by Scott Weems
“You guys are just so funny, standing around.”
Assistants took note of each interaction as the test continued. Meanwhile, A.K.’s body continued to make unexpected motions. One moment her right leg tingled, the next her arms twitched. Several times she found herself unable to speak and answer the doctor’s questions, and she had no idea why. Then, of course, there was the laughing.
The area of A.K.’s brain being probed was the supplementary motor cortex, and the doctors’ goal was to map its functions down to the millimeter. They found that the seizures were originating in the medial frontal region of her brain, not far from the part controlling speech and motor movements—as well as laughter. Although A.K. had never experienced laughter during her seizures, her brain apparently had lumped these behaviors together anatomically, with the motor areas affected by the seizures located right next to the areas controlling her laughter.
In this respect, A.K. was lucky; many patients do laugh during seizures, and the results are never funny. One stroke patient from India suddenly found herself laughing, then fifteen minutes later lost sensation in the right side of her body and the ability to speak. Another patient, a forty-seven-year-old man, began laughing following surgery to repair a ruptured aneurysm and didn’t stop for twenty years. And then there’s Jenna, a twenty-four-year-old patient from Great Britain who has laughed uncontrollably all her life, up to fifteen times a day. “The laughter is like an explosion,” she says, describing the condition that has only recently come under control using medication. “One minute all is normal and then I’m just laughing. It’s totally natural, but overwhelming too. Very erratic.”
The names for pathological laughter are almost as varied as the condition itself, all sounding like evil Harry Potter spells: enuresis risosa (Latin for “giggle incontinence”), fou rire prodromique (French for “sudden mad laughter”), risus sardonicus (Latin again, this time for “devil’s smile”). But the most common name is gelastic epilepsy, a term adapted from the Greek words for “laughter” and “seizure,” which neurologists agree is the most accurate way of describing the event. That’s what a seizure is—uncontrolled and excessive activity in the brain. For patients like Jenna, that activity manifests as laughter.
Pathological laughter tells us a lot about the brain because it shows how humor involves the interaction of many different parts. As discussed earlier, laughter is related to humor the same way a symptom is related to underlying disease: it’s an external manifestation of inner conflict. Although that conflict often comes in the form of jokes, it doesn’t have to. It can be caused by stress, anxiety, or, in cases of pathological laughter, excessive brain activity due to neural insult. The immense number of different modules in the brain, and the many connections between them, allows us to be highly adaptable as a species, but we’re also more susceptible to unusual behaviors, such as uncontrollable laughter, because there are so many ways for the brain to break down.
This might be why the symptoms associated with pathological laughter are so varied. For Jenna, the outbursts don’t include any feelings of mirth, only laughter. Other patients feel euphoria during spontaneous laughter episodes, and still others confuse pleasure and pain, an unfortunate condition called pain asymblosia. In some cases, pathological laughter is accompanied by cognitive deficits such as reduced intelligence or memory. In others, there are no additional impacts. There are seemingly a hundred different ways to trick our brains into laughing inappropriately, but no way to guess what will happen from one person to the next.
Possessing such a modular and interconnected brain has both advantages and disadvantages. Species tend to be divided into two groups: specialists and generalists. Specialists thrive only in the environments for which they are highly adapted. A good example of a specialist is the Costa Rican katydid, which avoids predators by camouflaging itself as a leaf from the local flora. Take a Costa Rican katydid from its home and pretty soon you have a dead katydid. Specialists aren’t limited to insects and other simple organisms; the koala, for instance, is a specialist too. Its diet consists solely of eucalyptus leaves, and so it’s found only in eastern and southern Australia. Unless you visit a zoo, you won’t find a koala in Europe, or even a short distance away in Tasmania, because the eucalyptus tree is a specialist too.
The fact that humans live in Europe, Tasmania, and even Antarctica shows how we are extreme generalists. Our specialty is intelligence, developed over generations as an ability to adapt to our surroundings. Our brains are the tools of our survival, allowing us to outsmart our environments instead of merely conforming to them. But they also do strange things when broken, such as causing us to laugh inappropriately—an unfortunate consequence of possessing so many working parts.
To liken these survival strategies to cutlery—which I’m sure is the analogy you were thinking of too—if a koala is a bread knife, then a human is the Swiss Army Fieldmaster. The Fieldmaster not only cuts bread, it opens bottles, pops corks, and saws twigs. It’s not perfectly suited for any of those tasks, but it does the job, whatever it’s asked to do.
Which also explains our extreme variability. With so many features, and so many parts interacting to give us this adaptive intelligence, there’s a lot of room for people to differ. To continue with the cutlery example, an unscientific review of the Williams and Sonoma website shows that they offer twenty-four kinds of bread knives. That may seem like a lot, but you can find that many varieties of Swiss Army Knives just within their “flash collection.” Those are knives containing USB drives inside. Their total number of options is well in the hundreds.
I’m not trying to sell you a Swiss Army Knife, but it’s worth recognizing that complexity has a price—namely, unpredictability. It means that we have more parts to break, and even when our brains work perfectly, they do so in idiosyncratic ways. This chapter explores one consequence of that unpredictability—individual differences. Nowhere are those differences more apparent than in our sense of humor, which is why it remains one of the best ways for examining who we really are.
STATES AND TRAITS
Humor is notably short on quantitative formulas. Sure, surprise and internal conflict are important, but how can we possibly measure these things? It’s impossible. Still, this hasn’t stopped some people from trying—for example, Peter Derks, who came up with this quite clever formula:
Humor = salience (trait + state) x incongruity + resolution
At first this looks like a jumbled mess of words. Salience? What’s that? But further examination suggests that Derks is actually onto something.
Let’s start with the second half of the formula: incongruity and resolution. As we’ve already discussed, we laugh at things that surprise us (incongruity) and that force us to look at things differently (resolution). These concepts parallel the stages of reckoning and resolving described earlier. Granted, I would have given resolution a more important role, perhaps making everything else depend on it exponentially, but regardless, from incongruity and resolution we see that we find things funny that catch us off-guard and change our view of the world.
Now let’s consider the first half of the formula, which says that humor also depends on salience. Salience has two components: trait and state. When we understand these elements, we should see how all the humor ingredients come together. Right?
I’m 5’9”, roughly 180 pounds, and whenever I eat mints I always sneeze at least three times. These details have accurately described me since turning an adult, thus making them traits. They don’t change, at least not quickly, and so for practical purposes they can be described as fixed. Contrast these traits with the fact that right now, as I write this paragraph, I’m experiencing a dull pain in my left ankle. This morning, as I let my three dogs outside, my five-year-old rescue mutt Maynard tripped me by running between my legs. As a result, I’m in a bit of a surly mood and trying hard not to blame Maynard for his enthusiasm. That’s a state, and it will surely change soon, either when my ankle stops hurting or when Maynard does s
omething funny like roll on his back and purr, as he sometimes does when he forgets he’s a dog.
This is a roundabout way of saying that our moods vary from moment to moment, but we possess general dispositions too, and both have a big impact on humor. For example, many religious people have a poor sense of humor. This may seem an unfair generalization, but at least it’s a scientifically based one. I’m referring to a study by the Belgian psychologist Vassilis Saroglou from the Université Catholique de Louvain. He gave nearly four hundred subjects a variety of sense-of-humor tests, having previously assessed their self-reported religiosity. He found that strength of religious beliefs was inversely proportionate to social humor, and also that religious men tend to tell self-defeating jokes, perhaps due to their discomfort over the lighthearted nature of humor, given their spiritual convictions.
As you might expect, countless studies have looked at the relationship between personality characteristics and sense of humor. I won’t go into most of them because they aren’t very informative—how surprising is it, really, that cheerful people tell more jokes than sad people? However, one experiment in particular says something important about how we think, beyond the positive influence of being in a good mood. I’m referring to a study conducted by Paul Pearson, who is both a psychologist and a member of the Cartoonist Club of Great Britain. He administered a personality test—specifically, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ)—to sixty professional cartoonists and found that sometimes the least likely people to tell a joke are the funniest.
The EPQ is perhaps the most widely used psychological assessment there is, so it’s worth addressing here. Developed by the psychologist Hans Jürgen Eysenck, with help from his wife Sybil, the test was designed to measure three key aspects of our temperament believed to be set at birth. Though no one, including the Eysencks, believe these three characteristics never change, it’s widely accepted that they remain relatively stable over our lifetimes. As such, they’re very useful to measure.
The first is extraversion. It exists on a continuum, ranging from introversion to extraversion, and it describes how much energy we seek from our environment, as contrasted with how much we like to be alone. It’s also closely linked with arousal—extraverts tend to seek arousal from their surroundings as a means of overcoming boredom, while introverts seek quieter environments due to their jittery natures. If you feel a constant need to be around people and to experience stimulating environments, you’re probably an extravert. If that sounds like a lot of work, consider yourself on the other end of the spectrum.
The second is neuroticism, which exists on a continuum ranging from stability to neuroticism. This measures how much anxiety we typically feel and how influenced we are by depression, tension, and feelings of guilt. Neuroticism is closely linked to the fight-or-flight response, a response that is activated relatively quickly in neurotic people, because they’re so easily stressed or made anxious. By contrast, people with higher levels of stability tend to be cool under pressure.
The final characteristic is psychoticism, which contrasts with socialization. Psychotic individuals are assertive, manipulative, and dogmatic. This makes them inflexible with their environment, and pushy about it too. They can also be tough-minded, along with reckless and hostile. Testosterone is often identified as the culprit for this behavior, which might explain why studies conducted in more than thirty countries have found that men, on average, exhibit higher levels of psychoticism than women.
It’s important to note that these characteristics do not imply any sort of pathology. Psychoticism can be a diagnosis, or it can simply describe someone’s position on a much broader continuum. Which is good, because the cartoonists in Eysenck’s study scored much higher than the normal population on both neuroticism and psychoticism. So, apparently these artists were a bit “on edge” with respect to anxiety and aggression. What’s more surprising is that the cartoonists didn’t differ from the rest of the population in terms of extraversion—a surprising finding because if there’s one personality characteristic we’d expect to see linked with humor, it’s how outgoing we are. Numerous studies have shown that outgoing people tell more jokes, and also appreciate good jokes more. So, what gives—are cartoonists just special?
Apparently not. It turns out that creative people in general show similar results. Professional musicians typically score higher than amateurs on both neuroticism and psychoticism. Painters and sculptors do too, especially on psychoticism, with the most successful artists often scoring highest on this measure. A huge meta-study, examining creative professionals ranging from professional dancers to Nigerian veterinary surgeons, found that one factor best characterized successful scientists and artists alike. That factor was a high degree of psychoticism.
One problem with generalizing on the basis of scientific studies like these is that they often measure different things. Some researchers study professional artists; others, students; and still others, mixtures of both. Some scientists give their subjects questionnaires to assess personality traits, others measure things like laughter. As a result, it’s difficult making comparisons without performing years of in-depth analytical work. Thankfully there are scientists like Willibald Ruch willing to do that for us.
Often, researchers conduct studies involving only one or two experiments, with only a couple of different measures, because science takes effort. There’s the issue of getting participants, plus practical matters like what tests to administer and how long to gather data before finally publishing. Which makes the following study performed by German psychologist and former president of the International Society for Humor Studies Willibald Ruch all the more impressive. He knew that to understand the complicated connection between personality and humor, he had to be comprehensive. So he didn’t just target humor in a single population, he studied more than one hundred adults whose ages ranged from seventeen to eighty-three. He didn’t just give one or two personality tests, either; he gave twelve. And rather than administer surveys and questionnaires, he put his subjects to work. In one task, for example, he instructed them to view fifteen cartoons and then come up with as many humorous captions as they could within thirty minutes. Knowing that the captions would vary in quality, he asked a team of independent observers to rate the wittiness and originality of each one.
Ruch’s findings were clear—extraverted subjects produced the most humor. The more outgoing they were, the more captions they created. They were also the most cheerful, least serious, and most likely to selfreport a sense of humor. In short, they were the most fun to be around.
The subjects who rated high on psychoticism proved quite different. They scored low on seriousness and produced fewer captions. However, they distinguished themselves by the quality of those captions. Specifically, their contributions were judged by the independent observers to be significantly funnier than everybody else’s. So, being assertive, manipulative, and dogmatic might make you less prone to tell jokes, but at least the jokes will be funnier and more likely to make people laugh.
This finding helps explain why some studies find relationships between certain personality characteristics and humor, and others don’t. It’s not sufficient just to measure how many jokes a person tells, because quantity is very different from quality. We’ve all known people who love to tell jokes and amuse others around them. Sometimes they’re funny, but other times they’re simply annoying. I’m not saying that a person needs to be mentally unbalanced to crack a good joke, or that all good comedians are necessarily schizophrenic. Rather, my point is that when we “cultivate” conflict, both within our brains and with others around us, we’re more likely to find our humorous side. By the same token, overactive brains aren’t a bad thing, at least when it comes to humor. As we’ve seen, it’s important to have a bit of edginess, just enough to make those jokes funny. Too little and we become boring. Too much and we become institutionalized.
One implication is that psychotic individuals (again, I’m not implying an
y pathology) are more likely than others to speak out in awkward or socially unacceptable ways to make a good joke. But we haven’t yet considered the difference between being funny and having a good sense of humor. As we all know, there’s a difference between telling a joke and being able to enjoy one when it’s presented to us. It’s a matter of production versus appreciation. Are certain people better at “getting jokes” than others?
The answer is “yes”—and here, too, the explanation has to do with overactive brains. There’s another group of individuals who are highly tuned for appreciating humor, and it’s because their minds are more active than those around them. We call these individuals sensation-seekers.
Sensation-seeking individuals can be thought of as combining all three of Eysenck’s key personality traits. Like extraverts they’re highly excitable, always seeking out new social situations. Yet they’re not always sociable. True sensation-seekers don’t care whether their actions are harmful to themselves or others—and if unchecked the result can be dangerous lifestyles and antisocial behavior. This makes them more than a little neurotic. And like psychotics, sensation-seekers frequently have high levels of testosterone, which itself is strongly correlated with drug use and sex. In a sense, then, sensation-seeking is like turning the dial of one’s personality to ten and letting the chips fall as they may.
We know that sensation-seeking individuals are especially responsive to humor because we can look at their brains as they process jokes. Which brings us to the topic of absurd humor, the kind that doesn’t lead to easily resolved punch lines (e.g., What’s yellow and can’t swim? A bulldozer!). Most of us respond to absurd humor with “quiet” brains, primarily because we’re not sure what to make of it. But we see a different reaction among sensation-seekers. For them, it leads to more brain activation, because it’s seen as a challenge. This form of humor allows them to work as hard as they want to get the joke, and since it’s ridiculous, there’s no boundary for how much exercise their brains can get. So if you want to know if any of your friends have a particularly keen sense of the absurd, show them the cartoon in Figure 4.1. An inactive, lazy brain will immediately give up trying to make sense of it. A sensation-seeker’s brain will keep probing.