Des MacHale on humour and puzzles

So I'm here in Waterstones with Professor Des McHales, and Des, you're a professor of mathematics, but what makes you so interested in puzzles and humour? May I speak? You may. In confidence? Yes.

I think there's one aspect of human beings that's received very little attention from psychologists or philosophers, and that's the great desire to know. They want to know things, they want to find out, they certainly want to find out the answer to some sort of riddle or puzzle. And And this is, by the way, the way that soap operas operate. You know, they will give you a little puzzle at the end of every soap opera— what has happened, I mean, is she going to leave him or not— and that will be resolved in the next episode, and then another puzzle is set up, and so it goes on and on. The same is true for mystery novels, like the Christie detective novels— who committed the murder? People want to know. The word science comes from scientia, which means knowledge, or again, wanting to know. And I think what's common to both humor and puzzles is that the listener wants to find out how it ends. they want to find out exactly what the solution to the puzzle is. And with humor, they want to find out what the punchline to the joke is. And this is an innate desire common to human beings of all ages, of all genders, and of all nationalities. And I think it's something that we can exploit. It's a very interesting process. If the mind is left unresolved and doesn't get the solution, it feels annoyed and frustrated. Remember that last clue you have in a crossword? It looks like a sore on the page of the newspaper, but you can't fill it in. And people will go to any lengths as far as Googling, Or looking at a dictionary or whatever just to fill in this last little bit, or indeed the last little bit in the jigsaw. There's a certain satisfaction once it's finished and done. Now strangely enough, and maybe paradoxically, once it's done, the person immediately loses interest in it. Once they get the solution, once they get the punchline, they don't want to know anymore. They want to go on to something else. But for those moments when it's unresolved and they don't have the solution to something, they will think and feel intensely until they actually get the solution.

Thank you.