It was in the marbled thinking chamber that we were reading both Playboy and the New Yorker at once. A theory resulted: That the rate of humor found in New Yorker cartoons is the exact same as naturally occurring humor in the world. That is to say, in the case of any decent drawing set-up, one could pair a drawing with any caption and reasonably expect to laugh the same amount. We decided to test our theory of stochastic humor by mashing-up Playboy cartoons with New Yorker captions and vice versa.

Contact information for this author is not available.