General Principles

Question 1

MAP - material / audience / performer

Question 2

THREES - target - hostility - realism - exaggeration - emotion - surprise

Question 3

CONTEXTUAL - what makes something funny?

Answer 3

MAP and THREES and STRUCTURE are not inherently funny - what contextual qualities make something funny? The answer may vary from person to person, but relative to professional comedian jokes that I find funny, I should be able to define contextual qualities that are important to me.

Question 4

PATTERN RECOGNITION

Answer 4

funny situation - funny pattern -
funny opportunity - funny intuition -
I have felt it - maybe similar to improv scene development - maybe similar to bridge pattern recognition

Question 5

PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTANCE

Answer 5

Psychology book - word for word - 3 types - different rules

Question 6

PLAYFUL MINDSET

Answer 6

Playful mindset - necessary and sufficient for performer, audience and joke writer - with it, everything is possible - without it, things will not work right

Question 7

CAUSALITY

Answer 7

Exploration of the direct and indirect causes of laughter - Identify multiple models of causation and consider how they can be applied to the causation of laughter

Question 8

MYSTERY

Answer 8

bewildering mystery can be fascinating and fun, rather than frustrating and serious

Question 9

PRAGMATISM

Answer 9

funny is funny is funny - Bob Newhart (don’t complicate it - my paraphrase)

Question 10

EMOTION WHEEL

Answer 10

How can we use an emotion wheel to better understand, enhance and sharpen the emotional components of humor

Question 11

SIMPLICITY

Answer 11

Audience and performer have to be exactly at the same place and time -
same cadence - complexity slows audience comprehension

Question 12

LAUGHTER IS SOCIAL

Answer 12

So easy to forget as we individually (alone) try to understand and write jokes

Question 13

EXPERIENTIAL

Answer 13

There are limits to understanding an experience

Question 14

HAPPINESS

Answer 14

cannot seek directly, instead indirect consequence of activity - perhaps
humor is similar

Question 15

METAPHOR

Answer 15

Visual puzzles - need to relax to see
Happiness - can’t seek directly
Orgasm - similar to laughter
Night Driving - it works!

Question 16

MUSE

Question 17

JOY

Question 18

OPTIMISM

Question 19

PLAYING WITH BLOCKS

Answer 19

every kid knows that it’s fun to combine and recombine blocks - perhaps this is the right mindset for joke construction

Question 20

IMAGINATION

Question 21

SIGNALING

Answer 21

Rationality is the currency of credibility, productivity and status - we need to signal and come to mutual agreement
to enter the alternative world of humor - perhaps we do have 3 minds as Howard suggests

Question 22

SURPRISE

Answer 22

key component of humor - perhaps begins by surprising myself - perhaps jumping into the unknown - like improv actors - discover surprise after plunging into the dark unknown

Question 23

Stand-up Singularity is Idiocy

Answer 23

Humor and comedy can only occur within mutually acknowledged, accepted and consented communication between at least two people, otherwise it’s the same as homeless insanity - example - Seattle furniture shopping - I’ve been doing this type of “stand-up” for years - I just need to connect with an audience and I should be brilliant

Question 24

ART

Answer 24

Art is viewing life from a unique and pleasing perspective - humor is viewing life from a different and pleasing perspective - pretty similar

Question 25

Nuance of Language

Answer 25

Humor is generally not translatable into different languages because in many ways humor is playing with subtle differences in meanings and that’s fun and can be funny

Question 26

ORGASM

Answer 26

Laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of sense and nonsense