Jokester

"Jokester" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the December 1956 issue of Infinity Science Fiction, and was reprinted in the collections Earth Is Room Enough (1957) and Robot Dreams (1986). It is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac.

==Plot summary== Noel Meyerhof is a "Grand Master", one of a small cadre of Earth's recognised geniuses, who has the intuition to know what questions are important enough to ask Multivac. The senior computer analyst notices that Meyerhof tells jokes to Multivac and becomes worried about the mental state of Meyerhof. Eventually Meyerhof discloses that he wants to ask Multivac two questions he feels to be important. The first one is, what is the source of the jokes. He explains that whoever tells a joke, they either heard it from someone else or read in a book and nobody claims to be an author of the joke. The only kind of humor that can be non-borrowed are puns. But puns are supposed to be unfunny and the proper response to a pun is to groan rather than laugh.