Ha!

by Scott Weems

  It’s likely that spindle cells are key for sharing such warnings. They appear to be concentrated in the ventral part of the anterior cingulate, which is responsible for detecting such emotional messages, and they’re also found in a region called the fronto-insula, another key area for processing emotion. This makes them well suited for dealing with conflict in social situations, particularly those involving mixed or contradictory emotions. Both the ventral part of the anterior cingulate and the fronto-insula are also active during times of empathy, guilt, deception—and humor. In short, these two brain regions are especially involved in dealing with messy feelings.

  This issue of messy feelings is significant because it brings us to another kind of conflict important for humor—personal conflict. Sometimes the target of our jokes is unnamed, but much of the time our comedy is directed at particular individuals. In these cases the humor is personal, involving feelings about specific people, and maybe even insults. Though we haven’t yet identified precisely which neural responses are involved in these kinds of interactions, with the discovery of spindle cells we may not be far off. Their long projections and their connections to our emotional centers allow these cells to access a wide range of feelings, thus helping us to work through our complex emotional reactions. One way to do that is to tell a joke.

  One day, the secretary to Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy hears on the radio that a lunatic is driving against traffic on the busy Jerusalem/Tel Aviv highway. Knowing that this is her boss’s route, she immediately calls his car to warn him. “Just one lunatic?” he screams back at her. “They’re all driving against the traffic!”

  This joke depends on your knowing who David Levy is, which many readers will not, but I include it here because it highlights two kinds of humor. First, it’s clearly an insult. At the end of the joke, we get some clear impressions of Levy—that he’s a bad driver, not particularly smart, and maybe hard-headed too. The joke is also political satire, since Levy is a public figure. And it’s a polarizing one, which makes the joke even funnier.

  During the late twentieth century, David Levy was a prominent and controversial Israeli politician. With only an eighth-grade education, Levy began work in construction before later aligning with his country’s moderate right-wing Likud Party. After holding several ministerial positions he attained a well-recognized position in government, but several unfortunate personal characteristics kept holding him back. One was that he frequently appeared stern-faced and pompous. Another is that he never learned English, making international relations difficult. Even in his native language he often made slips of the tongue that caused him to look dense. Eventually he became a symbol of stupid, selfish politicians who are willing to say whatever the public wants to hear.

  Enter the wave of Bedichot David Levi, which is Hebrew for “David Levy Jokes.” This phenomenon, as recorded by Hagar Salamon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, took Israel and neighboring countries by storm. They made fun of Levy’s intelligence, his arrogance, and—most of all—his inability to recognize his own shortcomings. The jokes became so widespread that a Los Angeles Times reporter even wrote an article wondering if he could overcome them. Here’s an especially popular one: A man approaches David Levy and says, “Have you heard the latest David Levy joke?” “Excuse me,” David Levy responds. “I’m David Levy.” “That’s okay,” the man replies. “I’ll tell it slowly.”

  At first glance, this may appear to be just another wave of political humor directed at an easy target. In the early 1990s, nearly everyone was telling Dan Quayle jokes for seemingly the same reasons. The names Quayle, Clinton, and Palin could easily be used in Levy’s place for any of the jokes and be just as funny. Or could they?

  Though language differences make it hard to answer this question, a closer examination shows that the humor behind these jokes is more complicated. For one thing, Levy wasn’t born in Israel but in Morocco—and as a Moroccan Jew, he represented a new faction in Israeli politics. Up to Levy’s time, Israel had been dominated by European Zionism; however, as Levy came to power, Jews from eastern, traditionally Muslim countries were beginning to alter the ethnic balance of Israeli society. The fact that Levy frequently emphasized his ethnic origins only heightened the growing tensions associated with this change. Aspects of Levy’s personality clearly made him easier to ridicule, but the conflict that people felt about their old and new society played a large part too. Levy frequently complained that jokes about him were motivated by latent racism, and perhaps the accusation worked because the joke cycle eventually ended.

  It’s easy to find similar jokes targeting popular American figures, though most of these have nothing to do with racism. By the late 1980s and early ’90s, when Dan Quayle jokes were at the height of their popularity, America had become obsessed with money and power. The Reagan years had ushered in an era when wealth was the ultimate status symbol, whether earned or inherited, and Quayle was the perfect example of the latter, coming from two generations of wealthy publishers. Though moderately successful on his own, he was seen as out of touch, dense, and disconnected from common America. It certainly didn’t help that Quayle didn’t know how to spell potato, but at a time when America was ready to rebel against the rich and privileged, he had been set up to fail.

  Waves of Clinton jokes in the 1990s. Sarah Palin jokes in the 2000s. Each of these targets tapped into an aspect of society characterized by conflict, whether it was Clinton’s chronic infidelity during a time of economic prosperity or Palin’s intellectual deficits contrasted with her folksy populism. Why did Americans revel in these joke cycles but leave another figure, Jimmy Carter, relatively alone? Carter didn’t escape unscathed, of course—several jokes about peanut farmers surfaced in Washington in the late 1970s. But considering his failures, such jokes were relatively few. Rising gas prices, inflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis led critics to assess Carter’s presidency as one of the most ineffectual in recent history. Yet jokes at his expense were scarce, primarily because Carter was not a man to elicit conflicting emotions. Likable, ethical, and smart, he came across as a generally good guy, better suited for peace missions than for leading the free world.

  Political jokes are popular because they feed on the mixed feelings that people have about public figures, but what if those feelings are about larger groups? When politicians such as Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich run for office, they expect to be subjected to ridicule as part of the process, but what about jokes about Mexicans, or Polish people? What do jokes about larger social and ethnic groups say about society?

  When I was growing up, Polish jokes were huge. Though grossly inappropriate, nearly every child or adult knew at least one. What do they print on the bottom of Polish Coke bottles? Open the other end. How do you break a Pole’s finger? Punch him in the nose.

  Every country has one or more popular targets. Russians make fun of Ukrainians. Australians make fun of Tasmanians. Canadians make fun of Newfoundlanders. Most of the time the jokes are about being stupid, but sometimes they’re about being dirty or uncivilized too. These targets may seem to be chosen haphazardly, or aimed only at low-status groups that threaten the home country’s prosperity. Not so.

  The amazing thing about stupidity jokes is that they can be found everywhere, though the targets aren’t usually groups most disliked within the culture. Instead they’re the ones just barely outside the mainstream, the ones on the periphery. We make fun of these groups because they’re only slightly different from ourselves, and such humor helps relieve the stress and anxiety associated with living in a pluralistic society. To what extent, really, were Americans threatened by the Polish when jokes targeting this group were most popular? Those jokes came almost a hundred years too late for that possibility to be taken seriously. Rather, people laughed at Polish jokes because Polish people were different from those around them, but not so different to be an actual danger to existing cultural norms.

  If this interpretation is wrong and racial jokes reall
y are a matter of picking on the downtrodden, then the content of those jokes shouldn’t matter. But again, this isn’t the case. Though in America we’re equally comfortable telling jokes about Poles, Irish, or Italians being stupid or dirty, overseas things are very different. It won’t take much time in an English pub before you hear someone call an Irishman stupid, but you’ll be walking a long way along Haverstock Hill before you hear a Brit calling an Irishman unclean. Grooming habits just don’t show up on the list of things that Londoners tease foreigners about. So what gives?

  The clearest example of insult jokes saying more about the teller than the target is the prominence of “dirty jokes” in America, but almost nowhere overseas. Why do Italian men wear mustaches? To look like their mothers. You’d never hear that joke in Switzerland, even though the Swiss frequently make fun of Italians. Why the difference? “The key is that Americans and Canadians are obsessed with cleanliness. It’s a central value,” says Christie Davies. “In Britain and elsewhere, it’s something empirical. It matters more how clean you are depending on the circumstances. It’s utilitarian. Things ought to be clean because the consequences of being unclean are bad. In America it’s a moral value.”

  Nobody in Britain makes fun of the grooming habits of Irish or Belgian people because nobody there cares. This is one more way that insult humor says more about the tellers of jokes than about their targets, because it shows what their values truly are. It’s not that Italians or the French are pathologically dirty and don’t own razors, it’s that Americans are obsessively clean. To us, everybody is dirty, making such jokes less about insulting others than about coping with our own feelings about personal hygiene.

  Arguments like these might sound like unscientific conjecture, and in a way they are, but they’re still important for anthropologists and sociologists because humor trends are difficult to quantify. Analysis can go overboard, too. Consider the review published by Roger Abrahams and Alan Dundes in the 1960s. Abrahams was an English professor, Dundes a folklorist, and together they examined a growing wave of humor making its way across America: elephant jokes. “One cannot help but notice in this regard that the rise of the elephant joke occurred simultaneously with the rise of the Negro in the civil rights movement,” they wrote. “The two disparate cultural phenomena appear to be intimately related, and, in fact, one might say that the elephant is a reflection of the American Negro as the white man sees him and that the political and social assertion by the Negro has caused certain primal fears to be reactivated.”

  In case you missed it, these authors are implying that white people like elephant jokes because they’re afraid of black people. The article goes on to consider several elephantine characteristics supposedly shared by these groups, including phallic ones.

  Obviously, some judgment is required here, as well as patience with 1960s’ racial terms and stereotypes. Still, just because such analysis can go overboard doesn’t mean insult humor doesn’t say more about its tellers than its targets. And to see how, let’s finish this chapter with an example involving a slightly less sensitive subject. Let’s laugh at some lawyers.

  How do you stop a lawyer from drowning? Shoot him before he hits the water.

  How many lawyers does it take to roof a house? Depends on how thin you slice them.

  How many lawyers does it take to stop a moving bus? Not enough.

  Have you heard these jokes before? If not these specific ones, you’ve probably heard others like them. That’s because in the last several decades, lawyer jokes have become one of the most popular kinds in this country. A study of humor types in the 1950s found that of the 13,000 jokes found in common circulation, so few were about lawyers that they didn’t warrant counting, but by the late 1990s more than 3,000 Internet sites had been constructed for the sole purpose of sharing lawyer jokes, as compared to 227 for doctor jokes and 39 for accountant jokes. That’s a big increase.

  When lawyer jokes exploded three decades ago, they were notorious for being both popular and amazingly violent. Looking at the three jokes shown above, we see that all involve murder. None have anything to do with the law, and none give hints for why lawyers should be so reviled. Could it be that lawyers are by nature an especially unlikeable group? Maybe, but as numerous sociologists have pointed out, lawyers have a much worse reputation in other countries. The Netherlands, for example, are well known for their antagonistic attitude toward lawyers. Yet among the 34,000 jokes and humorous anecdotes compiled by Dutch sociologist Theo Meder, only 5 targeted this group.

  Something changed within the American court system in the 1980s. That decade brought a pernicious wave of litigiousness to the United States as well as a near doubling of the number of lawyers. Then, on February 27, 1992, Stella Liebeck ordered a cup of coffee at a McDonald’s drive-through in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After leaving with her order, she spilled the coffee in her lap, suffering third-degree burns over 6 percent of her skin. Though Liebeck initially sought to settle only for the costs of her medical bills, about $20,000, the case eventually went to court and Liebeck was awarded almost $3 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

  Liebeck and her lawyers were merely trying to change the fast-food chain’s practices to make their product safe—over seven hundred similar incidents were already on record—but the public was outraged. McDonald’s coffee is supposed to be hot. What is the world coming to if spilling fast food on your lap makes you a millionaire? Only in America, where everyone wants to become a successful, highly paid professional, could the public have such contradictory feelings about lawyers. On the one hand, we want to praise them for protecting the innocent, preserving the law, and making a successful living. On the other, we want to feel certain that someone tripping on the sidewalk outside our house can’t sue us into oblivion. By taking such a prominent role in society, lawyers have exposed themselves to both admiration and fear. It’s a catch-22—love them or hate them, lawyers are here to stay. Our only option is to laugh at them.

  In this way we see that humor serves an important social function, helping us deal with grief and resolve conflicting opinions about prominent figures. It may also be a consequence of living in a social society, allowing us to work through our differences in more mature ways than our ancestors did, for example, with clubs and sticks. The Russian psychologist V. I. Zelvys recounts the story of the Dyak tribes of Borneo, who used to engage in frequent battles among themselves—including headhunting. Whenever these tribes went to war, they always began their skirmishes by approaching one another and swearing in the most obscene of ways. The insults were gruesome, replete with promises to remove limbs and shove them up very private places. They were also quite personal, involving offensive remarks about sexual prowess. Similar traditions have been found in ancient North America and Italy, where the ritualized insults even took on a special rhythmic meter, making them a form of poetry. Only after these insult matches concluded were any actual battles allowed to begin.

  I wonder whether, sometimes, the insult matches became so lively that the two sides forgot to actually strike each other physically. Like sick humor and jokes about tipping dead pizza delivery boys, these shouting matches served a social purpose, and for the Dyak tribes of Borneo that purpose was to delay violence, at least for a short while. In modern society this purpose has evolved, helping us to deal with the anger and grief associated with tragedy, as well as to integrate conflicting opinions about prominent individuals. It’s easy to see the value of humor in these difficult situations, just as it’s easy to see how doctors must sometimes joke about their most helpless patients. Humor doesn’t have to be cruel, and it doesn’t have to be hurtful either. Sometimes it’s simply the only available way to react.

  PART TWO

  “What For?”

  HUMOR AND WHO WE ARE

  4

  SPECIALIZATION IS FOR INSECTS

  A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It’s jolted by every pebble on the road.

&
nbsp; —HENRY WARD BEECHER

  I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

  —EDWARD ALBEE

  IT’S TIME TO SHIFT GEARS. IN THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS WE focused on the What is? question of humor. What is humor, and why do some things make us laugh and others not? So far we’ve seen that humor has distinct components, such as conflict and resolution, but now it’s time to shift to what I call the What for? question: What purpose does humor serve, and why don’t our brains adopt simpler means for turning conflict into pleasure? All this arguing within ourselves seems an inefficient way to do business. Surely, if our brains were simpler and worked more like computers, we’d be happier, more jovial people? Not so. And to show why, let’s get to know A.K., a sixteen-year-old girl who went to the UCLA Medical Center hoping to find a treatment for epilepsy and left knowing the exact part of her brain that makes her laugh.

  A.K.

  “The horse is funny,” exclaimed patient A.K. in response to the doctor’s question. The doctor had just inquired why she was laughing, and lacking other explanations, this was her best answer. In front of her the doctor held a picture of a horse, and although it wasn’t particularly special, it seemed hilarious to her. She didn’t know why.

  The doctor continued to show her pictures, and to ask her to read paragraphs and move her fingers and arms. While he did these things, another doctor worked just out of sight, nearer her head. A.K., whom we know only by her initials, understood that the second doctor was probing her brain. The doctors were trying to find out why she was periodically experiencing seizures, and the only way to do that was to identify which area of her brain was malfunctioning. What she didn’t understand was why her body kept abandoning her control.

  A.K. started laughing again. Again, the doctor asked why.