Chapter 6: Silence Is Funny
The squirrel has committed.
You can see it in the tail — which is the only part of the squirrel still visible. The rest of the animal has gone headfirst into a hole in an old tree in a park in Ravenna, Italy: head, body, front legs, all of it swallowed by the hollow in one clean, purposeful motion. But Milko Marchetti's camera has caught the precise instant before the rest follows. The back legs are still out. The tail is extended horizontally in the air, perfectly level, perpendicular to the trunk, as though the squirrel has plunged through a water surface and been stopped halfway by some invisible mechanism. White flowers bloom on the branches around it. The squirrel, from what can be seen of it, is not moving.
It looks, in every way that matters, stuck.
It was not stuck. Marchetti had been coming to this park for years, watching the red squirrels that used this hollow as a den. He knew their routines. He knew the geometry of their dives. He was lying in the grass, waiting, and when the moment came, he had his shutter. The squirrel disappeared cleanly inside a split second after this photograph and ran off to do whatever squirrels do. The photograph shows none of that. The photograph shows a tail and two back legs and a blank expression of physics-induced dignity failure, surrounded by white flowers, held perfectly still.
At photography seminars, Marchetti has reported, this image produces laughter within seconds of being displayed — across audiences of different nationalities, in rooms where not everyone shares a language.
Why?
No caption has been offered. No thesis has arrived. The squirrel just got in a tree hole in a way that looked like it didn't.
Here is what the brain is doing when that image lands.
Every serious account of why things are funny — and there have been more of these than you might imagine, from Kant to contemporary cognitive scientists, with the philosophers presumably having a better time than their subject matter normally allows — converges on a single core mechanism: the violation of expectation. Kant called it "the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing." Schopenhauer, who had more fun with most things than Kant did, refined it slightly: "the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it." Contemporary psychologist Peter McGraw updated both formulations into what he calls Benign Violation Theory: a situation is funny when it is simultaneously a violation — of expectation, norm, or physical law — and benign, meaning safe or distant enough that the violation doesn't register as an actual threat. All three conditions need to be active at once. The violation without the benign is just alarming. The benign without the violation is just pleasant. Both together, at the same moment, in the right proportion: funny.
What is useful about all of these formulations for our purposes is that none of them require language. The violation they describe is a violation of a pattern the mind holds, and the mind holds patterns about visual things — about how bodies move, about the relationship between predators and prey, about the physics of objects in space — long before it holds patterns about sentences. The cognitive shift that produces laughter is triggered by perceiving something wrong, before any linguistic processing begins. The mechanism is architecturally visual.
In 2007, a team of neuroscientists led by K.K. Watson ran an fMRI study that had a simple design and a result that surprised everyone, including the researchers. They showed subjects two kinds of funny things — sight gags and verbal jokes — and watched what lit up. The assumption going in was that there would be a single "humor circuit": different inputs, common destination. What they found was two distinct networks. Sight gags activated high-level visual areas — the extrastriate cortex and regions beyond it, the same regions that process complex visual information. Verbal jokes activated classic language areas: Broca's area, the left temporal regions, the architecture of words. The routes were separate. The brain did not process a funny picture the way it processed a funny sentence, then combine them at a shared punchline. It ran different operations, on different hardware.
The final signal converged. Both pathways end up lighting the same reward system: the nucleus accumbens, that deep bright region that fires for food and music and a friend's face across a crowded room. The same endorphin spike, the same brief relief. But they arrived by entirely different roads, and one of those roads — the visual one — is older. More distributed. Less dependent on the accumulated conventions of any particular language or culture. The brain has been reading physical incongruity for longer than it has been reading sentences, because it has been a brain for longer than it has lived among sentences.
This is why the squirrel's tail is funny before you think about it. The cognitive shift that produces laughter happens in the visual system, before language gets involved. Your eye resolves the wrongness of the image — the tail where a tail should not be, the laws of physics apparently suspended, a creature of obvious intention caught in an act of apparent helplessness — and the reward fires. No words needed. No cultural footnote. No prior experience of Italy, squirrels, or wildlife photography required. You just need to know what a tail is supposed to do. Which is something your nervous system has had considerably longer than your vocabulary to figure out.
There is one more piece of the mechanism worth naming, because it explains something that seems paradoxical: how a still image can be funny. Verbal humor unfolds in time. Setup first, punchline second; the joke lives in the sequence. A still image presents both simultaneously. How does it have timing?
The answer is: the timing is spatial, not temporal. The viewer's eye scans the image, constructs the setup from context — this is a tree, these are flowers, this is an animal whose body language says entered hole with confidence — and arrives at the incongruity through gaze movement rather than through elapsed seconds. The punchline is built into the frame; the viewer supplies the timing by looking. Film theorist Noël Carroll called this compression the defining property of visual comedy: unlike verbal jokes, sight gags can present the setup and the violation at the same instant, relying on the viewer's perceptual recognition to deliver the shock. The decisive moment, as Henri Cartier-Bresson called it — the instant when geometry surprises — is not an aesthetic concept. It is a description of where the joke lives. The photographer's job is to freeze that specific interval, the one that contains everything wrong, and let the viewer's eye do the rest.
This is a book full of chapters that had to negotiate translation. Punchlines that got lost crossing borders. Insults that landed in the wrong register. Taboos that were funny in one village and incomprehensible in the next. Language does this. Language is a local agreement, and when you cross into territory that doesn't share the agreement, the joke dissolves.
This chapter is about what happens when you take language out of the room entirely.
The answer — and this is not a spoiler, it's a promise — is that quite a lot of the joke remains.
Before we get to the squirrel's contemporaries, we have to go see the ape-knight.
In the early 1960s, an art historian named Lilian M.C. Randall sat down with a problem that her field had been politely ignoring for generations. The margins of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century illuminated manuscripts — the decorative borders of prayer books, psalm books, law books, the physical edges of some of the most solemn objects medieval culture produced — were full of knights fighting snails. Not one knight. Not in one manuscript. She counted: seventy examples, across twenty-nine different books. The motif crossed national boundaries. It clustered between roughly 1290 and 1310. In dozens of the images, the knight — in full armor, sword drawn or lance leveled — was losing. Not just being challenged. Losing. To a snail.
Randall's 1962 article in Speculum was the first time anyone had taken these images seriously enough to count them, map them, and ask what they were doing there. The act of counting changed everything. What had been dismissed as the idle doodlings of bored scribes turned out to be a structured tradition of visual commentary, apparently popular enough that twenty-nine different patrons in a dozen years had commissioned their own version. Someone in 1290 drew a joke about a knight and a snail. They expected it to be understood. Nearly a thousand years later, Randall counted, and confirmed that it had been — repeatedly, by readers spread across what is now France, England, Belgium, and the Netherlands, all of whom apparently found this funny enough to want their own copy.
The margins, it turned out, had been paying attention the whole time.
The Rutland Psalter's version is the one to start with, if only because it commits so completely to the bit.
The Rutland Psalter is a prayer book now housed in the British Library (Add MS 62925), made around 1260, and it contains what is probably the earliest surviving example of the snail-combat joke. The "knight" is not a human being. He is a hybrid ape-man — a creature with a man's body and an ape's features, which is its own category of statement about martial dignity. He is not mounted on a warhorse; he is mounted on a dog. His lance is not a lance: it is a spindle, the long wooden tool women used for hand-spinning fiber into thread. He has leveled this spindle, this implement of domestic textile production, in the direction of his opponent. His opponent is a garden snail.
The snail is painted with careful detail. You can see the spiral of its shell, the slight extension of its body as it moves. It is facing its assailant with what the visual record suggests is complete indifference — no acceleration, no apparent alarm, no concession that the situation in which it finds itself carries any urgency whatsoever.
Consider every element individually. The ape-man: wrong species for the role. The dog: wrong animal for a warhorse. The spindle: wrong weapon on two counts, both the wrong object and the wrong gender's object. The snail: wrong opponent, wrong scale, wrong speed, wrong everything. There is not a single correct element in this tableau. The ape-knight does not represent any individual social failure; he represents the comprehensive, systematic collapse of the entire category of knightly combat.
A nineteenth-century French medievalist named Auguste de Bastard d'Estang looked at a version of the snail-knight image positioned near a miniature of the Raising of Lazarus and arrived at a different conclusion: the snail, he proposed, symbolized the Resurrection. The snail emerges from its shell as Christ emerged from the tomb. It was an elegant argument. It was, as Lilian Randall's count later demonstrated, entirely wrong. The snail appeared in secular manuscripts, in legal texts, in contexts with no possible resurrection symbolism. De Bastard had found the snail next to Lazarus, decided this was meaningful, and built a theory on what turned out to be coincidence of probability. The joke had been so popular that illuminators put it everywhere — which meant that, seven centuries later, you could find it next to anything. De Bastard found theology where there was merely abundance. The snail was just very funny.
The specific reading Randall proposed — that the snail represented the Lombards, a Germanic group notorious across Northern Europe for cowardice and usury — has itself been vigorously contested since. It doesn't matter for our purposes. What matters is the structure: a figure of power, fully equipped, comprehensively defeated by the lowest possible adversary. You don't need to know about Lombards or Lazarus to read that. You need to know what a knight is supposed to do and what a snail is supposed to do, and those pieces of information are available to the human eye without cultural mediation. The ape-knight has been funny for seven hundred and sixty years, and it will be funny for seven hundred and sixty more, because the gap between his equipment and his opponent is, as these things go, permanent.
Two folios into the Smithfield Decretals, the jokes get more elaborate.
The Smithfield Decretals is a law book — Pope Gregory IX's legal rulings with the scholarly commentary of Bernard of Parma. It is one of the most authoritative texts in medieval canon law. Across six consecutive folios, roughly in the middle of the manuscript, an anonymous London illuminator has inserted a complete criminal justice narrative in which the hunter becomes the hunted.
The sequence begins with a rabbit archer drawing a longbow and shooting a human hunter in the back. The hunter falls. Muscular rabbits — painted with what the scholarly record describes as "evident relish" — bind him and haul him before a rabbit judge seated at a proper tribunal. The court is in session. Procedure is followed. A verdict is rendered. The hunter is led away and beheaded. A parallel sequence substitutes a hunting hound for the hunter; the hound is hanged rather than beheaded, because the rabbits are observing the proper distinctions of medieval justice. Each species of collaborator in the hunt receives the appropriate penalty.
Elsewhere in the same manuscript: a "demonic rabbit baker" tends to his goods. A scholar who wrote about him noted this raised "ominous questions about his baked goods."
The joke is medium-specific in the best possible way. The rabbits are not merely reversing the food chain — they are parodying the very legal procedures the text above them is enunciating. A reader consulting the Decretals on ecclesiastical law would find, on the same physical page, both the law and its animal parody. The rabbits know the forms. They have done their procedural homework. They know that the hound gets hanged while the hunter gets beheaded, because hounds and hunters are different grades of accomplice and the law treats them accordingly. They are not running a kangaroo court. They are running the correct court, with the correct species in the dock.
Someone — a canon of a London priory, probably — commissioned this. A professional illuminator executed it with evident skill and evident delight. The humor was built into a book of binding ecclesiastical law in the 1340s and has survived every century since, which is what tends to happen when you make the joke in vellum.
The snail joke and the rabbit justice system represent two flavors of the same underlying gag: the hierarchy of the natural and social world, turned on its head. Both of them are funny before you know anything specific about the medieval world in which they were made, because both of them are built from materials the eye can read without preparation. You know what a knight is and what a snail is. You know what a rabbit is and what a judge is. The image does the rest.
Go back further: three thousand years, to a village on the west bank of the Nile.
Deir el-Medina was the settlement where the artisans who built and decorated the Valley of the Kings' royal tombs lived with their families. Literate, skilled, and apparently, in their spare time, very funny. The Turin Erotic-Satirical Papyrus (Papyrus Turin 55001, now in the Museo Egizio in Turin) is eight and a half feet of illustrated scroll, and its first third is devoted to what scholars have identified as a topsy-turvy world in which the natural order has been comprehensively overturned.
A cat herds geese. In the image, the predator has become the shepherd; the prey are the flock. A hippopotamus — the largest semi-aquatic megafauna in Africa, an animal that in life spends its time in rivers and marshes — is sitting in a fruit tree. A lion and a gazelle are playing a board game together. Mice besiege a cat fortress with full siege equipment: scaling ladders, a siege tower, possibly a battering ram. Cats wait on a mouse dressed in the manner of the nobility.
Eight and a half feet. Every image is a variation on the same punchline: the powerful serve the powerless. The hunters are hunted. The rulers are ruled. Scholars have read this as social satire directed at the royal court — and it probably was — but the political reading is optional. The image of a lion and a gazelle sharing a board game is funny before you know anything about 20th Dynasty Egyptian court politics. The gazelle sitting across the board from the creature that would normally eat it is funny on the same principle as the ape-knight with the spindle-lance: wrong scale, wrong relationship, wrong everything. The joke structure is the constant. The specific creatures and the specific grievances against specific elites change around it.
Someone in a village of tomb-builders in 1150 BC was drawing the same joke as the illuminator in London in 1260. The predators serve the prey. The powerful are ridiculous. An ape-man charges a snail with a woman's weaving tool. A mouse dresses as the nobility. These are the same joke, three thousand years apart, because the joke is not cultural. It is structural. It is the gap between what a thing is supposed to be and what it is doing, rendered visible.
And a photographer lying in the grass in Ravenna in 2024, waiting for the exact moment when a squirrel would look, for the duration of one camera shutter, as though it had gotten stuck in its own front door — that photographer was working in the same tradition. Same gap, different species. Same punchline, different millennium. The snail faced the ape-knight with complete indifference. The squirrel's tail stuck straight out in the air, perfectly horizontal, surrounded by white flowers, and waited for the rest of the animal to catch up.
Now: a stork.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Procter & Gamble was trying to sell Pampers disposable diapers in Japan. They used, for the Japanese market, the same campaign that had worked well in the United States: a cartoon stork, cheerfully delivering diapers. The stork was warmly rendered, visually competent, and entirely harmless. By 1983, domestic competitors — Uni-Charm and others — had nearly driven Pampers from the market entirely.
The stork carries no birth symbolism in Japan. There is a traditional Japanese story about the origin of children, and it involves a giant peach floating down a river. The folk hero Momotaro, the Peach Boy, emerges from the fruit. The stork is simply a wild bird. Japanese consumers were not offended by the stork in the diaper advertisement. They were confused by it. A bird was carrying a diaper. There was presumably a reason for this. The reason was not apparent.
The stork's charm, in the North American context, is entirely dependent on prior knowledge: you find it endearing because you already know it's supposed to be delivering a baby. Without that layer, the endearment has nowhere to attach. Without the folklore, the stork is just a bird carrying a diaper. It is not funny. It is not offensive. It is simply a bird, holding something, for reasons that the image declines to explain.
This is the distinction the chapter needs to make precise, because without it the argument goes sloppy. The ape-knight with the spindle-lance has been funny across seven centuries of religious, political, and linguistic upheaval because it does not ask you to know anything cultural. It asks you to know that soldiers do not typically charge garden snails, that lances are not spindles, that dogs are not warhorses — and those are things the eye resolves from the image itself, before any cultural knowledge is required. The hippo in the fruit tree is funny because hippos are not in fruit trees; this is structural, not folkloric. The lion and the gazelle playing a board game is funny because lions eat gazelles; no annotation required.
The stork fails because the stork's entire meaning lives outside the image. The stork only signifies birth if you already carry the tradition that says storks signify birth. Bring the tradition and the image springs to life. Don't bring it — if you grew up with the story of the giant peach, if you are one of the Japanese consumers P&G was addressing — and the image is simply a bird, doing a mildly strange thing, with no explained motive.
The test is clean: does the image make you laugh before you read the label? The ape-knight: yes. The stuck squirrel: yes. The stork, outside the folkloric tradition it was designed for: no. This is not a defeat for the chapter's argument. It is the argument getting precise about its own edges, which is what arguments are supposed to do.
There is something worth lingering on about P&G's predicament, if only because it is so perfectly illustrative of what can go wrong when you assume your symbols travel. The stork was not a bad image. It was charming, professionally rendered, recognizable. In North America, it did exactly what it was supposed to do: activate a warm cultural memory, signal something about the gentleness of new babies arriving in a home, create positive emotional associations with the brand. It worked because its audience already carried the complete story and the image was a trigger for that story.
The problem is that triggers only work on the thing they were set to trigger. The stork in Japan was not a bad image. It was simply an inert one. It had no lever to pull. The tradition that gave it meaning — the Northern European folk motif of the stork as a deliverer of new life, which has its own murky origins in observed stork behavior and Teutonic mythology and centuries of accumulated repetition — simply did not exist in the minds of Japanese consumers. They looked at the image and saw a bird carrying a diaper, which is not charming. It is just odd.
P&G eventually figured this out, redesigned the packaging with imagery more appropriate to the Japanese cultural context, and recovered market share. The stork itself, as far as anyone can tell, was not consulted.
The lesson it points to is the one this chapter has been building toward: the jokes that travel, the images that have been funny in villages and cities and manuscripts and photography competitions across languages and centuries, are the ones that don't require you to bring anything the eye can't already see. The hippo is in the fruit tree. The cat is falling. The rolls are dancing. The hierarchy is upside down. No prior knowledge of the culture, the folklore, or the tradition required. The gap between what a thing is supposed to do and what it is doing is visible to anyone with eyes — and the brain, confronting that gap, does what it has been doing for longer than it has been doing anything else with jokes.
In 1922, a studio in Shanghai called Mingxing produced a film with the title Huaji Dawang You Hu — which translates, roughly, as "The King of Comedy Visits Shanghai." The King of Comedy in question was Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin had not visited Shanghai. He would not visit until 1936. The film was entirely fictional: a Chinese studio had watched a foreign comedian in silent films and found his physical persona so recognizable, so self-evidently legible without language, that they could premise an original domestic comedy on the fiction of his presence.
Twenty-nine Chaplin films had been released in China between 1919 and 1924. No spoken English had been involved. The Little Tramp — the bowler hat, the cane, the sideways walk, the absolute dignity of a man who has nothing and refuses to notice — had become a known cultural quantity in a city he'd never visited, through pantomime alone. The studio could invoke him in a title because the audience would understand the joke from the title alone. A wordless screen character had become a shared cultural fact across a language barrier that would have been, in any verbal medium, entirely impassable.
This is worth pausing on. In 1922, cinema had existed for about twenty-seven years. It had not yet found its voice — the first commercially successful sound film was still five years away. But it had already found, in the absence of its voice, something more portable: the visual language of physical comedy. The silent era was not a limitation that cinema was waiting to escape. It was, for the purposes of the joke, an accidental gift. Take out the words, and what you are left with is the body — and the body, as it turns out, speaks in something close to a common tongue.
No one spoke that tongue more fluently than a man from south London who had grown up performing in music halls, who had been on stage since childhood, who understood in his bones that the moment a body does something a body wasn't supposed to do, every eye in the room will follow.
Berlin, 1925.
The Gold Rush had its German premiere, and somewhere in the middle of the film, a thing happened that the theater manager apparently could not allow to end.
The setup: the Tramp has invited the dance-hall girl he loves to his cabin for New Year's Eve dinner. He has cooked. He has set the table. He has prepared everything. She does not come. She has forgotten, or perhaps she never intended to come; the film is kind enough not to specify. The Tramp sits alone at his table, at his holiday dinner, in his cabin, with his settings laid for guests who are not there.
And then he picks up two dinner rolls and puts them on forks.
What follows is perhaps ninety seconds of film, and it is worth dwelling on. The rolls go onto the forks, tines pointing down. The Tramp holds the forks so that the rolls hang below them, and he begins to move them — small, deliberate, precise movements, the forks becoming legs, the rolls becoming the feet of a tiny dancing body. He makes them step, these rolls. He makes them tap. He gives them a little hop, a little swing, a delicate crossing and uncrossing. The rolls perform a dance with more grace and specificity than dinner rolls have any business performing, because the hands that are moving them belonged to a man who had been practicing physical comedy since he was five years old in south London.
The Tramp's face, while the rolls dance, has an expression that can only be described as private tenderness. He is watching his own tiny performance with something that looks like genuine pleasure — not the mugging of a man who knows he has an audience, but the quiet satisfaction of someone doing something small and lovely for himself, in the presence of the dinner party that wasn't.
No word of English had been spoken. The intertitles had been translated. The physical gag required no translation whatsoever.
The audience reaction was so prolonged and so overwhelming that the theater manager left his office, ran to the projection booth, and told the projectionist: rewind it. Play the scene again.
It was played again. The audience applauded again.
Two dinner rolls on forks had made a Berlin audience demand an encore, in 1925, at a film made by an Englishman who was not present, in a language no one in the audience spoke natively.
Consider what the roll dance actually asks of its audience. It asks you to recognize a dinner roll, which is a very low bar. It asks you to register that a fork, positioned below a roll with its tines down, looks roughly like legs — which is the kind of visual pun that works because the human brain is constitutionally unable to look at two small parallel vertical things and not read them as legs. It asks you to note that the person performing this is doing so with tremendous care and skill, which creates a gentle incongruity of effort. A man spending this much attention on two rolls. The tenderness is the twist; the precision is the punchline.
And then: the emotional fact of it. The Tramp has set a table for guests who didn't come. The dinner-party-that-wasn't is a scene of quiet loneliness, and the roll dance is what he does instead of sitting in it. He improvises joy from kitchen implements. He makes something light out of the materials of abandonment. This is not slapstick. It is something more delicate — physical comedy in the service of emotional specificity, a man's private imaginative life rendered visible through the movement of bread.
A Berlin audience saw it, and would not let it end.
Charles Chaplin Jr. thought carefully about why this kept happening. His father's films had gone everywhere — Tokyo, Shanghai, Kobe, Sydney, everywhere there were movie theaters — and they kept getting the same response, and Chaplin Jr. wanted to know why. The usual explanation was emotional universalism: Chaplin was funny everywhere because everyone understood hunger and longing and the dignity of the poor. Which is a fine explanation as far as it goes, but it always felt, to Chaplin Jr., like it was explaining the content when the question was about the mechanism.
In his memoir, written in 1960, he offered a different account of Japan specifically. Japanese audiences, he argued, understood and loved his pantomime because it had "so much in common with the tradition of their own Kabuki theater." Not emotional universalism. Formal equivalence. Kabuki is a performance tradition built on physical precision, on stylized gesture, on the communication of character and feeling through the body rather than through spoken dialogue. A Kabuki audience has spent centuries developing the interpretive muscles required to read a body in motion as a story. Those muscles were exactly what Chaplin's work required. He didn't bypass Japanese culture. He plugged into it. The silence was the socket.
This sharpens the chapter's claim rather than weakening it. Visual comedy is portable in part because physical performance traditions are widespread — Kabuki, but also Kathakali in South India, kamishibai street theater in Japan, Roman pantomime, commedia dell'arte, mime traditions found on nearly every continent — and at the base of all of them is the same root claim: the body can tell a story. And the most fundamental stories the body tells are the ones that require the least prior knowledge. A body falling. A body surprised. A body performing with great dignity in circumstances that are actively undermining that dignity. A man's dinner rolls on forks, dancing.
When Paul Joynson-Hicks started laughing at his own photographs one afternoon in Usa River, Tanzania — a wildlife photographer who had lived in East Africa for thirty years, sitting at his desk on the slopes of Mount Meru — he wasn't thinking about brain networks or Chaplin or medieval marginalia. He was looking at an eagle he had photographed from directly underneath, the camera aimed upward, the bird framed peering through its own back legs. He was also looking at a close-up of a warthog's bottom. He found himself laughing out loud.
He called his friend Tom Sullam. He said: there should be a competition for this.
He did not say: there should be a competition for this because it would prove that embodied visual incongruity activates culturally portable neural reward circuits. He said it because an eagle was looking at him through its own back legs and this was clearly the funniest thing he had seen all week and someone else should be allowed to have this experience.
The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards launched in 2015 with a charitable partnership with Born Free, on the theory that humor was a more effective lever for engaging people with wildlife conservation than guilt or fear. This theory has held up. Animals photographed in attitudes of dignity failure generate more sustained attention from the public than animals photographed being majestic, and the explanation — beyond the straightforward observation that a regal eagle peering through its own back legs is funnier than a regal eagle being regal — probably has something to do with what humor does to the emotional relationship between viewer and subject. Guilt makes you look away. Laughter makes you lean in.
By 2025, the competition was receiving nearly ten thousand entries from a hundred and eight countries. Every year, the winners get covered by the global press — CNN, the BBC, NPR, newspapers in six languages — in the same week, with the same laughter. The captions are provided — the photographers write them, and some are quite good — but they are not necessary. The image is always the joke, and the image works everywhere.
What Joynson-Hicks built, without entirely meaning to, is a machine for producing cross-cultural evidence. Every entry is a test. Every winning image is a piece of data. Every year's global press cycle is a confirmation: this image, no translation required, made people in a hundred and eight countries laugh. The competition is, among other things, the largest ongoing natural experiment in visual humor universality on the planet. It started with a man alone in Tanzania, laughing at a bird framed by its own back legs, and the evidence has been accumulating ever since.
The 2022 winner, Jennifer Hadley's photograph "Not So Cat-Like Reflexes," is where this chapter began, and it is worth returning to it with full attention.
A three-month-old lion cub in the Serengeti has attempted, apparently for the first time, to climb down a tree on his own. Hadley's camera catches the moment when the attempt has completely failed.
He is mid-fall. Not gracefully mid-fall — not the fluid arc of a creature that has made a decision and is executing it. He is in free fall, and every part of his body is aware of this and is handling it in its own contradictory way. His front legs are extended outward and forward, as though reaching for a branch that isn't there, or possibly as though his front legs have made a unilateral decision to find the nearest solid surface and are conducting an independent search. His back legs are doing something different and incompatible, extended behind him at an angle suggesting his back legs have been separately notified of the falling and are registering separate protests. His face — and this is crucial — has not yet caught up. His face still carries the expression of a creature that had a plan. The plan is no longer operative. The expression hasn't gotten the memo.
Hadley said: "It didn't even occur to me that he would make a go of getting down by himself in the most un-cat-like fashion. I mean, how often do cats fall out of trees?"
He landed on all fours and ran off. Of course he did. He was a lion cub; they always land on all fours; this is probably the most reliable fact about lion cubs. But the photograph does not show him landing on all fours and running off. The photograph shows the exact interval between having a plan and gravity's response to it, and it is an interval of approximately three-quarters of a second that contains everything there is to say about the gap between intention and result.
The joke works in Tokyo and Nairobi and São Paulo and Berlin because it does not invoke any cultural knowledge. It invokes physics, and the eternal comedy of dignity failing, and the specific, irreducible hilarity of a cat — a cat, the very animal that gave us the phrase "cat-like reflexes" — falling out of a tree in the most un-cat-like fashion. These are not cultural facts. They are perceptual facts. The eye resolves them before the mind names them, and by the time the mind names them, the laugh is already there.
Jason Moore was lying in the grass outside Perth in 2023, in a field of yellow wildflowers, with biting ticks, waiting. He was a wildlife photographer; this was the job. He shot perhaps forty frames that morning before he got the one.
In it, a western grey kangaroo stands among the flowers, front limbs raised, wrists angled, body weight distributed in precisely the posture of a rock musician mid-riff. The limbs are positioned for a chord. The stance is pure performance. The yellow wildflowers behind him are an accidental stage.
The visual pun — and it is a visual pun, two simultaneous readings of the same image — requires no knowledge of kangaroos, Australian wildlife, or Perth to land. It requires only the knowledge of what a person playing air guitar looks like, and that is a piece of cultural knowledge so globally distributed by 2023 that it functions as close to a universal as pop culture produces. The kangaroo is not playing air guitar. The kangaroo is doing something entirely natural with its limbs. But one of those things contains the other, perfectly, and the brain cannot unsee it once it has been seen. Moore got one frame with the joke in it. One frame out of forty. Photography, like the snail joke, is about the moment when the setup and the punchline occupy the same space at the same time.
Arthur Trevino, 2021. American plains. A bald eagle — the national symbol, the apex avian predator, the creature on the Presidential Seal — makes a strike on a prairie dog.
The prairie dog does not flee. The prairie dog leaps directly toward the bird, body fully extended, in the posture of a martial arts assault. The eagle, startled, pulls back.
Two sentences, because two sentences are all you need. Predator flees prey. The rest is commentary — and the commentary has been the same in every culture and every century that has had predators and prey, which is all of them.
In 1808, the catalogers of the Harley Collection at what would become the British Library were working through a Book of Hours from around 1320. It had been made for a female owner in London. At some point in the early modern period, someone had cut out all the serious illuminated miniatures from the manuscript — the devotional images, the theological scenes, the content someone had decided they wanted to keep. What remained was the text and the marginal drolleries: fox preachers in clerical vestments addressing credulous birds, animal orchestras, cats and mice in combat, knights in states of humiliating submission to snails. The butt trumpets, if you know medieval marginalia, and you soon will. The whole inventory of medieval marginal absurdity, preserved by accident when the person who wanted the valuable miniatures took only those and left the jokes behind.
The catalogers' formal entry recorded the manuscript as containing "ludicrous figures in the margin."
Three words.
The Lombard symbolism, if Randall was right, was gone. The fox-preacher satirical tradition — the specific late medieval critique of preaching friars who spoke beautifully and lived badly, which is what the image was satirizing for a fourteenth-century reader — had dissolved completely. The theological comedy of animals playing instruments in the margins of a prayer book, which required knowing that animals playing instruments was a standard trope for the world-turned-upside-down, a visual idiom for chaos given an orderly surface — that layer was entirely inaccessible. The cultural context for every specific joke had been eroded by six centuries of religious, linguistic, and social change.
What the 1808 catalogers encountered was not the jokes these images had originally told. It was the structure underneath the jokes. Disproportionate combatants. Upended hierarchies. Creatures doing what they shouldn't do. A knight losing to a snail. A fox in a pulpit. Whatever that animal is doing with that trumpet. The specific political and theological commentary was gone. The visual incongruity was still there, still firing, still prompting the same instinct to call these figures ludicrous, which is a nineteenth-century British civil servant's word for funny.
The laughter had survived a complete cultural rupture. Not because the original cultural meaning had survived — it hadn't — but because the visual structure of the jokes was older than the culture that produced them. The images had been funny for reasons that preceded their own specific context. When the context eroded, the reason remained.
The eye didn't need the explanation. Six centuries of elapsed time, religious revolution, and complete linguistic transformation later, the eye still doesn't.
And that, of course, is only the visual system. Only the jokes that live in what the body sees — in scale, posture, physics, the gap between biological destiny and biological reality. We have covered the brain's visual humor hardware, the stuff that runs before language arrives, the ancient circuitry that decided a long time ago that a cat falling out of a tree was worth a laugh.
But the brain has other resources. It has language, yes, which we've visited at length. It has the dark material — the humor that lives at the edge of what's acceptable, the places where laughter and danger share a border. And it has something stranger still, something that doesn't quite fit any of the categories we've explored: the kind of humor that seems to exist for no reason at all, that follows no evolutionary logic, that serves no social function anyone has satisfactorily explained, that simply appears in the mind and demands to be laughed at.
The jokes that don't make sense. Which is to say: the jokes that make the most sense of all.