Humor and Partickle Metaphysics

``The most profund metaphysics, indeed, might be employed in explaining the various kinds and species of wit.''

-- David Hume

About a week ago [I wonder a week before when, sometimes --Ed.], I noticed that cheezy straight lines are always followed up, regardless of how obvious and (as a result) unfunny the gag happens to be. This behaviour puzzled me, so I stepped into my Pineal Gland during a Staph Meeting and thumbed through some of the books that I had out on loan from the Akashic Records (which are only available to Episkoposes on Unofficial Discordian Monkey Business).
      The pertinent Tome was, predictably, The Answers to the Puzzlements of Episkopos Aloysius Thudthwacker (the Akashic Records are lousy with books like that; I've been studiously avoiding The Horrid, Untimely and Completely Unavoidable Demise of Episkopos Aloysius Thudthwacker).
      It seems that there are two Fundamental Metaphysical Partickles which are responsible for Humor -- the Straight Line and the Gag Line. They appear spontaneously, zip through the metaverse and then annihilate and release a Joke.
      Metaphysically, it's a snap. However, viewed from Reality, it gets messy. Real messy. Straight Lines and Gag Lines can appear as ideas, situations, people, entire cultures or anything else. They can be separated by light years, eons or gulfs of language and comprehension. On occasion, you can even find one without its complement (in fact, good Pope John Paul George Ringo I found a Gag Line zipping by which had no Straight Line anywhere near it [in case you've found the missing Straight Line, the Gag Line was ``Yes, but they thought it was Wednesday.'' and has an Addams Family ring to it]).
      When they annihilate, they can release a Joke that is Good, Lame, Missed, Punny, Surreal, or some combination of them, depending on point of view. Worse yet, the partickles themselves differ with point of view, timing and spatial position. For example, consider the following two jokes, which involve Rabbi Hershel finding Rabbi Moishe sleeping with his wife (and require that you know that Chassidic Jews have to have sex with their wives through a hole in a sheet):
     

Joke 1

Hershel: Moishe, why are you sleeping with my wife?(Straight Line)
Moishe: This is YOUR wife? All wives look the same through a sheet, I guess.(Gag Line)

Joke 2

Moishe: This is YOUR wife? All wives look the same through a sheet, I guess. (Straight Line)
Hershel: You must be a hit in the Middle East, Moishe.(Gag Line)
     
Note how the same line can act as both a Straight Line and a Gag Line.
      This serves to explain why psychologists have so much trouble making any sort of sense out of humor (as if using reason to understand humor isn't similar to trying to read ancient Abyssinian using a Swahili/English dictionary, anyway. I hear that Freud tried such a feat, and in the attempt wrote the unfunniest book since Leviticus). The bottom line, obviously, is that humor just happens in random places at random times and in random forms (Hail Eris) and all the dry prose in the world won't change that. For further discussion of this point, see my addendum.
      The explanation to the Lame Joke Phenomenon mentioned above is that lame jokes often manifest in Reality in such a way that they are not far apart temporally (temporal distance in Reality is more or less often directly or indirectly proportional to how good a Joke is; for example, the Straight Line ``Christianity'' didn't really get very much mileage until a few years ago, but boy did the jokes come fast and furious then [the tension may be similar to the Law of Eristic Escalation, but this is mere conjecture at this point {and besides too, I just made it up}]).
      Remember, though, the words of the Pope John Paul George Ringo the Aforementioned: ``Analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog; you can find out how it works, but you have to kill it in the process.''