In his ground-breaking book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler explores the nature of humor and why a joke makes us laugh. He establishes the term “bisociative” thinking to explain how a joke takes the listener down one plane of thought, and then suddenly, in a surprise twist–the punchline–the joke teller jolts the listener to a new orthogonal plane of thinking.
(As an aside, I co-opt Koestler’s term in my book The Art of the Compromise but bend “bisociative” to the political context of compromises.)
Our response to this surprise? Laughter!
As a recent article at HistoryFacts.com reveals, jokes and laughter have long been a part of human history. The article explains the first recorded joke dates to 1900 BCE in Sumer, now southern Iraq. The Sumerians found the following hysterical:
“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
In August 2008, the University of Wolverhampton conducted a historical study to identify the top 10 oldest jokes. The Sumerians ranked #1!
Comedy, like beauty, must be in the ear/eye of the beholder.