Steven Pinker relates this joke, I think that its in How the Mind Works.
OK, calling it a joke in its current form is charitable.

While watching a network legal drama, we see a suspect break down crying in the witness stand. Why did this person break down? If one were to answer, because of activity in the tear glands, anyone who was looking to get the plot would no doubt find as little humor in your response as you do in this joke. But why should you find any humor at in this vignette?

Well, if you take a look at any formal models of causation, you see that the activity in the tear glands "d-seperates" the crying from just about any other cause you might want to explore. That is, it makes them informationally irrelevant. Once you know the tear glands are active, knowing any causes prior to that will not give you any information about wether or not the person on the stand was crying. Also, intervening to change any of those prior causes will not stop or start the crying unless it also changes the states of the tear ducts.

Thus, on a formal model of causation, given the glandular activity, the asked for plot points not only don't cause the crying, they're not even relevant.

This makes sense, given that the person is crying and their tear glands are secreting tears then it doesn't really matter wether the crying is caused by the revelation of duplicity on the cryer's part, an allergy attack, or the instruction's of the show's director. This is highlighted by the fact that somone asking, "why is the witness crying?" would probably accept the first of these three possibilities as the most legitimate answer to their question, but the third is most likely the actual reason.

Recently, I used Judea Pearl's text Causality in a seminar I taught on the subject. If you're interested in formal models of causality, that would be a good place to start.  ¶ #

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  I had a good friend in High School who seemed to believe that the phrase:

"I hate Illinois Nazis"

was the height of comedy. He brought it up at every possible opportunity.
We spent much of our time playing various RPGs and he tended to prefer Top Secret and other games in contemporary settings, so he got the opportunity pretty frequently.

I didn't really get it. Partly, this was because I was till years away from seeing The Blues Brothers.
However, it was also because this particular bon mot isn't really all that funny.

Its not clever, there's no play on words. The constituent parts did't seemed neither related nor so unrelated as to create Pythonesque surrealism. If the line had been "I hate polyglot fish." or "I despise furious green ideas", I could have probably found either of those funny. (Of course, I had already started on the path that got me to where I am today, so the second example may have been less than random to me.)

Mel Brooks aside, Nazis aren't funny. Nor is hating Nazis very funny. If you're to hate someone, it might as well be the Nazis. "I hate Nazis" is about as funny as "I like ice cream."

Now "Illinois" in virtue of being so ordinary, so midwestern, so MidAmerican, such the typical state of affairs state, becomes funny in many contexts.

I suspect my friend found it funny as a combination of bizarre randomness and making fun of the weakness of others.

One could argue that there are Nazis in Illinois and the joke was probably at their expense. Mid-American Nazis are a variety of paranoid kook and, I have to admit that paranoids can be mighty funny.

Of course, this was before Tim McVeigh proved that being a midwestern fascist wasn't the same thing as being harmless.

So, why was it funny to hate Illinois Nazis? Consider this first, why wasn't the second Blues Brother Movies funny?

Comedy requires context and timing.

So, I get it a bit more now, but its still not high comedy.
  ¶ #

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  it looks like KSU will be easier than blogspot afterall. now if I can just get the path names right

I hate path names  ¶ #

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  Day 2: Let's see if I can get this thing published.  ¶ #

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  I plan to host this project through my KSU website, which I'm just beginning to take seriously. But I can't quite get that to work, so for now, its blogspot.  ¶ #

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  First Post!!!  ¶ #

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