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Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
9/11.
9/11 who?
You said you’d never forget! What makes something funny?
The Freud sex theory says that jokes are funny because they express our forbidden impulses about sex. The old superiority theory says that we laugh when we feel this sudden glory of thinking we’re superior to someone else, like cuckolds and Polacks. And the incongruity theory says we laugh when things from different compartments of our mind are absurdly yanked together.
And your theory is?
My theory of the progress of jokes is an evolution, where filth and nastiness give way to the sheer delight in absurdity. Millions of years from now, our hyperintelligent descendants will all be philosophers and mathematicians. They’ll be pure mind, and they’ll love only pure absurdity. And we’ll revert back to chimp humor. Chimps think it’s funny when you present a rock to someone and say it’s food.
-- Jim Holt, interviewed by Jada Yuan in New York
magazine
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