Chapter 7 — Spam Spam Spam
The menu is not encouraging.
Mrs. Bun would like eggs, bacon, spam, and sausage. Or perhaps eggs, bacon, spam, and spam. The waitress, whose name we never learn, has a clear grasp of the situation: the menu offers spam. Every item on the menu features spam. Some items are mostly spam with structural elements to keep it from being entirely spam. Mrs. Bun's husband, whose requirements are if anything simpler than his wife's — he would like no spam, please, just eggs, bacon, and sausage — is told that doesn't come without spam. You can have it without bacon, or without egg, but not without spam.
It is 1970. The café is in England. Or rather: it is a television café, shot on video with the slightly melted look of BBC broadcast equipment, the walls roughly the color of old custard. Mrs. Bun and her husband (played by Eric Idle and Graham Chapman, respectively, in wigs and housewife drag that no one was meant to find flattering) are trying to order breakfast.
At the table behind them, a group of Vikings — helmeted, braided, magnificently costumed in ways that suggest someone raided the BBC's Scandinavian drama department on a Tuesday afternoon — have opinions about this. Their opinion is spam. Their opinion is sung. They begin, at first, with a modest consensus: Spam, spam, spam, spam. But this is merely the opening position. They escalate. Spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam. The word fills the café. Mrs. Bun, attempting to continue her conversation with the waitress, finds she cannot be heard. The word fills the room. Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam. It fills the sketch. It fills the air. It fills, temporarily, the entire perceptual universe.
A historian enters. He is wearing the blazer and tie of someone who explains things professionally. He is going to explain what's going on.
He does not get to finish.
The Vikings are still chanting.
There are a lot of ways to watch this sketch, and most of them involve knowing that it aired in February 1970 in the United Kingdom, on BBC One, as part of the seventh episode of the first series of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and that the writers were six Oxbridge-educated men who had collectively decided, sometime in the late 1960s, that a certain kind of English institutional comedy — the kind that escalated logic to its conclusion and then kept going — was worth doing on television. You could describe the sketch as a satire of postwar rationing, since Spam, the canned pork product manufactured by Hormel Foods of Austin, Minnesota, was a wartime staple in Britain, durable and cheap and not quite food. You could discuss it in terms of the Theatre of the Absurd, the line of theatrical descent running from Ionesco and Beckett through the Cambridge Footlights revues that three of the Pythons attended. You could write a thesis, and many people have.
Or you can just sit in the café.
Because here is the thing: fifty-five years after the sketch aired, the word "spam" — that specific word, taken from that specific canned pork product, which itself took its name from a portmanteau of "spiced ham" — is the English-language internet's word for unwanted repetitive noise. For the overwhelming flood of identical messages that drowns out everything else. For the thing that, once it starts, you cannot stop hearing. The punchline of the sketch arrived twenty years after the sketch, when Usenet and early email administrators, looking for a word to describe the phenomenon of messages repeated until they destroyed the signal, reached for the Python sketch. Every person who has ever deleted a spam email — which is, by current estimates, more than half the human species — has understood the punchline without having seen the setup. The joke never resolved. The Vikings are still chanting.
This is either the most perfect thing that has ever happened in the history of comedy, or it is a coincidence so good that it functions as perfection anyway. I've been going back and forth on this.
What I am prepared to say is: you just read a setup and a punchline. The punchline arrived three paragraphs after the setup, and if you have read the prologue to this book, you know exactly what just happened. The same click. The same thing.
Here is the question the rest of this chapter answers. Not "why is the Spam sketch funny" — that's a question about cultural history, about postwar Britain, about Hormel Foods and the BBC prop department and the specific comedic sensibility of six men who had gone to university in the 1960s. That's a good question, but it's not the one I'm after.
The question is: why is the Spam sketch funny to people who have never heard of Hormel Foods? To people who have no postwar British rationing context? To the Spanish teenagers who first encountered it on YouTube? To the Japanese audiences who embraced Monty Python's visual absurdism decades before the Fliegender Zirkus failure I'm about to describe? To everyone, everywhere, who has watched a word repeat until it loses all meaning and felt, in the losing, something recognizable?
Why does a joke that doesn't resolve feel, in the not-resolving, like something that was supposed to happen?
That is the question. The answer has been the whole book.
The Machine in the Brain
There is a woman in London named Sarah Blakemore who built a device whose entire purpose is to demonstrate that you cannot tickle yourself.
You already knew you couldn't tickle yourself, and you may have wondered why, and Blakemore's device is the answer. She was working with Daniel Wolpert and Chris Frith at University College London in the late 1990s, and the device she built was simple: a button that, when pressed, caused a foam pad to stroke the participant's palm. The button could be configured to activate the foam pad immediately, or with a delay of up to two seconds. When the pad arrived instantly, participants felt almost nothing. After a two-second delay, they felt genuinely tickled. The result was precise and slightly vertiginous: time, not touch, was the difference.
Here is why. The cerebellum — a dense, crumpled structure at the back of the brain that you could hold in your hand if you were professionally authorized to handle brains — issues constant predictions about what the body is about to feel. When the prediction matches the sensation exactly, the cerebellum actively dampens the somatosensory cortex's response. The sensation is real but neurologically muted. You pressed the button; you knew the foam was coming; the sensation arrives exactly as predicted; your brain says, essentially, that's us, nothing to note. But a two-second delay is long enough that the prediction misses. The foam arrives at a moment the cerebellum didn't expect. The brain reclassifies it as external — as coming from the world rather than from yourself. Something happened that wasn't quite predicted. And the body responds.
The cerebellum, in this framing, is a self/other boundary detector. Blakemore could redraw that boundary in real time, by adjusting a delay.
This matters for what we're doing here because absurdist humor works on a parallel mechanism. Something was predicted — the joke was going somewhere, the sentence was going to mean something, the menu was going to offer options — and the prediction was refused. The brain is in the middle of building an expectation when the expectation is simply not honored. Not subverted in a way that reveals a hidden logic. Not resolved. Just not honored. And the body, which was waiting for the foam pad to arrive, has been handed something unscheduled. It responds involuntarily. The laugh is the body's report that something happened that wasn't in the prediction.
This is the first piece of the mechanism: the laughter is not the resolution. The laughter is the recognition that there is no resolution coming. And that recognition was the point.
The neuroscientists have a name for it. A 2017 fMRI study by Dai, Chen, and colleagues at the National Taiwan Normal University scanned participants while they read three kinds of text: normal sentences, incongruity-resolution jokes (setup, punchline, the gap closed), and absurdist jokes (setup, gap, gap stays open). What the study found was not that absurdist humor fails to activate the humor circuitry. It activates a different branch of it. Standard jokes light up the regions associated with perspective-taking and memory retrieval — the machinery of getting it, of finding the hidden logic. Absurdist jokes light up the inferior frontal gyrus and, critically, the superior temporal gyrus — the region governing pragmatic awareness, the brain's sense of communicative intent. What the brain achieves with an absurdist joke is what Dai et al. called "pseudo-resolution": it cannot close the gap logically, but it recognizes the gap as deliberately opened. Someone opened this gap on purpose. This was an attempt to amuse. That recognition — the registering of intent rather than logic — is sufficient.
The humor lives not in the answer. It lives in the recognition that there is no answer, and that this was the point, and that we are therefore in the domain of play.
Peter McGraw's benign violation theory, which we've visited before, includes "logic norms — absurdities, non-sequiturs" explicitly in its catalog of violations that can be rendered funny. A non-sequitur threatens the cognitive expectation that cause follows effect, that categories are stable, that a question has an answer. The expectation is violated. And it is rendered benign not by resolving the violation but by psychological distance — the audience recognizes the violation as unreal, game-like, performative. No harm follows from the Vikings chanting spam. The world has not actually broken down. The menu will not actually offer no alternatives forever. The historian will, eventually, finish his explanation. Probably. The violation is genuine. The threat is absent. And in that gap between genuine and absent, in the space where something is wrong but nothing is at stake, the laugh lives.
An evolutionary corollary from McGraw and Warren, which I think is the most interesting sentence in the benign violation literature: "As humans evolved to develop a sense of self, culture, language, and a system of logic, violations likely expanded to include threats to logic norms." Only a creature sufficiently invested in coherence can find incoherence funny. You cannot violate a norm you do not hold. The capacity for absurdist humor is not a philosophical sophistication acquired through reading Camus. It is evidence that you take logic seriously enough to notice when it has been abandoned. It is evidence of the very cognitive architecture it is laughing at.
The Vikings are funny only to creatures who expect things to stop.
Old Nonsense
In or around the year 1305, someone in England — we do not know who, we will never know who — wrote a 188-line poem in Middle English describing a land where food was architecture.
The Land of Cockaigne is one of the oldest surviving English poems in what scholars call the mundus inversus tradition, the world upside down. In Cockaigne, the houses are built of fish and meat. Pigs walk about pre-roasted, with carving knives inserted into their sides to make slicing convenient. Rivers run with oil and honey. Geese arrive at table self-seasoned, turning themselves on spits as a courtesy. Every scarcity of medieval peasant life is systematically inverted, not randomly but with the rigorous application of inversion logic — the poem is not chaos, it is exact mirror-image order. Everything that is scarce becomes abundant. Everything that requires labor arrives ready. The joke is the system, the perfect application of a single rule until the rule has covered everything.
This is not Monty Python. This is a poem written more than six hundred years before Monty Python. But it shares something structural: the humor is in the refusal to stop. In the full application of an absurd premise without apology or qualification. The pigs keep walking. The knives stay in the sides. The system, once established, runs.
Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian critic who spent much of his career thinking about medieval carnival — the sanctioned inversions of normal order, the licensed upending of hierarchy — argued that the mundus inversus tradition was always at least partially about the rigid categories of medieval social life. The joke, in this reading, is that the categories are revealed as contingent. It is always possible to imagine a world that runs differently. Imagining it together, collectively, in the form of a poem or a festival, was a way of briefly acknowledging that the order was constructed, not inevitable, and of laughing at the gap between the constructed and the felt-as-inevitable.
A century before Cockaigne was written, Nasreddin Hodja — a Turkish folk sage whose stories began accumulating from at least the thirteenth century and who may have been a real person named Nasreddin of Akşehir who died around 1284 — was telling a story about a man looking for his key.
He lost the key inside his house. He is searching for it in the street, under the streetlamp.
His neighbor, puzzled: "Why are you looking out here? You lost it inside."
Hodja: "The light is better here."
The story has become, since its rehabilitation in the twentieth century, a standard illustration of a cognitive bias — the "streetlight effect," the tendency to search for answers where the tools are available rather than where the answer is. It has been cited in psychology papers. It did scientific work for several decades before people noticed that it was a thousand-year-old Turkish joke about a man who is wrong and is not going to stop being wrong.
The key is not under the streetlamp. It is not going to be under the streetlamp. Hodja is not going to stop looking there. There is no answer coming. The gap between where the key is and where the search is happening is not going to close. And the joke is funny — has been funny across the entire former Ottoman world, across Persia, across Central Asia, in twenty or thirty different versions under names including Nasreddin Afandi and Mulla Nasreddin — because the gap is recognizable. Because the gap is not exotic. Because every person who has ever searched for something in the wrong place for the wrong reason, with the serenity of someone doing something sensible, recognizes the man under the streetlamp.
The jokes don't resolve. The light is still better there. The pigs are still pre-roasted. The Vikings are still chanting.
Now: Russia, 1937, near the end of what was genuinely one of the more terrifying decades in recorded history.
Daniil Kharms was a writer, a member of the OBERIU group — the Association for Real Art, a collective of avant-garde Russian poets and performers who had been active since the late 1920s, producing performances and texts that the Soviet authorities found, correctly, to be resistant to ideological interpretation. The OBERIU had been suppressed in 1930. Kharms kept writing. He had been arrested before and would be arrested again. He was writing in a country where official reality was systematically, compulsively, and violently falsified — where newspapers reported facts that had not occurred, where speeches praised conditions that did not exist, where the gap between official meaning and actual experience was so wide that to inhabit it was itself a kind of madness.
In this context, Kharms wrote what is probably the purest piece of literary nonsense in the Russian language.
"Blue Notebook No. 10":
There was a red-haired man who had no eyes or ears. He didn't have hair either, so he was called red-haired theoretically. He couldn't talk, since he didn't have a mouth. He had no nose either. He didn't even have arms or legs. He had no stomach and he had no back and he had no spine and he had no innards whatsoever. He had nothing at all! So there's no knowing whom we are even talking about. In fact it's better that we don't say any more about him.
The joke is entirely in the logical structure. We establish a subject — a red-haired man — and then proceed to remove every attribute that constituted the subject. The hair. Then the eyes. The ears. The mouth. The nose. The limbs. The internal organs. Each removal is performed with the calm of someone making a reasonable correction. By the time we reach he had nothing at all, the subject has been definitionally eliminated: there is no one here to talk about. The piece ends by noting that it is better to stop, which is the only reasonable response to a subject who does not exist.
The punchline negates itself. The joke is about its own impossibility. And it is funny — has been translated into more than twenty languages, has been read and laughed at by people with no knowledge of the OBERIU or the Soviet terror, and is funny before you know any of that context — because the structure is pure. The logic is applied until the logic destroys what it was applied to, and the result is the most Cartesian joke ever written: I think, therefore I am; I have no attributes, therefore I am not; in fact, let's drop it.
Kharms died in February 1942, of starvation, during the Siege of Leningrad. He had been arrested by the NKVD in August 1941 and was in custody in a Leningrad prison hospital when the siege began. The official records classified his cause of death as "exhaustion from dystrophy." He was thirty-six years old.
In a world where official language had become systematically false, Kharms had chosen nonsense as a form of honesty. Not the nonsense of someone who doesn't know better. The nonsense of someone who knows that official meaning is a lie, and that the most truthful register available is the one that doesn't pretend to mean anything at all. His punchlines don't resolve because in Leningrad in 1937, the resolving punchlines were the ones the authorities were writing.
Now, ten thousand miles west and three hundred years earlier, in Bengal.
Sukumar Ray was a writer, illustrator, and printer who published Abol Tabol — which means something like "gibberish" or "topsy-turvy talk" — in 1923. He wrote it while dying of a tropical illness, at the age of thirty-five. Abol Tabol is a collection of nonsense verse, illustrated with Ray's own drawings, featuring impossible hybrid creatures, logical paradoxes, and commands that cannot be obeyed. One such creature — the Hukum-Hukum — issues simultaneous and contradictory commands. Do this. Don't do this. Do both. Do neither. The humor is in the perfect impossibility of compliance: the commands are grammatically precise, bureaucratically formal, and utterly irreconcilable. You cannot obey the Hukum-Hukum. The Hukum-Hukum does not care. The commands keep coming. The syntax is coherent. The semantics are not. Ray's language plays with sound in Bengali the way Lewis Carroll played with sound in English — words that mean nothing but feel like they should mean something, phonetic shapes that carry weight without carrying content.
Ray was the father of Satyajit Ray, the filmmaker, who spent decades translating his father's work and writing about its untranslatability into English. The specific pleasures of Bengali nonsense phonetics do not cross the language border intact. But the structure — the impossible creature, the command that cannot be obeyed, the premise applied to its own destruction — does. Abol Tabol has been read in Bengali continuously for a century. Its non-Bengali admirers can get the shape of it through translations, and the shape is recognizable.
Kharms was writing in Leningrad. Ray was writing in Calcutta. Both were writing in the same decade. Neither knew the other existed. Both had separately reached for the same form — the systematic application of impossible logic until the logic consumed itself — as a way of dealing with reality's inadequacy. Kharms in a state where official meaning was violent. Ray in a colonial administrative apparatus that applied impossible categories to a world that exceeded them. Two absurdist traditions, independently discovered, on opposite ends of Eurasia, within a decade of each other.
Something keeps being discovered.
The Comedy That Doesn't Close
We should talk about Japan, because Japan is the complication that sharpens the argument rather than breaking it.
Manzai is a two-performer comedy tradition with roots in Heian-era ritual that had by the Taisho period become secularized, and by the postwar period had become one of the dominant forms of Japanese comedy on television. Its structure is precise: one performer, the boke, introduces logically incongruous statements. The other performer, the tsukkomi, restores order through sharp retort — verbal correction, and in traditional forms a physical strike. A scholar of Japanese comedy named Tsutsumi has catalogued seven types of tsukkomi response: negation, echo, silence, correction, derivation, metaphor, negative reflection. The boke's incongruity is introduced not as an end in itself but as a problem to be solved. The tsukkomi solves it. Incongruity is introduced so that it can be corrected.
This is the opposite of Kharms. This is the opposite of Hodja. This is the opposite of the Spam sketch.
In manzai, the gap is not the destination. It is the setup. The gap is opened specifically so that it can be closed. The humor lives in the closing, in the tsukkomi's restoration of rational order, in the satisfaction of the rule being reasserted after its violation. The form institutionalizes resolution the way Western absurdism refuses it.
But here is what this tells us, and it is the chapter's most useful piece of evidence: the raw material is the same. The gap — the incongruity, the logical violation, the statement that shouldn't cohere — is the raw material of both traditions. What the traditions do with it differs. Japanese manzai closes the gap. Western absurdism sits in it. Medieval Cockaigne maps it. Nasreddin Hodja stands under the streetlamp in it indefinitely. But all of them require the gap. All of them are built on the same floor: the cognitive expectation of coherence, and the pleasure available in that expectation's relationship to the actual world.
The floor is the same floor. The buildings look different.
The Flop and Its Evidence
In 1971, flush from an award at the Montreux Television Festival, the Monty Python group received a commission from West German broadcaster WDR for two television specials. They would perform in German. Alfred Biolek produced. The Pythons learned their lines phonetically, from transliteration cards, in the way people learn lines in a language they do not speak.
The ARD audience opinion survey for Episode 1 came back at 51% favorable. This is, for a well-publicized special from internationally celebrated comedians, a number that means something. Biolek described it as "an absolute flop." The German press found the show "too British, incomprehensible, and lacking broad appeal."
There are two distinct things being described by those adjectives. "Too British" means the satirical substrate was culturally anchored — the material was violating specifically British institutional norms, and without the context of those norms, the violations weren't legible as funny rather than merely strange. This is the culturally specific problem. But "incomprehensible" is pointing at something different: the genre had no scaffolding. German television audiences in 1972 had no established category for "anarchic surrealist sketch comedy." The intentional incoherence had no frame to be placed in. Without a prior tradition to locate the Pythons in, the audience couldn't distinguish deliberate formal violation from incompetent production. The nonsense read as accident.
When Episode 2 was re-recorded in English and dubbed — eliminating the language problem entirely — it still did not generate sustained viewership. The humor-style problem was independent of the language problem.
Here is what this is evidence of. The genre-scaffolding problem confirms, rather than refutes, the chapter's argument. The German audiences of 1972 did not lack the cognitive capacity for absurdist humor. They lacked a prior media tradition in which formal incoherence had been established as intentional. You need to know that the rule was known before you can recognize its violation. You need to have been in enough rooms where logic operated correctly before a room where logic has been abandoned reads as comedy rather than chaos.
Which is another way of saying: the capacity for absurdist humor is evidence of sophisticated logic-norm formation. You cannot be amused by the deliberate violation of a norm you have never held. The audience that laughs at a non-sequitur is an audience that has invested sufficiently in coherence to feel the gap when coherence is withdrawn. The German audiences of 1972 had the cognitive architecture. They lacked the genre education.
Within a decade, that education existed. The Pythons' influence on German comedy culture is documented. The door opened, and the genre scaffolding was built. Today, a German audience watching the Spam sketch on YouTube does not find it incomprehensible. The architecture was always there. The tradition caught up.
The divine fool exists across Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and animist traditions. Nasreddin Hodja crossed from Turkey into Persia into Central Asia without losing his essential joke. Kharms and Ray were discovered independently and recognized as belonging to the same species of humor. Something is being discovered, repeatedly, everywhere there are minds that expect things to cohere, which is everywhere there are minds.
The Nyan Cat Problem
In April 2011, a pixel-art GIF appeared on the internet. A cat with a Pop-Tart body flew through a field of stars, trailing rainbows. A looping Japanese Vocaloid track accompanied it, the sound of which can be described as a cheerful electronic cat saying "nyanyanyanyanyanya" forever. The video contained zero text. It had no setup. It had no punchline. It had only itself, looping, the impossible cat moving through impossible space indefinitely.
It generated spinoff versions in dozens of cultural contexts. It became one of the most viewed internet phenomena of 2011. Its creator, Chris Torres, auctioned the original GIF as an NFT in 2021 for approximately 300 Ethereum.
The humor of Nyan Cat — to the extent that calling it "humor" is even the right word, which is a question worth holding — is entirely formal. It is a cat that is also a pastry in a space that contains no cats or pastries, moving through a field of stars it has no business being in, producing rainbows it cannot explain, doing this forever. No cultural knowledge is required. No shared frame. No prior tradition. Just the endless loop of an impossible object through an impossible space, and the brain confronting it with nothing to do except recognize that the violation is genuine and the threat is absent and this is therefore the domain of play.
Compare Doge. The Shiba Inu photograph with Comic Sans overlaid phrases — "wow," "much amaze," "very brave" — traveled globally as an image, but the linguistic humor (deliberate English grammar violation, modifier agreement subverted for comedic effect) did not. In China, the Shiba Inu face became a sarcasm emoji divorced from its English grammar joke entirely. Users deployed it appended to statements about authority figures as a censorship-circumvention device. The visual survived the crossing; the linguistic mechanism transformed into something unrelated on the other side of the border.
A meme's image and its humor mechanism can decouple completely at a cultural border. Visual absurdism — the loop, the impossible object, the formal non-resolution — is more portable than linguistic absurdism, which is more portable than cultural-reference absurdism. There is a gradient. At the top of the gradient, where the portability is highest, is the pure formal loop: the thing that keeps going when it shouldn't, the thing that is wrong in a way the eye can see without preparation.
The Spam sketch is on this end of the gradient. The word "spam" repeated until it has no meaning is a visual and acoustic loop. It does not require knowledge of Hormel Foods or postwar Britain to recognize that a word repeated enough times stops meaning what it means. Meaning requires discrimination. Repetition erases discrimination. The word becomes a sound. The sound fills everything. This is not a cultural critique. This is a demonstration of how language works, and how it stops working, and how the stopping is funny.
Everything That Came Before This Room
I want to slow down here, because we are approaching something, and I want to make sure we go in deliberately rather than stumbling through.
This book began with Jaak Panksepp's bat detector. A gadget designed for listening to bats, turned on rats in an Ohio laboratory in the late 1990s, and what it heard were small chirps at 50 kilohertz — ultrasonic sounds that the rats made specifically when they were playing and being tickled. Panksepp had the thought: what if that's laughter? And the rats, when he tickled them and withdrew, pressed their small forepaws against his hand. They circled back. They presented themselves for more.
The same ancient brain structure — the periaqueductal gray, sitting in the midbrain where it has been sitting since before the mammalian line diverged into its many forms — mediates the 50-kilohertz chirp in the rat and the involuntary laughter of a human at something genuinely funny. Not an analogy. The same address. The same circuit. A 2023 cross-species neuroimaging study confirmed what Panksepp had spent his career arguing: the line runs continuously from a rat's ancient midbrain to the convulsing laughter of a human at a café full of Vikings.
When the Vikings chant in the café and the audience laughs, their endorphin levels rise. This is not a metaphor. Robin Dunbar, the British anthropologist who has spent decades arguing that laughter is the scalable version of social grooming — the mechanism that bonds a hundred people simultaneously to the same thing that physical grooming bonds two — measured it directly, with frozen wine coolers strapped to forearms and blood pressure cuffs inflated to 260 millimeters of mercury, and found that fifteen minutes of social comedy raised pain thresholds by approximately ten percent. The Dai et al. (2017) fMRI study found genuine mirth in response to absurd jokes — M=6.00 on a nine-point funniness scale, compared to M=3.38 for neutral sentences — with the same reward pathway, the same nucleus accumbens, the same brief bright relief that Chapter 1's rat was seeking when it pressed its paw against the hand.
The universality this book has been building toward is not a philosophical claim. It is not an argument about the inherent dignity of all persons, or the essential sameness of human experience, or any of the things that such claims usually invoke. It is a neurobiology fact. The reward lives at the same address in the rat and in the Viking audience and in you. When the café fills with nonsense and the room laughs, the endorphins are the same endorphins that were running in that Ohio laboratory. The laughter is in the body, in a part of the body that has been there longer than anything distinctly human, longer than language or culture or comedy traditions or arguments about whether things are universal.
We started in the body. We end in the body. Everything in between has been the body finding things to work with.
Chapter 2 documented the oldest jokes we have — the Philogelos, the Sumerian schoolboy texts, the Aristophanes that doesn't work anymore and the doctor jokes that still do — and found them already exploring both paths. The incongruity-resolution path: setup, beat, the gap closed. And the incongruity-without-resolution path: the scholastikos standing in front of the mirror and closing his eyes to see what he looks like when asleep, the Nasreddin Hodja joke disguised as a wisdom story. The Dai et al. (2017) dual-path model is the neuroscience of something that was already happening in the ancient Mediterranean, in Bengal, in Russia, in Turkey, in whatever language the Sumerian tablet-writers were speaking on their lunch breaks. Both doors have always been open. Some jokes wanted to close the door. Some wanted to leave it open. The door still hasn't closed, and the oldest jokes knew this.
Chapter 3 gave us the banana peel, and Zeus with his crown caught in his own ladder, and Buster Keaton at two inches of clearance, and the Busu servants eating their master's sugar. The argument there was that the fall is measured in social space: the powerful brought low, the contingency of authority revealed in the moment of the pratfall. Absurdism is the limiting case of this. Not A over B, not B over A — the hierarchy dissolving. When the historian enters the Spam café to explain what is happening and is himself swallowed by the thing he came to explain, it is not that he falls from status. Status briefly ceases to apply. The hierarchy has not been inverted. It has been replaced with vikings. The banana peel hits the face and then the face dissolves and the pie keeps flying. Absurdism is what happens when the status reversal has nowhere left to go.
Chapter 4 gave us the in-group joke — the Finnish researchers watching twelve men in a scanner laugh together, the molecular warmth of two nervous systems firing on the same joke at the same moment, the endorphins released, the binding sites occupied. And it gave us the asymmetry: the joke that bonds some people bonds them by excluding others. The circle has an inside and an outside. Every humor tradition this book documented — from sanankuya in Mali to the Ba'al Shem Tov's three laughs to Gilbert Gottfried's pivot to the Aristocrats — depends on a circle, and the circle is defined by who has the key.
Absurdism is structurally the opposite of this. It does not require shared cultural knowledge. It requires only the shared cognitive architecture of logic-norm expectation — which is every human mind. Nasreddin Hodja travels from Turkey to Uzbekistan to Iran not because those cultures share a language or a religion but because they all expect that you look for lost things where they were lost. The absurdist joke is the most democratic joke. The widest circle in the world is the one that expects things to make sense. Every person inside that circle — which is every person with a mind sufficiently developed to hold an expectation — is qualified for the joke.
Chapter 5 gave us the gallows. The Wipers Times printing press, slightly soiled at a reasonable price. The unnamed woman at Auschwitz who laughed about her haircut being free. Viktor Frankl's observation that humor is "the soul's weapon in the fight for self-preservation." Gallows humor is targeted — it is about a specific horror, a specific death, the catastrophe that is currently happening and to which you are in proximity. Absurdist humor is general. It is about the impossibility of coherence as such. Gallows humor is the emergency tool; absurdism is the maintenance practice; but they share a mechanism, and Frankl named it: the ability to afford "an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds."
Camus arrived at this from the philosophical direction. The Absurd, as he defined it in 1942, is not a property of the world or of the mind alone. It is the product of their collision: "The absurd is not in man nor in the world, but in their presence together." The gap between the human demand for coherence and the universe's reliable refusal to provide it. Camus's prescribed response was revolt — not despair, not false transcendence, but defiant acceptance. Absurdist comedy enacts this response in comedic form. Laughing at incoherence is refusing both to weep at it and to pretend it isn't there. It is the Hokja response: I know the key is in the house, I am looking under the streetlamp, the light is better here, and this is somehow going to have to be sufficient. It is the Kharms response: the red-haired man had no eyes, ears, hair, mouth, or innards, and in fact it is better that we don't say any more about him. It is the Mrs. Bun response: everything on this menu has spam in it, the Vikings are not going to stop, the historian is not going to finish, and I would like eggs, bacon, and spam, please.
Chapter 5 was gallows humor. Chapter 7 is what gallows humor is made of.
Chapter 6 gave us the squirrel. Milko Marchetti's photograph of a red squirrel going headfirst into a hole in a tree in a park in Ravenna, the tail still extended horizontally in the air, white flowers blooming on the branches around it, the animal looking, for the exact duration of a camera shutter, stuck. The chapter established that visual humor runs on a separate neural pathway from verbal humor — older, more distributed, less dependent on the accumulated conventions of any particular language — and that the joke in a still image lives in the spatial arrangement, the setup and punchline compressed into a single frame. The 1808 British Library catalogers finding the marginalia of a medieval Book of Hours after someone had cut out the devotional miniatures and left behind the jokes — "ludicrous figures in the margin" — six hundred years of cultural change later, still looking at these images and finding them ludicrous.
The stuck squirrel and the ape-knight with the spindle-lance are not different jokes. They are the same joke in different centuries, delivered by different species, caught by different instruments. Something wrong happened. The wrongness is visible. The wrongness is not dangerous. The eye resolves the incongruity before the mind names it, and by the time the mind names it, the laugh is already there.
Pure visual absurdism — Nyan Cat, the impossible loop — sits at the far end of cross-cultural portability precisely because it strips humor to pure formal incongruity with no cultural content. Mr. Bean, the wordless physical comedian selected by Smith, Morgan, and Singh for their 2019 existential anxiety study precisely because it required no linguistic or cultural competence, was measured buffering death anxiety across participants with varying cultural backgrounds. Chapter 6's visual humor is not adjacent to Chapter 7's absurdism. It is absurdism at its most portable. Chapter 6 showed you the picture. Chapter 7 is why the picture works everywhere.
When you strip the cultural scaffolding, when you remove the words and the references and the shared knowledge, what remains is the gap itself. And the gap is the same everywhere.
The Floor
Here is what you reach when you strip everything away.
The oldest jokes were already exploring both the resolution path and the non-resolution path. Chapter 2's Nasreddin Hodja, hiding under the Sumerian joke structure all along, searching in the wrong place because the light is better there. Chapter 3's Busu servants eating the sugar — not a joke about who wins, but about the contingency of any system in which winning and losing are supposed to mean something. Chapter 4's Ba'al Shem Tov laughing three times at the dinner table for no apparent reason and then leading his students through the dark to see a couple dancing — the setup has no punchline, or the punchline is the whole night, or the gap between the laughs and the dancing is itself the joke. Chapter 5's Wipers Times: "Having managed to pick up a printing outfit (slightly soiled) at a reasonable price, we have decided to produce a newspaper." The printing press in the rubble of a bombed city, described as slightly soiled, as though the Ypres Salient were a mild inconvenience to the publishing schedule.
All of these are absurdism. Not the Theatre of the Absurd tradition, not Ionesco and Beckett and the Pythons and the whole twentieth-century lineage, but the thing the tradition is made of. The gap between expectation and reality, held open, presented without resolution, made available for contemplation. The universe's failure to cooperate with the human demand for coherence, dressed up as a joke and handed to someone.
The unnamed Deir el-Medina artisan who drew a hippopotamus sitting in a fruit tree on a scroll in approximately 1150 BC had it. A hippopotamus is not in a fruit tree. There is no scenario in which a hippopotamus is in a fruit tree. The tree is not large enough. The hippopotamus is not arboreal. The incongruity has no resolution. The artisan drew it anyway, on their lunch break from inscribing the eternal majesty of a divine pharaoh, and the drawing is funny three thousand years later because the hippopotamus is still in the fruit tree and the fruit tree is still not big enough and nothing about this has been resolved.
The Sumerian scribe writing in cuneiform on wet clay. The Cockaigne poet in early fourteenth-century England. Nasreddin Hodja not finding his key. Daniil Kharms reducing the red-haired man to nothing, then recommending silence. Sukumar Ray on his deathbed in Calcutta, issuing impossible commands. Chris Torres drawing a cat with a Pop-Tart body. The Monty Python writers in 1969, deciding that a word repeated until it stopped meaning anything was worth six minutes of television time. The internet, twenty years later, realizing they had named something.
None of these traditions knew about the others. They discovered the same thing. They discovered it because the thing they discovered is not a tradition. It is a feature of the architecture. Every mind that holds an expectation has access to the floor. The floor is the gap. The gap is always there. The gap was always going to be there.
Children laugh at pure nonsense before they can form complete sentences. Thomas Schultz, who was certain in 1976 that adults require resolution and only children under seven laugh at nonsense, was refuted by the fMRI data and the laugh data and the simple fact that the Spam sketch has been making adults laugh for fifty-five years without resolving. Children laugh at it. Adults laugh at it. The 50-kilohertz chirp in Panksepp's Ohio laboratory was a rat finding the gap, over and over, pressing its small paws against the hand. The gap is there before language. It is there in the body, in the midbrain, in structures that predate the human species by millions of years.
This is not a philosophical sophistication. It is the first response the mind has ever had to the universe's fundamental refusal to cooperate.
The historian in the Spam café is still trying to explain.
He is a good historian. He has notes. He has credentials. He has arrived at the precise moment when explanation is most necessary and most futile, which is to say he has arrived in the Spam sketch, which was always going to do to explanation what it does to everything else. He opens his mouth. The Vikings are still chanting. He tries again. Still chanting. He has been trying to explain the joke to us for fifty-five years, and the joke has absorbed him, the way it absorbs everything. The meta-humor is perfect and was always perfect: the figure of explanation, absorbed into the thing it came to explain, the historian himself becoming part of the sketch, the sketch therefore becoming also about the impossibility of explaining the sketch, which is also the impossibility of explaining jokes, which is the conclusion this entire book has been arriving at from different directions.
You cannot explain why the Spam sketch is funny in a way that survives the explanation. You can describe the mechanism — the superior temporal gyrus, the pragmatic awareness, the pseudo-resolution — and the description is accurate and interesting and generates zero laughs. This is not a failure of the description. It is the nature of the thing being described. The joke lives in the gap, and the gap closes when you name it, and then you have to reopen it, and then it closes again, and then the Vikings start chanting.
The Vikings are still chanting.
Here is where I need to stop moving and say the thing the book has been building toward.
Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau, by — among other things — deliberately cultivating the capacity to find things funny. Man's Search for Meaning, published in 1946, is partly a clinical account of this. His description of what humor does in extremity is the most precise sentence about laughter I have encountered in this entire subject: "Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds."
Even if only for a few seconds.
The book has not been arguing that laughter saves us. It has not been arguing that humor resolves anything, or closes any gap, or renders any catastrophe acceptable. The Spam sketch does not resolve. Hodja's key is not found. The red-haired man with no attributes does not reacquire his eyes. The Vikings do not stop.
What the book has been arguing is that the gap is there. That the gap has always been there. That every human mind that has ever existed has encountered the gap between what it expected and what arrived. That the gap is the fundamental fact of conscious experience in a universe that does not care about the expectations of conscious beings, and that every human tradition has had to find a way to live with this fact, and that some of those traditions reached for something that has no practical value, no survival mechanism, no demonstrable function — they reached for the joke. The gap between expectation and reality, deliberately opened, presented as play, handed to someone else, laughed at together.
Even if only for a few seconds.
Across all the centuries and cultures this book has documented — the Sumerian scribe, the medieval Cockaigne poet, Chunyu Kun's drunk man on the horse, the Yanomami and their month of obscene genealogical research, the Wipers Times printing office in the ruins of Ypres, the unnamed woman at Auschwitz laughing about her free haircut, Panksepp in Ohio and Marchetti in Ravenna and Torres drawing his Pop-Tart cat — all of those seconds accumulate. All of those moments of aloofness, all of those few seconds of rising above. From a sufficient distance, they add up to something.
Not a solution. Not an answer. Not evidence that the universe is benign, or that coherence is available on request, or that anything resolves cleanly. Just the accumulated weight of all the seconds that laughter bought. All the moments when a mind encountered the gap and, rather than despairing or pretending, did the third thing.
There is a room somewhere right now.
It might be a café in England, or a living room in Japan, or a market square in Mali, or an ice tent in Antarctica where someone's job is to maintain team cohesion through a winter that does not end. The room contains people. Something is happening that makes no sense. Or something is happening that makes a particular kind of sense — the sense of a thing being exactly what it is, which is wrong in a way everyone in the room can see.
Someone laughs. Then someone else. The endorphins are running in the anterior cingulate cortex and the nucleus accumbens and the ancient basement of the periaqueductal gray that has been running this circuit since before the species existed. Robin Dunbar's acoustic signature of group laughter is in the room — the overlapping bursts, the rhythm, the particular sound of several bodies being simultaneously surprised by the same wrong thing. From the sound alone, you cannot tell what anyone is laughing at. From the sound alone, you cannot tell which country you are in, or which century.
That is the point.
That has always been the point.
Camus wrote that one must imagine Sisyphus happy. The whole argument of this book is that happy is not quite the word. Not happy. Laughing.
One must imagine Sisyphus laughing.
Sources: Blakemore, Wolpert, and Frith (1998, 2000), Nature Neuroscience/NeuroReport; Dai et al. (2017), Frontiers in Psychology, 8:498, PMC5402715; McGraw and Warren (2010), Psychological Science 21(8); Dunbar et al. (2012), Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 279(1731); Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942/1955, trans. J. O'Brien); Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946/1959); Cornwell, Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd (St. Martin's Press, 1991); Tsutsumi, "Boke and tsukkomi," New Voices in Japanese Studies vol. 5; Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (MIT Press, 1968); Templeton, "Origin of the term 'spam' to mean net abuse," templetons.com; Grokipedia and WikiMili production records for Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus, 1971–72; Smith, Morgan, and Singh (2019), HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research, 32(3).