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A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition:
A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry.
"The Funniest Joke in the World" is a Monty Python comedy sketch revolving around a joke that is so funny that anyone who reads or hears it promptly dies from laughter. Ernest Scribbler, a British "manufacturer of jokes", writes the joke on a piece of paper only to die laughing. His mother also immediately dies laughing after reading it, as do the first constables on the scene. Eventually the joke is contained, weaponized, and deployed against Germany during World War II.
A pun, also known as a paronomasia in the context of linguistics, is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use of homophonic, homographic, metonymic, or figurative language. A pun differs from a malapropism in that a malapropism is an incorrect variation on a correct expression, while a pun involves expressions with multiple interpretations. Puns may be regarded as in-jokes or idiomatic constructions, especially as their usage and meaning are usually specific to a particular language or its culture.
Humour or humor is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humours, controlled human health and emotion.
A limerick is a form of verse that appeared in England in the early years of the 18th century. In combination with a refrain, it forms a limerick song, a traditional humorous drinking song often with obscene verses. It is written in five-line, predominantly anapestic and amphibrach trimeter with a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA, in which the first, second and fifth line rhyme, while the third and fourth lines are shorter and share a different rhyme.
Word play or wordplay is a literary technique and a form of wit in which words used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement. Examples of word play include puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, double entendres, and telling character names.
A double entendre is a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, one of which is typically obvious, and the other often conveys a message that would be too socially unacceptable, or offensive to state directly.
Nonsense verse is a form of nonsense literature usually employing strong prosodic elements like rhythm and rhyme. It is often whimsical and humorous in tone and employs some of the techniques of nonsense literature.
LOL, or lol, is an initialism for laughing out loud, and a popular element of Internet slang, which can be used to indicate amusement, irony, or double meanings. It was first used almost exclusively on Usenet, but has since become widespread in other forms of computer-mediated communication and even face-to-face communication. It is one of many initialisms for expressing bodily reactions, in particular laughter, as text, including initialisms for more emphatic expressions of laughter such as LMAO and ROFL or ROTFL.
Nonsense is a form of communication, via speech, writing, or any other symbolic system, that lacks any coherent meaning. In ordinary usage, nonsense is sometimes synonymous with absurdity or the ridiculous. Many poets, novelists and songwriters have used nonsense in their works, often creating entire works using it for reasons ranging from pure comic amusement or satire, to illustrating a point about language or reasoning. In the philosophy of language and philosophy of science, nonsense is distinguished from sense or meaningfulness, and attempts have been made to come up with a coherent and consistent method of distinguishing sense from nonsense. It is also an important field of study in cryptography regarding separating a signal from noise.
Jesus H. Christ is an expletive interjection that refers to the Christian religious figure of Jesus Christ. It is typically uttered in anger, surprise, or frustration; although often with humorous intent.
Self-referential humor, also known as self-reflexive humor, self-aware humor, or meta humor, is a type of comedic expression that—either directed toward some other subject, or openly directed toward itself—is self-referential in some way, intentionally alluding to the very person who is expressing the humor in a comedic fashion, or to some specific aspect of that same comedic expression. Here, meta is used to describe that the joke explicitly talks about other jokes, a usage similar to the words metadata, metatheatrics and metafiction. Self-referential humor expressed discreetly and surrealistically is a form of bathos. In general, self-referential humor often uses hypocrisy, oxymoron, or paradox to create a contradictory or otherwise absurd situation that is humorous to the audience.
"No soap radio" is a form of practical joke and an example of surreal comedy. The joke is a prank whereby the punch line has no relation to the body of the joke, but participants in the prank pretend otherwise. The effect is to either trick someone into laughing along as if they "get it" or to ridicule them for not understanding.
Bananas is a 1971 American comedy film directed by Woody Allen and starring Allen, Louise Lasser, and Carlos Montalban. Written by Allen and Mickey Rose, the film is about a bumbling New Yorker who, after being dumped by his activist girlfriend, travels to a tiny Latin American nation and becomes involved in its latest revolution. Parts of the plot are based on the book Don Quixote, U.S.A. by Richard P. Powell.
Surreal humour is a form of humour predicated on deliberate violations of causal reasoning, thus producing events and behaviors that are obviously illogical. Portrayals of surreal humour tend to involve bizarre juxtapositions, incongruity, non-sequiturs, irrational or absurd situations, and expressions of nonsense.
Witzelsucht is a set of pure and rare neurological symptoms characterized by a tendency to make puns, or tell inappropriate jokes or pointless stories in socially inappropriate situations. It makes one unable to read sarcasm.
Computational humor is a branch of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence which uses computers in humor research. It is a relatively new area, with the first dedicated conference organized in 1996.
Although humor is a phenomenon experienced by most humans, its exact cause is a topic of heavy debate. There are many theories of humor which attempt to explain what it is, what social functions it serves, and what would be considered humorous. Although various classical theories of humor and laughter may be found, in contemporary academic literature, three theories of humor appear repeatedly: relief theory, superiority theory, and incongruity theory. These theories are used as building blocks for the rest of the theories. Among current humor researchers, there has yet to be a consensus about which of these three theories of humor is most viable. Some proponents of each theory originally claimed that theirs, and theirs alone, explained all cases of humor. However, they now acknowledge that although each theory generally covers its area of focus, many instances of humor can be explained by more than one theory. Similarly, one view holds that theories have a combinative effect; Jeroen Vandaele claims that incongruity and superiority theories describe complementary mechanisms that together create humor.
A dad joke is a joke, typically a pun, often presented as a one-liner or a question and answer, but less often a narrative. Generally inoffensive, dad jokes are stereotypically told with sincere humorous intent or to intentionally provoke a negative "groaning" reaction to their overly simplistic humor.
The Bible and humor is a topic of Biblical criticism concerned with the question of whether parts of the Bible were intended to convey humor in any style. Historically, this topic has not received much attention, but modern scholars generally agree that humor can be found in biblical texts.
References
- ↑ Chaffee, Judith; Crick, Oliver, eds. (2015). The Routledge Companion to Commedia Dell'Arte. London, UK; New York, N.Y.: Routledge. p. 181. ISBN 978-0-415-74506-2.
- ↑ Helitzer, Melvin (1984). Comedy techniques for writers and performers : the hearts theory of humor writing. Athens, OH: Lawhead Press. p. 118. ISBN 978-0-91619-900-5.
- ↑ Franzini, Louis R. (2012). Just Kidding: Using Humor Effectively. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 138. ISBN 978-144221-336-4.
- ↑ Berger, Ivan (6 June 2007). "Quacked humour". New Scientist . Retrieved 20 June 2017.
- ↑ Wiseman, Richard (20 April 2007). "The truth about lying and laughing". The Guardian . Retrieved 20 June 2017.
- ↑ Gultchin, Limor; Patterson, Genevieve; Baym, Nancy; Swinger, Nathaniel; Kalai, Adam (24 May 2019). "Humor in Word Embeddings: Cockamamie Gobbledegook for Nincompoops". Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning: 2474–2483. arXiv: 1902.02783 . Retrieved 14 July 2023.
- ↑ Hutson, Matthew (17 June 2019). "Bejesus! A cockamamie AI can predict which craptacular words you'll find funny". Science. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
- ↑ Fadelli, Ingrid (26 February 2019). "A new study explores humor in word embeddings". TechXplore. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
- 1 2 "Ask the Experts: Robert Beard on language". Bucknell University. 6 May 2010. Retrieved 20 June 2017.
- ↑ Beard, Robert (2009). The 100 Funniest Words in English. Lewisburg, PA: Lexiteria. ISBN 978-0-61-526704-3.
- 1 2 3 "How funny is this word? The 'snunkoople' effect". ScienceDaily (Press release). University of Alberta. 30 November 2015.
- 1 2 3 Lewis, Danny (7 December 2015). "Finally There's a Scientific Theory for Why Some Words are Funny". Smithsonian. Washington, D.C.
- 1 2 3 4 "This is why some words just sound funny – and others don't". Reader's Digest . 13 February 2017. Archived from the original on 4 October 2022. Retrieved 20 June 2017.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Shariatmadari, David (26 November 2015). "From whong to quingel: the science of funny words". The Guardian. London, UK.
- ↑ "shart". Dictionary.com. Retrieved 16 January 2021.
- ↑ Kaplan, Sarah (2 December 2015). "Scientists have figured out what makes Dr. Seuss so silly". The Washington Post.
