Comedy

[Taem]

If you say that *some* comedy is based on tragedy, I'll agree. […]I'm sure that, with a little thought, you can tie all of them to tragedy. But it is a stretch, you've hit upon a truth and you're turning it into a principle.

I can see what you’re saying and where you are coming from. I can even agree with you when coming at some jokes with a human understanding, which is why I devised a little experiment.

Let’s try this another way: THE ROBOT EXPERIMENT

Let’s pretend for a second that you are part of a team of scientists that just finished creating a humanoid-type robot, complete with a limited, yet complex software based AI (no nero-net devices ala Data via Star Trek TNG). The emotions prove tricky; you cannot just tell the robot to LOVE because it does not value the emotion of love, nor can you program each and every emotion based on its own set of ideals because this would cause wide-range emotional instability. All the emotions need a set of core ethics to be based upon. As a very, very simplistic example of this, to a Self-Efficient robot, LOVE might be the desire to protect “X” because of what “X” does for the robot.

To make the robot understand emotion, your team decides to program its ethics in one of two possible ways:

1) SELF-EFFICIANT: Like all humans, it thinks of itself and its needs first, and all emotions revolve around that. It can still be considerate of its surroundings and of others, but it will understand its emotions based on this basic principle.
2) ALTRUISTIC: The robot thinks about others first, as long as its actions are for the greater good. It will still be considerate of its own mortality and well-being, however it will understand its emotions based on this basic principle.

Baring a possible “god-mode” complex, your team decides its best to go with option #2. From the emotional scale, your team teaches the robot to FEAR – including all emotions on that FEAR scale from the fright all the way to paralyzing fear – LOVE – with the same emotional scale – and ANGER – however on this scale, the highest the emotion can go is ANGER, not up to hatred or loathing. But your first real challenge comes up trying to teach the robot HUMOR. This ALTRUISTIC robot sees every joke and punch line as an attempt to cause pain or misfortune.

How would you teach this robot HUMOR? Lets assume it’s intelligent enough that you can talk to it to explain concepts to it, and it can ask you child-like questions back to better process what it’s being taught. How would you explain to the robot how to understand humor? Go ahead, give it a shot!

*****

I couldn’t do it without conceding that all humor is based on misfortune in one way or another, rather a slight infraction to ones ego, such as Petes Elephant joke, to the more perverse, such as the television show Jack-Ass. And wouldn’t you know it, the more misfortune that befalls the individual, the funnier the skit becomes, so long as it doesn’t go “too” far, at which point it ceases to be humorous. Being Altruistic, the robot was very concerned about the well-being of others, so the first step for me was to teach the robot about “fiction”, i.e. Home Alone-type humor, as opposed to real life; if somebody gets hurt in a fictional setting, its funny when nobody gets seriously injured or violated and the antagonist is having fun doing it. In real life, when someone falls in front of you while attempting a kick-flip on a skateboard, it’s funny so long as they get up and “walk-it-off”, and can even warrant a “dumbass” comment from you, but if they cry in pain, it’s not funny. If you make someone feel slightly stupid with a joke, it’s funny, but when they start to take it personal, it’s no longer funny. I can go on and on, but what it comes down to is this: the robot cannot understand humor without understanding that slight misfortune is what comedy is all about! Does this ring true for humans? Not if we "feel" it does not, but the basic concept remains the same in my opinion.