John Allen Paulos

Quotes

• “Together the, two ingredients—a perceived incongruity with a point and an appropriate emotional climate—seem to be both necessary and sufficient for humor.”
• “After all, one must have some grasp of logic even to recognize a non sequitur.”
• “The necessity of this psychic stepping back (or up) to the metalevel is probably what is meant when people say that a sense of perspective is needed for an appreciation of humor. It also explains why dogmatists, idealogues, and others with one-track minds are often notoriously humorless.”
• “Appreciating humor—even recognizing it—requires human skills of the highest order (level?); no computer comes close to having them.”
• “Humor, since it depends on so many emotional, social, and intellectual facets of human beings, is particularly immune to computer simulation.”
• “All art, in fact, has these two aspects: its content and its frame (or setting), which sets it apart from nonart and which says of itself, “This is not an everyday sort of communication. This is unreal.””

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Wikidata facts

Official website

math.temple.edu/~paulos

Image

John Allen Paulos TAM13.jpg

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