rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen) (08/01/85)
LESSON 2: CALCULATING THE HUMOR QUOTIENT
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Our previous lesson showed some significant flaws in the Costello-Mouret
Hypothesis and its notions of joke templates. But what does this imply as to
the viability of vehicular substitution as a humoristic tool? Nothing at all.
Witness this joke:
A refined British gentleman is seated on a park bench to the right of a
slovenly wino. A very pretty young woman seats herself next to the
gentleman, who says to her in a muffled voice: "Tickle your ass with a
feather?"
"What?!" the woman exclaims. To which the gentleman responds: "I said,
P'ticularly nasty weather". The woman blushes and remains silent for the
duration of her stay on the park bench.
This same scene is replayed every afternoon on the same park bench by the
same British gentleman, the same slovenly wino, and a different woman each
day. Until, one day, the man's query elicits the desired response from one
woman who happened to pass by, and off they go. This greatly impresses the
wino, who decides to try this technique himself on the next woman who passes
by. As luck would have it, only seconds later another woman sits down on the
park bench.
The wino inches closer to her and says: "Wanna come back to my place, love?"
To which the woman retorts: "I beg your pardon." Prompting the wino to look
up at the sky and say: "Looks like rain, eh?"
The gentleman in this story knows the value of vehicular substitution, and
would probably score well on the final examination for this class.
Back to the subject of "humor quotient" or HQ. The humor quotient value has a
tenuous if not insubstantial link to the funniness value (FV) of the joke,
which we will discuss shortly. We have seen an example in the previous lesson
of a joke with a negative humor quotient. This is not uncommon. It simply
indicates the extreme lack of funniness value in the joke. There are, in fact,
examples of jokes with imaginary humor quotients. Such jokes are imagined to
be funny by the joke-teller, but are actually not funny at all. I cannot think
of any examples of this in my own repertoire of humor.
As promised, here is the method for calculating the HQ for a given joke:
FV <== Funniness Value
HQ = --------
PFV <== Potential Funniness Value
The PFV scale is an arbitrary numeric scale ranging from -37 to +23. An
example of the FV's for some jokes is shown below.
-37 |^-^------------------^--------------|-^------^--^----^-----| +23
^ | | | 0 | | | |
| | Light bulb jokes "X's do it YYY" | | | |
| | Chicken crossing road | | My dog has no nose
| Dead baby jokes Nasty weather |
Bach-Offenbach Pedro-repedro
One important concept that may be inferred is that, since the scale is skewed
in the negative direction, there are more unfunny things than there are funny
things. This is, in fact, true, but the scale does not explicitly show the
magnitude of difference between the number of funny and unfunny things.
Actually, the ratio of the number of funny things to the number of non-funny
things is 1:42. (This principle will be utilized in a subsequent lesson.)
IMPORTANT TERMS LEARNED IN THIS LESSON
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FV or funniness value - an arbitrary rating of the humor content of a given
joke which, when divided by the potential funniness value (another
arbitrary quantity) yields the HQ or humor quotient
vehicular substitution - see "chinese fire drill"
--
"Wait a minute. '*WE*' decided??? *MY* best interests????"
Rich Rosen ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr