When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought

by Jim Holt

And in the evolution of humor over the millennia, the perception of incongruity has played a more and more dominant role. Laughter, at its highest, is now regarded as the expression of an intellectual emotion. Indeed, the upper bound of the evolution of jocularity may be the Jewish joke, where a Talmudic playfulness toward language and logic reigns. (Think of your favorite Groucho Marx or Woody Allen line.) On this intellectualist view, the greatest stimulus to laughter is pure, abstract incongruity. Every good joke, as Schopenhauer held, is a disrupted syllogism. (For example, “The important thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”) And incongruity is the opposite of boring old tautology. And just as universal.