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From: naus@ur-tut.UUCP (Paul Marchese)
Newsgroups: net.books,net.jokes.d,net.math
Subject: Re: MATHEMATICS AND HUMOR by John Allen Paulos
Message-ID: <107@ur-tut.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Sep-85 00:51:59 EDT
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Posted: Mon Sep  9 00:51:59 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

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