Humor perhaps displays best the elusiveness of the occasion, with its internal components often showing self-reference before exploding into a punchline that draws from outside itself. A joke that propels us into laughter shifts the ground upon which we stand, taking us from one occasion into another in just an instant.

“Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“To get to the other side.”

This, perhaps the most famous American joke, illustrates the complex nature by which one occasion builds upon another, for the listener, in a mental framework in which he expects the punchline to a typical gag, instead gets an answer he might receive in a non-humorous occasion. It is a non-joke in a joking situation, making it a meta-joke upon the receiver, pulling the rug—his occasion—right out from under him: you’re expecting a punchline but I won’t give you one, the joke is on you!

Without a practiced experience of humor, where a joke is told and a punchline expected, no occasion can arise to support such a complex gag—a child simply will not get it: though he may be practiced enough in humor to laugh as he knows he’s expected to, he’ll not know that the joke is a not-joke (though not a not-joke that he should not-laugh at). Only the dense history of the joking procedure, a space painstakingly worn out from hard reality with the brush strokes of repeated experience, gives the not-joke the empty structure upon which to attach its funny unfunniness.

Comedians know well this procedure, and measure their audience to see just how sophisticated their humor should be. Take this joke:

“Why did the punk cross the road?”

“Because he had a chicken stapled to his cheek.”

See how it plays upon not just the original experience of a humorous context, but the experience of meta-humor that the first chicken joke provides. The comedian telling this joke extends experience into a new occasion that requires support from earlier histories, a process that, when continued by a comic frontiersman, sometimes dizzies even the listener who can keep up with his routine.

While it’s debatable whether animals experience humor, many species do exhibit its close cousin, play. When pups or kittens of the same litter pretend to fight, they somehow understand the violent behavior that their partners display is not violence, but play. The pseudo-fighters, akin to teen gang members trading insults and wrestling, experience the equivalent of the jocular occasion, their old realities suspended and replaced by a new set that perfectly mimics them without actually being them.

Those outside such occasions often fail to discern the internal difference between play and violence, and may interfere in what seems to be a dangerous situation. Others, recognizing it as play, may try to join in, and though perfectly emulating the players’ behaviors, may find themselves the target of unexpected violence—as when an outsider of one ethnic group, joining a play session between two of another, uses the same denigrating words he heard them use but which from him are seen as inappropriate.

Play and humor can become contextual histories, occasions stacking upon prior occasions, creating sophisticated, dialectical strings that only insiders understand: “inside” jokes, elaborate puns, complex word puzzles. George Carlin appeared on the Tonight Show in the seventies with a routine using only facial expressions—and older people, accustomed to a different comedic style, thought it offensively humorless. The comedian Andy Kaufmann took this process to its extreme, once reading Shakespeare verbatim at a club appearance—a routine that might seem funny when imagined as an idea, but which even devoted followers walked out on upon its deliverance. Transcending an occasion, while often used to create humor, is not a sufficient condition, by itself, to do so.

Humor sometimes builds on prior experiences in order to create new ones, but it may also be used to circle back on old occasions in order to solidify them. Teenage girls and radio talk show hosts often use sarcasm in a complex manner, first creating “playful” occasions understood as places that, like the arena of puppies playing, are safe and not-real, then wielding real virulence while pretending it to be unreal—“I didn’t mean it that way,” is the teenager’s as well as the radio host’s oft-heard reply when confronted as duplicitous, and who can decipher the truth from the complicated knot they’ve woven?

Shakespeare’s Hamlet uses a similar recursive method when he presents a theatrical play to the Queen before the court. Set as entertainment and therefore purportedly unreal, his production is instead a thinly veiled accusation in which the actors stand in for the real targets of allegation, their actions mimicking those which the now watching villains previously undertook—while Hamlet feigns innocence as the producer of a harmless play. In fiction, as in real life, the victims of such ploys are rarely prepared. Expecting the safety of a playful occasion, they cannot sort out the differences between what the moment should be and what it is, and if sufficiently unwary they may experience something akin to temporary schizophrenia. As when the puppies bite just a little too hard, as when the gang member says something just a bit over the line, such an occasion of play or not-violence can turn into the very thing it mimics and claims to not-be.