Ha!

by Scott Weems

  Even animals use humor as a tool for diffusing tense situations. For example, chimpanzees bare their teeth in laughter during friendly interactions, especially when meeting strangers and forming new social bonds, and dogs, penguins, and even rats have all been shown to give hearty chuckles during rough-and-tumble play. Consider, for instance, a study conducted by members of the Spokane County Regional Animal Protective Service. They recorded the grunting noises made by shelter dogs during play, noises that seemed eerily like laughter. When those same noises were broadcast over speakers in the shelter, the dogs not only became more relaxed but also played more. They wagged their tails and generally acted as though they were relaxing in a comedy club rather than being confined in a kennel.

  Our similarity to other species isn’t limited to laughing, either—some animals even demonstrate a rather provocative sense of humor. A case in point is the chimp named Washoe, one of the first animals to learn American Sign Language. Washoe was raised by primate researcher and adopted parent Roger Fouts, and according to one frequently repeated account, one day Washoe was sitting on Fouts’s shoulders when suddenly and without warning he began to pee. Of course Fouts was disturbed by the incident, as anyone would be under such circumstances, but then he looked up and saw that Washoe was trying to tell him something. He was making the sign for “funny.” The joke, apparently, was on Fouts.

  The third scenario asked why Laura would crack a joke while watching the closing scenes of Titanic. We could ask Laura herself, but psychology suggests that doing so would provide an unreliable answer. Laura probably doesn’t know any more than we do. We can only look at her actions, which brings us to “Yo, Adrian!”

  As we’ve seen, humor is often thought of as involving jokes, even obscene ones like Gottfried’s. This, however, was a different situation entirely. Laura laughed while surrounded by dozens of crying people, none of whom thought her actions were appropriate for that moment. In fact, several people shushed her, including her mother-in-law, something that would never have happened had we been watching a comedy. There was no social expectation of laughter, and no punch line, either—only an embarrassed wife and a crowd of angry moviegoers.

  The American Film Institute lists “Yo, Adrian” among the most influential lines in movie history, though it isn’t recognized for being deep or meaningful. On the contrary, it’s just one of those phrases that comes out of our mouths. When the Rocky movies were first released, everybody was mimicking Stallone’s slurred “Yo, Adrian.” The line is even repeated in the sequels, and in each case it’s portrayed as an honest, unsentimental call to Rocky’s love. This isn’t to say it’s a simple or meaningless line. Far from it—it’s genius. After Rocky survives his fight with Apollo Creed, his call to Adrian is a touching climax. Punctuating the scene with a short, slangy line is real life. It’s the noticeable absence of sentimentality.

  I can’t say what Laura felt, but obviously she wasn’t moved by the DiCaprio character’s demise. My guess is that her brain needed a way to resolve the conflict between watching a tragic death on-screen and feeling like her emotions were being manipulated with a sledgehammer. “I just saw all the people crying and for some reason I imagined Sylvester Stallone, I mean Rocky, out there in the water too, yearning for Adrian,” Laura told me afterward. “And I asked, What would Rocky say? There was no getting it out of my head at that point. I wanted to cry, I really did. I just really wanted Rocky to be out there too.”

  In Laura’s reaction we see another important psychological principle governing humor, which is that we react to humorous situations everywhere, and we’ve all laughed at situations that only we thought amusing. Laura was the only person laughing in the theater because only she found the overwhelming sentimentality entertaining, her brain struggling to resolve her opposing emotions about what was happening on-screen. On the one hand, she experienced sadness while watching hundreds of people tragically drown, including the male lead character. On the other, she could see director James Cameron treating the emotional climax in front of her the same way he treated the action-based climaxes of his earlier films, Aliens and The Terminator—with nonstop fury. That’s a lot to ask of anyone.

  It may seem that each of our three laughter case studies has moved further and further away from the traditional concept of humor. They have, but as we’ve seen, humor isn’t just about being funny; it’s also about how we deal with complex and contradictory messages. It helps us resolve confusing feelings, and even connect with others in times of stress. Laughter is simply what happens as we work through the details.

  THE ELUSIVE CONCEPT OF MIRTH

  Imagine that it’s the middle of the twentieth century and you have just volunteered to participate in a study on humor. The researcher wants you to view a series of hand-drawn cartoons. Act naturally, he says, and laugh only when the feeling strikes you.

  The first cartoon depicts a man casually raking leaves, next to a buxom woman tied to a tree. There’s no explanation, just a woman who looks irate and a man who appears happy to be experiencing the outdoors without his partner able to interfere. The second cartoon shows a man and a gorilla walking into a pet store next to a sign reading “Pets bought and sold.” In the second frame, the gorilla walks out of the store holding a stack of money in his hands. The third cartoon is from The New Yorker and depicts two skiers, one facing uphill and the other down. Behind the downhill skier is a set of tracks passing around a tree. Except that the path of the left ski passes to the left of the tree and the other to the right. The uphill skier looks on in befuddlement.

  None of these cartoons is particularly funny, but you chuckle at the second one—the one with the gorilla—as well as at the last one with the skiers. You notice that the researcher is taking copious notes, and when the test is complete you ask him how you did. He says you show signs of anxiety. Why? He replies that the first cartoon, the one featuring the tied-up woman, is a “sensitive stimulus.” Anxious people and schizophrenics tend to be disturbed by the thought of involuntary restraint and thus don’t laugh at that one, whereas normal people find it amusing because they recognize that the violation is minor and that the man is just using an unusual, and potentially humorous, means of enjoying a sunny day. The researcher goes on to tell you that the other two cartoons, the ones with the gorilla and skier, aren’t particularly provocative, so it’s interesting that you found those amusing. Normal people typically require that their humor make them a little uncomfortable, and these cartoons shouldn’t satisfy that need.

  But don’t worry, he adds. It’s only one assessment.

  You have just taken the Mirth Response Test, a humor tool from the mid-twentieth century that was once popular enough to be featured in Life magazine. It’s based on Freud’s theory that humor is our way of resolving inner conflict and anxiety. According to Freud, we constantly desire things such as food and sex. At the same time, our anxieties keep us from acting on these desires, leading to inner conflict. Humor, by treating these forbidden impulses lightly, allows us to relieve inner tension—in other words, it permits us to express ourselves in previously forbidden ways. This is why successful jokes must be at least a little provocative. Too much anxiety and we withhold the laugh. Too little and we don’t laugh because our humor system isn’t engaged at all. The funniest things are those right in the middle. Individuals suffering from schizophrenia or high levels of anxiety generally enjoy only the milder cartoons because they have enough stress in their lives already. Everybody else prefers more of a middle ground.

  Though few scientists take Freud seriously now, most recognize that there’s at least a kernel of truth in his theory. Jokes that fail to make us at least a little uneasy don’t succeed. It’s the conflict of wanting to laugh, while not being sure we should, that makes jokes satisfying.

  We laugh at what forces us to integrate incompatible goals or ideas that lead to confusion, doubt, and embarrassment, but the form of what brings on these reactions varies widely. For example, there are
riddles, puns, satire, wit, irony, slapstick, and dark humor, to name just a few. Asa Berger, prominent humor researcher and author of more than sixty books on such topics as the comic book industry and Bali tourism, identified as many as forty-four separate types of humor. Realizing that this number was getting unmanageable, he went on to group them into four categories: linguistic, logical, active, and identity-based. Slapstick, for example, is an active form of humor. Caricature focuses on identity.

  Future chapters will explore some of these humor types in greater detail, but for now, let’s focus on slapstick as an example. Slapstick humor involves exaggerated violence, often in the context of crashes and collisions that occur outside the boundaries of common sense. In other circumstances such violence would be frightening, but with slapstick it’s humorous. Why? Because when the Three Stooges strike each other with bats, they do so with exaggerated motions and the understanding that the violence isn’t intended to injure or maim. It’s still violence, but it’s harmless, a perplexing paradox leading to laughter. If the violence were realistic, it wouldn’t be funny, which is why striking a stranger with your car is a felony. Doing the same thing to Johnny Knoxville wearing a chicken suit will get you on television.

  Even with all this variation, humor’s effects on the mind are the same for everybody—chemicals flood the brain, resulting in joy, laughter, or both. Though many people think of the brain as an electrical machine, this is a misconception. Individual neurons internally rely on electric polarization, but the connections between neurons are almost always chemical. This is why certain drugs can have strong effects on our thinking—they’re made up of the same substances as those used by the brain to convey messages.

  Dopamine, the neurotransmitter most closely linked with humor, is often considered the brain’s “reward chemical.” That’s why it has also been linked with motivated learning, memory, and even attention. Food and sex stimulate the brain to increase available dopamine too, whereas dopamine deficiencies lead to impaired motivation. Cocaine also increases dopamine availability in the brain, which is why it’s so addictive; after the initial high, the user is left desperately wanting more. Chocolate does largely the same thing, just not as strongly.

  We know that dopamine is important for humor because we’re able to look at people’s brains as they view jokes and see what happens. This is what the neuroscientist Dean Mobbs did at the Stanford Psychiatric Neuroimaging Laboratory. Specifically, he showed subjects cartoons while they were being monitored by a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, known popularly as an MRI. Half of the eighty-four cartoons were chosen for being particularly funny, while the other half had the funny parts removed (see Figure 1.1). His goal was to see what parts of the brain became active during the funny trials but not the others.

  Mobbs saw that subjects’ brains became highly activated for all the cartoons, but one subset of structures responded solely for the funny ones—namely, the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, and the amygdala. What do those brain regions have in common? They’re key components of what scientists call the dopamine reward circuit, which is responsible for distributing dopamine throughout the brain. In response to unfunny jokes, we not only fail to laugh, we miss out on the joy. That joy comes in the form of dopamine.

  The dopamine reward circuit is one of the brain’s most misunderstood regions, partly because it does so much. It’s important for emotions as well as memory, and has been linked with classical conditioning, aggression, and even social anxiety. It’s so important because reward is how the brain keeps itself going. We often think of rewards as things we are given, rather than give ourselves, but the brain doesn’t work that way. To keep us making good decisions, it gives rewards to itself all the time. That’s why emotion is such a key element in successful decision making. Dopamine is the currency that allows the brain’s government to operate.

  FIGURE 1.1. One of the cartoons shown to subjects while they were monitored by an MRI. For the “funny” version, the unaltered cartoon was used. For the “unfunny” version, the alien was removed and the man made the remark about hallucinating to himself. Only the funny version led to activation in dopamine centers of the brain. Copyright BIZARRO © 2013 Dan Piraro, Distributed by King Features.

  It’s worth taking a moment to recognize this important fact—humor taps directly into the brain’s pleasure-production system. To explore this concept, let’s compare two studies, each examining very different phenomena. The first was conducted at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where ten musicians listened to pieces of music identified as being so emotionally moving as to induce chills—that shivers-down-the-spine feeling that accompanies intense euphoria. For each musician just such a piece was chosen before the experiment began, and then researchers identified the brain regions responsible for the feeling while the musicians listened to their songs. The culprits? Not surprisingly, these were the amygdala and the ventral striatum of the dopamine reward circuit, as well as the primary region they are connected to: the ventral medial prefrontal cortex.

  Subjects’ brains were monitored in the second study too, but this time the experimenters showed video clips of the British television show Mr. Bean, starring Rowan Atkinson. This series, which focuses on the physical comedy of Atkinson as he solves everyday problems with child-like confusion, is unique in that it features almost no dialogue. This allowed subjects to be shown matched funny and unfunny bits whose only difference was their inherent level of humor. Half of the videos were taken from the show’s funniest bits, while the other half included no humorous elements at all, and subjects were instructed to mimic laughter even when they didn’t find them funny.

  The brain area most active during the funny parts, but not the others, was the ventral medial cortex, the primary target of the dopamine reward circuit. This is the region responsible for differentiating true laughter from pretend, the same one that apparently gives some of us chills when we listen to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

  From these findings you might suspect that dopamine is one of the most important chemicals in the brain, and you’d be right. Scientists have even proposed something called the Dopamine Mind Hypothesis, which states that increased reliance on dopamine helps explain our evolutionary separation from lower ape ancestors. According to this theory, when Homo habilis took up meat eating around 2 million years ago, brain chemistry began to alter. Dopamine production skyrocketed, and so did the incidence of cognitive and social processes depending on this chemical, such as risk taking and goal-driven behavior. In short, dopamine made us who we are—physical and intellectual thrill-seekers, always on the lookout for some new way to improve our lives or make ourselves laugh.

  We have proof that dopamine is key for animal humor, too, most notably from Northwestern University’s Jeffrey Burgdorf. Not only did he learn how to tickle rats, he was able to set up recording devices to hear their laughter. Apparently, one tickles a rat by scratching its belly, causing it to emit high-pitched screeches at around 50 kHz, well outside human hearing range but easily audible to a rat. Burgdorf showed that rats respond to tickling the same way as humans, running in anticipation to tickling fingers and sometimes laughing even before any contact is made. Stroking (i.e., petting) the rats doesn’t elicit the same reactions, and neither does holding them. Burgdorf further demonstrated that older rats respond less to tickling than young ones, as with humans, and that young rats who are lonely as a result of being isolated from peers are the most prolific laughers of all.

  But more importantly, Burgdorf showed that tickling wasn’t the only thing that brought on laughter in his rats. Inserting electrodes in their dopamine-producing centers achieved the same result. He even trained rats to stimulate their own brains by pressing a bar, delivering a current to their dopamine centers and causing them to laugh even without any tickling. Administering dopamine-promoting chemicals directly into the rats’ brains had similar effects.

  Apparently rats aren’t so different from human
s, which suggests that laughter might have been around for a very long time. Perhaps it developed to help women like my wife cope with excessive sentimentality, and girls like Conchesta deal with political and social upheaval. For Gilbert Gottfried, it may even have helped prevent a sensitive audience from booing him offstage. Now that we’re no longer able to resolve confusion by picking fleas from each other’s fur or beating each other with sticks, our humor has evolved just as we have. And that evolution has taken some very broad turns.

  THE FUNNIEST JOKE IN THE WORLD

  Legend has it that there are only five jokes in the world. I suspect this myth persists only because nobody has tried to identify what those jokes are, but the sentiment has some truth. Even as times change, humor stays constant, which is why we can still appreciate many jokes dating back to Roman times: “A garrulous barber once asked his client how he should cut his hair,” goes one gag shared more than two thousand years ago. “‘Quietly,’ the client replied.” It may be that traditional jokes are rare, if not dead, and that humor is best understood not through one-liners but in terms of conflicting thoughts and feelings. Yet it’s still useful to analyze jokes because there’s no better way of understanding how humor affects us all differently. There’s something universal about humor, despite its many forms. What better way to recognize different humor types than to see them in action in the form of jokes?

  Probably the most successful attempt at categorizing humor types has the least funny name possible: the 3WD Humor Test (WD stands for Witz Dimensionen, or “joke dimension”). It was developed by German researcher Willibald Ruch, who asked subjects a series of questions about jokes and cartoons and, based on these judgments, grouped their humor preferences into three types. The first type is called incongruity-resolution, which typically involves violating expectations in novel ways, with punch lines leading to surprise or relief. The second is called nonsense humor, which is funny only because it makes no sense at all. The third is sexual humor, which is frequently offensive or possibly taboo. Though the content of individual jokes varies, Ruch showed that the way they provoke us generally falls into one of these three categories, with the most popular jokes relying a little on each.