Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

The Meaning of Life 549and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignityis tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive topair up and writhe and moan. And as Isak Dinesen wrote, "What is man,when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingeniousmachine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz intourine?"But oddly enough, humor is also a prized tactic of rhetoric and intellectualargument. Wit can be a fearsome rapier in the hands of a skilledpolemicist. Ronald Reagan's popularity and effectiveness as presidentowed much to his facility with one-liners that quashed debate and criticism,at least for the moment; for example, when deflecting questionsabout abortion rights he would say, "I notice that everyone in favor ofabortion has already been born." Philosophers relish the true story of thetheoretician who announced at a scholarly conference that while somelanguages use a double negative to convey an affirmative, no languageuses a double affirmative to convey a negative. A philosopher standing atthe back of the hall shouted in a singsong, "Yeah, yeah." Though it maybe true, as Voltaire wrote, that "a witty saying proves nothing," Voltairewas famously not above using them himself. The perfect quip can give aspeaker an instant victory, deserved or not, and leave opponents stammering.We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that wouldrequire pages to defend in any other way.And here we get to Koestler's attempt to reverse-engineer humor.Koestler was an early appreciator of cognitive science at a time whenbehaviorism ruled, and he called attention to the mind's inventory ofrule systems, modes of construal, ways of thinking, or frames of reference.Humor, he said, begins with a train of thought in one frame ofreference that bumps up against an anomaly: an event or statementthat makes no sense in the context of what has come before. Theanomaly can be resolved by shifting to a different frame of reference,one in which the event does makes sense. And within that frame,someone's dignity has been downgraded. He calls the shift "bisociation."Koestler's examples of humor have not aged well, so I'll illustratethe theory with a few that amuse me, at the cost of killing the jokes byexplaining them.