Abstract

Successful jokes involve incongruities, but not any incongruity will do—not, for example, one as blatantly bare as an explicit instance of the form p.~p. Substitution in such is no secure generator of fun; and stand-up comedians would be lucky to escape with their lives, if—at the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night—they delivered one-liners such as “She came from Dungeness and not from Dungeness.” Build-up context, alcohol level, and delivery skills—and it is not impossible that any line, even the p.~p instance, could secure some laughs; but laughs alone need indicate no joke. At a level virtually platitudinous, jokes require an incongruity—a tension—between expectations typically aroused by initial words and resultant sabotaging revelations. We could, no doubt, be a species that laughed at every expressed contradiction, yet one for which banana skins, sexual spasms, and implied inconsistencies raised no flicker. Which particular sayings generate incongruities and not mere laughter is no empirical matter, but one of logic, logic taken sufficiently widely to include semantics and pragmatics. These incongruities, with the masking, the movement and unmasking—the teasing, stripping, and exposed sabotage—are to be found within many philosophical paradoxes as well as within jokes. Laying bare the jokes’ mechanisms can help to resolve such paradoxes. Joking matter itself need be no joking matter; and as jokes and paradoxes rely upon veiled incongruities, an all-seeing god would see no joke and meet no paradox.