Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (by Mathew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams) explores humor from an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. I first became aware of the book when Dennett spoke at Beloit College in February of 2011. I have been interested in analyses of humor since my doctoral research on creativity at the University of Wisconsin years ago. Along with the usual definable candidates of categories where creativity might be manifested (arts, sciences, …) humor offers a fascinating glimpse at how minds might work. This book makes an argument for the necessity of humor in thinking human beings.
Inside Jokes
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