CIS Working Paper Series

COMPUTER-ORIENTED HUMOR (COHUM): "I GET IT."

All humor is to some extent cultural and, perhaps to that same extent, humor serves to define, explain and enhance our understanding of a particular culture. The computer industry, now over 50 years old, is a mature culture characterized by industriousness, creativity, energy, bureaucracy and wit. The computer itself has lately become something of a cultural icon or signpost. Yet the computer industry has always seemed to breed its own special brand of humor - intelligent, somewhat superior, slyly subversive - even from its very earliest days.

The purpose of the current paper is to explore computer-oriented humor (COHUM), to provide an overview, a framework, and a comprehensive categorization, and to place COHUM in the context of the much broader study of humor. COHUM is found to be related to culture-specific humor, in-group humor, and I-get-it humor. I-get-it humor is presented as a category of humor that includes elements of both culture-specific humor and in-group humor, and that may be characterized as eliciting an audience response of "I get it."

Several broad categories of COHUM are presented with representative examples. Examples are also presented of various types of COHUM, e.g., anecdote, riddle, fable, parable, and magic trick. The authors conclude that context - what the audience brings to the comedic experience - is as important as the content of the humor itself.


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