Joke

• 1. Introduction

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  A joke can be the oldest written thing that still makes someone laugh. The oldest one identified is a Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC, and it is about flatulence: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Toilet humour, four thousand years old, scratched into clay. A joke is a display of humour in which words are arranged within a specific narrative structure to make people laugh. It usually takes the form of a short story with dialogue, and it ends in a punchline, where the funny element is finally revealed. The linguist Robert Hetzron put one condition above all others. The tension should reach its highest point at the very end, with no continuation to relieve it. So how does a string of words tip a listener into laughter at exactly the right moment? Why does the same joke land in one room and die in another? And why have scholars from psychology, linguistics, folklore, anthropology, and even computer science all argued that the joke belongs to them?

• 2. The Anatomy Of A Punchline

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  Victor Raskin built a Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour around a single hinge. The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns, signalling a shift between the scripts needed to interpret it. Humour appears when a trigger in the punchline forces the audience to abruptly drop its first, obvious reading of the story and adopt a second, opposing one. For this to work, both interpretations must fit the joke text yet be incompatible with each other.

  Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently widened this idea into two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution. He argued that incongruity alone cannot account for the structure of humour. In his framework, appreciating a joke is a two-part sequence. First the listener discovers the incongruity, then resolves it, and in a joke that resolution generates laughter.

  Neurolinguistics has watched this happen inside the skull. The cognitive scientists Coulson and Kutas measured brain activity as people read jokes, in an article titled "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders." Other studies support a two-stage processing of humour, shown by the longer processing time jokes require. Neuroscience adds that laughter runs on two partly separate neuronal pathways, one involuntary and emotionally driven, the other voluntary. That split explains a familiar moment. An off-colour joke earns a laugh, and then in the next breath a disclaimer arrives: "Oh, that's bad." The laugh fires a breath faster than the brain finishes weighing the joke's morality.

• 3. How A Joke Is Told

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  Telling a joke is a cooperative effort. The teller and the audience must agree, in one form or another, to treat the narrative that follows as a joke. The sociologist Harvey Sacks described its sequential organisation in three serially ordered parts: the preface, the telling, and the response.

  Framing opens the transaction with a formulaic signal. "Have you heard the one," "Reminds me of a joke I heard," "So, a lawyer and a doctor" all key the audience to expect a joke and draw a clear boundary around what comes next. Response to the frame can be anticipation, or a dismissal like "this is no joking matter." The frame invokes a play mode, and if the audience will not move into play, then nothing will seem funny. "An elephant walks into a bar" instantly tells a competent listener that this compressed, unrealistic story is not meant to be taken at face value.

  The telling itself is loose. Unlike riddles and proverbs, a joke need not be verbatim, so the teller modifies the text by memory and by audience. The narrative stays succinct, carrying only the details that lead to the punchline. Brevity is prized, and the shaggy dog story mocks that virtue. Presented as a joke, it rambles through pointless detail and then deliberately fails to deliver a punchline, an anti-joke. The expected payoff for a real joke is laughter, which makes a joke a kind of understanding test. If listeners do not get it, they have missed the two scripts hidden in the narrative.

• 4. The Power Of Context

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  A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague at the water cooler than to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. The punchline does not change, but its appropriateness shifts with the room. A joke about toilet humour can be funnier on an elementary school playground than on a college campus. The narrator automatically adjusts the wording to suit the audience while keeping the same divergent scripts in the punchline. Telling the joke at a fraternity party and telling it to one's grandmother call for different vocabulary.

  Function, however, is not the same as context. Function is an abstraction drawn from many contexts. In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local cafe, joking with the waitresses was used to gauge sexual availability for the evening. Jokes moving from general to topical to explicitly sexual signalled openness for a connection. Jokes can also mark group identity, signal inclusion or exclusion, or test attitudes toward politics, religion, and sex. Among pre-adolescents, dirty jokes let them share information about their changing bodies. Some of this play hardens into a fixed social form called a joking relationship, a term coined by anthropologists for groups who engage in institutionalised banter. It blends friendliness with antagonism, a pretence of hostility wrapped around real affection, or permitted disrespect. Anthropologists first described it within kinship groups in Africa, then found it in cultures around the world.

• 5. From Clay To Internet

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  Jokes were never refined culture, so their printed versions were treated as ephemera, temporary documents meant to be thrown away. Many early ones dealt with scatological and sexual topics that entertained every class but were not worth saving. The second oldest known joke, found on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, dates to Ancient Egypt around 1600 BC and asks how to entertain a bored pharaoh. The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab, a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC, completes the three oldest jokes, though the portion holding its punchline has not survived intact.

  Puns expose how hard jokes are to move between languages. Julius Caesar once sold land cheaply to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to him. Cicero remarked, "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta," where "tertia deducta" means either "with one-third off" or "with Tertia putting out."

  The earliest surviving joke book is the Philogelos, Greek for The Laughter-Lover, a collection of 265 jokes in crude ancient Greek from the fourth or fifth century AD. The classicist Mary Beard suggests it was a jokester's handbook of quips to use on the fly. Its protagonists include the absent-minded professor and the eunuch, and one joke resembles Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch." After movable type spread in the 15th century, printers turned out jestbooks alongside Bibles. Poggio Bracciolini's Facetiae, first published in 1470, ran through twenty documented editions in that century alone. Narrative jest characters followed, from Rabelais in France to Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain, and Master Skelton in England. Broadsides and chapbooks later carried jokes as page fillers, including an 1706 Harvard-archived title, "Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection." Magazines kept the habit. Reader's Digest closes articles with an unrelated joke, and The New Yorker, first published in 1925 as a sophisticated humour magazine, is still known for its cartoons. Electronic communication at the end of the 20th century brought new traditions, where an emailed joke draws a reply of a smiley or LOL and the framing often sits in the subject line, "RE: laugh for the day."

• 6. Joke Cycles And Their Meanings

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  A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation that shares a consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Elephant jokes run on nonsense humour, dead baby jokes on black humour, and light bulb jokes on every kind of operational stupidity. The same Head and Shoulders joke was refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten, and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle. These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across borders, and then dissipate.

  The folklorist Bill Ellis turned the internet into a kind of time machine. By watching humour message boards immediately after the 9/11 disaster, he observed topical jokes being posted in real time, including the attempts at humour that failed before any successful joke emerged. Earlier folklore research could only collect jokes after they had already succeeded.

  Disaster cycles attach to celebrities and national catastrophes, such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. An analysis of the Challenger cycle from February to March 1986 found the jokes arriving in distinct waves, the first using clever wordplay and the second playing with grim images. The primary social function appeared to be closure, signalling that it was time to move on. The sociologist Christie Davies studied ethnic jokes worldwide and found the stupid target is never a stranger but a well-known peripheral group, so Americans joke about Polacks and Italians, Germans about Ostfriesens, and the English about the Irish. For Davies, such jokes reveal more about how tellers imagine themselves than about their targets, reminding people of their place in the world. The folklorist Alan Dundes pushed deeper into absurd cycles from the 1960s, reading dead baby jokes as a response to guilt over contraception and abortion, and elephant jokes as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an image of the counterculture.

• 7. A Beast Of Many Disciplines

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  The blind men and the elephant is the image scholars use for their own field. Each discipline studies jokes with competent methods yet keeps failing to grasp the whole beast, which is why the joke demands a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary inquiry. Sigmund Freud was among the first modern scholars to treat jokes as serious objects of study. His 1905 work "Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious" describes their social nature with many Viennese examples and carefully distinguishes jokes, humour, and the comic.

  Classifying jokes has frustrated folklorists for over a century. The Aarne-Thompson system, first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne and later expanded by Stith Thompson, ends with anecdotes and jokes but leans on obsolete actors like the numbskull. The finer Thompson Motif Index breaks tales into individual elements, yet because nearly every incident has an actor and an item, most narratives end up filed under several headings at once. Mid-century prudery also meant obscene and scatological elements were regularly ignored. The General Theory of Verbal Humour, developed by Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, tried to fix this with six Knowledge Resources: Script Opposition, Logical Mechanism, Situation, Target, Narrative Strategy, and Language. A hierarchy partly restricts the lower resources, so a light bulb joke always takes the form of a riddle.

  The physiology of laughter opened the same questions earlier. In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first comprehensive and accurate descriptions of laughter in "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals." The science of gelotology, from the Greek gelos for laughter, now studies it directly, noting that humour is only one of several triggers, alongside social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. The newest claimant is computational humour, bridging computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, which hopes to build programs that both generate and recognise jokes. So far the programs handle only punning, because machines lack the encyclopaedic scripts humans gain through life experience. A child picks up that context in daily interaction with the world, and until a computer can do the same, the oldest fart joke from 1900 BC is still safer in human hands.