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What ‘game’ am I playing? This is a puzzle, and one that I will ‘explain the logic’ behind and ‘the answer to’ soon enough. BUT from the perspective of Artificial Intelligence, I wonder whether/how long it would take for it to answer the question. Don’t worry. All...

You may decide to ‘take the one down’ in a situation (ref: Paul Watzlawick), or the situation may require it - as with a parent and child. But when the ‘one down position’ is forced upon you, what can you do? The answer, you can mock. And mockery done well is funny....

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin was a British comedy show initially aired in the mid to late 1970s. It is a lovely series with a character arc that is more thoughtful than most comedies.  And there is one really important reference to mention... Reggie, married...

Here is a fun exercise for you… Imagine you reach the end of the Universe, or at the end of all your lives, and you see a Billboard - alit with scores. What would it be measuring, and what would your scores be? Here is an example - think of it in the context of me...

Let’s start by stating the barber paradox, based on Russel’s paradox: “The barber is the "one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves". The question is, does the barber shave himself? Answering this question results in a contradiction. The...

In the TV show “I’m dying up here”, when Eddie Murphy (played by Michael Angarano) discovers his girlfriend has cheated on him, aging comic Roy Martin (played by Brad Garrett) offers his some sage advice - take the hurt and alchemise the experience on stage (in his...

There are many beautiful comedy moments in the cartoon series Family Guy, but the one below is certainly ‘meta’. Brian, the talking dog, is in the back of a truck with some Mexican fellows. He turns to the person next to him and begins a conversation in stilted...

“A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution. If you had to define humour in a single phrase, you might define it as dignity sitting on a tin-tack. Whatever destroys...

For something to be both meta and intertextual… Not only is there a ‘nod’ to something else i.e. intertextual, there is also something deeper going on i.e. meta. It may be the case you need other information beyond what is apparent to ‘get’ the intertextual and/or the...

I was about 13 years old, in an art class at Rougemont, when the teacher (Mrs Hale, from memory) asked us to draw logos. The Kappa logo was one that the class of about 5 people requested we draw: As you can see, the perspective is ‘from the side’. She asked us “why”...

In a way, we could describe a conventional joke as one that follows the structure of ‘This’ and ‘That’. It starts with ‘This’ (first story) and instead of concluding that story (still ‘This’) it takes a step in a different direction to ‘That’. The bigger, or better,...

The codification of jokes could be done in many ways. One may code them according to theme (e.g. a joke about frogs/tables/men etc), pattern (e.g. A man walks into a bar), or - as we will do here - by their structure. This does, of course, serve our purpose directly...

Take a look at the image below, starting at the bottom with [A man] This is one of the most familiar patterns - A man walks into a bar. But for our purposes, I want you to look at filling in the upper right gap with a word or phrase that logically fits. The...

Meta, intertextual, self-referential humour...ugh. But, let’s look at a few definitions, with a visual to help understand how this all  When I tell you the set up to a joke, you hear ‘this’ but I then confound your expectations with something else i.e. ‘that’.  For...

Welcome to the Crazy/Genius School of Thought!  (mental exercises) The 4 Ps Here are a series of exercises for you: 1. Begin by drawing out 14 dots, like the image below: Then, without looking at the finished image. Connect the dots to create the same framework. How...

Overview There is no universal test that can prove ‘consciousness’, yet it is the most fundamental of concepts attached to ‘being human’. As such, shouldn’t we have a test of human consciousness before we consider one for machine consciousness? We’d probably agree...

A trigger in ‘mind’ happens when there is an association between the casual event e.g. ‘a word’ being spoken, and the historic connections you have with that word.  If you are seeking to achieve subtlety, then you cannot be too obvious, yet you still need the...

Many of us grew up with the values based standard of the ‘Ten Commandments’ i.e. they were one of the first instructions we received on “how not to mess up your life”.  The Commandments came from Yahweh and were revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai (around 1500 BC), yet...

This is probably my favourite scene in the Austin Powers movies. Austin has emerged from being frozen, had a pee, and goes to collect his belongings from the counter. The trouble is, there is something there he may not want to admit he owns… With Elizabeth Hurley’s...

I grew up with my Dad and Grandfather watching comedy that was not meant for a kid my age. And most of the time I wouldn’t understand it, but I never heard them laugh so much. There is one such scene with comedian Dick Emery where he is a farmer with a stutter,...

Sean McLoughlin supported Ricky Gervais in Cardiff, June 2019. He’s a really good comic.  I especially liked a routine he did where he stressed the collision of two worlds, saying he was on   "a train...under the water...with wifi...watching a video on YouTube of a...

Rougemont School (which I attended for 12 years) had a slogan of: A School for Life . Although, if I was marketing it, maybe I’d run with the more direct path: “The difference between Barrister and Barista” I say that, and yet I hear that quite recently a teacher...

There is nothing particularly magic about Palindromes, yet there is something ‘in them’ that grabs our attention. Palindromes are words or phrases that can be read the same backwards or forwards. You can also consider numbers/dates in the same way. But why should we...

Once you have a theme, you begin to collect ‘items’ related to a scene - everything you read, watch and think can coalesce around it. Recently, I was reading an article about comedian Tim Vine and it had the phrase ‘comedy in utero’ and it instantly connected to the...

Lucy Greeves, with co-author Jimmy Carr, wrote what is probably my favourite of all books about comedy: The Naked Jape In it they write... “We began this chapter with a riddle: why do human beings tell jokes? To make each other laugh. But like most riddles, this one...

This idea of "Less is more" was first adopted by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). When it comes to joke writing, it is often a process of removing away any superfluous words, before then adjusting the others that remain - all in all, a polishing...

Letter to an agent Dear Sir or Madam, As a futurist comic, my jokes will be funnier in the future and mostly enjoyed post humourously by self-aware artificial intelligence (Ai). Let me explain… Without wishing to elongate this letter, it doesn’t take Einstein to work...

If I had to pick my favourite Groucho Marx quote it would probably be, “I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member” as the logical paradox is appealing. But in the movie Duck Soup he plays with the word ‘either’, pronouncing it one way and then...

I once took a course with Greg Dean when he was in San Francisco. His joke structure process spells out very well how many jokes work. Source. As Greg says, “jokes have a structure. It’s not just some random thing that happens.” Let’s take a look at the process, and...

In on episode of British comedy, ‘A little bit of Fry and Laurie’, Hugh Laurie dies; Stephen Fry then plays an interview of himself talking about Hugh’s death, before Laurie then turns up on the sofa, wearing a white suit, to share in the viewing. The white suit...

In Up Pompeii (1971), Frankie Howerd, playing a slave named Lurcio, reads love letter - An Ode to Flavia - written by his young master:  Lurcio: “I love her face, that bosom, that skin without a ripple.  But most of all I love to lie with my lips upon her... left...

In Marvel’s Doctor Strange we see Stan Lee making his cameo appearance whilst Strange is in the mirror dimension. Lee is on a bus reading ‘The Doors of Perception’ by Aldous Huxley. On the surface we see a connection that Doctor Strange is about ‘expanding people’s...

It was probably in my Grandparent’s living room that I was first exposed to characters that made my Dad laugh. And it’s my Dad’s laugh that I’ve inherited - a distinct, belly laugh that travels quite a distance and is usually triggered by comedy of a ‘rude nature’. ...

“In the age of telepathic machines you’ll need a School of Thought…” Last night I was falling asleep and my brain decided to kick into ‘funny mode’, writing the best comedy of my life. But I was too lazy to wake up and write it down… And I am fairly sure it was...

In Season 1 of ‘This Time with Alan Partridge’, Alan is sat on the couch about to invite a guest onto the show. Here is what happens next… Alan: ‘Here to tell us more about these moustachioed mammals, is the show’s creator, Alice Clunt!’  Guest: ‘…It’s Alice Fluck.’ ...

How accurately you predict how someone will respond to a particular situation or a prompt? A joke is one of the best ways to assess whether a person ‘did’ what you wanted them to do inside their head - and most often resulting in laughter. You don’t need to know the...

In the same way as we sense that a joke that is ‘perfect’ was almost pre-written, waiting to be found, soon after I scribbled this image into my notebook, I called Elisa and said it was "Too genius to be me." I’m humble like that. And if I had to describe...

“If you had 7 seconds of someone’s attention, what would you do with it?” I ask you this question as this is what you have, when you have someone’s attention. So depending who that someone is, what would you say to them? You’re answer is probably…”it depends…” Sure,...

In 2017 actor and comedian Will Arnett was filming in Cardiff Bay.  I walked up to him and told him a joke, just horsin’ around. I said there is a cool downstairs bar in town, ‘The Dead Canary’, with a ‘South Wales coal miner’ theme as... “After they came up from the...

We saw Stewart Francis’s show at St David’s Hall June 2019, he is a marvellous punster. Below is one such example of his work... “Before he started drinking he was a world renowned turtle expert. Now he is just the [shell of his former self]. Francis then stresses...

In the early part of 2019, BBC Radio 6 presenter Shaun Keaveny's developed a theme of a ‘Palindromic Time Check’. He’d announce it was coming up to 13.31, which happened to be in the middle of the news; or that it was going to be 14.41 a little over an hour later -...

This picture sits on the wall of the Dead Canary.  When I first saw it, I thought it was ‘real’ i.e. an actual picture of people who were in the temperance movement - which encouraged sober living. It turns out, it’s not ‘real’. What I mean is, it’s a picture that is...

The difference between a cat and a dog. Jack Dee acts out a lovely scene of his general failure at DIY, and specifically when he drills a hole in the wall the onlooking dog says “I don’t know what you’re doing but it looks very clever”, whilst the cat looks on and...

Let’s say, hypothetically, you had a mate who’d had some ‘work done’ i.e. as he got older he’d gone knock, knock knockin on a few surgeons doors. And you said the following joke to him: “John Travolta called; he wants his face back.” On the surface this is simply...

In his TED talk psychiatrist George Blair-West shares three keys to preventing divorce, and build a happy marriage. He makes three points, but when he comes to make the third he puts his hands up as follows… ...and says ‘number 3’, before laughing and correcting...

In the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind we see Joel Barish (played by Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (played by Kate Winslet) we see a couple who erase the memory of their relationship, yet find themselves inexplicably drawn to each other. The...

Writing jokes helps me break out of my personal habitual language patterns...which just happens to be one of my habituated language patterns... as is, 'which just happens to be one of my habitual language patterns' too. Bill Hicks once said “I don’t do...

In Mike Myers’s classic proof spy comedy, Austin Powers - The spy who shagged me, we see ‘meta’ when zooming out from Austin’s nemesis Dr. Evil laughing in his secret volcano lair, to seeing Dr Evil as the mountain itself. Meta, in this way, can be far more obvious...

The premise of this project is as follows: if you can understand how comedy works, you can understand how ‘the mind’ works. But we don’t get taught how to think, or rather, we get taught how to think ‘in opposites’. I first came across this idea when reading Fritjov...

May 2017 myself and Elisa got married in Virtual Reality as a pair of robot avatars, filmed by the BBC. We decided to postpone our honeymoon, and instead hang around in South Wales enjoying summer. One Sunday afternoon I received a call from my Mum’s bestie, Jan,...

Myself and Elisa were on London Tube’s Metropolitan line after visiting exhibit named ‘The Psychology of Magic’. The tannoy came on as we approached the stop ‘Kings Cross St Pancras’ when a female voice said, ‘“Alight here for the Royal Institute for the Blind and The...

We went to see The Book of Mormon April 2019, having been recommended it by Jan and Dave Swatridge. It was fun. There were a few pieces in particular that grabbed my attention that I want to share. The first to mention relates to two contradictory rules (“According to...

When I was writing the ‘pregnant pause’ joke, I used Facebook’s timeline as a way to keep track of edits. You can see from top to bottom the basic adjustment in the thinking. “A pregnant pause is a joke waiting...to be delivered.” The reason this is ‘vaguely amusing’...

Think for a second about your fingernails… Do you find they grow far quicker than your toenails? Well, this was a conversation that I heard about 20 years ago on a radio show hosted by Steve Wright in the afternoon. And he is right, I seem to cut my toenails about...

If you search Google for recursion it delivers a message at the top of the screen that says “did you mean: recursion” The principle being that ‘the thing’ refers back to itself. We see it mentioned a series of times in an 1980’s episode of Dr Who, called ‘Castrovalva’...

There is a lovely scene in the animated movie ‘Shrek The Third’ where Pinocchio is attempting not to lie. It goes like this... Prince Charming: You. You can't lie, so tell me puppet, where is Shrek? Pinocchio: Uh, hmm, well, uh, I don't know where he's not. Prince...

In the 80’s Peter Gabriel realised music was a visual game, and he seems to be one step ahead again. Writing on Edge.org he talks of ‘Open Water’, a phrase that would later become the name of Mary Lou Jepsen’s start up company bringing to the world the capability of...

Imagine this… As I lie here, drifting off to sleep I imagine a time in the future when I am delivering a TED talk. The man on the stage (me) is sat quietly on a stool, with the screen behind me displaying an image of the Crazy/Genius symbol. The image begins to...

In their TV sketch show, ‘That Mitchell and Webb Look’, they go elegantly meta by shooting a scene of the pair having a ‘private chat’, only to reveal that the chat is scripted, word for word. It is only about a minute long, and whatever I write cannot do it justice....

Misdirection is used in magic, and jokes. Something is going one way, then goes another - like the magic tractor that went up a hill and turned into a field.

Beatles song ‘Paperback Writer’ is Meta Brian G. McHale, US academic and literary theorist, says with The Beatles Paperback writer’s release in 1966 “meta ‘arrived’ in our lives”. For me it was about 30 years later, and yet probably my first memorable ‘meta’...

When I was in Australia in 1995 I remember being in a surf shop where, it turns out, ‘bearded clam’ t-shirts could have sat nicely next to Frankie Boyle’s range of Parched Spaniel yoga pants. Two guys were in the shop, looking at a Mambo t-shirt ‘Map-o-Tassi’ printed...

When Les Dawson was interviewed on ‘Parkinson’ (a TV chat show), he said the following jokes. Talking first about one of the places he used to do shows, it was “...a club so bad they didn't laugh if they liked you, they let you live.” It is this second one that...

We went to see Jerry Sadowitz’s show in Newport 8th May 2019. In terms of content, he should be publicised by riots on the streets of every town he visits. His show hammers everyone, and I mean everyone. There are literally (and I mean literally) no survivors. This is...

Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch... ...man, now that’s a woman with a giant pair of bollocks. Myself and Elisa were about to attend a music concert (Passenger) at Cardiff’s ‘Wales Millenium Centre’ when in hallways I saw Germaine Greer walking by. In a...

This is a letter I wrote to Rhys from Goldie Lookin Chain when their gig at Cardiff’s Pride event was cancelled. ---- Dear Rhys, I was recently shocked to read the news in Wales Online about Goldie Lookin Chain being cancelled from Cardiff's Pride parade end August....

Dear Mary Lou, The time has come to reach out and say how much I've been inspired by you over the years, especially in regard to how it manifests as 'Open Water'. I'm always on the look out for the next wave of communication, and see the ripples forming in my mind as...

When we come across contradictory information we tend not to know what to do with it. In the case of Bullshit with a heart above the ‘i’, it softens it to a point of almost being ‘warm’ (yes, ‘warm bullshit’). As such we have surface level and deeper level structures...

I don’t write political comedy, but if I did it would go something like this… Brexit: the very word best used to describe the concept of separation, is a word best used to describe when concepts come together. Let me explain... The word Brexit, meaning Britain and...

Peter Dinklage is a dwarf, and plays Dwarf King of Nidavellir, Eitri in the movie Avengers: Infinity War. But the dwarf is a giant, giving rise to a (small) joke intended to jolt one’s perspective on...

The first time Elisa saw this speaker she said “If it was mine I’d get the tippex out on that.” Ok, so here is the thing… What ‘process in mind’ did you use to fill in that gap? I mean, in order for you to get the joke (that adding a ‘W’ to the front of the word was...

“You know how they say we only use 10 percent of our brains? I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts.” – John Beckwith, Wedding Crashers The first time I saw Richard Herring was in Cardiff March 2018. It was then I heard him say the phrase, “I think we’ve got...

When I was working in Brazil in 2014, I had a challenging experience that turned into a form of play. I was attempting to communicate with a non-English speaker when I hit a wall. I wanted to say the word ‘guess’, but not knowing what word it could be in Portuguese, I...

In Greek ‘palin dromo’ means “running back again” - so putting it simply, a palindrome is a word/phrase/sentence that reads the same when read forward or backward e.g. kayak, or rotor. The date 0202 2020 is therefore a palindromic date. Now, here is the puzzle for...

0505 2020 is not palindrome... …but it is ‘something’, and that something is ‘curious’. It is the sort of date that grabs attention visually but needs a rule (in this case application of a ‘digital font’) in order for it to become outstanding. ‘Outstanding’ - remember...

Take one date (in a digital format): 0202 2020 And you then take a second date (in the same digital format): 0505 2020 Then answer the following puzzle: What is the next date in the future which follows BOTH the rules that to which each date (in that format) adheres...

Always avoid generalisations. I mean, you should never use them. I was watching TV in the States, when I saw a Unicef USA advert with actress Alyssa Milano. She said you should donate to the kids, “So they never have to look into the face of death again.” If you apply...

An echo of familiarity Man's true character is only known when he stands alone in front of an all you can eat buffet. (Confucius) This phrase came to me when I saw this sign in cafe... Aside from the creative possibility of ending an existing phrase (as was on the...

Atariaxia - outside the game Even though the original Atari logo looks a little like Mount Fuji, it was apparently based on Atari’s first game ‘Pong’ - where a player on each side of the central line would hit a ball back and forth. ‘Atariaxia’ is an obvious extension...

It’s wrong to be too clever; it’s wronger to be cleverer. Wronger should be ‘more wrong’, and cleverer should be ‘more clever’ but the former is using something incorrectly (i.e. wrong) in order to accentuate a point, and possibly leading to subtle humour. ‘Cleverer’...

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s Self Portrait “Artist painting themselves - “first piece of self referential art”, that is what my wife just said…” At the National Gallery, London, I spotted this painting of Bartolome Esteban Murillo, 1617 - 1682. A Spanish painter who,...

Language is a tool, and the word ‘cuntie’ (with added flowers and hearts) can be used to play with your perceptions. ‘Don’t be cuntie’ – said in the right voice tone is funny. But we all know the general perspective of the word without the ‘ie’ on the end. When you...

The immaculate misconception of Christianity was that a carpenter didn't spend his time screwing, nailing and banging. This joke started with the simple addition of three letters ‘mis’, to change one thing (a conception) into another (misconception) and in doing so we...

Eric Siegel: Meta Palindrome On May 6th 2017 I created a video with the intent of getting Predictive Analysis expert Eric Siegel’s attention. I asked him whether it being 1001 days until 0202 2020 was a Meta Palindrome? The answer was ‘yes’. Eric has a page on the...

As I walked past a launderette in the Mission area of San Francisco, I saw a sign in the window: 60lb Giant Washer - and thought to myself, “That’s not a very big giant.” Of course this is just ‘silly’, but that’s AOK in a crazy/genius...

Memory clinic appointment. Don't forget. This was a real question I saw on a medical form at the Royal Gwent Hospital in South Wales: Do you have an appointment at the memory clinic? It is obvious, sure, but sometimes reality just gives you gifts - just remember to...

‘No doubt’ equals ‘certainty’ - and it would seem that doubt/certainty are mutually dependent concepts i.e. each one exists in reference to the other. Here is a puzzle for you… ‘No doubt’ means 0% (‘zero’) doubt - which we know means ‘certainty’. But is it possible...

There is a different experience in ‘mind’ based upon the function it performs. In the most simplest manner, we ‘search and retrieve’ information. If someone asks you a question about pop culture, like which band sang the 90’s hit “Don’t look back in anger”? You will...

Miranda Hart “Bang our head when we galloped through the 4th wall, did we?” In her TV show, ‘Miranda’, she uses the technique of talking straight to the audience i.e. by looking into the camera. It was George Sepich that first told me this was called ‘breaking the 4th...

This was a sign I saw at an Indian restaurant in Cardiff. It entertains me in many ways… Ricky Gervais’s character David Brent sings a request, “Please don't make fun of the disableds, there’s nothing funny about those” yet underlying we know it is ‘wrong’ as it has...

It was pointed out to me on the weekend that I am the only person who cares about these dates. That is kind of the point. I am the one who is ‘making meaning’ to create a vision for the next 35 years, adding in a twist and a turn with the rule I am applying. Think of...

You can make smaller the phrase ‘make smaller’ by turning it into the word ‘smallen’. We were recently sat at the Christmas table after dinner, about to play a board game (Sherlock Cluedo) when I suggested we ‘smallen’ the table down a bit by removing the middle...

When Ted Chippington next meets Stewart Lee, will he say "Long time, no sea of fog?" And just as Stewart Lee credits Ted Chippington for getting him into the business, I - in my own meta intertextual way - am crediting Stewart Lee for inspiring me. One of Ted...

Have you ever considered that the word ‘neologism’, which is used when a word is yet to be confirmed as ‘a real word’, was once a ‘neologism’? Well, seeing as we are looking at ‘new words, let’s play a game with these two: ‘Simulation’ and ‘Multiverse’ How many ways...

My buddy Travis Taylor first made me aware of the cultural phenomenon around 11.11 whereby people have attributed significance to ‘seeing that number’. Knowing in a Crazy/Genius world there is no inherent meaning, only the meaning attributed by human mind, let’s...

Let me take you back in time, to the early 80s. Television was in short supply, and that we could get our minds on was limited to three channels. Shows like Battlestar Galactica shone distant futures brightly on our screens, and the A-Team were comedy action in motion...

In the 1989 movie ‘Wilt’, I recall watching Griff Rhys Jones as a schoolteacher and Mel Smith as a Police Officer play out the following scene: Inspector Flint: You're inferring we're... [‘we’re’ being ‘the police’] Inspector Flint: all thick! Henry Wilt: No, I'm...

How quickly would a Human, or Artificial Intelligence, connect a drawing of a paper unicorn to the movie ‘Bladerunner’? Just in case you haven’t seen the movie, Bladerunner pivots on the premise that replicants (Ai) are trying to extend the date of their expiry,...

Vic Reeves 88.2% of comedians steal other people's jokes and don't even know it. On the flip side - the B side - Vic Reeves is 88.2% like Eric Morecambe. I once saw Vic Reeves at a North London airport, which prompted me to write this joke. Now, I know you may not...

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NLQke0PNpgNNmNmv4JoC85Ahx-6SG_bv Wanderer above the sea of fog and Game of Thrones In Stewart Lee’s show ‘Content Provider’ he disdainfully describes Game of Thrones as ‘Peter Stringfellow's Lord of the Rings’, yet I wonder if he...

Once you know there is ‘a model’, you begin to see it imitated - and find the origin of a pattern that seems to proliferate itself. In this case we see ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ by Casper David Friedrich as a model for movie posters. The originator being long...

In March 2019, I happened to see a show was going to air that was promoted with the image above. Noting the phone cover was ‘Wanderer above the sea of fog’ I thought it would be entertaining for Stewart Lee to see it. Note: just in case you haven’t read any of the...

Myself and Elisa were sat in The Exchange Hotel’s bar, in Cardiff Bay and started to play with this idea on a cocktail napkin, which I have kept in my desk drawer. The phrase itself is playfully paradoxical – where the ‘is’ negates the genius, and therein lies the...

‘Meta’ is a broad term these days, but for our purposes we can consider it to be ‘something that goes beyond’, or ‘something that contains something else’. This cartoon, from XKCD.com is an example of meta, and meta humour: There are some layers to be uncovered here,...