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Comment by wrp | Hacker News Reader

Completely serious, I think Calvin & Hobbes had the best concise explanation.

(https://mymorningmeditations.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/...)

I'm not sure if I'm missing something (perhaps the joke, as it were) but the Calvin & Hobbes strip seems to be entirely about having a sense of humour, rather than a theory of comedy.

It's an interesting thought and a question "why did sense of humor develop through evolution?". I don't think this comic applies to the author's post though. Which is more about how to produce comedy, and seemingly quite one dimensionally?

Also I don't think the comics final answer is satisfactory, because you could definitely respond to absurdity, by calling out why something is absurd, you don't have to laugh at it.

So why do we have a sense of humor in the first place?

If absurdity made us despondent or desperately sad instead, that probably wouldn't do much for the ol' evolutionary fitness.

By default you don't have to have any such emotional reaction to absurdity. You could just analyze the situation and take action accordingly.

The point is exactly that you _can't_ just analyze every single situation that ever happens and then know what to do. That there's a huge amount of life experience for which there is no analytical solution. So you can't "just analyze" every single thing. What do you do then? Dispair? Or laugh.

The ancients eventually came up with the whole God thing to explain all confusion away but i have a feeling that happened after the evolutionary push to not kill yourself the first time you see lightening

So laugh = communication tool to indicate to others that a weird thing happened, but we think it's harmless, so we don't have to react?

The C&H explanation has two parts, what triggers the humor response (perception of things that don't make sense) and why we have the humor response (evolutionary fitness). A theory of the humor mechanism should be congruent to a theory of comedy.

The physiological manifestation of the humor response is also explained by evolutionary fitness when you consider it as countering the physiological reaction to the perception of stressful ambiguity.

That's much more interesting than just the comic strip alone, thanks!

That's actually very interesting... humor is lubrication for stressful ambiguity.

Great explanation, indeed, and a gem of a comic.

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