Recognising Eight Funny Patterns: According to evolutionary theorist Alastair Clarke there are only eight types of joke, eight patterns of humour that exist across all cultures regardless of creed, race, or personal taste, from the earliest souk to the Broadway stage. [...]
The patterns are positive repetition, division, completion, translation, applicative and qualitative recontextualization, opposition and scale.
“The eight patterns divide into two main categories,” explains Clarke, “The first four are patterns of fidelity, by which we recognize the repetition of units within the same context, and the second four are patterns of magnitude, by which we recognize the same unit repeated in multiple contexts.”
