The Hierarchy of Humor (from 2016)

True humor is, indeed, laughter at one’s Self—at the Divine Comedy, the fabulous deception, whereby one comes to imagine that a creature in existence is not also of existence, that what man is is not also what everything is. All the time we “know it in our bones” but conscious attention, distracted by details and differences, cannot see the whole f

The nature of humour is not very well understood, so we do not know whether general-purpose thinking is required to compose jokes.