Origin of Humor

About the Book

D uring the Covid Pandemic we stumbled upon I. M. Suslov’s revolutionary idea that considers humor from the brain’s perspective. In summary, humor helps us forget “incorrect” inputs, making us smarter. For artificial intelligence programmers, this suggests that humor helps eliminate AI hallucinations. There is one snag with this theory. We remember jokes. But Suslov’s insight sparked our curiosity. The more we read, the more we discovered numerous people have studied humor from all kinds of perspectives. This list includes Aristotle, Freud, and Darwin. We soon realized all theories of humor fail at some level. No one really knows why we laugh. We then asked the question, “How is our voice box wired up to our brain?” We should have never asked that question. That question, along with our background as a camera designer who is also interested in self-driving car systems, led us down a six-year odyssey. We spent two to three hours every morning digesting over 1,000 research papers while reverse engineering how our brain is wired together. We discovered there are multiple competing paths from our brain to our voice box. One path is for speech, the others for laughter. We discovered the power of “mirror neurons” and the origin of empathy. We deciphered the neurological wiring between long-term, short-term, and working memory. We figured out how combative humor, nurturing humor, and sexual humor work at a system level. Also, how resonances amplify laughter when we recall memories with old friends. We then applied Darwin’s “Theory of Opposites” and studied the evil laugh. By accident we discovered deaths from war and genocide have the same statistics as earthquakes. Unfortunately, these statistics predict 2 to 3 billion people will die this century. Description of the evil laugh is in Volume I. Statistical details are in Volume II.

About the Author

Finding your voice can be difficult. We know the exact moment we found ours. In Volume II, it is when we wrote, “Relax Sherlock” when discussing how Vilfredo Pareto became known as the father of fascism. Vilfredo Pareto’s big mistake is he wanted to end war by amplifying conflict with more conflict to keep those in power, in power. We became a different person after our “Relax Sherlock” moment. Hopefully this book helps you discover your voice.

Now the obligatory paragraph that the author has some level of intelligence. We have a PhD in physics from Cornell. Between 2001 and 2020 we were technical lead on image sensor projects that have brought in over $1 billion in sales. We have over 30 patents, some of which are in cell phone cameras today. Besides Wichita and Ithaca, we’ve lived in Los Angeles, Los Alamos, Clemson, Houston, and Rochester NY. We had the honor of working with John Bardeen, inventor of the transistor. One of his last papers starts with our name (Physical Review Letters 64, 2297, May 1990). In that paper Bardeen recalculates a scaling argument we made to explain a large data set. In Volume II of this book we will use similar scaling arguments to explain an even larger data set, war and genocide.

Finally, first semester in college we were assigned to write about what the east and west coasts thought about Kansas and fly over country. During that exercise we realized our father was a chemistry professor from Omaha and our mother a farm girl from Paxico with a nickname. That literally makes us the love child of the Wizard of Oz and the Wicked Witch of the West. Since that assignment we sign all our hobby projects Ozmioz.