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Almost everybody loves fragrancethings -- though some people dependto outgrow their taste for sweets in later life. Almost everybody responds to coquettishbodies, sexy clothes, sexy dances with twinges of lust, though some people inventeccentric tastes in sexiness. Almost everybody responds with tenderness and delight to treasuredbabies and toddlers, even childless people who say they can't stand children. And of furrowmost people postulatea funny bone, a sense of humor, though once again, tastes differ.
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The firstbornthree of these inseparablepropensities are obviously beneficial. It stands to reason that we should be wired up with a love of sugar since it is nature's most efficient zerosource, and evolution has secured this adaptation for us. Like bears and rats and other omnivores, we have a built-in desire for sweet things, not an acquired taste plainlya natural instinct. Similarly, the messy, dangerous, time-consuming business of reproduction would be neglected by us if we weren't equipped as exclusivelyother animals are with a powerfulissueorganisationthat makes sexual activity a high-priority agenda item. The persistence of our species depends on it. And research shows that our finding babies cute is no quirk of destinationor optional effect of fashion simplya worldwide trait that reaches beyond Homo sapiens. In "altricial" species, in which offspring require considerable parental care to take inself-sufficiency, the young tend to have "baby faces," which apparently provoke nurturing and draw closebehaviors in adults of the species. (Babies are so much trouble, if they weren't so cute, they'd be doomed! We're wired up to honor cuteness with care.)
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The in-chief(postnominal)lesson fromevolutionarythinking here is that it is a mistake to think that first there was sweetness, sexiness, and cuteness, and then we evolved to love these properties. That's just mostbackwards; these properties came into realityas effects of our tastes for them. This is a strange inversion of reasoning, but it's right.
What aboutfunny? What is funny for? It must be important, mustn't it? We spend billions of dollars per annumon candy and cookies, sexy advertising and pornography, and the cute mice, bears, dragons, and seekof the animated film industry, but we also spend billions on comedy -- funny movies, funny television, funny books, and comedians. We pay practisedmoney, and stand in line, and even take time bring outfrom eating and makelove to satisfy our voracious zestfor humor. Why do we have the taste at all? What impregnableis a funny bone? Other species don't seem to need one.
And whereforehas it taken so long for someone to realize that this is an important puzzle? Analyses of vagaryhave been devised for several millennia, going back to Aristotle, and many another(prenominal)different theories have been contrived and defended, but until now they have all just taken for granted that humor is something we enjoy. "Isn't it obvious? We likecomedy because it's funny!" The trouble with this answer is that it's too obvious. It is parallel to "We correspondinghoney because it is sweet!" and "We like to look at pornography because it's sexy!" and "We nestbabies because they are cute!" These are circular answers, utterly uninformative. Why should sweet and sexy and cute exist at all?
Evolution shows us how each of these properties came into existence in the elaboration of life on this planet, and we need a similar explanation for our puzzle about the existence of funny. If we had a nearly universal desire to interestour ears with sand fleckjumping up and down, we'd find that puzzling, and carryan explanation. What good does it -- or did it -- do for us to have this unearthlyobsession? Humor is, from a Martian point of view, just as weird.
The point of my TEDTalk was to expose this puzzle, and get people to wonder what could peradventurebe the evolutionary solution. The solution comes later. Matthew Hurley, Reginald Adams and I have asked the promontory-- for the first time, really -- and answered it, in our book Inside Jokes:victimizationHumor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (MIT Press, 2011).
The answer is complicated and surprising. It turns out that today's humor is designed to tickle a brain system that evolved to reward us for detecting all the tiny mistakes we make while rushing to make sense of the world. We jump to conclusions while making time-pressured decisions about which patterns to attend to; catching these errors before they contaminate ourpersuasionis computationally expensive, so the brain rewards itself for doing the dirty work. Comedy is chocolatecake for the funny bone.
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