[andyfox]

I was wrong.

David has clearly thought more, and thought better, about the issue than I have. Plus I both misread and misunderstood his assertions. It makes sense that the more intelligent a person is the better chance he has to excel, in most fields, or to do better, than a less intelligent person. (A better example of that would be my arguments vs. David's arguments than the cited article; the Edinburgh Fringe is open to both amateurs and professionals and there's no evidence the named comedians are capable of coming up with "good jokes"; in fact, recent reviews of the comedy there often complain that the comedy is not as funny as it once was.)

A difference between math and comedy, however, is that there are no correct answers in comedy. David said, "If a martian is more likely to figure out how to stop hurricanes than you, he is more likely to be correct if he disagrees with you about any subject assuming you have spent the same time and effort investigating it. Religion baseball, tuning a piano, or even coming up with a good joke."

The problem I see is that there is no objective definition of a good joke. It seems to me that having a good sense of humor is more important for comedy than being intelligent. But again, given two people with equal senses of humor (if such a thing can be measured), and everything else being equal, one would think that the more intelligent person would be the more capable one.

In fact, if a major element of comedy is quirkiness, or a quirky way of viewing things, one would think more intelligent people would have an extra advantage, as they do in science. If we define quirkiness as an unusual way of viewing the world, this probably is more common in smarter people than in others. As David ponted out in another thread, scientists are used to, upon finding facts or conclusions that don't fit their axioms, changing their axioms to accommodate the facts or conclusions. Whereas Andy Fox types usually just have conclusions and axioms that don't match and fail to see, or worry about (or both) the discrepancies. Many of the discoveries of modern science, such as quantum mechanics, or curved space, or black holes, one would think, required that their discoverers adopt a new, "quirky" way of looking at things.