Why do misspellings make us laugh so much? From the dawn of time we’ve been fascinated by the failures of others maybe it makes us feel better about ourselves. Maybe it reminds us that everything we’ve built is absurd. Maybe it’s just funny when somebody says Borpo instead of Oprah. We may never know the true cause. But all we know is that we delight in it. Whenever I see a funny typo on the street, guess what? I’m snapping a picture and I’m sending it to my closest friends. And we’re laughing at it. Sorry!

Maybe humans are just a cruel species. We see others try something and fail at it and we delight in that failure. We like to see others suffer for suffering sake. But I think this is less true than the second option, which is that we know we ourselves are fallible so it makes us feel better when others acknowledge that they are fallible too. At least this is the nicer way to think about things.