You could hear 1,000 jokes and not remember any of them when you wanted to retell one but remember every single one when you heard them told again. amirite?

Does this explain song lyrics? I can't recite any of them but once I hear a song, it all comes back to me.

Simple.Recollection easier than retrieval.That's why we fail in exams So you got to keep repeating the jokes in your mind to retrieve them faster

Just remember that you're dead

Every 60 seconds, a minute passes in Africa.

The availability heuristic

I was walking down the street, and I saw these three birds flying down this direction where there wasn't anything, and I said "Hey you birds! Whyyy, are you flyin' down the street that way!"

No, no, wait...

Or when you're trying to sleep

To recall my favorite jokes, I try to think about where I was when I heard or read them. If I browse through locations in my head, I'm likelier to remember the good'uns!

I remember my favorite joke. Goes like this.

Ohm, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg are in a car speeding down the road when they get pulled over. The officer asks Heisenberg if he knows how fast he was going. He replied "No, but I can tell you where we are." The cop informs he was going 60 in a 45. Heisenberg says "Great! Now we are lost!" Finding their behavior odd the cop searches the vehicle. He calls out "Do you guys know you have a dead cat in your trunk?" Schrodinger yells "Well, now we do, asshole!" The cop moves to arrest. Ohm resists.

What

Well yes but actually yes

If you hear jokes, it stores them somewhere in your brain. That path on where it is stored is based on the joke so if you hear one, your brains goes the same route as it went when it stored the joke. You can't recall the joke because you didn't store the path in your long term Memory

And of course, when put on the spot, there's always that one sticky joke that we can't shake from our memory that if you put a gun to my head, I'll tell every time:

There's these two old men, sitting on their front porch, rocking in their rocking-chairs just watching the day go by. And this old dog comes up and lays down between them, and he starts licking himself, like dogs do. One old man says to the other "boy I sure wish I could do that", and the other says "He'll baaaht youuuuuuuuu".

Stories like TV shows, movies, books, etc are the same. Ask someone to tell you what happened in a movie and they'll often just summarize it and stutter on the details, but as soon as you go to watch one you've already seen every moment is remembered.

So forgotten memories work like a hash function

Memory is associative. This is why I use cruel rhymes for people's names and never forget a single one.

Memory is weird, generally speaking we get the jist of what people are telling us but don't remember the exact words used, it means you can't really retell the joke but you understand the concepts in it and what made it funny

Memory is based on context.

I had a couple of joke books in the 90s as a boy, one was aptly named 1001 jokes, the other one had a smaller number of jokes, can't remember exactly how many it had. Wouldn't be able to remember all the jokes that were in them but like op said if I heard them I'd probably remember them.

aND MUFF'S THE PUNCHLINE.

I have this ability...

This is jokerlogy

The same thing applies to me for memes

I see you too have watched Milton Jones's stand up act 😁🤭

God that sentence needed a comma 😖

That's called associative memory... It's what humans have

Kinda like knowing all the words to a song when it's playing, or remembering what happens in a show as you watch it.

recognition vs memorization, not a lot of mind blowing here

I actually heard it would be uncomfortable.

Telling a joke requires use of the motor cortex (or muscle memory) and the sensory cortex, so it probably requires more brain power to remember a joke and tell it than to remember a joke as someone is telling it.

You can remember anything when you are told it again?

This is actually an old phycology trick published by a guy named Hereford Sonic is a set of about a hundred rules, as a matter of fact this is the thirty-fourth one, dont believe me? look up Sonic Rule 34

The difference between recognition and recall

I know you think this sounds deep but it's essentially "you don't always remember things but you remember them when someone reminds you"

I have the same problem

Yeah that's a very, very, very common thing in regards to any form of memory

You could not remember someone's name you met 20 times but as soon as someone says "that's Brian" you know that is in fact, Brian.

As a young bartender decades ago, I used to paste notes with punchlines on them down a pillar that only staff could see. At slow times you could keep up the banter with minimal effort.

Yes, that is how memory works

I always wanted to be a stand up Comedian but i'm afraid when i get on Stage i could never remember any of the jokes i have made.

Yup.

I hate this.

It takes practice to tell a joke and also takes practice to listen to one. You've listened to more jokes than you've told.

Jokes are stored in the brain as a hash map instead of a vector

could?

This is true except all I remember are the dead baby jokes from summer camp

And of course the classic "What's the worst part about having sex with your grandma? Banging your head on the coffin lid"

You can tell me your name 100 times and I will still forget it. Tell me a joke once and I'll remember it forever

I dunno about you, but #69 really busted my gut.

Recognition is always easier then recall.

I worked with a guy that told jokes all day long. We worked 70+ hours a week and he told jokes all day and never repeated them.. I can't remember a single one.

That is simple to understand. You have some or all of the joke presented to you, so it triggers the memory. Before the person starts telling it, you don't know what they are going to say.

Someone could list 1,000 books, and you can tell them whether you've read and/or currently own each one of them. However, you could not recall every book you've read or every book on your bookshelf from memory.

Yeah difference between receptive and productive knowledge/memory

So very true. I have to check myself when I want to tell a joke I vaguely remember. Sometimes it works to just start in on it and hope it will come to you but just as often you get half way thru it and start bumbling.

This is the worst thing about seeing a stand up comedian. You spend at hour laughing your ass off then 2 day trying to remember what you were laughing at

It's the same thing like being able to sing all the lyrics to a song on command versus singing along with the radio. I only know like 5 songs by heart. But I can sing along with several dozen when they're on the radio.

Recall vs recognition.

Now I'm getting a feeling I read this somewhere

Recognition and recall are two entire different things.