Is my friend all perfection, all virtue and discretion? Has he not humors to be endured? --South.
For thy sake I admit That a Scot may have humor, I'd almost said wit. --Goldsmith.
Syn: Wit; satire; pleasantry; temper; disposition; mood; frame; whim; fancy; caprice
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Humour
n 1: a characteristic (habitual or relatively temporary) state of feeling; "whether he praised or cursed me depended on his temper at the time"; "he was in a bad humor" [syn: temper, mood, humor] 2: a message whose ingenuity or verbal skill or incongruity has the power to evoke laughter [syn: wit, humor, witticism, wittiness] 3: one of the four fluids in the body whose balance was believed (in ancient and medieval physiology) to determine your emotional and physical state; "the humors are blood and phlegm and yellow and black bile" [syn: humor] 4: the quality of being funny; "I fail to see the humor in it" [syn: humor] 5: the trait of appreciating (and being able to express) the humorous; "she didn't appreciate my humor;" "you can't survive in the army without a sense of humor" [syn: humor, sense of humor, sense of humour] v : put into a good mood [syn: humor]
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hacker humour
A distinctive style of shared intellectual humour found among
hackers, having the following marked characteristics:
1. Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and
humour having to do with confusion of metalevels (see meta).
One way to make a hacker laugh: hold a red index card in front
of him/her with "GREEN" written on it, or vice-versa (note,
however, that this is funny only the first time).
2. Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual
constructs, such as specifications (see write-only memory),
standards documents, language descriptions (see INTERCAL),
and even entire scientific theories (see quantum
bogodynamics, computron).
3. Jokes that involve screwily precise reasoning from bizarre,
ludicrous, or just grossly counter-intuitive premises.
4. Fascination with puns and wordplay.
5. A fondness for apparently mindless humour with subversive
currents of intelligence in it - for example, old Warner
Brothers and Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, the Marx brothers,
the early B-52s, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Humour
that combines this trait with elements of high camp and
slapstick is especially favoured.
6. References to the symbol-object antinomies and associated
ideas in Zen Buddhism and (less often) Taoism. See has the X
nature, Discordianism, zen, ha ha only serious, AI
koan.
See also filk and retrocomputing. If you have an itchy
feeling that all 6 of these traits are really aspects of one
thing that is incredibly difficult to talk about exactly, you
are (a) correct and (b) responding like a hacker. These
traits are also recognizable (though in a less marked form)
throughout science-fiction fandom.
(1995-12-18)