Studying Jokes

With the premise that books about humor aren't funny, Tim Lewens reviews the latest one, Inside Jokes, whose thesis is that "we find things funny when our expectations are overturned":

Wordplay is amusing because the lead line encourages one understanding of a term, while the punchline shows that we should have had a different meaning in mind. Some of the earliest humour experienced by children can be induced by deliberately singing the wrong words of nursery rhymes that they know well. Conceptually richer humour often involves brief vignettes that invite one understanding of a situation, only to make clear that a very different one was intended all along. One of the few funny jokes mentioned in this book, which we owe to Bob Monkhouse, is of this kind: "I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my father. Not screaming and terrified like his passengers".