The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  Of course, you don’t have to be a minority to be a great comic. But either way, it seems helpful to cultivate what W.E.B. Du Bois called your “double-consciousness,” your “two-ness.”10 Yes, in the United States this phenomenon has been a bad thing, something that’s kept people fractured and suspicious and struggling with self-identity. But on the bright side, it also makes for good comedy.

  For something that’s conceptually so basic—joke-telling in its primal form—all we hear from stand-up comics in LA is how complicated it is to do their job right. In comedy, they explain, context is everything. There are too many outside variables, they tell us, too many ways those simple jokes can get mucked up by quirks of the comedy club or audience or a million other factors. “Comedy is seldom performed in ideal circumstances,” wrote Steve Martin in his memoir, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life. “Comedy’s enemy is distraction, and rarely do comedians get a pristine performing environment. I worried about the sound system, ambient noise, hecklers, drunks, lighting, sudden clangs, latecomers, and loud talkers, not to mention the nagging concern, ‘Is this funny?’ ”

  And more than anything else, comedians seem to worry about the space they’re trying to be funny in. Is it a “good” room or a “bad” room? But what does that even mean? What constitutes a comedy club, after all, is all over the map. In Los Angeles alone, we’ve visited venues ranging from brightly lit halls to shadowy bars to back-alley alcoves to black-box theaters to the back room of a comic book store. But if the comedians we’ve talked to had it their way, clubs would all look more or less the same: a densely packed, dimly lit space with low ceilings, red curtains, and nothing at all that’s blue. As Jordan Brady, a comedian turned director whose 2010 documentary I Am Comic explored comedy-club designs, put it to us, “A great club experience is best served dark and intimate.”

  What’s funny about these suggestions is that they go against best practices in retail-space design. Research shows that consumers are happiest—and therefore most likely to spend money—in environments with open layouts, high ceilings, and blue-hued color schemes.11 But as Pete points out, an ideal comedy club isn’t designed to get people to buy stuff, even if some drink-shilling club owners wish otherwise. It’s to help them have an emotionally arousing experience: to laugh.

  And from that perspective, the comics might be on to something. Experiments have shown that people exposed to warm color schemes, especially those with red, are more likely to become aroused and excited, while cool colors like blue are calming and sedative. And the last thing you want of a comedy audience is everybody feeling calm and sleepy.12 Furthermore, darkened clubs might help people feel more concealed and therefore less inhibited in what they’re willing to laugh at. In experiments, people in poorly lit rooms and wearing sunglasses were more likely to do devious things because they felt anonymous.13 Being packed into a comedy club might have the same disinhibiting effect. When people are in large groups, they are more likely to do embarrassing things such as act like monkeys, make rude noises, and suck on baby bottles.14 Apparently, if you get enough folks together, everything turns into a frat party.

  To see if the comedians knew what they were talking about, Pete figured there was only one thing to do: build his own comedy club. Incredibly, the Denver Art Museum let him do so. During one of the museum’s monthly after-hours social events, in which the building remains open late and a cash bar serves up drinks, Pete, working with his collaborator Caleb and graduate student Julie Schiro, took over a small 15-by-50-foot gathering space, filling it with rows of chairs and setting up a movie projector stocked with comedy footage: an Ellen DeGeneres Show sketch in which the actor Dennis Quaid terrorized a café barista (“Dennis Quaid wants a coffee!”); a compilation of “epic fail” videos, most of which involved people hit in the groin; and clips of babies making ridiculous faces as they gummed on lemons. Throughout the night, they had groups of museum visitors “attend” their comedy showcase, varying aspects of the room for different performances—changing lighting levels and switching the color of the background behind the movie clips. (Pete had hoped to modify room temperature, but the museum wouldn’t go for it. Something about damaging millions of dollars’ worth of art.)

  Sure enough, combining low lighting with a red backdrop seemed to make some of the clips funnier—but not all of them. And none of the differences reached levels of statistical significance. Plus, an outside variable threw off the results, one Pete never anticipated in an upright place like an art museum: As the night progressed, people became increasingly drunk and rowdy. “That’s great for a comedy club,” says Pete, “but bad for science.”

  What about the people who fill the comedy clubs, we wonder—those who come to hear the jokes? Is there a difference between a good comedy audience and a bad one? Hollywood believes there is—and has lately been throwing time and money at the issue. Which is why, just after dawn one morning, Pete and I drive to a warehouse in a bland Burbank industrial zone to have our chuckles evaluated by the laughter queen of Los Angeles.

  “Have you practiced laughing?” I ask Pete.

  “I practiced yesterday, while I was stuck in traffic,” he says. “It was kind of embarrassing.”

  I haven’t practiced. And it’s 7 a.m., and I haven’t had coffee. There is nothing at all to laugh about.

  Lisette St. Claire greets us at the warehouse’s entrance, showing us around its cubicle-filled interior—the headquarters of Central Casting, the giant staffing company that’s Hollywood’s go-to place for extras and stand-ins. “This is the heart of Hollywood,” she says. “Eighty-five to 90 percent of everything that’s shot in LA, we have a finger in it.” That’s why she’s seeing us so early. In a few hours, things will get busy around here. Folks will begin to line up outside for a shot at being cast as “Homeless Man Number Two.” Sometimes, for certain jobs, St. Claire casts herself. “It’s fun,” she says. “You get to be a hooker one day, a doctor the next.”

  Her most unusual assignment of all fell into her lap thanks to The Nanny, the 1990s sitcom starring Fran Drescher. Years earlier, Drescher had been assaulted in her home by armed robbers. She wasn’t keen on having random people in her studio audience. The show asked Central Casting to provide prescreened audiences for the show.

  For St. Claire, the casting director assigned to the task, not any old audience would do. “I was not about to send just anybody. I wanted people who were really good,” she tells us. St. Claire’s overzealousness on the matter makes sense: from her outsized personality to her riot of curly hair to her storied history as a onetime mud wrestler, she’s not the sort to do the bare minimum.

  She started auditioning people, looking for dominating, infectious laughs. If chosen, folks got $75 for a day’s worth of chuckles, slightly better than your typical extra. If folks made the cut, she put them into one of three tiers: top-level Group A, second-string Group B, or “when hell freezes over” Group C.

  Her formula was a hit. Her phone started ringing, with three to four shows a week turning to Central Casting’s cacklers instead of, say, a laugh track. “We couldn’t get enough people with good laughs out,” she says.

  St. Claire’s live laughers have a better scientific track record than the canned version. In one study, researchers found that the sound of strong laughter caused people to rate a Steven Wright comedy routine funnier—but only if they believed the laughter wasn’t pre-recorded.15

  So, do our laughs make the cut? St. Claire turns to me. “Laugh like you’re about to pee your pants.”

  I try my best, feeling goofy and awkward as I cackle as loud and long as I can. It’s hard not to feel like a fool when you’re laughing at nothing whatsoever.

  When I’m laughed out, it’s Pete’s turn. He slaps his knee and rears his head back, mouth agape. No wonder his college friends nicknamed him “T-Rex.”

  “Not bad,” St. Claire says with a polite smile. “I’d put you both in Group B.”

  The laughter queen is being kind.
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  No trip to Los Angeles is complete, we figure, without a road trip to Las Vegas. So on a bright California morning, we lock our apartment, pack up our rental car, and, trading hackneyed shouts of “Vegas, baby!” head out onto the road . . . only to find ourselves stuck in five-lane, bumper-to-bumper, no-end-in-sight traffic. At 11:37 a.m. on a Saturday. “This is not the exciting Swingers-style trip we envisioned,” grumbles Pete as we idle in a sea of cars. He points to a homeless man pushing two shopping carts piled high with odds and ends down the sidewalk. “That guy is beating us.”

  Eventually we make it through the congestion and, after hours of cruising through desert vistas of gnarled Joshua trees and craggy mountain peaks, we make it to Sin City. It’s like a fever dream in the middle of nowhere: gargantuan casinos soaring overhead, kitschy music blaring from all directions; lurid neon flashing—and, in the middle of it all, featuring a smile as bright as any of the signs on the Las Vegas Strip, a huge billboard for the man we’ve come to see: “Funny Man George Wallace for President!”

  As entertainment journalist Richard Zoglin wrote in Comedy at the Edge, “Stand-up comedy may be the only major art form whose greatest practitioners, at any given time, want to be doing something else”—whether that be a sitcom star, a film icon, or a late-night talk-show host. But it’s difficult to break out in such a way, to become mega-stars with multimedia empires. For one thing, once you’ve reached the top, it’s hard to stay there. Unlike rock stars, comics can’t just do greatest-hits tours, since old jokes are, well, old.16

  Still, some comedians have managed to become fabulously rich. But maybe they had an unfair advantage. Is a white comic, for example, more likely to strike it rich than a black comic? To find out, Pete decided to mine the data from an online list of nearly 200 comedians’ net worth, ranging from the $800 million fortunes of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David to the $5,000 income claimed by Andy Dick.17 Working with undergraduate research assistant McKenzie Binder and cognitive scientist Phil Fernbach, he sliced the info every which way. Not surprisingly, they found the biggest predictor of success was age. The longer folks had been in the business, the more money they’d earned. Being involved in endeavors other than stand-up, such as starring in or producing films, also correlated with higher net worth. Gender didn’t have much effect, but then again, only 10 percent of the comedians listed were female. A few other traits, though, did seem to offer marginal help. Comedians who were atheistic or agnostic, were married, or, yes, happened to be white, tended to be richer. But these effects mostly went away when Pete and his collaborators controlled for the other relevant characteristics. Put another way, Chris Rock wouldn’t make more money if he were white, but he would make more money if he wrote, produced, and directed more movies.

  George Wallace, a former ad-agency salesman who started in comedy in late-1970s New York alongside his roommate and friend Jerry Seinfeld, seems to have handled his ascension to the comedy firmament with ease. While he’s never starred in a sitcom or big movie, he sells out the biggest theaters, has appeared on the biggest talk shows, and was named among the 100 greatest comics of all time by Comedy Central. And here in Las Vegas, at the Flamingo Resort and Casino, where he has a running show we have tickets for tonight, he holds court like a king over his flashy fiefdom.

  Some say Vegas, with all its distractions, is one of the toughest places for a comic to perform. But not so for Wallace. As soon as the comedian, in a gray suit and signature beret, steps on stage in the Flamingo Showroom with its 60-foot ceilings and red plush seating, he’s in his element. The near-capacity crowd eats up his cracks about NBA stars, televangelist Joel Osteen, and what he’d do if he were president. Every “yo mamma” joke lands a laugh, every time he trots out his catchphrase, “I be thinkin’ . . .” folks go wild. It’s a bit hokey. But Wallace is fun, he’s boisterous—and most of all, he seems happy.

  Such a persona goes against one of the most endearing stereotypes in all of comedy: the road-weary, liquored-up, drug-addled, and all-around screwed-up comic. As British humorist Jimmy Carr and his journalist co-author Lucy Greeves put it in their far-reaching book Only Joking: What’s So Funny About Making People Laugh? “In a room filled with people, the comedian is the only one facing the wrong way. He’s also the only one who isn’t laughing. For normal people, that’s a nightmare, not a career aspiration.”18 In many famous cases, that nightmare hasn’t ended well. Lenny Bruce overdosed on drugs. Mort Sahl lost himself in obsession over the John F. Kennedy assassination. Richard Pryor set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine and nearly killed himself. The comedy industry accepts these potential outcomes as a given. The Laugh Factory, one of the biggest comedy clubs in LA, has an in-house therapy program. Two nights a week, comics meet with psychologists in a private office upstairs while lying on a therapy couch once owned by Groucho Marx. “Eighty percent of comedians come from a place of tragedy,” Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada, a colorful guy in hip sneakers and jeans, told Pete. “They didn’t get enough love. They have to overcome their problems by making people laugh.”

  But could Wallace, with whom we’ve been granted a sit-down, be the exception? The proof comedians don’t have to be miserable? After his Flamingo show, casino personnel pull us backstage and whisk us through a maze of corridors, past stretching cabaret dancers and a mariachi band set, into a well-appointed dressing room with Wallace’s name on the door. The towering, grinning man inside greets us, happy to chat. “I had the perfect childhood,” Wallace says. “My ultimate goal was to work Las Vegas, and now I’m here.” He rambles on with a confident swagger, like a rambunctious grandpa overflowing with stories. Plus, he says with a wink, “I’m the most successful comedian you’ve ever met, and I can go pee without anyone bugging me.” He points to a photo on the wall of his friend Seinfeld. “He can’t go pee.”

  In the early hours of the morning, we thank Wallace for his time, figuring it’s time for us to go. “Don’t leave!” he cries. “I’m going to be lonely!” He says this jokingly, but there’s something in his voice. Maybe the most successful comedian we’ve ever met has no one else to talk to, nowhere else to go.

  Even Wallace could have a trace of unhappiness buried beneath his layers of contentment and success. Does this mean funny people are inherently unhappy? Gil Greengross, an anthropologist from the University of New Mexico, looked into the matter by subjecting comics recruited from a local stand-up club to established personality surveys. He found that comedians on the whole don’t report having more childhood problems than typical university students, nor do they appear to be more neurotic. He did find that they tended to be slightly more introverted and disagreeable than others, an odd finding considering that they’re always making jokes in front of crowds. But, as Greengross put it when I talked to him, “The personalities they project on stage might not be their personalities in daily life.”19

  Our time with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre students left Pete wondering if improvisers would score differently on such tests. So he partnered with Greengross, as well as HuRL graduate student Abby Schneider and decision-research scientist (not to mention improv alum) Dan Goldstein to undertake what they believe is the largest-ever data collection on amateur and professional funny people. They had more than 650 UCB students—from absolute beginners to members of the theater’s house teams—complete online surveys measuring personality traits like agreeableness, neuroticism, self-awareness, and tenacity. When the data came in, Pete and his colleagues found just one area of difference between the two types of humorists: the students specializing in improv tended to be more conscientious than the stand-up comics. The improvisers, the data showed, were more likely thorough, efficient, and deliberate (i.e., they were good at coming up with what comes after “Yes, and . . .”). But there’s a downside: Conscientious people tend to be perfectionists. Take it from the two of us: that’s not always a good thing.

  But other than that, UCB instructor Joe Wengert turned out to be right: the personalities o
f stand-up comedians and improvisers are far more alike than different. Despite their cheerful and engaging on-stage demeanor, the improv students ended up being just as disagreeable and introverted as stage comics.

  So are all comedians jackasses? Not necessarily. In his solo research, Greengross found one other bit of data: Those comedians who seemed to have the most success, in that they reported having the most shows booked, were those who tended to use friendly, more affiliative humor in their daily lives and were more open-minded, agreeable, and extroverted than their counterparts.20 As Greengross put it to me, “There might be something in the combination of being nice to others, and not being an asshole, that pushes you over the top.”

  We heard the same thing from Chris Mazzilli, the cool-as-ice co-owner of Gotham Comedy Club, the poshest stand-up joint in New York City. “It’s a business,” Mazzilli told us about comedy. “A lot of people don’t treat it as such.” If you want to be successful, he concludes, “don’t be an asshole.” Yes, comics make their living by creating conflict and turmoil in front of an audience, but if they hope to succeed with managers, agents, club owners, producers, and directors, that conflict and turmoil had better stay on stage.

  So why is it that people assume successful comics are the opposite, that they’re screwed up both on stage and off? It could be because by nature of their career, all they do is talk about what’s wrong with themselves, says Pete: If you’re going to mine your life for comedy material, for benign violations, you’re going to start with the violations—relationship struggles and health problems and other topics—that people don’t talk about in polite company, but are great for a laugh.