Humor. It is not a difficult concept. It is most logical.

Do Vulcans laugh at farts? I bet they do. They just don't tell humans about it; got an image to maintain, after all.

I think the reason Saavik couldn't grasp the concept of humor was down to her simply being a particularly stupid Vulcan.

She's supposed to be half-Romulan, which leads to the thought that humans of her time probably told Russian Reversal jokes about Romulans.

On Imperial Romulus, the joke gets YOU!

Sharts are even funnier, especially when it's a female.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j7ftfRiWlg

I'm still thinking that Saavik was just extraordinarily dumb for a Vulcan. Her Vulcan name was T'Derp.

I think humour is especially difficult to define beacuse not only does everyone recognize it without having an explicit concept for it, but recognizing it is a mark of honour. So we pretend we recognize it under various conceptual guises, when those concepts really have little to no bearing on what makes us laugh.

Castle's insistence on 'illogic' is one case in point, and now Paladin comes along with...

Every single one of your examples is pure gold, and each made me laugh, but none of them contains anything I would call irony in any sense of the word -- neither rhetorical irony, comedic irony, tragic irony, nor romantic irony.

Remember, irony means someone saying the opposite of what somneone knows to be true or meant -- the second someone being the speaker and his audience themselves (classical, i.e. rhetorical irony), the author that creates a character and puts the words in their mouth (tragic irony), the author as above as well as their audience (comedic irony), or someone who has stopped believing that anything can have a direct, actual meaning, rendering language a game of approximations (romantic irony).

To say nothing of the fact that all the classical examples of irony aren't funny. "But Brutus was an honorable man." Anyone laughing?

So help me, if you can -- where's the irony in any one of your examples? (And if someone wants to take a shot at showing how it is illogical that a man walks into a bar as his life is being torn apart by alcholism, go ahead.)

Defining humor is easy, if it makes you laugh it's funny.

"A man walks into a bar. After he picks himself up..."

The humor is in the superimposition of logic and illogic between "opens the door to a drinking establishment and walks inside" and "collides with a cylindrical object."

More here:

http://www.quora.com/Humor/What-are-the-best-double-meaning-sentences

I hafta join to read the link.

Would you mind posting a quote?

Interestingly, this thread was posted about the same time I got home from going to see an open mic comedy night.

Based on that experience I can tell you that humor is indeed a difficult concept.

So "illogic" now means "a phrase that has more than one possible meaning"? Or is that "superimposition", while "illogic" is "infelicitous actions", such as walking into things?

I think it's pretty clear that the opposite is true. Many people in this thread can make others laugh at least now and again. So far, nobody has come up with a good conceptual explanation as to why.

A lot of it seems to come down to playing with expectations and release of tension.

I think that's a good start. Couple the two, and you exclude many similar things that aren't humour. A sudden monster attack in a horror movie isn't funny, although it is unexpected: because it increases tension. A massage isn't funny because its release of tension isn't unexpected.

Add the hidden aggression and you're pretty much back to Freud.

No, logic still means what it meant. Illogic still means what it meant. It's the superimposition of the two -- a statement or situation which is simultaneously logical and illogical -- that provokes the cognitive dissonance event described as humor.

Here's an example:

Little Johnny's teacher's answer is revealed by little Johnny's "punch line" to be illogical and, simultaneously, logical in an unexpected way. From this: humor.

Another example:

The humor derives from the ascending boasts regarding titles of deference. The humor arises with the woman's boast, which is simultaneously a logical progression in the ascension of boasts and an exclamation entirely disconnected from that progression. Cognitive dissonance arising from simultaneous logic and illogic. Humor.

Not at all difficult; unless, that is, you're Kirstie Alley.

A sudden attack in a monster movie is funny though when it turns out to be something harmless.

Precisely! Because it then suddenly turns out to require less tension, releasing it.

Sorry, I still don't recognize any of that as illogical. The teacher's assumption is logical if obscene, and you've quite rightly described both the progression of titles and the exclamation elicited by the girl's appearance as logical.

Perhaps you mean something like "two competing logical processes"?

Can you explain the logic behind assuming a woman is married because she sucks her ice cream?

Can you explain the logic behind a woman being referred to as "God" as a title of divinity?

No. These aren't cases of competing logical processes. These are cases of logic competing with illogic within the same thought.

Absolutely, and so can you. And you did, for the woman that elicits the "Oh my God!" response. And we both see the crude logic behind the popsicle argument, otherwise the joke wouldn't be funny. Consider this version:

There. That's logic (wedding ring denotes marriage) versus actual illogic. Did you laugh? I wouldn't.

That's no more or less logically sound than "I guess the one who sucks her ice cream cone." Both the "Conny" guess and the "sucks her ice cream" guess are illogical. Neither your alternative answer nor the original is a logically valid method for determining which woman is married.

And the "sucks her ice cream" guess remains illogical until little Johnny's answer imbues it with an alternative logic which was, up to that point, unexpected, making it simultaneously illogical (which it already had been) and logical (which it became with the punch line.)

The "sucks" answer doesn't get its meaning only from Johnny's answer; we immediately know why the teacher chooses it, and so does he, as shown by his nervousness. Any logic it has by the punch line is there as soon as the teacher comes up with it.

Let me try this again: Perhaps you mean reason versus logic rather than logic versus illogic? Both jokes certainly demonstrate unreasonable, though logically correct, conclusions.

You're going to have to explain your understanding of 'reason' as opposed to logic. To me, those two words are interchangeable.

Here are some good examples of (not particularly humorous) good logic, and awful reason:

(1)
If London is the capital of France, I am female.

(2)
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Nothing even remotely similar to grass can rest, as long as a ravenous cow named Nietzsche lives.
Therefore, Nietzsche is dead.

(3)
If there are knives in my kitchen, I run a higher chance of cutting myself than if there aren't.
I don't want to cut myself.
Therefore, I remove all knives from my kitchen.

How is that good logic?

That only involves logic at the end, and it's fallacious, a non sequitur. I'm not referring to the non sequitur that would be effected by the substitution of Neitzsche the ravenous cow for Nietzsche the famous philosopher; I'm referring to the non sequitur established by the unsupported implication that "the grass is resting" required for the final statement "Neitzsche is dead."

That's not a logical argument.

None of those are logically valid arguments. And nothing in that post explains your contention that "logic" and "reason" are conceptually different.

Because speaking from logic alone, bereft of reason, "if A then B" is false only if A is true and B is false. Here, A is false, thus the whole implication is automatically true. In other words, the sentence can only be falsified in a world in which London is the capital of France.

I'm not sure if you're missing the fact that grass is green and thus anything green is at least remotely similar to grass, or if you're saying the second premiss is factually false. But neither makes a logical non sequitur. It's just extremely unreasonable semantically.

Sure it is. (Assuming the homework of "I don't want knives in my kitchen, and I remove things from places where I don't want them if I can, and I can remove knives from my kitchen, therefore I remove knives from my kitchen" is done by the student.)

All of these are logically fine, but they lack all reason.

Here, by comparison, is a conclusion that's illogical:

All humans are bipeds.
Many bipeds are American citizens.
Therefore, all American citizens are human.