At the Shangri-La Diet forums, karky, who has lost 75 pounds on SLD, wrote:
In July I experienced a plateau, and wrestled with the same 5 lbs all month. At the end of July, I donated a pint of blood. WooHoo! Weight loss is back! I think to myself, hmmm… coincidence. In November, another plateau, wrestling with 3 lbs. I donated a pint of blood Monday. Today is Wednesday, I have lost 5 lbs since Monday, 3 lbs Tuesday morning, 2 lbs this morning.
Chrianna replied:
you certainly make a good argument for donating blood!
Which made me chuckle.
I cannot come anywhere near explaining karky’s observation. But maybe I can explain — someday, not right now — why Chrianna’s reply amused me. I once wrote down about 50 laugh-inducing sentences I heard on the the sitcom Cheers, looking for patterns. Several were obvious. For example, many of the laugh-inducing sentences were insults. Maybe I should resume this quest.
It is a good way to pass the time. A few days ago, I heard the following on a Chevrolet radio ad:
Male voice: With Pilates, three kids, and a house full of laundry, Diana is too busy to think about fuel economy.
Female voice: I’m sorry. Did somebody say something?
Funny! I was driving. I turned off the radio and thought about it for the rest of the trip. What’s the rule? What general pattern is it an instance of? I couldn’t figure it out. I’m not the only one interested in this question. In an interview I can no longer find, Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker, said he wanted to write a scientific paper about the patterns he saw in New Yorker cartoon caption contest submissions. Which reminds me: I have written about patterns in New Yorker cartoon captions and talk-show monologue jokes.
Blood donation could put one’s metabolism into a “fight or flight” mode, i.e. blood loss makes one’s body think an emergency is occurring. So maybe appetite decreases, metabolism increases.
My theory (and perhaps others have expressed it too, can’t recall) is that humor is a means of venting anxiety caused by surprise that turned out to be harmless or not seriously harmful. Someone breaks wind–initially your ancestral-environment-oriented brain thinks “Is that sound dangerous?!” Then, “Oh, it was just Jim.” You laugh, venting the anxiety.
The surprise could be more complex. Giving blood could be thought of as a signal of altruism. “I wish to demonstrate I am a valuable person to the tribe.” Giving blood for obviously selfish reasons damages the signal and could be potentially dangerous, until you realize it’s not. You feel anxiety and then relax, seeing that expressing selfish motives for giving blood isn’t likely to be worth worrying about.
You might want to read ‘Made to Stick’ by Chip and Dan Heath. The book discusses what makes ideas memorable to humans but includes a great deal on what makes things funny (since this also makes things memorable). Largely boils down to this: ‘violate my expectations’.
I blogged about Made To Stick:
https://sethroberts.org/2007/04/06/made-to-stick/
Violation of expectations is part of humor — nothing we expect is funny. But humor requires more. In neither of my two examples (blood donation and Chevy ad) is there a clear expectation that is violated.
I think anxiety makes us more likely to laugh. Nervous laughter. The “oh it was Jim” sounds more like the insult category than a “relieved to be safe” category.
I’ve spent a lot of time on humor over the years. Historically, there are 4 major insights.
1. Hobbes has the “instant glory” notion; we laugh because we feel superior. You fall on a banana peel; I’m up, you’re down ha ha.
2. Freud of course writes about conspiracies of aggression, using humor to express what’s covert; this is in line with releases hidden anxieties we don’t want to talk about etc…
3. Bergson, talked about the seeing the mechanical as animate, like a slinky toy going down the stairs…
4. The best writing on humor, which “contains” all of the above, is Arthur Koestler’s “The Act of Creation”. He gets to the heart of the matter. It’s bisociation. We start from one matrix of thought, i.e., we are functioning with one set up background assumptions or modes of intelligibility, one frame of understanding. Why did the chicken cross the road? (Assumption: I’m telling you a joke) To get to the other side. (Assumption: I’m giving you obvious factual information about the chicken.) The two frames collide. Think of puns. We laugh to dispel a kind of cognitive disorientation, an eruption of confusion and then return to normalcy. Laughter is 85-90% exhalation — try laughing while inhaling. All exhalation slows down heart beat and calms the ANS. Laughing at humor is pleasureable reconstitution of cognition; notice that groaning at puns or bad jokes is less pleasureable, but also involves exhalation. (Of course we laugh in many contexts; a psychologist at Vanderbilt is studying laughter rigorously and trying to break it all down.)
In the radio commercial, the announcer is making a statement about how busy Diana is so that she can’t think of certain thing; and Diana says she thinks she may have heard someone say something. My girlfriend has told me she thinks my hearing is getting worse. I respond by saying, “What did you say.” She repeats it, and I say, “What?” Then she gets that I’m making a joke. It’s 2 frames colliding.
In the commercial, there is the frame of an announcer in a commercial, and some implicit expectation that Diana is part of the commercial; there is a dramatic reality implicit in this. Then it’s as if she doesn’t know she’s in a commercial or that he is present and speaking even. She’s that busy. We are not quite used to this collision of frames; 50 years from now we might be and it might seem trite.
Sometimes “matrices of thought” are hard to pin down exactly — those are often the best cases of humor. But When Robin Wright says, “I keep an enormous collection of seashells scattered across the beaches of the world. Perhaps you’ve seen them.” It’s very simple, but brilliant.
I believe a computer could generate humor randomly by generating collisions of frames; most of it would not be funny, but there would be enough of it generated so we could find the funny examples. I’ve tried writing humor from Koestler’s theory with some success…
Another take on humor strategy (from a course with Neil Simon’s brother Danny) especially serially like sitcoms, is setting up, then satisfying an expectation from a character. Jack Benny being mugged — “Your money or your life” — “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”
The greatest funny line in Cheers IMO ends the episode with John Cleese (of Monty Python) as a famous marriage counselor, who obviously considers Sam and Diane a disastrous couple. Diane, of course, won’t accept this answer, and badgers Cleese mercilessly, at dinner, in the bath, etc. to his very funny outrage. Finally, to get rid of her and get some peace, he sarcastically screams that they are the greatest, most successful, most sublime match since Adam and Eve.
Diane’s one-word triumphant fade-out line:
“See?!”
Do you remember how you categorized this one?