If anyone is interested there is a free book you can download via:
http://www.physorg.com/news156761595.html
"Researcher identifies just 8 patterns as the cause of all humor
March 20th, 2009 Evolutionary theorist Alastair Clarke has today published details of eight patterns he claims to be the basis of all the humour that has ever been imagined or expressed, regardless of civilization, culture or personal taste."
...and
"Basically humour is all about information processing, accelerating faculties that enable us to analyse and then manipulate incoming data."
Clarke lists the patterns that are active in humour as positive repetition, division, completion, translation, applicative and qualitative recontextualization, opposition and scale.
"Some are more intuitive than others," he admits. "The most basic, positive repetition, simply means that the unit is repeated in a similar form with the same purpose. As with all patterns, the repeated unit can be composed of any information available to the human brain, whether an entity, action or property. Then there's opposition, in which we take the unit and turn it against itself, such as can be seen in a mirror image or if we turn an arrow back to point in the other direction, producing a pattern of symmetry. However, while all the patterns are relatively simple in structure the activity of some forms of translation and recontextualization can seem counter-intuitive at first sight."
Just scroll down to the "pyrrhichouse" link, that takes you into the download, it is over 3mb's from memory, haven't read it all yet, but it is an interesting piece of *work he has researched. The download is only active for 30 days I think, as of 20/03/09. I am enjoying the read.
* NB I'm not affiliated with him, (author), the book publisher or anyone involved, I just have a great curiousity of life, the universe and people...and err, stuff.
http://www.physorg.com/news156761595.html
"Researcher identifies just 8 patterns as the cause of all humor
March 20th, 2009 Evolutionary theorist Alastair Clarke has today published details of eight patterns he claims to be the basis of all the humour that has ever been imagined or expressed, regardless of civilization, culture or personal taste."
...and
"Basically humour is all about information processing, accelerating faculties that enable us to analyse and then manipulate incoming data."
Clarke lists the patterns that are active in humour as positive repetition, division, completion, translation, applicative and qualitative recontextualization, opposition and scale.
"Some are more intuitive than others," he admits. "The most basic, positive repetition, simply means that the unit is repeated in a similar form with the same purpose. As with all patterns, the repeated unit can be composed of any information available to the human brain, whether an entity, action or property. Then there's opposition, in which we take the unit and turn it against itself, such as can be seen in a mirror image or if we turn an arrow back to point in the other direction, producing a pattern of symmetry. However, while all the patterns are relatively simple in structure the activity of some forms of translation and recontextualization can seem counter-intuitive at first sight."
Just scroll down to the "pyrrhichouse" link, that takes you into the download, it is over 3mb's from memory, haven't read it all yet, but it is an interesting piece of *work he has researched. The download is only active for 30 days I think, as of 20/03/09. I am enjoying the read.
* NB I'm not affiliated with him, (author), the book publisher or anyone involved, I just have a great curiousity of life, the universe and people...and err, stuff.
