alt Hacker NewsComedy is a complex superstructure. I think the site has a probably-correct description of the ground-floor basis of that superstructure. But the rest of the structure is where the magic is.
I describe this "ground-floor basis" not as "comedy is search" but "comedy is learning." One of the first things babies laugh at is object permanence. But you quickly get into forms of comedy that are much more than the formula discussed into the article. Consider sarcasm. Consider crass humor derived from blatant invocation of socially inappropriate subjects. Consider "inside jokes" which are often purely social, having lost all connection to the "relating two concepts."
Interesting. Re: search vs learning.
With search, I understand it as a process of learning, where diff search strategies create different learnings. Maybe laughter is a strategy of search, or what the algorithm feels like from the inside attention head...?
And search feels like moving around a tree or maybe graph (moving thru graph from known origin to unknown extremities, this is maybe tree-like in any meaningful local sense). Anyhow, searches being depth-first vs breadth-first with attention feels related.
Thinking through your comment has me reflecting on the distinction between depth-first vs breadth-first comedy, and if that even makes sense :)