The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  To test his hypothesis, Pete recruited grad student Erin Percival Carter and Colorado State University professor Jennifer Harman to run an experiment in which they had 40 people come up with a short story they might tell to others at a get-together. Half had to recount a funny story, while the others just had to be interesting. Among the humorous stories were tales of a dog swallowing a box of tampons, a guy getting caught singing in the men’s room to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” and someone deciding one drunken night to let a buddy burn a lightning bolt into his forehead so he’d look like Harry Potter. When others read the stories and chose which authors seemed the most “messed up,” the funny storytellers were rated significantly more screwy than the others.21

  But maybe these storytellers were viewed as screw-ups simply because they weren’t very good at telling funny stories. So the team re-ran the experiment, this time employing the talents of our new friends at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Alex Berg, UCB LA’s artistic director, was so excited about the partnership, he launched a whole UCB “science department” to handle it (cute, we know). Once again, when the findings came in, the UCB performer who penned a funny story about teaching grade-school kids to swim when he didn’t know how to swim himself was judged to be significantly more messed up than the UCB member who described in a serious manner saving a guy who’d fallen onto the subway tracks—even though both stories were actually written by the same person.

  In conclusion, maybe we’re all equally screwed up. The rest of us just aren’t as motivated as comedians to share those screw-ups with others in the guise of jokes.

  That is, except for the Harry Potter lightning-bolt guy. He needs professional help.

  On our last night in Los Angeles, we head back to the UCB Theatre to catch the hottest stand-up show in town: “Comedy Bang Bang.” The small black-box theater is crammed with twentysomethings in hipster T-shirts and baseball hats, swigging booze from brown paper bags beneath the venue’s prominent “No drinking” signs. As usual for the show, nobody knows who’s going to perform. But that doesn’t matter to folks in the know. Tickets for the event sold out days ago, as they do most weeks.

  When the show starts, Pete and I sit in back, taking it all in. We’ve seen so much stand-up lately we act like snooty connoisseurs, nodding and whispering to each other, “Oh, that’s funny,” rather than laughing like normal people.

  Then, at the end of the night, the big special guest: Aziz Ansari, co-star of the sitcom Parks and Recreation and, alongside Louis C.K., one of the biggest comedy names around. He’s here to work on material.

  Ansari works the audience, asking what dating sites people frequent, and segues into an extended bit on internet matchmaking. He complains that as a child he was ignored by pedophiles, something he doesn’t understand: “For child molesters, I must’ve been like the hot chick at the bar.” The crowd eats it up, but with one graphic molestation joke, he takes it too far. The laughter dies.

  “Oh, come on!” he cracks in mock annoyance, gesturing at a digital recorder he has running nearby. “Other people have laughed at that. I’ve taped it. Want me to play it for you?”

  Later, Pete realizes something: “Comedians are using science.” While comics like Louis C.K. might deny there’s a formula behind what’s funny, they’ve all developed their own formulas—by experimenting bit by bit, recording their shows night after night and gauging the results. As we’ve learned here in LA, it’s not about whether or not you’re funny, it’s how you’re funny: how you learn the ins and outs of the business, how you develop your comic perspective, how you mix honesty and humor, how you deal with bad venues, and how you handle your shot at fame. And the only way to learn is through hard, repetitive, empirical work. “Comedians are experimenting every time they go up on stage and try a new bit and they gauge how the audience responds,” says Pete. “They tweak it, see how it changes, tweak it, see how it changes.”

  Yes, non-scientific stuff plays a role, too. Several months after our trip to Los Angeles, comic hopeful Josh Friedman sends us an e-mail. He’s turned his attention to improv, he tells us: “As an art form and personal activity, I find I enjoy it a whole lot more,” he writes.

  The talent scouts’ gut feeling was right. He didn’t have stand-up in his soul.

  Call it whatever you want, but experimentation is integral to being funny. “To say that science can’t help comedy is to ignore what comedians have learned throughout the years,” Pete says.

  Yes, comedy’s a bit messy, a bit dangerous. But then again, so is science.

  3

  NEW YORK

  How do you make funny?

  Pete and I are staring at a cartoon from the New Yorker magazine, willing our brains to come up with the perfect caption for a drawing of a wolfman sitting in a barbershop.

  The caption has to fit—but it also has to be funny. And how do you do that? In Los Angeles, we poked around in the strange and off-kilter minds of the gatekeepers of comedy and came away with a rough idea of what makes them tick. But how do they create those jokes and routines in the first place? Not to mention, how do people come up with all the other forms of comedy—narrative poems and plays and animated cartoons and novels and sketches and sitcoms and short stories and movies and satire and caricatures and puns?

  That’s what Pete and I aim to find out—starting by creating a funny caption for a wolfman getting a haircut. How about, “Be sure to cover up my bald spot”? Or, “Somewhere in here, I lost my keys”? Or maybe something a little more risqué—a request for a Brazilian wax?

  What we’re doing isn’t all that unusual. Thousands undertake this task every week. Since 2005, when the New Yorker began devoting the last page of its weekly issue to a cartoon caption contest, the magazine has received more than 1.7 million total caption submissions from people all over the world. And at this point, 1.7 million minus 300 or so have lost. Comic actor Zach Galifianakis might be funny enough to earn $15 million for Hangover 3, but his submission for a 2007 cartoon of a dog throwing a stick (“He’s his own best friend”) didn’t get a finalist nod. Michael Bloomberg turned himself into one of the richest people in the world and a three-term mayor of New York, but he swears he can’t come up with an idea good enough to submit.1

  Sure, it’s possible to win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, but keep in mind that your chances are 5,666 to one. It’s about the same chance as getting a hole in one—if you are very good at golf.

  Disregarding the odds, Pete and I are taking a shot at it, but this particular contest is special: we’re doing it on the twentieth floor of a gleaming skyscraper in New York City’s Times Square—more specifically, in the offices of The New Yorker. We’re sitting in a swanky conference room with floor-to-ceiling undulating glass walls. All around us are well-dressed doctors, engineers, and other professionals sipping mimosas from champagne flutes and trying to outwit each other captioning drawings of man-sized babies and guys wearing horse costumes. We’re taking part in a live caption contest, part of the annual New Yorker Festival—Lollapalooza for the New York literati.

  Attendees have been broken into a dozen or so teams of eight people, and our table is stymied. Floundering, we’ve been experimenting with different strategies. For the first round, we tried brainstorming a single list of captions. But that soon devolved into wild tangents and rambling, and our final list was pitifully short. So for round two, each team member submitted a caption and we consolidated the best options. Output was much improved, but it felt like a homework assignment. And it didn’t get us on the leaderboard. So far, not one of our options has cracked the three finalists.

  Maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves, since creating things that are funny is really hard. For starters, how people create anything unique and brilliant is downright mysterious. For centuries, the talents of artists and inventors were thought to be either a gift from the gods, a satanic trick, or some sort of comic book–type genetic mutation. Creating stuff that is supposed t
o be hilarious is especially strange. Humorists will slave endlessly to find just the right combination of words or images that will get people to laugh, a body spasm that seems to occur subconsciously. It’s as if the point of the Sistine Chapel ceiling were to get the Pope to sneeze.

  Add to that, as Pete’s discovered in his research, most things just aren’t funny. In a marketing study with his collaborator Caleb Warren, he had research assistants ask undergraduates to create funny advertising headlines for the made-up company “ThriftOnline.” Of all the headlines generated, only 10 percent were deemed by a second group to be gut-busters. (Best of the best? “Because looking this bad never had to be expensive.”) The vast majority instead skewed toward stinkers such as “Come get your nerd.”

  So, then, what’s the secret to making people laugh—especially when your audience numbers in the hundreds of thousands? How does someone come up with material that’s novel enough, inoffensive enough, and hilarious enough to tickle funny bones the world over? Is it better to use a team-based approach, bouncing humorous ideas back and forth? Or is one single funny person all you need? And what about the giant industry that’s sprung up around comedy, from Hollywood films to sitcoms to meme-filled websites? Has the rise of big-budget comedy made things funnier—or dampened the joke?

  We hope to find the answers here in New York, a mass production and distribution center of American comedy, a place teeming with the film studios, television sets, publishing operations, ad firms, and theater stages that help generate, shape, and dispense one of the nation’s biggest cultural exports. It’s why we’re at the New Yorker offices, racking our brains about werewolves getting haircuts. Sure, we don’t really fit in with the swanky crowd, but we happen to be pals with New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff.

  In a famous episode of Seinfeld, the character Elaine comes up with a New Yorker cartoon and in the process tangles with the magazine’s cartoon editor. Although Bruce Eric Kaplan, a long-time New Yorker cartoonist, wrote the episode, the editor is nothing like Mankoff. The Seinfeld Bob Mankoff is an uppity New Yorker stereotype in a sweater vest and sports coat. The real Bob Mankoff is cool and engaging, if a bit intense, sporting a tailored jacket and wavy locks of shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair. (Regarding his portrayal in this book, Mankoff quipped, “The main thing I will be concerned with is how my hair is represented.”)

  The Seinfeld version of Bob Mankoff resists all attempts to explain the New Yorker cartoons, insisting, “Cartoons are like gossamer. And one doesn’t dissect gossamer.” But the real version of Bob Mankoff has never met a thread of gossamer he hasn’t sliced, diced, and stuck under a microscope. A onetime PhD student in experimental psychology—he taught pigeons how to sort addresses by ZIP code—he’s a member of the International Society of Humor Studies. We’d first met Mankoff when he was making the rounds of humor conferences, presenting on the science of why LOLCat images would never be set among the publication’s rarefied Adobe Caslon typeface.

  No wonder we get along. And when he offered us a behind-the-scenes look at the New Yorker’s cartoon operation, we didn’t hesitate. After all, the magazine looms large in the world of American humor creation. Before the New Yorker was filled with names like Truman Capote, E. B. White, and Malcolm Gladwell, it started as the 1920s version of The Onion. As Ohio University communications professor Judith Yaros Lee wrote in Defining New Yorker Humor, the humor publication was one of the first to target a specific socioeconomic demographic (college-educated, upwardly mobile urban professionals), and to match this population’s sense of humor, the magazine’s jokes were groundbreakingly intelligent, topical, and a bit dangerous. In the world of published comedy, the New Yorker was a turning point. According to literature professor and author Sanford Pinsker, when the first issue rolled off the press on February 21, 1925, “The ‘character’ of American humor changed.”2

  Part of that transformation was due to the magazine’s cartoons. Harold Ross, the New Yorker’s founder, once joked that because of all the visual gags, his magazine had been described to him as “the best magazine in the world for a person who cannot read.”3 But they weren’t just silly drawings. The entire cartoon medium changed thanks to the New Yorker’s one-two punch of a concise, clever image combined with a witty, short caption. As Lee put it to me over the phone, “The central discovery of the New Yorker cartoon was not the one-line caption, but rather the idea that the caption and the drawing worked together to convey a comic idea.” That combination stuck around, revolutionizing the funny-drawing industry, and has come to define what most people now recognize as cartoons. No wonder former New Yorker editor Tina Brown once noted that New Yorker cartoons are “a sort of national treasure.”4

  And Mankoff offered us the keys to the vault.

  To start, Mankoff suggests we try our hand at this live caption contest. Pete jumps right in, filling his yellow legal pad with captions and bouncing ideas around our table. Meanwhile, I’m staring wide-eyed at the blank page in front of me, feeling like a Pop Warner benchwarmer who’s been dropped in the middle of the Super Bowl. As a writer, the New Yorker is my Valhalla. Being here leaves me feeling awed and unworthy. And that I’m being asked to come up with concise writerly brilliance after two flutes of mimosa? Forget about it.

  Thanks to Pete, however, we’ve come armed with a few tricks. Not long ago, Mankoff handed over to HuRL all the submissions for a recent caption contest, one featuring a man and a woman struggling through a desertlike parking lot and coming to section “F,” with no car in sight. With the help of cognitive scientist Phil Fernbach, Pete compared the several thousand losing entries to the 43 captions short-listed by the New Yorker as potential finalists. They found that the short-listed entries tended to have four things in common: They were novel, in that they didn’t rely on words common in other entries such as “park” and “desert.” They were concise—on average, 8.7 words long, a full word shorter than the rest. They didn’t go overboard with punctuation; losing entries were nearly twice as likely to use question marks, and nearly seven times more likely to use exclamation points. And they featured imaginative imagery, playing with abstract concepts that weren’t represented in the drawing.

  “I am shocked—shocked—by the results,” responded Mankoff sarcastically. “When I went to cartoon college, I was taught that long, heavily punctuated, commonplace captions were the key to success.” (The final results of the contest that HuRL analyzed suggests a final secret: have lots of experience writing. The winning caption—“I’m not going to say the word I’m thinking of”—was submitted by none other than the late celebrated film critic Roger Ebert, his first win in 108 attempts.)

  Considering the four criteria Pete discovered, maybe our caption ideas for the wolfman in the barbershop aren’t so bad after all. Take this caption: “Be sure to cover up my bald spot.” It’s a concise eight words, doesn’t bother with exclamation points or question marks, is pretty abstract, and seems novel. Who knows, maybe we have a winner.

  Our colleagues at the table agree, and submit it to the judges. And sure enough, when the results are in, there’s our caption, standing strong at second place!

  I’m thrilled, until I realize that at the New Yorker, second place will never cut it.

  So where do the mass-market jokes begin that get churned out from New York’s sprawling comedic sausage factory? Where do the raw doodles originate that become polished New Yorker cartoons? According to Bob Mankoff, many of them come from a second-story walk-up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. When we stop by one morning, a 28-year-old named Zachary Kanin meets us at the door. Kanin’s small and compact, built like a high-school wrestler. There’s a somberness to him, a quiet seriousness, which we weren’t expecting. Mankoff, after all, calls Kanin a comic genius.

  In Kanin’s apartment, which he shares with his wife, an enormous blackboard scrawled with a lengthy to-do list takes up much of the living-room wall:

  Banjo (done)

  Start band (done)

 
Order dresser

  Go on Wheel of Fortune

  Get sexy (done)

  The last item sounds ominous, if not a bit racy: “July 24th: Bananageddon!” Kanin explains it refers to the time when he and his wife bought too many bananas. They figured if they didn’t eat them all by July 24, they’d have a bananageddon on their hands.

  Kanin has already accomplished a lot of things that aren’t on the board. Like attending Harvard and serving as president of its illustrious humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon (at five three, Kanin is proud to point out he’s the shortest-ever president). And scoring the job when Mankoff called the Lampoon’s offices his senior year in college, looking for a new assistant. And once at the magazine, becoming one of its youngest-ever staff cartoonists.

  According to Mankoff, cartooning is “idea creativity on overdrive.” Scientists, inventors, and artists don’t have to come up with that many good ideas to get by. A good year for a research professor like Pete entails publishing one peer-reviewed journal article. As a journalist, I am in good shape if I come up with a dozen solid magazine articles a year. Cartoonists? We’re talking about a different order of magnitude. If someone like Kanin hopes to cut it at the New Yorker, he or she has to come up with dozens upon dozens of funny ideas each week.

  Kanin shows us where he tries to do so: a room at the back of his apartment not much larger than a storage closet. On a small white desk, a MacBook is surrounded by piles of drawings in various stages of germination. There’s a doodle of an overweight man grasping his rumbling stomach. A Chewbacca look-alike is wearing a hobo outfit. An amoeba-like tree sprouts branches with mouths. In the margins of the pages, Kanin has scribbled down random words and phrases, hints of other odd ideas: “tap dance,” “hard work,” “trunk of car.”