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Essay:Humour
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This essay is an original work by Javascap. It does not necessarily reflect the views expressed in RationalWiki's Mission Statement, but we welcome discussion of a broad range of ideas. Unless otherwise stated, this is original content, released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 or any later version. See RationalWiki:Copyrights. Feel free to make comments on the talk page, which will probably be far more interesting, and might reflect a broader range of RationalWiki editors' thoughts. |
As a psychologist/programmer, there are a diverse range of issues I have taken an interest in. After building an evolution modeler in Java, I was struck by a thought.
Why do we have a sense of humour? Psychiologically, how did we as humans develop a response to absurd ideas, the ability to mock or laugh at crazy things that make no sense?
I do find it odd thinking about it. As a direct benefit, laughter doesn't really do anything, time spent laughing could have been better spent making a spear or hunting, but regardless, when confronted with something funny, we laugh, despite the absurdity of laughing at absurdity.