What humor at all is, why something is funny, and similar questions might seem unanswerable. (And are made the worse by differences in taste.)
Here, I will make an attempt to partially (!) explain the matter from my point of view and following a “Why is that funny?” by a fictional character. In due time, I might offer a more complete explanation and/or address other aspects of humor.
As a disclaimer, various side-tracks of the original discussion have already added more, and more tangential-to-that-discussion, material than I foresaw. Chances are that some of these side-tracks are better moved up one level in the page structure, but I will save a restructuring for some later date, when other material is added.
In the movie “Bicentennial Man”, Richard, a human, tries to explain something about humor to Andrew, a robot with little insight into humans and human nature. After several failed attempts at a joke, Richard resorts to “Why did the chicken cross the road?”. (In the continuation, I will refer to this and the punchline as “the chicken joke”.) Andrew makes several suggestions that seem to imply that he takes the question at face value. Richard gives the traditional answer of “To get to the other side!”, and Andrew asks the very reasonable question “Why is that funny?”. (All quotes should be seen as approximate.)
Why indeed? To begin with, I have never, myself, found that joke funny.
And neither have I enjoyed the great number of variations that try to find a cleverer answer, play on the lameness of the joke, and/or joke about the joke.
I must admit that I have myself consider some very politically incorrect variations, e.g. to have a Mexican chicken cross the U.S.–Mexican border and spin something off that, say, “To get social security!” or “To annoy Trump!”. The problem with these variations is that none of them actually are funny. The underlying idea of such a joke, as a parody of the original, seems promising to me (and I do not give two hoots about political correctness), but the result simply has never been funny.
One possibility could be that children and adults experience a joke differently and that repetition can wreck a joke, which could be important factors in why so few actually seem to find the chicken joke funny. (And will play an indirect role when I actually begin my explanation to Andrew below.) A better example of this might be “When is a door not a door?”–“When it is a[ ]jar!”: Most very young children will likely not truly get the pun. (They might or might understand it, but they are unlikely to appreciate it, even should they understand it.) When they have grown up a bit, however, they might already have heard this joke a dozen times and are unlikely to be entertained for that reason. Having learned English as a second language, I had the advantage that I already was older when I first heard the joke—and I did find it funny. (How old, I do not remember, but it might have been in my early teens.) It did not, I admit, leave me shaking with laughter, but it was funny enough—the first time. The second time and onwards, not so much.
In a next step, it is possible that the same applies to the chicken joke, but maybe it fails here too. Even the first time around, I was left cold.
Below, I offer an explanation relating to subversion of expectations. This is sound enough in principle, might actually work with some, and is very compatible with a joke losing its effect upon repeated tellings. (Expectations are less likely to be subverted with a repetition. The same applies, m.m., to jokes with a twist of some other type.) However, it simply does not work with me.
I might even go as far as to suspect that the true value, for someone sufficiently young, lies in giving the answer, that maybe the one kid aged six puts the question to the other, the latter bumbles a bit, and then the former pulls out the insipid “official” answer with a feeling of superiority and an implicit “Gotcha!”.
Simply put: the joke is not funny.
While watching on, my mind drifted, and I found myself forming a sort of explanation for the benefit of Andrew, something that I might have wanted to tell him, had I been in Richard’s shoes.
Roughly:
[Inquiry into what Andrew knew about human evolution, with a possible detour to fill the gaps of that. Let us say that he is knowledgable.]
Chances are that laughter and humor partially arose from dangerous situations in the human or pre-human past. By some mechanism, laughter might have caused a positive feeling, which humans enjoyed and have learned how to trigger, maybe even while the original function was reduced. You might have noticed that some women react to certain negative situations, e.g. an own fall, with giggles and large smiles, which could be a remnant of such an earlier mechanism. [Some speculation that this might have involved a release of hormones, maybe endorphins, that could have made a situation easier to handle, or might have involved some aspect of appeasement towards someone hostile.] Similarly, male and female children alike, and quite a few adults, might react with laughter when someone else takes a fall.
If so, it seems plausible that situations that involve something unexpected or a “twist” of events, say the punchline to a joke, can have a humorous effect, because what brings danger is often the unexpected and the unexpected might then have triggered the effect. Indeed, I, myself, often find jokes with an unexpected paradox, absurdity, incongruence, or something that does not make sense (when taken at face value), unusually funny. For instance, [some suitable example; see side-note].
If we look at the question “Why did the chicken cross the road?”, chances are that someone expected either a more earnest answer, like a young child might or as you did, or a pun of some cleverness, as with [tell and, if need be, explain the “When is a door not a door?” joke or some other joke with a punning punchline].
By now giving so trivial and unhelpful an answer as “To get to the other side!”, the expectations of the audience are subverted, which could trigger the type of reaction viewed as “funny”. [Possibly, some derogatory remark about those who do find it funny.]
I deliberately left the example out above. This mostly because no good, short, and easily understandable example occurred to me. (But the below joke about a globe might give something of the right idea in an accessible manner.)
For instance, one of my very favorite jokes, and what otherwise would have been an excellent illustration of the principle, might be too math-centric for many readers:
Two functions walk along the street.
Says the first, “Look out! There comes a differential operator!”.
Says the other, “I don’t care, I am e^x.”.
Cockily, he walks up the differential operator and says, “Hi! I’m e^x.”.
Replies the differential operator, “Hi! I am d/dy.”.
The hitch with “To get to the other side!” is that it adds very little information. A human, e.g., would almost always cross a road for some purpose involving exactly getting to the other side, and the questions “Why did the human cross the road?” and “Why did the human want to get to the other side [of the road]?” are almost the same in their effect, and, in real life, an answer more akin to those suggested by Andrew would have been warranted. (One such suggestion involved a male chicken who had spotted a female chicken; another might have involved a chase by a predator.) The same might or might not apply to a chicken in real life—and is very likely to apply to the implicit view of the fictional chicken that arose with both counterparts. (Exceptions exist, e.g. when a human or a chicken is fleeing from someone or something and the crossing of the road is entirely in- and/or accidental. If Andrew did suggest this, it would have made Robert’s reply of “To get to the other side!” quite weak.)
The introduction of a human shows another aspect of the chicken joke: it matters little whether a chicken, a human, or, say, a fox did the crossing—the same punchline could have been used with “Why did the fox cross the road?”. This further subverts the expectations of the victim, as something in the punchline might be expected to relate to a chicken or some sufficiently similar creature. Note how the potential replacements in “When is a door not a door?” are far fewer. It does not absolutely and non-negotiably have to be a door, but it has to be something sufficiently similar, say, a window—as if the chicken joke would have worked with a goose but not a fox. The globe joke below would have worked without a Scotsman, but if we replace a globe with almost anything, including a “flat” map, the joke no longer works. Replace the functions above with, say, two equations or two algebraic fields and the joke becomes nonsensical. Etc.
Slightly before the main event, Robert begins a joke with “Two drunks walk into a bar”, which makes Andrew confused—why should two drunks walk into a bar? Should not the sober walk into bars and the drunk walk out? Here, he does have a partial point, but he is not in the spirit of joking. This type of reality-centric detail is unlikely to actually have affected the joke, and putting in an objection only interrupts the telling.
I say “partial point”, because it is not uncommon that drunks do walk into bars, e.g. because they are on a “crawl”. Likewise, it is very common for those not drunk to walk out of bars. including designated drivers, those who have had one drink and then left, and staff heading home from work.
I say “unlikely”, because Robert did not continue the joke beyond that point, which leaves some uncertainty. (But here a mentality difference shines through: Robert took the interruption as a reason to move on to another attempt, while I might have explained about drunks and bars, and then moved on with the same joke.)
An interesting twist is that Andrew’s awkward reaction, it self, becomes a joke to the movie audience. (And this joke might (a) have gained from the repeated awkward reactions to the several different attempts to joke, (b) lost from the type of explanation mentioned in the previous paragraph.)
However, this type of interruption does happen in real life—and cases where the question is in someone’s mind, but not actually voiced, might be somewhat common. Most are likely innocent of at least the spoken version, but I have been guilty myself (which an astute reader might have suspected) and I have seen this type of question raised by others on some few occasions. Likewise, when writing fiction, I have often had to hold myself back, so that I do not over-think or over-elaborate something: The details of this something might seem important to me, but will a typical reader actually notice? Is the price in terms of a worsened flow of the story worth paying? (And does it make a difference in the “worth” whether the reader has noticed?)
Chances are that joke tellers, writers, and their respective victims are all better off by taking a relaxed attitude.
To give some further plausibility to my comments on children and adults:
One of the first jokes that really registered with me involved a Scotsman shopping for a globe. He inquired into prices, was deterred by the expense, and then asked whether there was not some smaller globe, featuring only Scotland, for sale. (I have replaced a Swedish group and locality stereotypically associated with excessive frugality to make the explanation easier to understand. I have, however, encountered the joke in English versions that do use a Scotsman and Scotland.)
As a very young child (5 years?), I did find this joke funny, but I did so for all the wrong reasons, more relating to the telling, including an exaggerated accent and otherwise funny voices than to the actual joke. The joke, as such, I did not appreciate. I am not even certain that my understanding of globes was sufficient that I saw the paradox that forms a part of the joke.
How would a globe with only Scotland look and work? A globe, by its nature, represents the entire world, and having a globe-filling Scotland would lead to enormous problems with projection. Leaving Scotland as it is on a normal globe, on the other hand, while leaving everything else out, would not make the globe smaller. Depending on details it might be cheaper (say, if the globe is handmade and richly ornamented, with work and ornamentation now restricted to Scotland) or more expensive (say, much more likely, if the globe was made in mass production and extra steps were necessary to remove other countries).
Even a very bright child of such youth is likely to be over-challenged by these complications.
Even the other portion of the joke, the play on stereotype, that Scotsmen are stereotypically frugal likely went over my head. However, in my defense, it is arguably not truly funny for an adult either. Such jokes might be another case of a joker drawing on a feeling of superiority or displaying some degree of meanness, rather than humor. An interesting difference to the chicken joke, however, is that the chicken joker might have made the joke at the cost of his counterpart, while the globe joker made it at the cost of someone absent and in the hope that the counterpart would gain a similar feeling—a “laugh at” vs. “laugh with” contrast.
The way that a joke is told can be quite important even to an adult. The point here is that it was only the telling that struck home.
In particular, telling a joke while or by explaining the joke results in something almost invariably unfunny. The reason that I still go down that road is, of course, that I aim at giving some insight into humor—not at being humorous.
Some jokes translate well (as with the globe), others do not (the pun on “a jar” vs. “ajar”, e.g., is untranslatable into Swedish). Here an interesting observation is that I have no recollection of encountering the chicken joke during my Swedish childhood, despite the ease of translation—which might be another sign that it is simply not funny. This, especially, as the bar for the import of a joke can be quite low, and the chicken joke failed to reach that bar.
A particular travesty of a translation, and a demonstration of that low bar, is a Swedish version of the following English joke:
Two tomatoes cross the street. One of them falls behind and is run over by a car.
Says, the other: “Hey! Catch up!” [“Hey! Ketchup!”]
Here there are two elements in play, the one a pun (which might work better spoken than written), the other a callousness, sardonicism, or similar, that is absurd in light of tragic accident—a callousness made the stronger by those who know that there is more to ketchup than just squashing a tomato. (Unless, of course, they get bogged down in a discussion of the “Should not drunks exit a bar?” type.)
Now, the former might be used to some effect without the latter, even at the risk of some lameness, but the latter just turns into pointless cruelty without the former.
(A third element, the oddity of walking and talking tomatoes might be argued, but is too unremarkable to be of note in today’s world. In earlier days, this might or might not have been different.)
My first encounter with this joke was in a Swedish translation, where the spoken phrase had been replaced with “Kom, ketchup, så går vi!” (or something very similar)—“Come, ketchup, let’s go!”. This loses the pun entirely (in Swedish), while keeping the callous reference to the former tomato as “ketchup”.
(An interesting side-question is whether the translator somehow missed the English pun or whether he deliberately sacrificed it.)
Mostly, stereotype jokes are not funny, but exceptions occur.
A particularly interesting case is when the stereotype is a more indirect base for the joke, e.g. in that stereotypes, as a phenomenon, or reactions to or around stereotypes become the topic of the joke. For instance, “Modern Family” (I believe) once had a joke where someone (likely, Cam or Mitch) assumes or appears to assume that a lesbian is a vegetarian. She grows angry and complains about stereotyping. Her girlfriend intervenes with some variation of “But honey, you are a vegetarian.”.
Note the importance of execution in TV series, which might be even more important than the “telling” of a regular joke. The above, in writing, does not sound funny (especially, as the angry lesbian might well have had a point—regardless of her dietary preferences), but it worked very well as executed. (A potential side-angle is that Mitch and Cam are themselves gay, which would give more depth to the issue of stereotyping of others, but I might have the characters mixed up.)
Generally, “Modern Family” contained many examples of stereotype-related jokes, most of which worked surprisingly well, in part exactly because they were well executed. (And, importantly, such were directed at various groups on an “equal opportunity” basis, without any consistent angle against some specific group.)
Another possible exception is when some stereotype becomes so repeated that it turns into a standing joke, and especially, as with some types of Jewish humor, when the stereotype is applied to oneself or a group of which one is a member. (Possibly, with an aspect of someone laughing out of recognition of own faults or of a similarity with some family member, as might or might not be the case with e.g. the complaining Jewish mother.)
A non-humorous motivation might be when the stereotype allows a shortened explanation, which, in turn, makes the rest of the joke easier to tell. (But here the stereotype, it self, is not necessarily used for humor. The point is that the mention of some characteristic can toggle more complex associations that, then, need no further explanation.) I see no such benefit in the case of the globe joke, as the introduction of a frugality angle on a more individualized basis would be trivial. In contrast, a joke beginning with “A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar” might see such a benefit.
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