Why do humans laugh? How does our brain determine what’s funny and what’s not?
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If you don’t mind me bringing in a bit of philosophy, please bear with me:
We don’t know why some things seem one way or another, and why some things are pleasurable and others are not. There is an unbridgeable chasm between information and qualia (the subjective experience of something).
There are people working in theory who have come up with theories of humor, but their theories only describe, and do not explain, why things seem funny. For example, jokes where the reader has access to information or reasoning that the subjects of the joke do not for some reason are funny, so it is theorized that funniness has something to do with information. But nobody teaches us this; the feeling of funniness is just self-evident to those who get the joke. And information theory based explanations of humor can’t explain why babies find some things to be hilarious for no good reason, or why some things look funny to one culture but not another. These often do not conform to information theory-based descriptions of humor.
As an example of what I mean about there being an unbridgeable chasm between information and qualia, consider the problem of odor. Suppose you knew all the chemical and physical information there is to know about a specific chemical. That still tells you nothing about how it smells or tastes. You simply cannot tell whether something tastes a certain way or smells a certain way without tasting or smelling it. [Hydrogen sulfide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide#/media/File:Hydrogen-sulfide-3D-vdW.svg) (H2S), for example, has the same shape as the water molecule, and sulfur is right under oxygen in the periodic table, so inferring from what we know about water, one might expect it to smell or taste like water, but no. Hydrogen sulfide has an intense smell akin to rotten eggs. There simply is no way to access this without experiencing it. In fact, the only way to describe it to someone who hasn’t experienced it is to describe it in terms of something else that others may have experienced, such as my comparing the smell to rotten eggs. If you’ve never smelled rotten eggs, this description is meaningless. This is like how wine tasters descriptions are meaningless to the reader unless you’ve tasted a bunch of the reference flavors with which they describe the wine.
Imagine if someone were to describe sexual orgasm to someone who has never experienced one. The description sounds positively awful—convulsions and screaming and moaning etc. There is just no way to convey qualia with information; you can only appeal to other qualia in an attempt to describe that which defies description.
Take that back to the matter of what is funny or not. Funniness, just like all the other subjective experiences, is not a matter of calculation and determination. It is a qualia. And try as we might, we do not know how to explain qualia. I do not personally believe in a materialist explanation for the human mind; for me, the existence of qualia is one of the things that tells me that deep down, our brains interface our soul at some level and mediate our senses to our soul. And why our souls find some things to be funny, or why things feel the way they feel, and why the various qualia are the way they are doesn’t really have an explanation. What may be revolting stench to us, such as the smell of dung, may be delightful fragrance to a dung beetle. What is spicy to us, like chili peppers, is flavorless to birds. Nobody actually knows why these things produce the sensations they produce.
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