One of the most difficult things to do is to make someone laugh!
Of course it is also difficult to make someone cry! Making someone sad or angry is easy though! But humans nowadays do not like to cry! One of the few traits which is actually human is something which humans do not like to do in case other people realise that they are human!
Anyway; the popularity of stand up comedians is testimonial to the fact that laughter is serious business!
Then again some comedy like the slapstick ones, the laughter is more to do with actions rather than words while the stand up acts rely more on the words.
If you include garbage and cuss words and talking ‘dirty’ then it is much easier to make someone or at least a group laugh! But the real art is to make someone laugh with pure wit and intelligence!
In fact in the past, the court jesters like Tenali Raman were actually some of the most cleverest people in the court who used to use humour to make their point. Now it has been seen that communication needs intentionality and making someone laugh needs more grades of intentionality!
So although laughter is probably of deep evolutionary origin, the telling of jokes, being language-based, is likely to be of more recent origin within the human lineage.
In language-based communication, speaker and listener are engaged in a process of mutually understanding each other’s intentions (mindstates), with a conversation minimally requiring three orders of intentionality.
Mentalizing is cognitively more demanding than non-mentalizing cognition, and there is a well-attested limit at five orders in the levels of intentionality at which normal adult humans can work!
Within this limit the quality of jokes appears to peak when they include five to six levels of intentionality, which suggest that audiences appreciate higher mentalizing complex!
Meaning clever jokes are more funny or some jokes can only seem funny to clever people! I still remember one Joke I told in my grade 8 about a talk between The plump Churchill and the slim G B Shaw! I found it so hilarious! But when I told it, no one laughed! This included my teacher! Which is when I comforted myself that you need a level of intelligence to get that one! It can also be that it was a bad joke! You decide!
‘Winston Churchill came upon George Bernard Shaw at a cocktail party and greeted him by saying ‘Looking at you, one would think there is a famine in England’.
Shaw, whose 1926 Nobel Prize was awarded for ‘stimulating satire’, replied ‘looking at you, one would think you caused it’!
Now I am not saying that if you found the joke funny then you are intelligent, you may be street smart and not find it funny!
Now a joke can be funny or not depending on your situation and mood which is the same with song (not funny but good or bad!). Speaking of song reminds me of Gulshan Kumar Dua!
Felt good after the sketch! Especially his eyes!
Shubh ratri!
ramadocblog 