Preface

An oppressive government aiming to crack down on political satire and humorous dissent could do worse than to establish a ministry to explain its opponents' jokes. Explanations are to jokes what autopsies are to bodies: if the subject isn't already dead, it soon will be. As a result, some scholars work with jokes so old that they may as well be unwrapping mummies. I try not to overexplain jokes in this book, since a joke that needs to be explained is hardly worth telling, much less studying. Still, there is a crucial difference between the kind of jokesplaining that can turn a specific joke inside out, to rob it of its timing and its humorous payload, and the deeper kind of analysis that sheds light on how jokes of all stripes might actually work. It is the latter kind that I aim for here, when I use the tools of artificial intelligence (AI) to lay bare the demands that jokes make on our models of language and the world, so that we can give our machines something like those models too.