"One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n. When it was ready, he tried it out, ordering it to make needles, then nankeens and negligees, which it did, then nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and numerous other narcotics. The machine filled out his instructions to the letter."
Nonsense is a variety of humor which does not appeal to everyone. It consists of a situation put together which almost fits into the normal realm of experience, but not quite. Frequently, it has aspects of alliteration and rhyme which cause it to be pleasing to the mind. People like nonsense because, in a way, it is very easy to understand.
General poetry is difficult to understand because it can fill many different frames. First, there is the basic frame of those things (29.7)which occur in the poem. In addition, it is often necessary to take the words out of the literal and figurative world and examine the K-lines and frames which each separate word creates, looking for the intersections between them. If this is not enough, there is a level of the language used, with complex patterns of rhyme and rhythm. Nonsense poetry, on the other hand, is easy to understand, as there is very little to understand.
Patterns are pleasing to the mind, as can be seen from small children chanting nursery rhymes. These patterns form neat K-lines, with many connections, which means that if a single connection is lost, it can probably be regenerated from those remaining.
Nonsense is humorous because it emphasizes similarities between things which, while they exist, really don't matter in the least. For instance, there is a genre of nonsense jokes which looks something like:
This joke may be stupid, but I laughed when I first heard it. When a child first hears a joke of this sort, it brings up the frames which describe lasers and fishtanks, and begins comparing the pronomes of the two frames, looking for terminals which are the same in both cases. However, there are none. At this point (or perhaps in parallel), the child pulls up picture frames of the two objects and looks for similarities in these. In this process, it may come up with superficial similarities (i.e. both can use electricity), but it knows that these are not the correct similarity. Eventually the child gives up, and is told the answer, which is obvious, but nonsense. The information presented about the two objects is so trivial that it cannot be found in the frames representing the two objects. The confusion and absurdity of the situation are what prompt the child to laugh. Obviously, this type of joke does not work if the frames for both objects are not present.