Two villagers decided to go bird-hunting. They packed their guns and set out, with their dog, into the fields. Near evening, with no success at all, one said to the other: “We must be doing something wrong.” “Yes,” agreed his friend. “Perhaps we’re not throwing the dog high enough.”

From Marvin Minsky’s “Jokes and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious,” in R. Groner, M. Groner, and W.F. Bischof, eds., Methods of Heuristics, Hillsdale, New Jersey, and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983, p. 178.

Addendum (April 12, 1998)

According to Minsky, getting a joke is the ultimate test of artificial intelligence. How about telling a joke—telling it well, that is? Even better, how about making one up? And how many of those endowed with “natural intelligence” would pass these three tests?