Punch lines and leads

"When you look at all jokes and humour across socieites, the common denominator of all jokes and humour despite all the diversity is that you take a person along a garden path of expectation and at the very end you suddenly introduce an unexpected twist that entails a complete re-interpretation of all the previous facts. That's called a punch-line of the joke."

Lines from one of the five 2003 Reith lectures delivered by Vilayanur Ramachandran, who I read somewhere is described as the Sherlock Holmes of neuroscience!

Apart from the punch line, he says, what is vital is that the re-interpretation should be of trivial significance.

His argument is that "Laughter is nature's false alarm."

Example: "Here is a portly gentleman walking along, he is trying to reach his destination, but before he does that he slips on a banana peel and falls. And then he breaks his head and blood spills out and obviously you are not going to laugh. You are going to rush to the telephone and call the ambulance. But imagine instead of that, he walks along, slips on the banana peel, falls, wipes off the goo from his face, looks around him everywhere, and and then gets up, then you start laughing. The reason is I claim is because now you know it's inconsequential, you say, oh it's no big deal, there's no real danger here."

Let me digress from neuroscience but will extend the punch-line theme a bit.

The following is the best example that I can think of of a nifty lead (punch line attached) for what you may call a fairly serious story. Given below is an intro of an Economist article on robots in Japan that I read a few months back:

"HER name is MARIE, and her impressive set of skills comes in handy in a nursing home. MARIE can walk around under her own power. She can distinguish among similar-looking objects, such as different bottles of medicine, and has a delicate enough touch to work with frail patients. MARIE can interpret a range of facial expressions and gestures, and respond in ways that suggest compassion. Although her language skills are not ideal, she can recognise speech and respond clearly. Above all, she is inexpensive. Unfortunately for MARIE, however, she has one glaring trait that makes it hard for Japanese patients to accept her: she is a flesh-and-blood human being from the Philippines. If only she were a robot instead."

Didn't that make you smile?