Thomas Flamson: Santa Monica College Department of Earth Science / UCLA Department of Anthropology

The Encryption Theory of Humor proposes that humor evolved as a means of signaling similarity in locally variable personal features in order to facilitate assortment with the most compatible peers within the local group. It claims that a necessary component of humorous production is the presence of multiple, divergent understandings of speaker meaning, some of which are dependent on access to implicit information. Because of this dependence, only those listeners with access to this background knowledge can “decrypt” the implicit understandings, which further entails the inference that the speaker shares that access. This provides a channel for the honest signaling of personal features, which enables within-group assortment for compatible long-term interaction partners such as friends or mates.

This talk will present a range of data supporting various aspects of this hypothesis, obtained both through online studies with literate Western participants, and ethnographic observation and studies conducted in rural northeastern Brazil. It will be shown that (a) prior knowledge interacts with information provisioning to impact individual humor preferences, (b) these preferences reflect closeness in real-world social networks, and (c) evaluations of the sense of humor of other individuals also reflect social closeness. These findings support the hypothesis that humor evolved as a subjective, interdependent signaling system for compatibility matching, and not simply as an index of objectively-evaluated traits, such as intelligence.