Date
26th June 2024

Our next event will take place on Wednesday 26th June at the Victory Services Club and will be an illustrated talk by The Queen’s College (1971) alumnus, Alaric Wyatt.

Why has nobody succeeded in cracking the secret code of ‘the joke’? How come ‘the joke’ is such a challenge to our human powers of explanation, especially when it is so easy to ‘get the joke’ in the first place ?

Jokes are the semantic butterflies of meaning. However, unlike real butterflies, about which we know much thanks to the Biological Sciences, we know very little about the essence of jokes, how and why they work and where they come from – which is strange because we are all intuitive experts when it comes to humour. Yet since the thinkers of Plato and Aristotle there has been a long history of interest in trying to work out what is going on ‘inside the joke’, and nobody has found an answer to this age-old question ! So, when Alaric switched from being a keen zoologist into the realm of the Social Sciences, via what was at that time ‘the new course at Oxford’ (the Honour School of Human Sciences), he decided to take on the challenge and investigate whether the logic of ‘the joke’ was really something impossible to understand.

Many professional thinkers and humourists who take on the challenge focus on the pun as their starting point, but this is perhaps the worst place to forge an understanding of the joke. From single frame cartoons, one-liners, shaggy-dog stories, puns, pictorals, slapstick, farce and beyond, the punchlines produce a smirk, a snigger, a belly-laugh or have audiences rolling in the aisles.

Finally, after a lifetime of research – that included many worthwhile distractions – Alaric has synthesised and distilled his discoveries and invites our erudite Oxford alumni audience to decide whether that time and endeavour has amounted to anything !

Be assured of a fascinating, thought-provoking and thoroughly enjoyable evening.

Full details and booking form will be e-mailed to OUS-London members.