Learning Wrong Answers Only
“Who Made the First Joke? Where Did Humour Come From?”
Introduction
I was recently invited by another Substacker to write a piece for their blog based on the concept of the game "wrong answers only". I was not familiar with the game, but the idea is to be playful with the question and deliberately provide humorous, nonsensical, or incorrect responses to a question or prompt. It's less about accuracy and more about creativity, wit, and making others laugh with absurdity.
I enjoyed the process and the idea of collaborating with other creators on the platform. I would definitely do more of this if others were interested.
The prompt was: “Who Made the First Joke? Where Did Humour Come From?”
My Wrong Answer
God made the first joke, and it is still going. Inevitably there will be a callback to the original punchline.
Existence + time = comedy, eventually.
A surreal sketch perpetuated by God’s Improv Troupe, complete with an overly elaborate set.
Henri Bergson, in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1911), suggests that, “The comic is that which arises when a person becomes a thing, or when life becomes mechanical”. Bergson explains that laughter often stems from observing rigidity, automatism, or inflexibility in what should be dynamic and alive. When someone behaves in a mechanical, repetitive, or overly predictable way, it creates a ripple in the Universe that will make a person laugh. It might make Kookaburras laugh too, let’s not forget them in all of this.
Taking rigidity seriously in a fundamentally absurd universe is inherently funny, which is why Kirk Cameron invented his hilarious God invented the banana bit.
Bergson also posited that humour involves the disruption of dignity (Bergson, 1911). Imagine Adam naming the animals, nude and confidently declaring, “I’ll call this a giraffe, because it looks so much like a giraffe.” Then God, ever playful, waits for the beat and then sends him a platypus next. They both laugh. Adam doesn’t think walking around nude, naming animals while God watches, is funny—yet God, observing it, finds it hilarious. Now I’ve told you that, you know all you need to know.
According to Bergson, “Laughter always suppresses a certain emotional element in its environment. It seeks to establish a momentary anesthesia of the heart to focus purely on the absurd” (1911). Laughing at something, Bergson notes, requires us to pause our empathy, removing emotional engagement to objectively (and critically) observe the absurdities or incongruities in life. This “freezing” allows us to focus solely on the comedic elements, disconnected from the normal flow of emotional reactions.
Consider the comedian onstage in front of a big audience telling the sort of jokes about encountering a homeless person that really make you laugh. According to Bergson, this laughter here requires forgetting the complex social, economic, and personal factors that make someone disheveled and on the street. The audience is lured by the comedian into focusing only on the absurd or exaggerated aspects of the scenario, normalising the ostracisation and bullying of vulnerable individuals by society. Laughing at it relies on the audience ignoring the underlying sadness of homelessness to focus solely on person as the object/actor required to service the punchline.
God, being omnipresent and omniscient, loves jokes. When He said, “Let there be light,” he had just created black holes. To engage with the light, God nudged it and said, “Black holes, (pause), they suck you in!” Then he paused for the perfect amount of time, before grinning and eventually chuckling considering things at once in both literal and figurative realms. God’s humor is multi-layered, even though he hasn’t read Bergson either. God is aware of Bergson, obviously, and knows that people had called it something of a comedy bible, but God considered the one he had written a superior piece of work both artistically and comedically. God had a book club long before Oprah did. Amen.
Bergson says laughing is inherently social—something that happens more often in groups than in solitude (1911). So you will laugh at black holes, not inside them. This is also why when you watch a comedy Gala night on the TV, you hear the audience, laughing hilariously as one, to a joke where the comedian had an encounter with someone who didn’t have a house, and who was struggling to access basic human services and rights. In the joke the comedian will tap dance around the homeless person intellectually, in a conversation full of witty banter and everyone laughs and waits with anticipation for the callback repeating what the homeless person yelled out at the start.
But you’re at home watching it on an iPad in a moment and between moments of existence, and you don’t laugh at any of it, because no one else around you is. But in big groups, preferably in a venue that is selling alcohol and Maltesers with comfortable chairs, we will all laugh at the homeless like it’s the funniest thing ever and the abstract bully will be defined and revered as a “comedic genius”.
After creating logic and order, God introduced surrealism: cloud shapes, ducks with corkscrew penises, fish that walk on land, “things you can’t say anymore” and irony. God made laughter, by making the funny inevitable, and also by introducing repetition. The invention of time creates an infinite loop of moments where slight variations keep ensuring something is potentially funny eventually. Eventually, God will find it funny, something will be funny eventually. This is one of the Laws of the Universe, and eventually God will appreciate the callback. Laughter exists in the echo and so do you, (echoes) do you, do you, do you?
These inventions were followed by some early attempts at practical jokes, like eating the forbidden fruit, showing the humor in mismatches between the seriousness of intention and the triviality of action. Fig leaves soon featured prominently in visual comedy. Laughter is observing things, making a mockery of observational comedy: bureaucracy, funny signs, self-checkout machines, when ants do or don’t do things and philosophy all become funny - eventually. Don’t forget the rule of threes. And the rule of seven, and yes those numbers are odd, and so are kookaburras, am I right?
This has been who invented the joke and where did humour come from. The answer: it was invented by everything and comes from nothing, which is always the wrongest answer.
If you enjoyed this wrong answer, you can read other responses here
References
Bergson, H. (1911). Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic (C. Brereton & F. Rothwell, Trans.). Macmillan.