Ha!

by Scott Weems

  A neuroscientist friend of mine once shared with me what he called evolution’s greatest gift to living creatures: the ability of the brain, at times of extreme damage to our bodies, to stop releasing chemicals associated with pain and alarm. Instead, it releases endorphins, nature’s equivalent of morphine. From an evolutionary standpoint it’s hard to see the benefits of such a release. It doesn’t increase energy, and it doesn’t promote recovery either. It simply provides psychological comfort, making our most trying moments peaceful instead of terrifying. Apparently nature thought that was important enough.

  I share this story to introduce the concept of positive outlook, which is also related to humor. I’m not talking about enduring pain associated with bear or tiger attacks; rather, my point is that humor helps us overcome psychological injuries. Humorous people experience the same number of stressful events as everybody else, and we know this because scientists have actually counted. However, as researchers have shown, people who are quick to laugh tend to forget those stressful experiences more quickly than those around them. Humor also helps us ignore the events in our lives that might otherwise cause us pain or harm. Humorous people may not experience easier lives than those around them, but they often feel as though they do. They’re able to block out negative experiences when they’re over and to move on.

  Perhaps this is why doctors are finally taking Cousins’s advice and incorporating humor as part of their medical treatments. Comedy Carts are springing up in hospitals across the country. For example, the one at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, which distributes whoopee cushions and funny movies to keep patients laughing. Or the Therapeutic Humor Program at Rochester General Hospital in New York. It distributes comic books and videos to its patients, who report a 50 percent decrease in stress as a result of the program. And then there’s the Big Apple Circus, which sends “Clown Care Units” to New York City hospitals to visit sick children and their families.

  When the movie Patch Adams was released in 1998, several reviewers complained that it downplayed the importance of medicine in recovery. Laughter and positive attitude are certainly beneficial, they said, but they’re of little help if the patient dies in the end. That’s true, but it’s also true that patients receiving the best drugs and medical treatments sometimes die despite the best efforts of doctors and hospitals. Humor alone may not keep us healthy, but it can reduce the amount of pain in our lives—whether real or perceived. It can also strengthen our heart and immune system and, assuming that we use it positively, improve our psychological well-being too. So laughter really is the best medicine, so long as it’s mixed with exercise, a healthy diet, and an occasional dose of penicillin.

  Humor is a lot like changing a baby’s diaper—it doesn’t necessarily solve all our problems, but it sure does make things more pleasant for a while.

  7

  HUMOR DANCES

  I’ve discovered that getting a laugh is more a trick of timing than of true wit.

  —GORE VIDAL

  NOW THAT WE’RE OVER FORTY, MY WIFE LAURA AND I DON’T spend many late evenings out anymore. The transition was slow but unmistakable; when we were young we frequently went out to dinners, movies, and comedy shows. Then, as jobs and other responsibilities started competing for time, these activities began to change. We became more inclined to get up early for hikes or bicycle rides. Late-night trips to bars turned into quiet evenings with close friends. We still went out to dinners and clubs, but they were no longer the kind with live bands. They were ones we’d been to before, where we already knew the menu.

  So, when I asked Laura if she’d like to go with me to a comedy club as research for this book, I expected her to balk. Boy, was I wrong.

  “Let’s go tonight,” she recommended. She didn’t ask who the head-liner was or how late the show would be starting. “What should I wear? Should we get dinner beforehand? Do you think any of our friends would like to join us?” I answered each question as best I could, trying not to overthink whether our transition to adulthood had been a mutual decision. She was in as soon as the offer left my mouth.

  We ended up going to Magooby’s Joke House, which is one of the most popular comedy clubs in Baltimore and only a short distance from our home in eastern Maryland. Located in a four-hundred-seat theater with tall ceilings and stadium seating, it was the kind of place where everybody has a great view. Like most clubs, it offered a variety of cheese- and potato-related appetizers as well as an elaborate menu of drinks with names like “The Blind Pirate” and “Screwy Light Bulb.” So the night was off to a good start.

  The first performer was the club’s emcee, Mike, and though he wasn’t bad he didn’t make me laugh much. His comedy was different from the kind I usually enjoy watching, with jokes that were safe crowd-pleasers and a style of delivery using exaggerated movements and facial expressions. At one point, Mike quipped about Facebook and how stupid he thought it is. Then, close to the end of his act, he got several cheers by asking whether anybody in the audience hated the Pittsburgh Steelers. In Baltimore, that’s like asking a crowd of Ohio State undergrads if anybody hates the University of Michigan.

  The next act was a little better, but already I was looking forward to the headliner, Rich Voss. I knew of Voss because I had watched Last Comic Standing, an NBC show where professional comics performed each week and got voted out one by one, Survivor style. Ratings were bad and the show was eventually canceled, though I remember Voss because he was one of the funniest and most likable contestants from the opening season. A regular bit involved the comedians giving recorded interviews, and Voss always gave his in a bathtub, usually accompanied by one of the other comics, David Mordal. It was absurd and awkward and, to me, utterly hilarious. So I was excited to be at Magooby’s that night.

  But as soon as Voss began his act, I could tell Laura was not impressed. He began with a few racial jokes and insults thrown out to the audience, a confrontational style that I suspect was intended to get people worked up early. Then he moved to safer topics like teenage daughters and spousal flatulence, and although I laughed frequently, Laura barely snickered. She was still having a good time, but clearly she wasn’t connecting with Voss’s dark comedic style. At one point he made a comment about dating, and how men don’t just date a woman but all of her friends, relatives, previous boyfriends, and every expectation she has had since childhood. I knew Laura must have found this joke funny because it was exactly her type of humor, yet it got only a chuckle, nothing more. Now it had become personal. She clearly just didn’t like Voss.

  After the performance, we agreed it had been a great evening and that we should do it again soon. Then Laura remarked that she would return simply to see the emcee, the performer I had disliked. He was hilarious, she said. When I remarked that I didn’t think his jokes were original, she said she didn’t either, but that she loved the way he delivered them. It was as if we had experienced completely different acts.

  It’s not that Laura was offended by Voss’s humor. Though his jokes were frequently off-color, my wife—a retired military officer who has spent significant time at sea in the North Pacific—isn’t easily offended. In short, there isn’t much she hasn’t seen or heard. And though I have explicit instructions not to make her sound like a longshoreman, let’s just say that when Laura is prodded, her profanity could make Mark Twain blush. So what gives?

  Clearly, each of the performers deserved to be onstage and each got plenty of laughs. The difference was really one of connectedness. I never connected with Mike the emcee and didn’t like how he manipulated his audience. Laura never connected with Voss and didn’t enjoy his stern, New Jersey style. These differences highlight the social nature of humor and how much it involves relationships between people.

  This chapter explores those relationships. Earlier in the book we looked at how humor violates expectations at a psychological level, leading to revised scripts. Now we’ll see how expectations exist on a social level, too.
Successful comics manipulate their audiences by controlling their expectations, which for Mike the emcee meant starting with a few simple crowd-pleasers, and for Voss meant insulting various members of the audience. Each approach shaped how the crowd would react to the performers’ quips and punch lines. These styles allowed relationships to form—but in each case, damaged connections meant failed humor. Over the next several pages we’ll explore why, showing how humor takes advantage of the most challenging aspects of our social relationships, such as subtlety, ambiguity, and conflict. We’ll also see how humor brings us together by cultivating shared expectations—and then destroying them.

  HUMOR AND DANCING

  The psychologist and philosopher William James once said that common sense and humor are the same thing moving at different speeds. Common sense walks, but humor dances.

  Dancing is indeed the perfect analogy for how humor works. Humor, like dancing, is by nature a social phenomenon. Try telling a funny story in an empty room and you’ll see what I mean. Without having other faces to look at for a reaction, you’ll find that the joke isn’t a joke at all. Humor requires both a teller and a receiver, and its success depends on how well one influences the thoughts and expectations of the other.

  The dancing analogy also highlights the important but elusive role of tempo. With dancing, there’s always a clear beat. Humor has a beat too, and we call it comedic timing, but there’s no rhythm section, only our instincts and our ability to read the audience. So, uncoordinated guys like me, who may not be able to dance but can fake our way through a song by biting our lip and listening closely for the bass line, have no safety net. Put us in front of an audience and ask us to tell a joke, and we might as well perform a mamba wearing earplugs.

  It’s worth addressing comedic timing because, as noted earlier, humor requires a connection between people, and that means being in sync with our audience. Some comedians, like Robin Williams, tend to speed up before a punch line. Others, like Steven Wright, slow down. Perhaps that’s why humorologists liken comedic timing to jazz. Improvisation is key for both, with the onset and duration of each note depending on all the ones that came before it. This makes for playfulness and the constant risk of surprise.

  One of the few actual experiments to measure comedic timing was conducted by our old friend Salvatore Attardo, who, as we learned in Chapter 2, also developed the General Theory of Verbal Humor. Attardo recorded ten speakers as they performed jokes, and then he broke down those recordings in three important ways. First, he measured their rate of speech—essentially how fast the joke-tellers talked during the setup and the punch line. Second, he measured their pitch and volume, looking for changes that signaled upcoming humorous turns. Third, he looked for pauses, ranging from less than a fifth of a second (200 milliseconds) to more than four times that long. His hypothesis was that speakers would pause before delivering punch lines and that the punch lines themselves would be delivered faster and louder than the rest of the joke.

  Sadly, his hypotheses weren’t borne out. Not a single aspect of the punch lines was different than the rest of the joke.

  “It caught me absolutely by surprise,” says Attardo. “It was to be one of those studies where you expect to confirm what everybody already knows is true, then everybody applauds and moves on. But we found just the opposite. . . . It took quite a bit of work to show that we hadn’t screwed anything up, though now it’s pretty well recognized that these markers don’t distinguish punch lines like we thought they did.”

  This finding countered what scientists call the folk-theory of joke delivery. Folk-theories are beliefs that everyone “knows are true” without ever having seen the proof. “We use only 10 percent of our brains.” “Blind people hear better than those with sight.” “Subliminal messages influence our behavior.” The problem with such beliefs is that even though they’re common, they’re also incomplete or wrong. Yes, a small percentage of the brain possesses functions predetermined at birth, but that doesn’t mean the rest isn’t important too. Blind people do sometimes experience superior hearing, but only when the blindness occurs during infancy, while their brains are still plastic. And unless you’re a character in a bad sitcom, being exposed to a subliminal message won’t make you do something you wouldn’t ordinarily do, like tell off your boss or make a public scene. It might make a word come to mind slightly faster than usual, but there’s little proof that the effects are broader than that.

  The folk-theory of humor is that punch lines are distinguished by pauses and higher pitch—a belief that, like those other folk-theories, contains a small kernel of truth. The complication comes in the form of “paratones,” which is what linguists call spoken paragraphs. Paratones tend to end with lower volume and pitch, not higher like jokes. Since jokes often come at the end of paratones, any changes in volume or pitch cancel each other out. This explains why Attardo saw no differences in his measures: the jokes weren’t salient enough to overcome the speakers’ natural tendency to end on a low note.

  Although timing effects don’t show up experimentally, we still know they exist. We’ve all heard people butcher a joke by skipping a needed pause or speeding up just when they needed to slow down. Those pauses and changes in tempo convey important information. Indeed, effective communication involves a lot more than just words; it also depends on what’s left unsaid, or what’s implied through hesitation and changes in pitch. These cues introduce many layers of meaning, and as we’ve seen, humor is all about multiple meanings. Expert comedians use pauses and tempo changes to build up expectations and signal upcoming turns, and without those manipulations there’s no humor. Just the prolonged telling of a story.

  Which is why we wouldn’t expect to measure the funniness of a joke using pauses and inflection, because these are only symptoms of a much broader phenomenon. That phenomenon is ambiguity, which occurs not just within our brains but between people too. Punch lines aren’t the bang of the jokes, only the tools we use to bring on a final resolution. The build-up—filled with pauses, changes in volume, and all sorts of other subtle indicators—is where the humor starts, because this is where the ambiguity is sowed. You can’t just look at a specific part of a joke to find the humor, because it’s everywhere.

  To see how humor depends on more than just the punch line, just listen to any funny joke or story and note when people laugh. Laughter almost always occurs over the course of entire jokes, not just at the end. A recent survey of nearly two hundred narrative jokes, which are typically lengthy and told in natural conversation, showed that the majority involved setups that elicited laughter well before the end. These “early” jokes are called jab lines, and any particular narrative joke can have several. Not all jab lines will make listeners laugh, but they’re important parts of the joke because they establish a connection with the audience. Consider the following joke that contains several different jab lines, each marked in underline:

  A man wanted to get a pet to keep him company around the house. After some deliberation, he decided on a parrot and chose one that, the sales clerk assured him, was well trained with a full vocabulary of words. He took the parrot home and discovered that it knew quite a lot of words, most of them vulgar, and that it had a bad attitude to match. The parrot spewed out rudeness and vulgarity every time the man entered the room, and the man set out to change the parrot’s attitude. He tried repeating nice and polite words around the bird, playing soft music, withholding special treats when it cursed, but nothing seemed to work. The bird just seemed to get angrier and cursed at him even more. Finally, desperately tired of the cursing, he opened up the freezer and shoved the parrot inside. After a few minutes, the cursing and squawking stopped and all was quiet. The man was afraid he had hurt the bird, so he opened the freezer door to check. The parrot looked around, blinked, bowed politely, and recited, “Sir, I am so very sorry I offended you with my language and actions. I ask your forgiveness, and I shall try to control my behavior from now on.” Astonished, the man just nod
ded and carried the parrot back to its cage. As he closed the door, the parrot looked at him and said, “By the way . . . What did the chicken do?”

  In this example, six different jab lines precede the punch line. I challenge you to omit any one of them without softening the joke.

  Taking the idea of jab lines a step further, most comics live by what is known as “The Law of Three.” This law states that when rhythm is needed to establish the tone or pace of a joke, at least three parts are necessary. As an example, consider this Jon Stewart quip: I celebrated Thanksgiving the old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, then I killed them and took their land. The joke wouldn’t be funny without mention of the invitation or the feast because the timing would be off. Humor requires a chance to warm up, and this needed time is very difficult to measure. Perhaps that’s why comedians work so hard on the order and theme of their routines—a simple string of jokes without order isn’t much of a comedy routine. It’s also not likely to build a relationship with the audience.

  Like dancing, humor is a form of interpersonal communication, though a complex one. What we find funny depends not just on timing and pace but also on the cumulative build-up of ideas working toward some final point. What sets humor apart from other forms of communication is that it seeks out rules so that it can break them. In our language we expect ideas to be presented clearly. Humor violates that expectation by leading us to believe one thing, then surprising us with the true, intended meaning. We observed this earlier in relation to scripts, and we see it now in relation to communication between people.