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From: leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper)
Newsgroups: net.books,net.jokes.d,net.math
Subject: MATHEMATICS AND HUMOR by John Allen Paulos
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Date: Wed, 11-Sep-85 01:38:12 EDT
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Posted: Wed Sep 11 01:38:12 1985
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                 MATHEMATICS AND HUMOR by John Allen Paulos
                 University of Chicago Press, 1980, $12.95.
                      A book review by Mark R. Leeper

     A good while back, I came to the conclusion that most humor is really
making a philosophical point in a very pithy and succinct manner.  It seemed
to me that laughter at a joke was much akin to what Martin Gardner calls the
"Aha!" experience in problem solving.  It seemed to me that if I thought
long enough about any joke, deep down there was a philosophical principle it
demonstrated.  Let me give at least some examples that show at least some
jokes come down to such principles.  A film I saw recently had a character
speaking a foreign translation, the English translation of which was printed
on the screen in subtitles.  Another character who didn't understand the
foreign language looked down and read the subtitles instead.  What point
does this make?  It says in the syntax of cinema that two completely
different images are super-imposed on the screen.  One is the story level
containing the characters; the other is a helping "presentation" layer.
This layer does things like translate with subtitles and shows that little
blip that tells the projectionist that the end of the reel is coming.  The
joke is really just a way of saying that the story layer is not supposed to
be affected by the presentation layer.  The result of breaking that rule is
incongruity.

     Here is another example, in this case from MONTY PYTHON.  In most
disciplines, if you know for sure that a procedure works, that procedure
will probably be more useful to you.  You prove a theorem, for example, and
then you can apply it elsewhere.  A counter-example is a foreign phrase-
book.  The way to know for sure that a phrase-book would be useful is to
know both languages and hence make the phrase-book useless to you.  A
phrase-book is only useful to you if you have no direct evidence that it is
useful.  MONTY PYTHON makes this point in a very terse manner when it has a
phrase-book translate innocent foreign phrases into English phrases like
"Please fondle my buttocks."

     But the sad fact is that, while it is often not all that difficult to
pull a philosophical idea out of a joke, it seems to be more an art than a
science.  Someone else might be able to pull a very different philosophical
point out of a joke and if they can do that, it calls to question whether
the joke is really making a real philosophical point or not.  This was the
state I was in when I came upon the book MATHEMATICS AND HUMOR by John Allen
Paulos.

     Paulos claims to use mathematical structures to analyze humor and what
is funny.  In fact, I am not sure that Paulos really has a better idea than
I already had on how to glean serious points out of humor.  He explains a
few mathematical structures--self-referential statements, recursion, over-
lapping sets, and catastrophe sheets--to analyze some jokes, but he seems to
just take a few jokes to exemplify each and even there, the over-lapping
sets and the catastrophe sheets could be used for the same jokes.  Take an
example.  He uses over-lapping sets to explain the joke:
     Interviewer [presumably at YMCA]: Do you think clubs are
          appropriate for small children?
     W. C. Fields: Only when kindness fails.
The word 'clubs' really fits into two classes: social organizations and
blunt instruments.  The joke switches us from one of these classes as a
context to the other.  However, the same joke could have turned up in a
later chapter as a "jumping between the sheets" in a catastrophe theory
model.  Catastrophe theory studies discontinuous events in which small
changes will have large effects, like "the straw that broke the camel's
back."  Fields's remark snaps us from one context for the term 'clubs' to
another.  Paulos's book does little to add to our analytical understanding
of humor.

     One useful idea that does come out of the book comes from Wittgenstein.
The philosopher feels that you could write an entire book of philosophy made
up of only jokes.  To understand each joke is to understand a philosophical
point.  That is sort of the dual of the statement I made.  It would mean
that for any philosophical chain of arguments, there is a chain of jokes
expressing it.  My contention was that any joke can be resolved into a
philosophical point.  Together they form a sort of equivalence theorem.

     Getting back to the book, it does not add much to our understanding of
humor, but it might tempt some students to read it for the humor and learn a
little math along the way.

					Mark R. Leeper
					...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper