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heard a good one the other day,' and 'Heard any good ones lately?'
"All the jokes are old! That's why jokes exhibit such a social lag.
They still deal with seasickness, for instance, when that's easily
prevented these days and never experienced. Or they'll deal with
fortune-giving weighing machines, like the joke I told you, when such
machines are found only in antique shops. Well, then, who makes up
the jokes?"
Trask said, "Is that what you're trying to find out?" It was on the
tip of Trask's tongue to add: Good Lord, who cares? He forced that
impulse down. A Grand Master's questions were always meaningful.
"Of course that's what I'm trying to find out. Think of it this way.
It's not just that jokes happen to be old. They must be old to be
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enjoyed. It's essential that a joke not be original. There's one variety
of humor that is, or can be, original and that's the pun. I've heard
puns that were obviously made up on the spur of the moment. I have
made some up myself. But no one laughs at such puns. You're not
supposed to. You groan. The better the pun, the louder the groan.
Original humor is not laugh-provoking. Why?"
"I'm sure I don't know."
"All right. Let's find out. Having given Multivac all the
information I thought advisable on the general topic of humor, I am
now feeding it selected jokes."
Trask found himself intrigued. "Selected how?" he asked.
"I don't know," said Meyerhof. "They felt like the right ones. I'm
Grand Master, you know."
"Oh, agreed. Agreed."
"From those jokes and the general philosophy of humor, my
first request will be for Multivac to trace the origin of the jokes, if it
can. Since Whistler is in on this and since he has seen fit to report it to
you, have him down in Analysis day after tomorrow. I think he'll have
a bit of work to do."
"Certainly. May I attend, too?"
Meyerhof shrugged. Trask's attendance was obviously a matter
of indifference to him.
Meyerhof had selected the last in the series with particular care.
What that care consisted of, he could not have said, but he had
revolved a dozen possibilities in his mind, and over and over again
had tested each for some indefinable quality of meaningfulness.
He said, "Ug, the caveman, observed his mate running to him in
tears, her leopard-skin skirt in disorder. 'Ug,' she cried, distraught,
'do something quickly. A saber-toothed tiger has entered Mother's
cave. Do something!' Ug grunted, picked up his well-gnawed buffalo
bone and said, 'Why do anything? Who the hell cares what happens to
a saber-toothed tiger?' "
It was then that Meyerhof asked his two questions and leaned
back, closing his eyes. He was done.
"I saw absolutely nothing wrong," said Trask to Whistler. "He
told me what he was doing readily enough and it was odd but
legitimate."
"What he claimed he was doing," said Whistler.
"Even so, I can't stop a Grand Master on opinion alone. He
seemed queer but, after all, Grand Masters are supposed to seem
queer. I didn't think him insane."
"Using Multivac to find the source of jokes?" muttered the
senior analyst in discontent. "That's not insane?"
"How can we tell?" asked Trask irritably. "Science has advanced
to the point where the only meaningful questions left are the
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ridiculous ones. The sensible ones have been thought of, asked and
answered long ago."
"It's no use. I'm bothered."
"Maybe, but there's no choice now, Whistler. We'll see
Meyerhof and you can do the necessary analysis of Multivac's
response, if any. As for me, my only job is to handle the red tape.
Good Lord, I don't even know what a senior analyst such as yourself is
supposed to do, except analyze, and that doesn't help me any."
Whistler said, "It's simple enough. A Grand Master like
Meyerhof asks questions and Multivac automatically formulates it
into quantities and operations. The necessary machinery for
converting words to symbols is what makes up most of the bulk of
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