by Scott Weems
Another approach is to rank statements into categories depending on how well they describe our humor tastes. This is the technique used by the Humorous Behavior Q-Sort Deck, which involves one hundred cards containing printed statements ranging from simple (e.g., “Is sarcastic”) to reflective (e.g., “Only with difficulty can laugh at personal feelings”). Participants sort the cards into nine decks, depending on the personal relevancy of the statements, and their sense of humor is assessed in terms of how social, restrained, or cruel it is. Extensive research using this test has revealed that American tastes in humor tend to be socially warm and reflective whereas British humor leans more toward the spirited and amusingly awkward.
But trying to measure humor without considering the psychological background of subjects is difficult, because we can’t see where their conflicts lie. We’re forced to make our best guess—and though doing so may prove useful, it can be tricky too. Perhaps this is why one scientist, Richard Wiseman, decided to stop asking subjects to characterize jokes altogether. Instead, he simply asked them a single question: “Is this joke funny?” He didn’t ask them why, and he didn’t make them visit his lab either. Rather, he enlisted help from the British Association for the Advancement of Science and started a website. One year and 1.5 million responses later, he stumbled upon the funniest joke in the world.
Wiseman is a psychologist from the University of Hertfordshire just north of London. He has written four books and is generally considered one of the most influential scientists in Britain. Though not a humor researcher by training, he’s had plenty of experience exploring unusual topics such as deception, the paranormal, and self-help. He also is credited by Guinness as the lead researcher on one of the largest scientific experiments of all time.
His project, called LaughLab, started with a simple question: What makes a joke funny? To research this question, he asked people to answer a few short questions about themselves, then to rate the funniness of a random sample of jokes, based on a “giggle-o-meter” scale of 1 to 5. Since he also wanted to keep a fresh supply of jokes, he added a section where people could submit their own personal favorites. Thanks to some free publicity and plenty of international interest, millions of people flocked to his website. In all, Wiseman received over forty thousand jokes, many of which had to be rejected because they were too vulgar to be shared with a wider audience. Wiseman included jokes that he didn’t think were particularly funny, in case he accidentally missed the humor. For example, the joke What’s brown and sticky? A stick was submitted more than three hundred times, and Wiseman left it in, because he figured that such a large number of people must know something he didn’t.
In addition to telling him what jokes people found most funny, the experiment produced vast amounts of information, thus allowing for some very specific analyses. For example, Wiseman found that the funniest jokes were 103 letters long. This particular number wasn’t special; there just had to be some length where ratings peaked, and 103 letters was it. Since many of the jokes included references to animals, he was also able to identify what animal was the funniest. Ducks, interestingly, won that prize. Maybe it’s the webbed feet, Wiseman mused, but if a joke-teller has the option of giving the starring role to a talking horse or a talking duck, the choice is clear. The funniest time of day: 6:03 in the evening. The funniest day: the fifteenth of the month. Wiseman’s data yielded an almost endless supply of discoveries.
One of the most interesting findings was how humor varies based on nationality. Germans thought every joke was funny. Scandinavians ranked closer to the middle, and also had the unfortunate tendency to include the words “ha ha” at the end of their entries, as if reassuring the reader that they had just experienced a joke. Americans showed a distinctive affinity for jokes that included insults or vague threats.
Here’s a joke particularly liked by Americans, less so by others:
TEXAN: “Where are you from?”
HARVARD GRADUATE: “I come from a place where we do not end sentences with prepositions.
TEXAN: “Okay—where are you from, jackass?”
Europeans, in turn, showed an affinity for jokes that were absurd or surreal. Here are two more examples:
A patient says: “Doctor, last night I made a Freudian slip. I was having dinner with my mother-in-law and wanted to say, ‘Could you please pass the butter.’ But instead I said, ‘You silly cow, you have completely ruined my life.’”
A German Shepherd went to the telegram office, took out a blank form, and wrote: “Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof.”
The clerk examined the paper and politely told the dog: “There are only nine words here. You could send another ‘Woof’ for the same price.”
“But,” the dog replied, “that would make no sense at all.”
British people’s taste for the absurd is informative, and also well supported by separate laboratory work. From sense-of-humor questionnaires, we know that the British consistently express a preference for deadpan or irreverent humor, just as Americans enjoy teasing and kidding. What else would you expect from a country that gave us this zinger: Mommy, what do you call a delinquent child? Shut up and hand me the crowbar!
Wiseman also discovered that humor varies widely based on gender. Women responders to his website distinguished themselves not in terms of their favorite jokes but in terms of what jokes they rated lowest. For example, although male responders consistently rated put-down humor highly, women seldom agreed, especially when the targets were women. We’ll discuss this issue more later, but for now, in the interests of science, let’s look at a joke that more than half the men enjoyed but only 15 percent of the women rated positively:
A man driving on a highway is pulled over by a police officer. The officer asks: “Did you know your wife and children fell out of your car a mile back?” A smile creeps onto the man’s face and he exclaims: “Thank God! I thought I was going deaf!”
Future chapters will examine what makes each of these jokes funny, but a general observation can still be made here—each is short, just under half the “maximum funniness” length of 103 letters. The comedy writer Brent Forrester refers to this preference for brevity as the Humor and Duration Principle, otherwise known as “The shorter the better.” He even gave it a formula: F = J/T. If F represents the level of funniness, then funniness depends on both the quality of the joke, J, and the amount of time needed to tell it, T. The best jokes are always lean. No fat, no extra words.
Wiseman’s study did have its shortcomings too. For example, only English-speaking people were able to participate, and the funniest jokes didn’t always succeed. (That isn’t just my opinion; it’s Wiseman’s too.) That’s because the jokes that avoided extremes, the “safe” jokes, tended to receive the most votes, leading to an unfortunate tendency toward mediocrity. This shouldn’t be surprising since we’ve already learned that humor is by nature confrontational—sometimes cognitively, sometimes emotionally, and sometimes both. Because people vary in terms of how much they like to be provoked by their jokes, the most popular jokes tend to cluster near, but still below, the most typical “provocation threshold.” Too high, and some people laugh wildly but others not at all. Too low, and nobody is impressed.
Fortunately, Wiseman was pleased with the eventual winner, if only because it just barely beat out the second-place competitor. The latter wasn’t a bad joke, per se; it just wasn’t all that good and most people have heard it too many times already. (The punch line reads “Watson, you idiot, it means that someone stole our tent,” in case you want to look it up.) Wiseman frequently tells both of these jokes in front of audiences because his research is often featured on television and at conferences, and most of the time neither one gets a laugh. One problem is the jokes themselves, for sure. But another is the delivery. Like most humor researchers, Wiseman has no comedic training, and so by his own admission he doesn’t know how to tell a joke. That’s another big issue in humor research, one that will get pl
enty of attention in Chapter 7.
What was the winner? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Two hunters from New Jersey are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed over. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency service. He gasps, “I think my friend is dead! What should I do?” The operator says, “Calm-down. I can help. First, make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, “Okay, now what?”
2
THE KICK OF THE DISCOVERY
The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick of the discovery.
—RICHARD FEYNMAN
TO INTRODUCE THE IMPORTANT ROLE OF DISCOVERY IN HUMOR, let’s look at a 2008 experiment conducted at Northwestern University. In contrast to our previously described studies, this one had nothing to do with humor. Instead, the scientists asked subjects to solve problems notorious for being exceptionally hard. So hard, in fact, that they couldn’t be solved analytically. The problems required what scientists call insight. Insight is what happens when we have no idea how to solve a problem and, instead, must rely on answers that pop into our heads for no apparent reason.
Another distinctive aspect of the Northwestern study is that a huge, multi-ton magnet surrounded subjects’ heads as they worked, altering the spin of protons in their brains so that scientists could tell what parts were most active.
The machine was an MRI, which allowed the subjects’ brain activity to be viewed as they followed the experimenters’ instructions. Three words were shown at a time, and though these words were unrelated, each was closely associated with another common word that wasn’t shown. The task was to guess that fourth word. As soon as subjects had an answer, they pressed a button, and for each set of words they were given fifteen seconds to identify a solution before the next three words appeared. Let’s see an example so you can try it yourself:
tooth
potato
heart
Obviously, the task isn’t easy. For most people, the first word that comes to mind after reading tooth is ache. That fits with heart, but not with potato. The first word most people associate with potato is peel, but that doesn’t fit with either of the other two. You can see why this is called an insight problem. Brute force analysis doesn’t work. Let’s consider another example:
wet
law
business
This time, let your mind relax. Even if the answer feels close, don’t let your brain slip into an analytical mindset. Ignore any similarities you might perceive between the words law and business, because those will hold you back. The only way you’ll come up with an answer is to let your mind go blank. Here’s one last example:
cottage
Swiss
cake
This last triad is easier, and hopefully you came up with the answer cheese—just as you may have come up with sweet for the first example and suit for the second. The task is called the Remote Semantic Associates, and it’s known for being exceptionally difficult. So difficult, in fact, that a study involving hundreds of people found that fewer than 20 percent were able to solve either of the first two problems within fifteen seconds. When given thirty seconds, most were able to solve the second one. And the last one, the one with the solution cheese (the easiest of the nearly 150 original problems), was solved by 96 percent of the subjects, most in two seconds or less.
Human insight is an amazing thing, and it’s especially important for humor, as we’ll soon see. Some connections between insight and humor may already be apparent, such as the close link they both share with pleasure. We enjoy coming up with solutions, whether in the form of punch lines or insight problems like the ones above. That’s what physicist Richard Feynman meant when he described “the kick of the discovery.” His greatest award wasn’t the Nobel Prize, he claimed, but the pleasure of having a job that involved discovering new things. We take pride and pleasure in solving problems because our brains are programmed with an inherent desire to explain. According to Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik, this drive is as fundamental as our desire for sex. “Explanation is to cognition as orgasm is to reproduction,” she says. Thinking without understanding is as unsatisfying as sex without . . . well, you know.
Consider, for example, a study conducted by the psychologist Sascha Topolinski at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany. Topolinski showed his subjects word triads similar to our earlier examples, except that he included sets with no solution at all (for example, dream, ball, and book—good luck!). Rather than monitoring subjects’ brains using an MRI, he closely examined their facial muscles, looking for responses that might give indications of their thought processes. Without informing his subjects that some word sets had shared associates, he found that triads sharing a single word in common elicited a very interesting reaction. Specifically, when subjects read those triads, the muscles responsible for smiling and laughing (zygomaticus major muscles) were activated and the muscles responsible for frowning (corrugator supercilii) were relaxed. In other words, although the subjects thought they were simply reading unrelated words and didn’t even try to come up with solutions, they responded as if they had just heard a joke. They experienced pleasure.
Perhaps this is why Karuna Subramaniam, the Northwestern University scientist who conducted the experiment described in this chapter’s opening, also had subjects rate their mood before starting. Though mood can be a difficult thing to measure, scientists have developed several tests—such as the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory—to identify the degree to which people feel positive or anxious at any given moment. By assessing her subjects’ emotions at the point they entered the lab, Subramaniam was able to determine whether mood had any effect on how well they solved the insight problems. It did. Subjects in a good mood not only solved more problems than those in a bad mood, they also engaged a specific part of the brain responsible for managing conflict. That region is called the anterior cingulate.
In this chapter we’ll take a closer look at humor by examining the three stages our brains go through when transforming ambiguity and confusion into pleasure. Along the way we’ll see how these stages allow us to both understand jokes and solve problems using insight. We’ll also see how one region of the brain, the anterior cingulate, plays a special role in keeping the rest of our minds in check.
THE THREE STAGES
Interpreting our world is a creative event. We are by nature hypothesis-generating creatures, meaning that we don’t just passively take in our environment but, instead, are always guessing what we need to do or say. Sometimes these guesses are wrong, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s good, because detecting errors is how our brains turn conflict into reward. Reward comes in the form of pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, that are released only when the conflict is resolved. Without this conflict, there would be no way to regulate reward, and so everything would give us equal amounts of pleasure. And, as the saying goes, if everything makes us happy, then nothing does.
These three stages, which I call constructing, reckoning, and resolving, are key not only for humor but for all aspects of complex thinking. When solving insight problems, we must generate possible solutions while also inhibiting “false alarms” and other incorrect answers. This process introduces the potential for lots of conflict, and it takes our brains several steps to work through the challenge. Let’s look at these steps individually to see why each is so important.
Constructing and the Anterior Cingulate
Why are insight problems so difficult? Is it because we have too many words floating in our heads to make sense of them all? Absolutely not. The challenge of insight problems is that our minds get stuck on wrong answers. We have trouble coming up with the correct response because the wrong ones keep pushing themselves upon us.
The initial triad we looked at—tooth, potato, heart—is a good example. For each word,
the solution sweet isn’t the first one most people think of. It isn’t even in the top ten. We know because there are databases containing what scientists call semantic associates—words that come to mind when subjects are presented with a prime such as tooth—and sweet appears near the bottom of the list for all three of our triad words. In fact, even as I write this chapter, and though I’ve seen the answer many times, the word ache still keeps coming falsely to mind. During an early draft of this book, I even misidentified it as the correct solution. Thank goodness for proofreaders.
I call the first stage of the humor process constructing to show how active we are in processing our environment. When solving problems, we don’t simply search our memories for possible solutions. Rather, we let our brains go to work generating lots of possible answers, some of them useful (sweet) and others not (ache). We do the same when reading jokes—though, in this case, misdirection comes before the punch line. One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know goes the classic Groucho Marx joke. Who wears the pajamas depends on how far along you’ve read.
The brain is a complex beast. There are separate regions for vision, hearing, and language, plus several guiding our movements. There are regions that activate when we do complex math, others that store new memories, and still others that help us recognize faces. The only thing more amazing than the brain’s specialization is that it does so many things that evolution could never have fully prepared it to do. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that when the brain gets to thinking about things, it makes some wrong turns.