt like trying to have a picnic while being harrassed by a flock of old sea gulls that seemed more intent on shitting on the food than stealing any.

> They didn't talk back, laughed politely, because it seemed clear Margot was not just unhappy, she didn't even remember happiness, and this was her way to get back at all what that had broken her heart when she was younger. Harlow knew Margot think she meant her, but that she didn't, didn't even see her, couldn't see her, saw only the light playing on her hatred for herself... so she came to feel deep compassion for this person. In the picnic analogy, she simply decided that they weren't going to get to eat a bite anyway, and that they may as well watch the acrobatics of the shitting birds... for even the ugliest human is beautiful, if you look at them careful enough, listen well enough. What seems ugly, what seems like chaos, is just as causally ordered, that order is just hidden from casual glance. Beauty is symmetric, and that's sublime, but uglyness is complex, and that is sublime too, and sneaking these kind of bald claims into stories is probably what makes writing them so fun.

> Later that night, when they were alone, Harlow said "you said it was bad, but I had no idea" and made sweet pity love to Anthony Asquith, which totally blew his mind.

[actually looking at his bio he was homosexual, which both makes that ending unlikely, and gives the scene a whole other level of oppressive atmosphere, at least in my mind: his mother calling a person she literally just met a harlot for being pretty and an actress, makes it seem unlikely she would have approved of his homosexuality, so maybe they were relieved she called her harlot, since that meant she had no clue of his homosexuality and they gladly played along]

Yes, she was implying harlot. It was just a joke, I don’t know how you turned a throw away one liner into a blog post...

You don’t think it’s rude for an elderly lady to respond to a young woman mispronouncing her name by “jokingly” calling her a prostitute?

There is some dispute about whether this famous insult actually happened though, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11193714/Meet-Marg...

It’s savage as fuck...still funny though

Such savagery is born out of weakness. To respond like that to a honest mistake is like slapping someone in the face for no reason at all. It's like a child saying something wrong to an adult and the adult just throwing it across the room, for no reason. There's no such thing as "no reason" though, and in this case it seems pretty easy to guess at the rough shapes of those reasons, and I find it hilarious that it seems to escape thousands, millions of people. I guess that is just one more pebble pointing to the wider alliance of the obedient with sociopaths that Arno Gruen described.

> I don’t know how you turned a throw away one liner into a blog post...

To be honest, I'm right with you. But I enjoyed it thoroughly, and actually already started to turn it into a blog post, haha. Also a new thing for me, but also fun.

I just find psychology interesting. And if you look around, it's actually some kind of quotation, instead of the kindly forgotten weak moment which it would be in a world that doesn't need even such silly blog posts. I didn't bring it up, I did my part to put it to rest, and you're welcome :P

Jokes are "absurd associations". Our brain thinks in patterns. When you put together two patterns(ideas) that don't belong together, it creates the feeling of absurdity, the less patterns belong together, the less they fit together, the more absurd they will feel. ("A man on a bicycle" is not absurd, "a man on a unicycle" is a little bit absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle" is very absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle while wearing a white dress and juggling fish" is absurd as fuck). Comedy is the art of finding connections between patterns. You "connect the dots" between two ideas, find an overlap(an association) between two patterns that are far apart, and you put them together. The more absurd(less compatible) the two ideas are, and the stronger the connection(the more it makes sense), the funnier the joke will be.

A longer post on this:

https://medium.com/@rayalez/comedy-theory-fd142076657e

----

I can analyze about 80% of the jokes this way and find two different patterns with clear connection between them, remaining 20% are what I call "purely absurd" jokes, they don't have two connected patterns, they're just ideas that make as little sense as possible. I don't know how to explain both types with some common underlying mechanism.

Just as an example, here's a "dot-connect" comedy sketch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT6jS_X4NaY

(Pattern 1 is clouds, common recognizer is "cloud that looks like a mushroom", pattern 2 is nuclear explosion).

And here's a "pure absurd" comedy sketch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQfvSLxTsEs

(no two distinct but connected patterns that I can discern, just an absurd idea that makes as little sense as possible)

- Puns are the simplest example of dot-connect jokes ("this word sounds like this other word"). Pranks too (the same situation means one thing to the person who's doing the prank, and another to the person who's being pranked).

- Metaphors are associations that aren't absurd enough to be funny, if a metaphor is absurd/weird enough it becomes a joke.

- Exaggeration/reversal jokes are closer to "pure absurd" jokes, you're taking a normal idea and making it make less sense by exaggerating a part of the pattern, or replacing it with it's opposite.

----

Animals seem to laugh when playing, another way to put it - "fake fighting". Play makes sense evolutionarily because kids are practicing fighting, and laughter seems like a signal that "I'm not actually trying to hurt you". I couldn't figure out how to reconcile it with the idea of absurdity, they seem vaguely similar, but I can't expain how comedy works from evolutionary standpoint.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_in_animals

To understand humor from evolutionary perspective, it would be interesting to analyze the jokes babies and kids find funny. Why do babies laugh at peekaboo?

Here's a fascinating video about the first jokes Hank Green's kid has came up with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q9AEu27NAg

Interestingly, two of them are "pure absurd" jokes (blue baby, police bus), and three of them are "dot-connect" jokes(mam-da, papa pants, coconut baby).

----

Laughter and humor are not the same thing. Tickling isn't funny, "social signaling" laughter isn't funny (like when girl giggles when she's attracted to a guy).

----

It would make sense if brains evolved to reward novelty. When you learn something insightful about the world, you get a pleasant dopamine hit. If comedy is "supernormal stimuli", it could come from people learning to hack this mechanism, making the sensation more intense.

The way people add more sugar/fat to the food to make taste more intense, or learned to masturbate to fake sex, maybe people found a way to trick their minds into feeling they've learned something super insightful? But what does that have to do with laughter?

Some sort of error-correction process? When you learn a new idea, your brain corrects your old wrong world model, "erasing" mistaken beliefs. Another way to describe absurd is an "obvious error". Maybe there's something to it...

----

It's easier to make jokes on taboo subjects because there's an absurd gap between the seriousness of a taboo subject and a lighthearted goofiness of a joke.

I have wondered at times if it would be possible to have a whole academic field of study in 'humor theory'. I personally termed it as the unexpected is part of what makes things funny.

A professor giving a lecture on medieval economics in a hall or an exotic dancer dancing at a bachelor party isn't funny. The exotic dancer giving a lecture on medieval economics at a bachelor party or the professor dancing at a lecture hall? Funny.

Awesome examples!

I think all jokes are surprising, but not all surprising things are jokes ("you have lung cancer" is surprising but not very hilarious). Surprise seems more like a side effect of comedy, instead of an explanation. The trick is to figure out what, aside from surprise, creates comedy. What kind of properties apply to all the funny things, and only to funny things.

There's a "benign violation" theory - they say that things are funny when they're surprising but harmless, but that's also not true. Plot twists, scientific inventions, new insightful ideas - there are plenty of surprising harmless things that aren't funny.

light on content, not sure what the point of the article is besides filler (I stopped reading half way through), so I'll go by the title. This must be a story about a guy with a liberal arts degree, who exaggerated on his resume, got hired as a joke, didn't get the joke (due to lack of iq), and just started writing crap.

James Geary mesdames et messieurs. Calling his work and career a joke would be an exaggeration.

For just once could we not downvote jokes here? The topic is humor. One HN thread of jokes won’t turn this place into reddit.

Should have phrased it as a joke!

That's what they all say.

You let one joke in, and the next day you have to scroll through thousands of pictures of Pepe the Frog on a bloated app that tracks your every scroll.

If you want to avoid that, you have to nuke all humor from orbit. That's the only way to be sure.

Don't worry, if Pepe shows up, I'll call in Gritty to take him down a peg or two.

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