But in an online message board you have the problem that jokes are understood by everyone, whereas a deep insightful comment isn't understood by everyone, so jokes tend to go to the top, and people tend to cluster jokes on jokes in joke trees and suddenly what started as "a joke here and there lightens the mood up" turns into people trying to one-up each other on jokes instead of reading the damn article and sharing some actual insight. It's hard to control "how much" online.
HN actually has lots of jokes in absolute numbers, usually only the best ones are tolerated, it's just that on a relative basis you won't enter a thread with 20 comments where 18 are jokes, which is what I would hate.
So the lack of jokes on HN is what makes debates here possible, if we had more jokes we would no longer have debates.
I think there is a correlation between joking and being difficult to reason with, but the causality between them might not be the one you assume.
It appears to me that one of the reasons why people laugh is to release some internal tension. The tension comes from the cognitive dissonance with conflicting thoughts that they have.
The alternative would be to not release the tension but to seeing that you hold these contradictory thoughts and enduring the pain that you must be wrong, because you hold contradictory thoughts, in other words, admitting there is something for you to learn.
But that would require you to become more conscious about your conflicts. The joking is the less conscious, automatic option. And when you are not being conscious, but you automatically take the route of joking, you do not have the ability to choose between being more conscious or less conscious.
Creating original jokes is very deliberate and requires lateral thinking, familiarity with the topic, and awareness of your audience. It's very conscious!
Deploying unoriginal or clichéd jokes to a positive reception calls for some of the aforementioned.
Comedy is widely acknowledged as a means of commenting or contemplating on topics that are controversial or uncomfortable.
Some types of humor are contradictory. This is bullshitting and sarcasm. Plenty are not a fan but it could also be argued that it's useful for approaching truth or good ideas by creatively exploring the space of falsehoods and bad ideas. Conversational TDD, if you will. Bullshitting specifically can be an exercise in role-playing, which may be useful practice for situations that may actually arise.
Some jokes betray no particular belief at all but still require that you be witty or clever. These are your puns, double entendres, innuendos, and so on.
Thinking of humor as lazy or useless or some vaguely compulsive behavior is some kind of thing.
Or, to borrow a clichéd bit of sarcasm, you sound like you're a lot of fun at parties. ;)
There seems to be a threshold of consciousness where we are self-aware, but another even higher level where we are more conscious about what happens within us, for example our emotional reactions. With diligent practice such as meditation, it is possible to increase the average level of consciousness.
I am now going on a limb and trying to explain you what I mean by using your own text above as an example. I am not doing it to insult you, but help you understand what I mean.
In your first sentence you talk about "characterizing ALL jokes". But in my comment I said "ONE OF THE reasons why people laugh".
So for some reason, you misread me claiming something more general than I did.
That kind of misunderstandings are very common, and by itself does not say anything about your intelligence etc. But it is very helpful to turn such misunderstandings around, and ask yourself, why did it happen?
Our mind does tricks on us, and it is up to us to try to put our mind in order. In this case, one possible explanation is that my idea ("one of the reasons people laugh") is for some reason not psychologically acceptable to you (it contradicts something you strongly believe), and this is the reason why you misread me saying it is the ONLY reason why people laugh. This allows your mind you "prove" that my idea is wrong, by providing a counterexample.
So to take the first sentence from my comment, your mind decides to "fight" my idea, instead of laughing it off. Both are defence mechanisms of the mind, to allow you to keep your world view constant.
If you would have been a little bit more conscious the moment you read my comment, you would have noticed that there was an emotional reaction in you from reading my comment. And you could have used that emotional reaction as a signal for yourself to look into what that emotional reaction is about.
The emotional reaction happened regardless of whether my original idea was right or not. My idea just conflicts with something you believe. So it signals less about my idea and more about the ideas you have in your own head, and your emotional valence associated with those ideas.
So your reaction does not prove anything. But it is less likely that I can find good critique of my idea from a comment that shows signs that it is based on less than fully consciously explored emotional reaction. It is possible, but less likely.
The theory is not really mine. You can get an introduction to science of laughter by reading the book called Laughter: Scientigic Investigation by Robert Provine.
The researchers found that people very commonly laugh in discussions at things that nobody thinks are funny, often at the the start of a sentence. We are just not very conscious about it. How it relates to consciousness is another story, but there is a large body of "research" done about the relationship between meditation and consciousness.