Humour

I once had a chicken who crossed the road, just because he knew what a cliche that would be.

Just another poultry example.

Look, the thread is called HUMOUR....there were no minimum quality restrictions, alright !?

Nice, Setanta.

And note the very different and distinct "sense of humors" the two dogs above displayed.

I don't know if my dog would really laugh much at the biscuit joke. Oh he might, I never tried it. But it wasn't really his favorite comedy channel, I think. Your dog seems to like more of the cerebal humor. My dog tended toward the dumb & dumberer slapstick WWF wrestling humor. They probably wouldn't go to the same comedy movies together...but yet they both have humor!

Oops just noticed this post from above. Yet a 3rd type of dog humor. This one fits loosely under misfortune, timing, and irony, wouldn't you say? You know damn well that dog in the quote is snickering and laughing as it is eating that biscuit.

If it acted ridiculously brave all the time, that would be displaying irony I suppose. Or would it be funnier if it pretended to be chicken all the time, to do sort of a sendup self-effacing spoof of its namesake?

Hey, it ain't easy bein a chicken y'know?

I've got stage fright AND I'm a chicken !!!!

But whaddayagunna do??

Yeah, em....I can see that...

Looking forward to if someone here makes a strong case that only humans are capable of humor. I guess it would hinge on how you define humor. But still, as has been pointed out, none of us is 100% certain what is going on inside a dog's brain. Heck, we don't even know what a female human is thinking, how can we presume to know the mind of a dog? :wink:

gnite again gents...

There is no certainty in anything.
All we can do is observe and extrapolate internal processes from external details.

The thing about humor is that it is reliant on self-consciousness which causes the disparity between personal beliefs and sensual interpretations.

I argue, in the original text, that the sense of humor is restricted to human minds, although no certainty is possible in this argument.
That animals can sense pleasure or enjoyment is without a doubt, for both are natural mechanism of forcing behaviors and determining outcomes, but to what extent animals can sense the absurd or the ironic is another matter.

Both the absurd and the ironic are caused by the difference between logic and a reasonable assessment of what is real and what is normal, and that which presents itself to our senses as being contradictory to our original assessments.
All reality is an abstraction and so all sense of irony and absurdity rests in the disparity between the abstraction of reality and the sensual interpretation of it.
To what extent animals possess an abstraction of reality that can cause irony and absurdity is up for debate.

From my perspective, both irony and absurdity seem to be intertwined with self-consciousness. And self self-consciousness seems to be reserved for only the highest intellects, making humor the product of intelligence rather than stupidity or dullness.

From what I know only a few species can look into a mirror and know it is themselves that they are looking at.
Dogs are not one of those species. Or are they?
Whatever other deductions we make is based on our own human frailties and our desire to place humanistic characteristics upon objects or animals that don't deserve it.
We love thinking that what we love, or what we like, has some sort of likeness to us and so we interpret any circumstance accordingly.

My cat eventually agreed to a truce with the other cat in the mirror. If he doesn't look at the cat, the cat won't look at him.

I think laughing at the misfortunes of others
is called schadenfreude, and yes, I think my
dog exhibits this.

My dog will also, on occasion, bark at dogs on TV!

I wonder if dogs see the humour in chasing their own
tails!

Satyr, i would point out that human "primitives" when first given a mirror often failed to recognize themselves. I suggest to you that "recognizing" oneself in the mirror is a learned behavior. Santayana speaks of the dissociative sensation that one has when one sees one's reflection in a shop window, and does not immediately recognize oneself, but has an eerie feeling that one ought to know who that is.

I also feel that you are making a set of assumptions about "higher" intelligence which are unwarranted, and which have at the root, the judeo-christian insistence upon human superiority. The barbarian lurks just beneath the surface of us all, and soccer hooligans and lynch mobs represent, to my mind, proof of this. The extent to which it could reasonably be alleged that all humans "possess an abstraction of reality that can cause irony and absurdity" is up for debate.

As i have pointed out, we are no more qualified to judge of the inner lives of dogs than they are to judge our prose. A dog's ability to gain information about their environment by olfactory means is superior to ours by orders of magnitude. I suggest that we just cannot possibly know the perceptive potential of dogs, and perhaps of many other animals. When i look at the human society around me, i am not at all confident that we are superior intellectually to every last animal with whom we share this planet. Furthermore, the conditions in which so many dogs are raised are such as we would never tolerate with children, were such abuse to become known. Finally, starting from an assumption of the limited capacities of animals in comparison to us, i think it likely that few people make much of an effort to develop the intellects of their puppies and kittens.

Geez, Setanta,

Is your dog actually laughing in your new avatar? No, it couldn't be. Not possible.

....................A TRUE STORY...I THINK IS RELEVANT.....................

.....Years ago I was part of a revue, working out of Athens, Ga. We all shared a house in this small town, and the front door was always open, Therefore our many friends inthe town would always walk in without knocking.
....One day I was sitting in a chair in the front room, dozing, and sleeping. We had a minature french poodle, we called Fifi, who was sleeping across the door frame a few feet from me. If somebody would have come in the door, she could have been injured. Now if it wasn't for the fact that I was in partly concious state, I wouldn't have did what I did next:
....I looked over at Fifi, I called out, "Fifi," she looked up, I said, "move over," she stood up, move a foot over, out of harms way. and lay back down. I was about to resume my nap, when it hit me. I went," what the hell .... I just comunicated with a dog! She was not trained. and I made no gestures. She simply picked up my thoughts.

Great topic Satyr and wonderful posts Setanta and Booman. It would seem we have a lot to learn from the animal kingdom....

When confronted unknowingly with elephant drawings, luminaries in the field of visual arts, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, were struck
by their "flair and decisiveness and originality". When
informed of the identity of the artist Willem exclaimed, "That is a
damned talented elephant!"

(When Elephants Weep by JM Masson and S. McCarthy)

18.15 hrs. dog observed sleeping
18:17 hrs. dog's tail observed rotating in a
clockwise direction at approximately
60 rpms.
18:18 hrs. dog's feet observed cycling fast in a northerly
direction at approximately 45mph.
18.19 hrs. dog's northerly cycling observed interrupted by
dog's intermittent audible chortling
18: 20 hrs. woof woof!

18.21 Dog observed sleeping.

Sso this is what you do when you get tired of watching paint dry ,huh?

Sso this is what you do when you get tired of watching paint dry ,huh?

So this is what you do when you get tired of watching paint dry ,huh?

Sso this is what you do when you get tired of watching paint dry ,huh?