A joke is a concept. It exists in the mind. Someone invents it, encodes it into language, writes it down, sends it to his literary agent, waits several years for a publisher to accept it, eventually it is published, someone buys a copy and reads it and understands the information that the author has encoded in the form of words on a page, thereby receving in his mind the same concept or very nearly the same concept given the imprecision of which language can sometimes run afoul, which the author originally imagined. And even years or centuries after the death of the author, the books can still exist, still be read, and still communicate a concept to the reader. So if the author no longer exists, the concept must be in the book.

The fact that one reader might read a book and find it funny, while another reader might read the same book and not find it funny, does not really mean that humor is not in the book or is not an emergent property of that book. It means that some people think about the world in a way that more closely resembles that of the author of the book than other people do. I did mention in an earlier comment that the effect of the book is collaborative, it requires efforts by both the author and the reader, but it is the author who has to be talented, the reader has much lesser intellectual requirements as a consumer of the author's creativity. There are also people who can't read the book at all because they never learned how to read, but that also does not mean that the concepts are not in the book. It just means that some people do not know how to extract the concepts that are in the book.

I have been explaining myself to you in enormous detail. Admittedly, nobody forces me to engage in debates on the internet. I chose this task. I am patient, but really, I have explained myself fully. If you do not believe me, fine, I am not obligated to change your mind. Believe what you like. If you are going to keep sending me back replies saying, but no, this doesn't prove anything, it doesn't mean anything, it makes no sense, it is contrary to all reason and logic, then obviously I am not doing a good job of communicating with you and I will return all the money that reddit has paid me to explain this to you.