Yet another try: daily blogging and humor
The last time that I restarted was here. And now I'm doing it again. Restarting. Trying to teach this old dog a new trick: writing regularly. Again. So here's my latest exercise in self-manipulation.
This is another one of those back-dated fill-it-in posts, a renewed attempt to rewrite history and post every day. But for the record, it's Friday May 17th.
![Daniel Dennett, at the Second World Conference... Daniel Dennett, at the Second World Conference...](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff19293f0-ff9d-4b2d-8f67-bf1996caf319_300x393.png)
Daniel Dennett, at the Second World Conference on the Future of Science, in Venice, 2006 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)I finished reading Dan Dennet's book, "Inside Jokes" (web site here, Amazon reference here) a week ago.
Dennet has popularized ideas in cognitive science and evolutionary theory and philosopy. Most of his work is readable by people with a moderate science background. This one is a bit more challenging: it's both very academic, and very funny.
The book explains a theory of humor developed initially by his co-author and former student Matthew Hurley as part of his doctoral thesis, for which Dennett was advisor. The third co-author is Reginald Adams, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and has cultivated a major interest in humor.
To help illustrate some of the features of the theory the authors retell (and then analyzes) some pretty good jokes.
My make-up project (let's see how long it lasts) is going to be a joke a day.
I'll start with this one from "Inside Jokes": (p.15)
"He who laughs last...thinks slowest."