Is there a reason why everyone on /prog/ is trying so hard to be funny. Is it because programming is a difficult endeavor and we're trying to make light of it? Is there a deeper philosophical reason for our behavior or are we all just socially awkward aspies? Or worse, are we all a bunch of bandwagon fools who are monkeying a select few of retards who seeded /prog/'s questionable culture?
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Anonymous2015-09-21 3:20
You should be asking this question to the whole Internet.
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Anonymous2015-09-21 3:31
Witty my anus
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Anonymous2015-09-21 4:12
Have you read your Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious today?
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Anonymous2015-09-21 4:25
The people who actually like talking about programming were driven out or never migrated to progrider. All that's left are the meme spouters. Read SICP.
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Anonymous2015-09-21 4:54
>>5 I try fucking hard to discuss programming but it isn't worth it. Shitposting was always common but people used to post and discuss interesting code. Now anything more complicated than fizzbuzz gets ignored.
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Anonymous2015-09-21 7:30
>>6 It's a vicious cycle. No one wants to waste time posting things that get ignored (except the /g/ro who thinks he's bumping threads off the board when he floods every once in a while), so we post more and more shitposting. The real shame is that the shitposting used to be of much higher quality as well. Now it's a quantity thing it seems.
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Anonymous2015-09-21 7:44
>>7 aha wicka/g/ro, do da flip kawaii you good wheeeeee
>>8,9 Your posts are garbage, you are an idiot, and your crap is not nearly as annoying or funny as you think it is.
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Anonymous2015-09-21 8:19
>>7 Yeah we got that broken window thing going on. We had that problem with the old place too but it was different.
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Anonymous2015-09-21 8:27
>>4 This book is about several traditional types of meaning-based jokes. It does not include a more sophisticated kind in which ambiguous language is used as a way of veiling or tactfully mentioning a foible or suffering. That type of humor is known to theorists today as "appropriate incongruity," though such theorists don't understand its meaning or ability to amuse. That is, they don't understand that appropriate incongruity is a kind of indirect attack or sarcasm.
There is no great loss in that omission of appropriate incongruity in Freud's case, as it is less typical as a class of jokes within his culture. Ironically, however, one of the stories from Tales of Sendebar, a medieval romance text, turns on equivocation. That suggests such meaning-hinged comedies were prototypical jokes. A central version of Sendebar is the Hebrew one, implying that the modern ambiguity-based joke might, or should have existed in early Jewish culture.
But it is also not very important that the book does not focus on one-liners. While not including many of those, the book makes careful note of the "tendentious" humor that such shorter jokes often exhibit. Freud mentions a quip spoken by Heinrich Heine that might be considered a one-liner, but he doesn't understand the humor in what Heine says.
Freud's examples feature salient double meanings, which he both fails to notice and to interpret as to their humorous force in general. What is the humor in double meaning? Freud should know, since it relates to his own psychology, but he doesn't have a clue. That is ironic, and the major oversight. Nevertheless -- while Freud denied it -- all such things can be explained on only one theory.
Freud's psychology would have been ideal for a theory of humor, since an adjustment to reality defines the growth of the psyche. What could be more perfect than a humor theory based on the science of accepting reality and dealing with existence? In other words, humor is always an allusion to a flight from reality, and all of psychoanalysis is centered around this idea. Although he does appear to have noticed this in the case of humor, he did not know how to develop or explain it. Now this difficulty of Freud's is related to the fact that he did not understand the actual meaning of desire, but that is a different topic.
Lost in the subtlety of jokes, Freud was not able to find a way to link his psychoanalysis with humor. This resulted in his erroneous view that jokes are a throwback to childhood nonsense and word games. Many claim that his examples are obscured by barriers of culture and language, yet this is unimportant. It's not that Freud's jokes are bad (though perhaps they are not great), but he did not understand them. Translation is never a major issue in Freud's ideas here.
Consider that, if he were right, then jokes would be no more funny than Spoonerisms. And when Freud tries to hijack all of the terms of humor theory one by one, "humor," "comedy," "wit" and "jokes" and assign unfounded meanings to them he is quite mistaken. That is just one of this book's several outrageous moves.
Note, however, that Freud is not wrong to imply as he does a connection between the uncertainty of mental development and stability, and jokes. He acknowledges this relationship by taking the illogical, frivolous and nonsensical as rebellion against mature reason. Freud is still rather far from the truth though he implies that jokes are allusive, or in other words that they are partial rebellions against reason and not complete ones. He seems to realize that they don't explicitly present the source of their power.
But Freud misses the precise sort of transgression that jokes vaguely reference. It is not a crucial matter, moreover, whether they violate meaning or logic. In either of those cases, they support only a "selfish self-deception" theory of humor, the theory that comical folly is a kind of diminutive ambition. But humor and comedy often express rebellion against the intended meanings that people impose. There is an old humor concept, mainly Jewish, in which one or more characters equivocate between the use, ownership or the possession of a thing. This happens in Isaac Bashevis Singer's story of Schlemiel and his wife passing the coin between them as a series of payments, and in Freud's joke about the cake, not paid for, being returned for exchange. The intention of others is the reality of meaning that irritates the self-centered psyche. All gaffes are mistakes of meaning or of the recognition of other people and the real world. That is the essence of what a gaffe is at least as we are evolved to interpret it emotionally -- through humor -- even though much clueless behavior may not be a problem of character or blameworthy in quite the same way that our sense of humor implies. Thus the humorous meaning of all jokes, which are just allusively imbedded gaffes, consists in selfish self-deception. They refer to the idea of a disregard for meaning as determined by context and other people.
One commenter to this review asks me to provide more of the evidence against Freud that I claim to have. He said, either tell me why Freud is generally wrong about humor or show how he failed to understand a few jokes. I think that what I just said above fulfills the first part of the request sufficiently. But the latter request is also basically already fulfilled. I'm not going to publish my analyses of Freud's jokes in this review. That's asking way too much.
Just go to my review of Noel Carroll's short introduction book on humor and you see the same Freudian pattern of jokes refuted. What you see there is essentially what I say about the jokes in Freud's book and his interpretation of them.
But the simple proof is that jokes are not funny on the basis of their resemblance or allusion to childhood word games. Punch lines don't merely fail to follow logically, but they involve double meaning. Freud doesn't explain the prevalence of double meaning, but he cannot because he doesn't know it's there half the time -- he misses it in several examples.
Sure, it may be difficult to explain such jokes properly and I have become skilled at it as the result of several years of intense research and thinking. I certainly was not good at it overnight or had no natural talent.
There is not a single section or argument in the book that follows logically or conforms to human experience. If anyone thought otherwise, a debate would be arranged to defend such a view. That isn't happening, and this smug silence only reflects the inability of defenders of this material to face reality. If society and academe were truly rational (obviously they're not), it would be only a matter of time before this insignificant garbage were removed from the intellectual landscape, ceasing to confuse, intimidate and mentally impoverish thousands of innocent readers. It is tragic that my own words are taken as the aggressive and tyrannical, when they are liberating.
Certain books are preserved because of who wrote them, and because they stand as landmarks along a course toward a better view. This is one of them. An honest and clear evaluation of Freud's view of jokes shows that it is entirely false, and could safely be forgotten. What the previous "no" votes to this review show isn't that it is unfounded or unhelpful, but that certain individuals are disappointed by the failure of someone they admire. They are flatly refusing to respect reason and truth. It's as though they believe Freud is right about humor just because he's Freud. But throwing a few rocks at the truth and ignoring it won't make it go away.
In this case it is unfortunate that a historic document is presented as actual theory, as it will cause confusion and ignorance for many generations. I wrote an entire book chapter which thoroughly discredited Freud's theory of jokes, humor, and the comic. I showed how, in several examples, he did not even get jokes in the basic sense, let alone manage to explain their psychological meaning.