hese days we live in a cultural desert, so we have to create our own
entertainment. Sometimes you just have to get away from reading the
Post and do something useless, like goofing off on the
computer by getting it to generate cheap jokes.
An anagram
One might say this is a way of seeking new insights about humor, but saying so comes perilously close to the section in a research grant where we tell the reviewers how essential our work is and how it will save lives and lead to important new insights. Grant reviewers know that's bullshit, but it's all part of the game of Let's Pretend where we justify to ourselves why we ought not be sent to the unemployment line.
Unfortunately,
goofing off on the computer invariably turns into a task of debugging
somebody else's program. In the case of the well known Linux anagram
generator, an-0.95.tar.gz,
when I ran the program I got either:
malloc(): corrupted top size
Abort
or
malloc(): invalid size (unsorted)
Abort
To fix that, it was necessary to repair the off-by-one error in
xcalloc() in the file an.c by adding
num_objects++; size++;
before the line that says
location = calloc (num_objects, size);.
And, of course, we have to give it a customized copy of our words file
(/usr/share/dict/words) to avoid results like
an -m 3 "washingtonpost"
sow th's nag point
which is a pretty good example of a non-amusing anagram.
Okay, so here are the results.
| Input text | Amusing Anagram | Non-Amusing Anagram |
|---|---|---|
| 'republican party' | capably prurient | ray bun carpet lip |
| 'democratic party' | myopic crated rat | ray dorm pet cacti |
| 'communist party' | patronymic smut | symptomatic urn |
| 'i am lord voldemort' | mm, i loved rat drool | mm, odd riot overall |
| 'i am lord voldemort' | i love ram drool mt | mm, i'd overdo a troll |
| 'new york times' | monkeys write | wintery smoke |
| 'new york times' | yonkers wit me | enormity skew |
| 'national review' | i weevil, anon rat | interwove lanai |
| 'democracy' | comedy car | cry me coda |
| 'mail-in voting' | violin mating | vomiting nail |
| 'settled science' | selected incest | licensed testes |
| 'twitter feed' | fetid wetter | few tittered |
| 'all the news that's fit to print' | forthwith slept talent stain | flatten wealth stript shinto |
| 'in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth' | thee hath hedged nonrestrictive abnegating hennaed | nonrestrictive bedding ghana heed thee hah tang teen |
It might be hard to tell, but the anagrams in column 2 generally seem to be slightly more amusing than those in column 3. But why? It seems to me that the answer tells us something important about humor. The common belief that humor is a way of deflating someone else's unearned claim of status—in other words, a type of social or political attack—is, in my opinion, incorrect.
The last item in the table gives us the clue: although it still doesn't quite make sense, it appears to be struggling toward something the Bible could have written. What makes it amusing is that it forces your brain to backtrack and re-interpret in a different way the scenario your joke laid out. The imaginary world that the brain constructed must be discarded and the facts re-interpreted to build a new one. That gives us a dizzying hit of dopamine that we interpret as humor.
The re-interpretation of the hypothetical world could be a social takedown, but it need not be so.
In the case of anagrams, it only works if the result appears to be a cynical comment on the original phrase. Or in other words, a cheap laugh. It's amusing not because it's cynical, or because it's cheap, but because it tricks the brain into thinking it's getting some great insight. That's not really true, of course, so in a way, all jokes are ironic: every joke is a joke on you.
Creating anagrams is easy for a computer—the software creates so much output it rapidly exceeds the maximum file length. But it cannot decide which anagrams are amusing, because it has no model for the world which could be overturned. This tells us that unless an AI generates a model for the world, the best it can produce is a mindlesss collection of random associations.
may 21 2021, 6:11 am
