This is the first in a series of articles I will be posting on humour as I discover more and more about it. The articles will aim towards exploring and perhaps defining formal (computational) models of humour, and will be sprinkled with jokes just to keep things interesting.

Q. How many men does it take to change a light bulb?
A. One. He just holds it up there and waits for the world to revolve around him.

Q. How many women does it take to change a light bulb?
A. None. They just sit there in the dark and complain!

Humour is one aspect of human cognitive abilities that has strangely eluded hardcore philosophical, linguistic and computational research over the years. And yet, it is ever-present in our day-to-day lives, in our social interactions, in courting. For most of us, it is difficult to let a day go by without having a good laugh or two. Many of us use humour to vent out negative emotions and feelings. But what really makes something funny?

The above jokes give us an insight. Firstly, many jokes have a strong stereotypical aspect to them. Sardarji jokes, blonde jokes, French jokes, jokes about women and jokes about men are just few examples. The stereotypes that women prefer bickering to acting, and that men are self-centred and egoistic are exploited by the jokes above to generate humour. But of course, not all jokes need to have a stereotypical aspect. Even if some jokes incorporate it, the humour is only partially generated by it. So what else makes something funny?

It was the end of the school year, and a kindergarten teacher was receiving gifts from her pupils. The florist's son handed her a gift. She shook it, held it overhead, and said, "I bet I know what it is. Flowers." "That's right!" the boy said, "But, how did you know?" "Oh, just a wild guess," she said.

The next pupil was the sweet shop owner's daughter. The teacher held her gift overhead, shook it, and said, "I bet I can guess what it is. A box of sweets." "That's right, but how did you know?" asked the girl. "Oh, just a wild guess," said the teacher.

The next gift was from the son of the liquor storeowner. The teacher held the package overhead, but it was leaking. She touched a drop off the leakage with her finger and put it to her tongue. "Is it wine?" she asked. "No," the boy replied, with some excitement. The teacher repeated the process, tasting a larger drop of the leakage. "Is it champagne?" she asked. "No," the boy replied, with more excitement. The teacher took one more big taste before declaring, "I give up, what is it?"

With great glee, the boy replied, "It's a puppy!"

It seems most jokes also depend on some form of inconformity or incongruity to generate humour. Victor Raskin, a professor of English and Linguistics at Purdue University, formalized this into what he initially called the Script Theory. A script (or theme, or set of beliefs) unfolds as the joke is narrated, and at a crucial point (a punchline perhaps), a conflicting script is introduced that generates humour. In the above joke, the script dictates that each child gets gifts for the teacher from his or her father's store. The last line, obviously the punch-line, introduces the conflicting script of the gift being completely unrelated to the child's father's profession. It also invokes a feeling of disgust that somehow generates humour.

This brings us to another category of humour. Things that are disgusting or related to sex and violence seem to invoke a rather primitive reaction from us, and are effectively used in jokes. Although more popular at a younger age, such jokes do make millions of adults laugh out hard as well. Visual jokes often belong to this category, such as the one put with this post.

But then, many jokes are fairly complex and logical, and the generation of humour often comes simply from the process of reasoning and inferring the joke. These jokes are very similar to logical puzzles, which invoke similar pleasure in the mind of the reader.

Did you hear about the French suicide bomber? Yes, he's on 23rd mission!

It seems that through this little discussion, we have realized that humour is not the result of one simple mechanism, but a group of mechanisms that generate related reactions. Perhaps then, a rigid taxonomy of humour is required, as is a survey of existing philosophical and computational models of humour...