The Humor Code Read Online Free

were rated considerably funnier than those that were unexpected. The level of incongruity of each punch line was inversely related to the funniness of the joke. 5
    There’s another dilemma with all these theories. While they all have their strengths, they also share a major malfunction: they short-circuitwhen it comes to explaining why some things are not funny. Accidentally killing your mother-in-law would be incongruous, assert superiority, and release pent-up aggressive tensions, but it’s hardly a gut-buster. 6
    It might seem that there’s no way to cover the wide world of comedy with a single, tidy explanation. But for someone like Pete, a guy who yearns for order, that wouldn’t do. “People say humor is such a complex phenomenon, you can’t possibly have one theory that explains it,” he told me. “But no one talks that way about other emotional experiences. Most scientists agree on a simple set of principles that explain when most emotions arise.” It’s generally accepted that anger occurs when something bad happens to you and you blame someone else for it, while guilt occurs when something bad happens to someone else and you blame yourself.
    It has to be the same for humor, Pete figured. There has to be a simple explanation that the authorities have long overlooked. He thinks he found it by doing a Google search for “humor theory.”
    One of the first results led to “A Theory of Humor,” an article published in a 1998 issue of HUMOR: The International Journal of Humor Research , written by a man named Thomas Veatch. 7 Veatch posited what he called the “N+V Theory,” the idea that humor occurs when someone perceives a situation is a violation of a “subjective moral principle” (V) while simultaneously realizing that the situation is normal (N). To prove that his idea worked, Veatch, who had a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, laid out point after compelling point, meandering from computational linguistics to developmental psychology to predicate calculus. It’s heady, compelling stuff, and to Pete, Veatch’s theory was closer to the truth than anything he’d come across. But it hadn’t rocked the field of humor scholarship. Why had Veatch and his N+V Theory sunk into obscurity?
    While Veatch had once taught linguistics at Stanford University, he’d since dropped off the academic radar. It took several weeks of online sleuthing and unreturned voice mails to get Veatch on the phone from his home in Seattle.
    The N+V Theory started with a simple joke, Veatch told me:
    Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
    Because it was dead.
    â€œI first heard it in ’85 or ’86, and I laughed for like an hour,” said Veatch. That didn’t make sense to him, so he thought long and hard about it—as he did about most things. Growing up, Veatch says, he was a loner who read every book in his grade-school library. It was the first inkling of a prodigious mind that, according to Veatch, would later dream up the MP3 player long before anyone had heard of MP3s and devise a phonetics chart that he believes can teach literacy to downtrodden people around the world.
    Before those endeavors, he decided to explain the dead-monkey joke. So he sat down in his Stanford office one day in 1992 and came up with the N+V theory. The concept seemed to explain the joke. The lifeless monkey was a violation, but the situation was normal because dead monkeys will fall out of their trees. The premise seemed to work for every other kind of humor Veatch could think of, too. So in 1998, he published his theory in HUMOR and waited for a response. And waited. And waited. And waited.
    It wouldn’t be the last time Veatch’s plans wouldn’t go as expected. After his stint at Stanford, he tried to make a go of it in the business world, but his attempt to build a speech-synthesizing e-mail reader fell through, as did