I don’t believe that anybody has come to a conclusion on why something is funny. It’s funny because it’s ridiculous and it’s ridiculous for different reasons at different times.

Mason is skeptical that humor can be reduced to a single, stable theory. He treats “funny” as an effect rather than a formula: laughter arises when something strikes us as ridiculous, but what counts as ridiculous shifts with audience, era, and circumstance. The remark reflects a working comedian’s pragmatism—comedy is tested in performance, not proven in abstraction—and it also hints at comedy’s dependence on shared assumptions. As those assumptions change, the same material can land differently: a joke may become sharper, duller, or even offensive. The quote thus frames humor as historically contingent and socially negotiated, resisting definitive explanation.