Tech Nonsense

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Is it possible to patent a joke as a "method for making people laugh"?

If I understand the patent system correctly (and I'm not sure I do), then it might be possible to patent a new joke (assuming you're the inventor of the joke, no one has documented a very similar joke before, and you haven't told it to anyone yet). Any such specific joke should probably be patentable as "A Method for Making People Laugh".

For an invention to be patentable, it must satisfy 3 requirements: novelty, utility and non-obviousness. Let's see:

Novelty: If we're talking about a new joke, then it's certainly novel.

Utility (i.e., usefulness): making people laugh is certainly useful. Professional comedians and clowns make money from doing this. Even politicians find making people laugh a useful thing.

Non-Obviousness: this might be the most difficult thing to defend here. If you've ever tried to invent a joke, you certainly know it isn't easy. However, it's a bit tricky to prove that "someone trained in the art of inventing jokes" wouldn't have thought of your joke as "trivial to invent" given some prior art. Still, I think that most good jokes aren't obvious, since if they were obvious they wouldn't make people laugh.


So what's the point of patenting a joke? I think that this would be a great way to demonstrate the absurdity of the patent system. Just imagine the reactions if a senator told a patented joke and got sued by the owner!