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Jolq.com pronounced as (Joke). Brand-able and Pronounceable names. Similar site is glvo.com glvo.com Glove brand-able and pronounceable name.

A joke is a short story or ironic depiction of a situation communicated with the intent of being humorous. These jokes will normally have a punch line that will end the sentence to make it humorous. A joke can also be a single phrase or statement that employs sarcasm. The word joke can also be used as a slang term for a person or thing which is not taken seriously by others in general or is known as being a failure. A practical joke or prank differs from a spoken one in that the major component of the humour is physical rather than verbal (for example placing salt in the sugar bowl).

Jokes are typically for the entertainment of friends and onlookers. The desired response is generally laughter; when this does not happen the joke is said to have "fallen flat".

Antiquity of jokes

Jokes have been a part of human culture since at least 1900 BCE. A fart joke from ancient Sumer is currently believed to be the world's oldest known joke

Anthropology of jokes

In 1975 anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that "Joking as one mode of expression has yet to be interpreted in its total relation to other modes of expression"; scholar Seth Graham remarked that 30 years later this statement remains largely valid.

Psychology of jokes

Why we laugh has been the subject of serious academic study, examples being:

* Immanuel Kant, in Critique of Judgement (1790) states that "Laughter is an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing." Here is Kant's 218-year old joke and his analysis:

"An Englishman at an Indian's table in Surat saw a bottle of ale being opened, and all the beer, turned to froth, rushed out. The Indian, by repeated exclamations, showed his great amazement. - Well, what's so amazing in that? asked the Englishman. - Oh, but I'm not amazed at its coming out, replied the Indian, but how you managed to get it all in. - This makes us laugh, and it gives us a hearty pleasure. This is not because, say, we think we are smarter than this ignorant man, nor are we laughing at anything else here that it is our liking and that we noticed through our understanding. It is rather that we had a tense expectation that suddenly vanished..."

* Henri Bergson, in his book Le rire (Laughter, 1901), suggests that laughter evolved to make social life possible for human beings.
* Sigmund Freud's "Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious". (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewu?ten).
* Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation (1964), analyses humour and compares it to other creative activities, such as literature and science.
* Marvin Minsky in Society of Mind (1986).

Marvin Minsky suggests that laughter has a specific function related to the human brain. In his opinion jokes and laughter are mechanisms for the brain to learn nonsense. For that reason, he argues, jokes are usually not as funny when you hear them repeatedly.

* Edward de Bono in "The Mechanism of the Mind" (1969) and "I am Right, You are Wrong" (1990).

Edward de Bono suggests that the mind is a pattern-matching machine, and that it works by recognizing stories and behaviour and putting them into familiar patterns. When a familiar connection is disrupted and an alternative unexpected new link is made in the brain via a different route than expected, then laughter occurs as the new connection is made. This theory explains a lot about jokes. For example:

* Why jokes are only funny the first time they are told: once they are told the pattern is already there, so there can be no new connections, and so no laughter.
* Why jokes have an elaborate and often repetitive set up: The repetition establishes the familiar pattern in the brain. A common method used in jokes is to tell almost the same story twice and then deliver the punch line the third time the story is told. The first two tellings of the story evoke a familiar pattern in the brain, thus priming the brain for the punch line.
* Why jokes often rely on stereotypes: the use of a stereotype links to familiar expected behaviour, thus saving time in the set-up.
* Why jokes are variants on well-known stories (eg the genie and a lamp and a man walks into a bar): This again saves time in the set up and establishes a familiar pattern.

* In 2002, Richard Wiseman conducted a study intended to discover the world's funniest joke .
* Humour and Jokes have also been concluded to be logic that is completely random or vice versa.

Laughter, the intended human reaction to jokes, is healthy in moderation, uses the stomach muscles, and releases endorphins, natural "feel good" chemicals, into the brain.

Rules

The rules of humour are analogous to those of poetry. These common rules are mainly timing, precision, synthesis, and rhythm. French philosopher Henri Bergson has said in an essay: "In every wit there is something of a poet." In this essay Bergson views the essence of humour as the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living. He used as an instance a book by an English humourist, in which an elderly woman who desired a reputation as a philanthropist provided "homes within easy hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of their failing, etc." This idea seems funny because a genuine impulse of charity as a living, vital impulse has become encrusted by a mechanical conception of how it should manifest itself.

Precision

To reach precision, the comedian must choose the words in order to provide a vivid, in-focus image, and to avoid being generic as to confuse the audience, and provide no laughter. To properly arrange the words in the sentence is also crucial to get precision. An example by Woody Allen (from Side Effects, "A Giant Step for Mankind" story ):
“ Grasping the mouse firmly by the tail, I snapped it like a small whip, and the morsel of cheese came loose. ”

Synthesis

As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, "Brevity is the soul of wit". Meaning that a joke is best when it expresses the maximum level of humour with a minimal number of words; this is today considered one of the key technical elements of a joke. An example from Woody Allen:
“ I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia. ”

Though, the familiarity of the pattern of "brevity" has led to numerous examples of jokes where the very length is itself the pattern breaking "punchline". Numerous examples from Monty Python exist, for instance, the song "I Like Traffic Lights", and more modernly, Family Guy contains numerous such examples, most notably, in the episode Wasted Talent, Peter Griffin bangs his shin, a classic slapstick routine, and tenderly nurses it whilst inhaling and exhaling to quiet the pain. This goes on for considerably longer than expected. Certain versions of the popular vaudevillian joke The Aristocrats can go on for several minutes, and it is considered an anti-joke, as the humour is more in the set-up than the punchline.

Rhythm

Main articles: Timing (linguistics) and Comic timing

The joke's content (meaning) is not what provokes the laugh, it just makes the salience of the joke and provokes a smile. What makes us laugh is the joke mechanism. Milton Berle demonstrated this with a classic theatre experiment in the 1950s: if during a series of jokes you insert phrases that are not jokes, but with the same rhythm, the audience laughs anyway. A classic is the ternary rhythm, with three beats: Introduction, premise, antithesis (with the antithesis being the punch line).

In regards to the Milton Berle experiment, they can be taken to demonstrate the concept of "breaking context" or "breaking the pattern". It is not necessarily the rhythm that caused the audience to laugh, but the disparity between the expectation of a "joke" and being instead given a non-sequitur "normal phrase." This normal phrase is, itself, unexpected, and a type of punchline.

Conclusions

When a technically good joke is referred changing it with paraphrasing, it is not laughable any more; this is because the paraphrase, changing some term or moving it within the sentence, breaks the joke mechanism (its vividness, brevity and rhythm), and its power and effectiveness are lost. Douglas Adams described sentences where the joke word is the final word as "comically weighted." This saves the "payoff" until the last possible moment, allowing the expectation for surprise to reach its highest point, while the mind is more firmly rooted in the pattern established by the rest of the sentence.

Comic

In the comic field plays the 'economy of ideative expenditure'; in other words excessive energy is wasted or action-essential energy is saved. The profound meaning of a comic gag or a comic joke is "I'm a child"; the comic deals with the clumsy body of the child.

Laurel and Hardy are a classic example. An individual laughs because he recognizes the child that is in himself. In clowns stumbling is a childish tempo. In the comic, the visual gags may be translated into a joke. For example in Side Effects (By Destiny Denied story) by Woody Allen:
“ "My father used to wear loafers," she confessed. "Both on the same foot". ”

The typical comic technique is the disproportion.

Wit

In the wit field plays the "economy of censorship expenditure" (Freud literally calls it "the economy of psychic expenditure".); usually censorship prevents some 'dangerous ideas' from reaching the conscious mind, or helps us avoid saying everything that comes to mind; adversely, the wit circumvents the censorship and brings up those ideas. Different wit techniques allow one to express them in a funny way. The profound meaning behind a wit joke is "I have dangerous ideas". An example from Woody Allen:
“ I contemplated suicide again - this time by inhaling next to an insurance salesman. ”

Or, when a bagpipe player was asked "How do you play that thing?" his answer was:
“ Well. ”

Wit is a branch of rhetoric, and there are about 200 techniques (technically they are called tropes, a particular kind of figure of speech) that can be used to make jokes.

Irony can be seen as belonging to this field.

Humour

In the comedy field, humour induces an "economized expenditure of emotion" (Freud literally calls it "economy of affect" or "economy of sympathy". Freud produced this final part of his interpretation many years later, in a paper later supplemented to the book.). In other words, the joke erases an emotion that should be felt about an event, making us insensitive to it.e.g: "yo momma" jokes. The profound meaning of the void feeling of a humour joke is "I'm a cynic". An example from Woody Allen:
“ Three times I've been mistaken for Robert Redford. Each time by a blind person. ”

This field of jokes is still a grey area, being mostly unexplored. Extensive use of this kind of humour can be found in the work of British satirist Chris Morris, like the sketches of the Jam television program.

Black humour and sarcasm belong to this field.

Cycles

Folklorists, in particular (but not exclusively) those who study the folklore of the United States, collect jokes into joke cycles. A cycle is a collection of jokes with a particular theme or a particular "script". (That is, it is a literature cycle.) Folklorists have identified several such cycles:

* the elephant joke cycle that began in 1962
* the Helen Keller Joke Cycle that comprises jokes about Helen Keller
* Viola jokes
* the NASA, Challenger, or Space Shuttle Joke Cycle that comprises jokes relating to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster
* the Chernobyl Joke Cycle that comprises jokes relating to the Chernobyl disaster
* the Polish Pope Joke Cycle that comprises jokes relating to Pope John Paul II
* the Essex girl and the Stupid Irish joke cycles in the United Kingdom
* the Dead Baby Joke Cycle
* the Dingo Joke Cycle that comprises jokes relating to the Azaria Chamberlain disappearance
* the Newfie Joke Cycle that comprises jokes made by Canadians about Newfoundlanders
* the Little Willie Joke Cycle, and the Quadriplegic Joke Cycle
* the Jew Joke Cycle and the Polack Joke Cycle
* the Rastus and Liza Joke Cycle, which Dundes describes as "the most vicious and widespread white anti-Negro joke cycle"
* the Jewish American Princess and Jewish American Mother joke cycles
* the Wind-Up Doll Joke Cycle
* Chuck Norris Facts
* Tom Swifties
* Aggie jokes honor Texas A&M University and its students' lack of intelligence.

Gruner discusses several "sick joke" cycles that occurred upon events surrounding Gary Hart, Natalie Wood, Vic Morrow, Jim Bakker, Richard Pryor, and Michael Jackson, noting how several jokes were recycled from one cycle to the next. For example: A joke about Vic Morrow ("We now know that Vic Morrow had dandruff: they found his head and shoulders in the bushes") was subsequently recycled about Admiral Mountbatten after his murder by Irish Republican terrorists in 1980, and again applied to the crew of the Challenger space shuttle ("How do we know that Christa McAuliffe had dandruff? They found her head and shoulders on the beach.").

Berger asserts that "whenever there is a popular joke cycle, there generally is some widespread kind of social and cultural anxiety, lingering below the surface, that the joke cycle helps people deal with".

Types of jokes

Jokes often depend on the humour of the unexpected, the mildly taboo (which can include the distasteful or socially improper), or playing off stereotypes and other cultural beliefs. Many jokes fit into more than one category.

Subjects

Political jokes are usually a form of satire. They generally concern politicians and heads of state, but may also cover the absurdities of a country's political situation. A prominent example of political jokes would be political cartoons. Two large categories of this type of jokes exist. The first one makes fun of a negative attitude to political opponents or to politicians in general. The second one makes fun of political clichés, mottos, catch phrases or simply blunders of politicians. Some, especially the you have two cows genre, derive humour from comparing different political systems.

Professional humour includes caricatured portrayals of certain professions such as lawyers, and in-jokes told by professionals to each other.

Mathematical jokes are a form of in-joke, generally designed to be understandable only by insiders.

Ethnic jokes exploit ethnic stereotypes. They are often racist and frequently considered offensive.

For example, the British tell jokes starting "An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman..." which exploit the supposed parsimony of the Scot, stupidity of the Irish or rigid conventionality of the English. Such jokes exist among numerous peoples.

Racially offensive humour is increasingly unacceptable, but there are similar jokes based on other stereotypes such as blonde jokes.

Religious jokes fall into several categories:

* Jokes based on stereotypes associated with people of religion (e.g. nun jokes, priest jokes, or rabbi jokes)
* Jokes on classical religious subjects: crucifixion, Adam and Eve, St. Peter at The Gates, etc.
* Jokes that collide different religious denominations: "A rabbi, a medicine man, and a pastor went fishing..."
* Letters and addresses to God.

Self-deprecating or self-effacing humour is superficially similar to racial and stereotype jokes, but involves the targets laughing at themselves. It is said to maintain a sense of perspective and to be powerful in defusing confrontations. Probably the best-known and most common example is Jewish humour. The egalitarian tradition was strong among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe in which the powerful were often mocked subtly. Prominent members of the community were kidded during social gatherings, part a good-natured tradition of humour as a levelling device. A similar situation exists in the Scandinavian "Ole and Lena" joke.

Self-deprecating humour has also been used by politicians, who recognize its ability to acknowledge controversial issues and steal the punch of criticism - for example, when Abraham Lincoln was accused of being two-faced he replied, "If I had two faces, do you think this is the one I’d be wearing?".

Dirty jokes are based on taboo, often sexual, content or vocabulary.

Other taboos are challenged by sick jokes and gallows humour; to joke about disability is considered in this group.

Surrealist or minimalist jokes exploit semantic inconsistency, for example: Q: What's red and invisible? A: No tomatoes..

Anti-jokes are jokes that are not funny in regular sense, and often can be decidedly unfunny, but rely on the let-down from the expected joke to be funny in itself.

An elephant joke is a joke, almost always a riddle or conundrum and often a sequence of connected riddles, that involves an elephant.

Jokes involving non-sequitur humour, with parts of the joke being unrelated to each other; e.g. "My uncle once punched a man so hard his legs became trombones", from the Mighty Boosh TV series.

Styles

The question / answer joke, sometimes posed as a common riddle, has a supposedly straight question and an answer which is twisted for humorous effect; puns are often employed. Of this type are knock-knock joke, light bulb joke, the many variations on "why did the chicken cross the road?", and the class of "What's the difference between..." joke, where the punch line is often a pun or a spoonerism linking two apparently entirely unconnected concepts.

Some jokes require a double act, where one respondent (usually the straight man) can be relied on to give the correct response to the person telling the joke. This is more common in performance than informal joke-telling.

A shaggy dog story is an extremely long and involved joke with an intentionally weak or completely non-existent punchline. The humour lies in building up the audience's anticipation and then letting them down completely. The longer the story can continue without the audience realising it is a joke, and not a serious anecdote, the more successful it is. Shaggy jokes appear to date from the 1930s, although there are several competing variants for the "original" shaggy dog story. According to one, an advertisement is placed in a newspaper, searching for the shaggiest dog in the world. The teller of the joke then relates the story of the search for the shaggiest dog in extreme and exaggerated detail (flying around the world, climbing mountains, fending off sabre-toothed tigers, etc); a good teller will be able to stretch the story out to over half an hour. When the winning dog is finally presented, the advertiser takes a look at the dog and states: "I don't think he's so shaggy."

Some shaggy dog stories are actually cleverly constructed stories, frequently interesting in themselves, that culminate in one or more puns whose first meaning is reasonable as part of the story but whose second meaning is a common aphorism, commercial jingle, or other recognizable word or phrase. As with other puns, there may be multiple separate rhyming meanings. Such stories treat the listener or reader with respect. (See: "Upon My Word!", a book by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, spun off from their long-running BBC radio show My Word!.)

Comedy has a popular meaning (any discourse generally intended to amuse, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy). This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was remarkably influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters.

The theatrical genre can be simply described as a dramatic performance which pits two societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye famously depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old" (The Anatomy of Criticism, 1957), but this dichotomy is seldom described as an entirely satisfactory explanation.

A later view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes; in this sense, the youth is understood to be constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse to ruses which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter (Marteinson, 2006).

Much comedy contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations, but there are many recognized genres of comedy. Satire and political satire use ironic comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, thus alienating their audience from the object of humor. Satire is a type of comedy.

Parody borrows the form of some popular genre, artwork, or text but uses certain ironic changes to critique that form from within (though not necessarily in a condemning way). Screwball comedy derives its humor largely from bizarre, surprising (and improbable) situations or characters. Black comedy is defined by dark humor that makes light of so called dark or evil elements in human nature. Similarly scatological humor, sexual humor, and race humor create comedy by violating social conventions or taboos in comedic ways.

A comedy of manners typically takes as its subject a particular part of society (usually upper class society) and uses humor to parody or satirize the behavior and mannerisms of its members. Romantic comedy is a popular genre that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms, and focuses on the foibles of those who are falling in love.

Humour or humor (see spelling differences) is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. Many theories exist about what humour is and what social function it serves. People of most ages and cultures respond to humour. The majority of people are able to be amused, to laugh or smile at something funny, and thus they are considered to have a "sense of humour".

The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which stated that a mix of fluids known as humours (Greek: χυμ??, chymos, literally: juice or sap, metaphorically: flavour) controlled human health and emotion.

A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, although the extent to which an individual will find something humorous depends on a host of variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, intelligence, and context. For example, young children may possibly favour slapstick, such as Punch and Judy puppet shows or cartoons (e.g. Tom and Jerry). Satire may rely more on understanding the target of the humour, and thus tends to appeal to more mature audiences. Non-satirical humour can be specifically termed "recreational drollery".
Smiling can imply a sense of humour and a state of amusement: a painting by Eduard von Grützner.
Smiling can imply a sense of humour and a state of amusement: a painting by Eduard von Grützner.
Understanding humour
This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can. (January 2008)

Humor occurs when

* An alternative (or surprising) shift in perception or answer is given that still shows relevance and can explain a situation.
* Sudden relief occurs from a tense situation "humourific" as formerly applied in comedy referred to the interpretation of the sublime and the ridiculous. In this context, humour is often a subjective experience as it depends on a special mood or perspective from its audience to be effective.
* Two ideas or things are juxtaposed that are very distant in meaning emotionally or conceptually, that is, having a significant incongruity.
* We laugh at something that points out another's errors, lack of intelligence, or unfortunate circumstances; granting a sense of superiority.

Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse of the term (the German loanword from English) to mean any type of comedy. However, both terms are often used when theorizing about the subject. The connotation of "humor" is more that of response, while "comic" refers more to stimulus. "Humor" also originally had a connotation of a combined ridiculousness and wit in one individual; the paradigm case being Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff. The French were slow to adopt the term "humour," and in French "humeur" and "humour" are still two different words, the former still referring only to the archaic concept of humors.

Western humor theory begins with Plato who attributed to Socrates (as a semi-historical dialogue character), in the Philebus (p. 49b), the view that the essence of the ridiculous is an ignorance in the weak who are thus unable to retaliate when ridiculed. Later in Greek philosophy, Aristotle in the Poetics (1449a p 34-35) suggested that an ugliness that does not disgust is fundamental to humor.

The Incongruity Theory originated mostly with Kant who claimed that the comic is an expectation that comes to nothing. Henri Bergson attempted to perfect incongruity, by reducing it to the 'living' and 'mechanical'.

An incongruity like Bergson's, in things juxtaposed simultaneously, is still in vogue. This is often debated against theories of the shifts in perspectives in humor. Hence the debate in the series Humor Research between John Morreall and Robert Latta. Morreall presented mostly simultaneous juxtapositions, , with Latta countering that it requires a "cognitive shift," created by a discovery or solution to a puzzle or problem. Latta is criticized for having reduced jokes' essence to their own puzzling aspect.

Humour frequently contains an unexpected, often sudden, shift in perspective, which gets assimilated by the Incongruity Theory. This view has been defended by Latta (1998) and by Brian Boyd (2004). Boyd views the shift as from seriousness to play. Nearly anything can be the object of this perspective twist. It is, however is in the areas of human creativity (science and art being the other two) that the shift results from ‘structure mapping’ (termed "bisociation" by Koestler) to create novel meanings. Koestler argues that humour results when two different frames of reference are set up and a collision is engineered between them.

Tony Veal, who is taking a more formalised computational approach than Koestler did, has written on the role of metaphor and metonymy in humour, using inspiration from Koestler as well as from Dedre Gentner′s theory of structure-mapping, George Lakoff′s and Mark Johnson′s theory of conceptual metaphor and Mark Turner′s and Gilles Fauconnier′s theory of conceptual blending.

Some claim that humour cannot or should not be explained. Author E. B. White once said that "Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

Evolution of humour

As with any form of art, the same goes for humour, acceptance depends on social demographics and varies from person to person. Throughout history comedy has been used as a form of entertainment all over the world, whether in the courts of the Western kings or the villages of the far east. Both a social etiquette and a certain intelligence can be displayed through forms of wit and sarcasm. 18th-century German author Georg Lichtenberg said that "the more you know humour, the more you become demanding in fineness."

Alastair Clarke explains: "The theory is an evolutionary and cognitive explanation of how and why any individual finds anything funny. Effectively it explains that humour occurs when the brain recognizes a pattern that surprises it, and that recognition of this sort is rewarded with the experience of the humorous response, an element of which is broadcast as laughter. The theory further identifies the importance of pattern recognition in human evolution as Clarke explains: "An ability to recognize patterns instantly and unconsciously has proved a fundamental weapon in the cognitive arsenal of human beings. The humorous reward has encouraged the development of such faculties, leading to the unique perceptual and intellectual abilities of our species."

Humour formulae
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Root components:

* appealing to feelings or to emotions.
* similar to reality, but not real.
* some surprise/misdirection, contradiction, ambiguity or paradox.

Methods:

* hyperbole
* metaphor
* reductio ad absurdum or farce
* reframing
* timing

Rowan Atkinson explains in his lecture in the documentary "Funny Business", that an object or a person can become funny in three different ways. They are:

* By behaving in an unusual way;
* By being in an unusual place;
* By being the wrong size;

Most sight gags fit into one or more of these categories.

Humour is also sometimes described as an ingredient in spiritual life. Humour is also the act of being funny. Some synonyms of funny or humour are hilarious, knee-slapping, spiritual, wise-minded, outgoing, and amusing. Some Masters have added it to their teachings in various forms. A famous figure in spiritual humour is the laughing Buddha, who would answer all questions with a laugh.
 

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