David Goldfarb (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} davidgoldfarb) wrote, |
By "puzzle-solving" I mean creating and revising a model of the environment. Here's a joke I remember from the Isaac Asimov story "Jokester":
A husband and wife, walking on a boardwalk, came across a fortune-telling-and-weight machine. The husband put his penny in. The wife took the card and read: "'You are brave, handsome, intelligent, loyal, generous, and irresistable to women.'" She turned the card over. "And it got your weight wrong, too."There's some other things going on there (e.g., recognition of the stereotype of the shrewish wife) but the main source of humor is how that last word "too" forces us to revise our estimate of the situation. The wife has read out that list of good qualities without argument, and our initial estimation is that she probably agrees with them, since she's made no initial protest, and wives often think well of their husbands. The little pause between her statements gives us time to let this expectation get settled into our brains. Then at the very end that expectation is thwarted.
