Humor and Explanation

Notoriously, explaining jokes is a grim business--in the words of E.B. White, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” In this talk I try to explain why explanations have this effect on jokes, with the broader goal of shedding some light on the nature of explanations and humor.