Jokes are "absurd associations". Our brain thinks in patterns. When you put together two patterns(ideas) that don't belong together, it creates the feeling of absurdity, the less patterns belong together, the less they fit together, the more absurd they will feel. ("A man on a bicycle" is not absurd, "a man on a unicycle" is a little bit absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle" is very absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle while wearing a white dress and juggling fish" is absurd as fuck). Comedy is the art of finding connections between patterns. You "connect the dots" between two ideas, find an overlap(an association) between two patterns that are far apart, and you put them together. The more absurd(less compatible) the two ideas are, and the stronger the connection(the more it makes sense), the funnier the joke will be.

A longer post on this:

https://medium.com/@rayalez/comedy-theory-fd142076657e

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I can analyze about 80% of the jokes this way and find two different patterns with clear connection between them, remaining 20% are what I call "purely absurd" jokes, they don't have two connected patterns, they're just ideas that make as little sense as possible. I don't know how to explain both types with some common underlying mechanism.

Just as an example, here's a "dot-connect" comedy sketch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT6jS_X4NaY

(Pattern 1 is clouds, common recognizer is "cloud that looks like a mushroom", pattern 2 is nuclear explosion).

And here's a "pure absurd" comedy sketch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQfvSLxTsEs

(no two distinct but connected patterns that I can discern, just an absurd idea that makes as little sense as possible)

- Puns are the simplest example of dot-connect jokes ("this word sounds like this other word"). Pranks too (the same situation means one thing to the person who's doing the prank, and another to the person who's being pranked).

- Metaphors are associations that aren't absurd enough to be funny, if a metaphor is absurd/weird enough it becomes a joke.

- Exaggeration/reversal jokes are closer to "pure absurd" jokes, you're taking a normal idea and making it make less sense by exaggerating a part of the pattern, or replacing it with it's opposite.

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Animals seem to laugh when playing, another way to put it - "fake fighting". Play makes sense evolutionarily because kids are practicing fighting, and laughter seems like a signal that "I'm not actually trying to hurt you". I couldn't figure out how to reconcile it with the idea of absurdity, they seem vaguely similar, but I can't expain how comedy works from evolutionary standpoint.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_in_animals

To understand humor from evolutionary perspective, it would be interesting to analyze the jokes babies and kids find funny. Why do babies laugh at peekaboo?

Here's a fascinating video about the first jokes Hank Green's kid has came up with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q9AEu27NAg

Interestingly, two of them are "pure absurd" jokes (blue baby, police bus), and three of them are "dot-connect" jokes(mam-da, papa pants, coconut baby).

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Laughter and humor are not the same thing. Tickling isn't funny, "social signaling" laughter isn't funny (like when girl giggles when she's attracted to a guy).

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It would make sense if brains evolved to reward novelty. When you learn something insightful about the world, you get a pleasant dopamine hit. If comedy is "supernormal stimuli", it could come from people learning to hack this mechanism, making the sensation more intense.

The way people add more sugar/fat to the food to make taste more intense, or learned to masturbate to fake sex, maybe people found a way to trick their minds into feeling they've learned something super insightful? But what does that have to do with laughter?

Some sort of error-correction process? When you learn a new idea, your brain corrects your old wrong world model, "erasing" mistaken beliefs. Another way to describe absurd is an "obvious error". Maybe there's something to it...

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It's easier to make jokes on taboo subjects because there's an absurd gap between the seriousness of a taboo subject and a lighthearted goofiness of a joke.