Jokes

Jokes have been a part of human culture since at least 1900 BCE. A fart joke from ancient Sumer is currently believed to be the world's oldest known joke

Why we laugh has been the subject of serious academic study, examples being:

Jokes can be employed by workers as a way to identify with their jobs. For example, 9-1-1 operators often crack jokes about incongruous, threatening, or tragic situations they deal with on a daily basis. This use of humor and cracking jokes helps employees differentiate themselves from the people they serve while also assisting them in identifying with their jobs. In addition to employees, managers use joking, or jocularity, in strategic ways. Some managers attempt to suppress joking and humor use because they feel it relates to lower production, while others have attempted to manufacture joking through pranks, pajama or dress down days, and specific committees that are designed to increase fun in the workplace.

The rules of humour are analogous to those of poetry. These common rules are mainly timing, precision, synthesis, and rhythm. French philosopher Henri Bergson has said in an essay: "In every wit there is something of a poet." In this essay Bergson views the essence of humour as the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living. He used as an instance a book by an English humorist, in which an elderly woman who desired a reputation as a philanthropist provided "homes within easy hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of their failing, etc." This idea seems funny because a genuine impulse of charity as a living, vital impulse has become encrusted by a mechanical conception of how it should manifest itself.

Though, the familiarity of the pattern of "brevity" has led to numerous examples of jokes where the very length is itself the pattern breaking "punchline".[citation needed] Numerous examples from Monty Python exist, for instance, the song "I Like Traffic Lights", and more recently, Family Guy contains numerous such examples, most notably, in the episode Wasted Talent, Peter Griffin bangs his shin, a classic slapstick routine, and tenderly nurses it whilst inhaling and exhaling to quiet the pain. This goes on for considerably longer than expected.[vague] Certain versions of the popular vaudevillian joke The Aristocrats can go on for several minutes, and it is considered an anti-joke, as the humour is more in the set-up than the punchline.

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