The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  “These guys are wildly optimistic,” says Pete. “I like it.”

  To see if these humor researchers know what they’re talking about, we venture out into Japan’s comedy capital. American bombers leveled much of Osaka in World War II, and the city that replaced it is a sprawling and modern concrete affair. There’s a lively, cosmopolitan feel to the place—elevated trains rumble overhead, illuminated electronic billboards pulse into the night, exotic aromas waft from the food stalls and restaurants that have led the city to be called the food capital of the world. Despite the urban bustle, everyone is incredibly, even disturbingly, well mannered. No one dares disregard “Don’t Walk” signals, even when there’s not a car for miles around. And whenever Pete or I happen to pause somewhere and look bewildered—something that happens often—a stranger sidles up and inquires in semi-passable English how he or she can be of service.

  Friendly, yes. But do Osakans find things funny? On the street, we don’t see much evidence of it. Nearly everyone we pass—pedestrians, shopkeepers, businessmen, police officers—remains more or less silent. Riding in packed subway cars, the unnatural hush is so surreal I wonder if something’s wrong with my ears. There’s none of the steady background noise I associate with city life—no hollering, no hawking, no bickering, no cell-phone babbling, no schoolkid chattering—and most of all, no laughing.

  But maybe Pete and I are going about this all wrong. Maybe we need to observe these people removed from the pressures of their everyday lives. We need to see them relaxed. We need to see them in their natural environment.

  We need to see them naked.

  The idea comes from Reilly. If we’re looking for something to do in Osaka, he offers after wrapping up his translation duties, Pete and I could visit some of the area’s exquisite temples and castles. Or, he added with a wink, we could go to Spa World, where the locals strip down to their birthday suits and, segregated by gender, luxuriate in a seven-story wonderland of hot tubs, steam rooms, swimming pools, and water slides.

  No contest. We head to Spa World.

  At first, once we’ve paid our 1,000 yen, or roughly twelve bucks, for all-day spa access (surely the best deal in all of expensive Japan), I’m a bit uncomfortable wandering around among all these naked strangers. But after a few dips in the heated pool and visits to the sauna on the main men’s floor of the spa, a steamy Roman baths knockoff the size of a shopping mall, I start to relax. When in Rome—or at least a reasonable facsimile of it—do as the naked Japanese do!

  So when Pete decides to investigate other parts of Spa World, I do likewise. While he wanders off to learn firsthand what an “exfoliation scrub” entails, I head to Heaven Spa, a swanky massage-therapy room in the heart of the Roman baths, to find out about a back rub. I stroll through the spa door, naked bits a-dangling, round a bend—and run into a gaggle of mortified Japanese women in masseuse uniforms. Shrieking and gesturing wildly, they herd me back around the corner. That’s where I notice the out-of-the-way cubby stocked with cotton shorts.

  Ah. In Heaven you wear underpants.

  Despite my humiliation, the masseuses don’t collapse into hysterics. They just titter. So once again, we’ve come up empty-handed on Osakan laughter. Why can’t we find any of the hilarity these people are known for?

  We’re not looking in the right places, says Heiyo Nagashima, the other Japanese humor scholar who attended the rakugo performance with us. When we meet him at the Osaka headquarters of the Japanese Humor and Laughter Society, he explains that in Japan, comedy is compartmentalized. Nearly every society has developed ways to keep folks’ zaniness within safe bounds. In the United States, folks are free to joke with one another in nearly any circumstance, but certain subjects are off limits—scatology, sexual extremes, racist ideas. In Japan, on the other hand, such limitations are geographical rather than topical. Here, nearly anything goes in the name of hilarity, but it is reserved for certain locales like comedy theaters and television. Don’t try joking in the office, in the classroom, or—as I’d learned—when you’re naked in a classy spa. Take the Laughter Society offices we’re sitting in, says Nagashima, sweeping his hand around the unremarkable one-room affair, where two expressionless workers type away at computers. “This is not a laughing place,” he says. “We are exchanging ideas about culture.”

  This idea cracks Pete up. “But this is the Japanese Humor and Laughter Society! If you can’t laugh here, where can you laugh?”

  We find that place one evening when Reilly and several of his improv colleagues take us to the Dotombori district, the improv group’s namesake and the beating, throbbing heart of the city’s nightlife scene. Dotombori inspired the setting of the sci-fi classic Blade Runner, and it’s easy to see why. The kaleidoscope of flashing neon signs and freakish crab and dragon sculptures that dangle over the bar-lined streets feel like something out of a futuristic metropolis—a metropolis inhabited by folks having the time of their lives.

  Gone are the quiet, impassive Osakans we’ve met. Here is a riotous horde desperate to let loose, screaming for another round of sake over the squeal of Motown hits at a packed bar. Flailing to the unrelenting beat of a video-game dance-off at a busy arcade. Crooning away for hours at one of the area’s numerous karaoke cafes. And laughing. Everyone is laughing.

  We join in the fun. Late that night, our voices hoarse from one too many Guns N’ Roses karaoke tunes, Pete and I wander off down a cramped alleyway—to the smallest bar in the world. In a shallow divot in the side of a building, a space no larger than a cramped closet, a bartender stands behind a thin plank, taking orders. Around him, bottles and drink glasses are fastened to the walls, like he’s in a small, one-man space capsule to a thirsty moon. There’s no room for clientele, so his half-dozen patrons stand in the alley, huddled around the opening and tossing back drinks. We squeeze our way in.

  We don’t understand a word of what our companions tell us, nor do they grasp our replies. Even if we did speak Japanese, we wouldn’t get the jokes. As Nagashima had explained to us at the offices of the Japanese Humor and Laughter Society, Japan is a high-context society. The country is so homogeneous, so unified in its history and culture, that most zingers don’t need set-ups at all. There’s no need for explanation or detailed backstories. Folks get right to the punch line. One common joke, about an Olympic gymnast whose leotard was too high, has apparently become so familiar that even the punch line isn’t necessary. All you have to do is gesture to your upper thigh.

  The United States, on the other hand, is as low context as you can get. All those divergent viewpoints and cultural backgrounds and political opinions make for a lot of great comedy fodder, but it also means that everyone has different kinds of jokes. In 2007, researchers subjected more than 800 people in several parts of the country to a battery of humor questionnaires. They found that Texans were more likely to tell self-defeating jokes than Alaskans, while those from Minnesota go for quips that build bonds with their friends and neighbors. And Texas is so sprawling that it has several different humor regions. Those from the northwest portion of the Lone Star State were the most likely of all to use humor to deal with personal difficulties, while those in the southwest corner were the least likely to do so.8 No wonder the list of top-grossing U.S. comedians is so wildly diverse, ranging from superstar ventriloquist Jeff Dunham to rock-star comic Dane Cook to late-night darling Chelsea Handler to redneck icon Jeff Foxworthy.

  Comedy is so context-dependent that translating jokes from one language to another can be daunting—far trickier than, say, translating a business memo or news report. You can’t just translate the words of the jokes. You need to capture and express the totality of shared cultural experiences the original joke builds upon and subverts, an entire universe of beliefs and expectations and taboos at which the zinger itself might only hint.9 In most Japanese jokes, such context doesn’t get mentioned at all. It’s why cross-cultural researchers have long seen jokes as a vital window into a given society. As anthropologist
Edward Hall put it, “People laugh and tell jokes, and if you can learn the humor of a people and really control it, you know that you are also in control of nearly everything else.”10

  We aren’t in control of the jokes flying about the Dotombori district. But that’s okay. At the smallest bar in the world, Pete and I get along just fine without knowing any context whatsoever. Arms slung around our new companions and howling into the night, we communicate via sloppy gestures, stupid expressions, and rounds of what might or might not be whiskey. Sure, we don’t speak Japanese and they don’t speak English, but we all speak Debauchery just fine.

  “Don’t move around the stage so much!”

  “Project your voice from your stomach!”

  “If you are going to pretend to be a girl, you really have to sell it!”

  Tomioki Daiku, a tired-looking teacher with graying hair and spectacles, barks criticisms at his 60 pupils. One after another, his young students clamber to their feet in groups of two from where they’re sitting along the walls and dash to the center of the parquet-floored classroom, where they banter back and forth with one another in Japanese. Then Daiku picks apart their performance—“Work on your pronunciation!” “Don’t make fun of women; most of your live audiences will be ladies!” The pupils listen expressionlessly, bow politely, and hurry back to their seats. There is no laughter here—not from the teacher, not from the performers, not from the other students looking on. Ironic, given that this operation is designed to turn people into comedians.

  We’re at the New Star Creation comedy school in the heart of Tokyo. The day before, we traveled from Osaka to the Japanese capital via bullet train. When we disembarked—hardly off the train before an army of pastel-clad workers hurried on to scrub every surface clean—it didn’t take long for us to realize that folks in Tokyo are even more methodical and meticulous than those in Osaka. When we checked into our hotel, the concierge wouldn’t let us be until we’d signed enough forms to adopt an orphan child, had our photos taken (“for security reasons”), and been given exhaustive directions on how to use everything in our room—the light switches, the cabinets, the remote control, the video phone, the three-ring binder of instruction booklets for all the electronics he’d already explained to us. “I think that’s everything,” he sighs at the end of his monologue.

  “Are you sure?” cracked Pete. The concierge looked panicked, wondering if he’d forgotten something.

  We’ve come to Tokyo for the same reason that 1,500 would-be comedians from all over Japan come. We’ve all been lured here by the biggest name in Japanese comedy: Yoshimoto Kogyo. The century-old operation owns the comedy school, which charges 400,000 yen (roughly $5,000) for a twelve-month crash course in comedy, with supplemental lessons in acting, dance, stage presence, and kung fu—but that’s not all the company controls. Yoshimoto is essentially Japan’s version of Comedy Central . . . if Comedy Central were not only one of the country’s largest TV production companies, but also managed 800 Japanese comedians, with several hundred more being groomed in the wings. And owned the comedy clubs. And put on a film festival. And once had its own comedy theme park.

  Yoshimoto isn’t just Japan’s biggest comedy company. It is Japanese comedy.

  “It’s like the old studio system,” Aki Yorihiro, CEO of Yoshimoto’s U.S. wing of operations, had told me over the phone from his office in Santa Monica, California. “We take care of people throughout their careers and throughout their lives.” I’d called Yorihiro to learn about Yoshimoto before our trip, but when he’d heard about what Pete and I were up to, he offered one better: behind-the-scenes access to every aspect of the comedy juggernaut.

  That’s how we ended up here at Yoshimoto’s New Star Creation class, with our own Yoshimoto-employed translator, Takahiro Araki. Thanks to spending a few formative years in Indiana, Araki boasts impeccable English, as well as more than a few American mannerisms. The bespectacled, messenger bag–wearing 26-year-old appears perennially disheveled, has the very un-Japanese tendency to be ten minutes late for appointments and is more interested in gabbing about NBA stars Kobe Bryant and LeBron James over sushi at Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market than hammering home talking points about Yoshimoto. We couldn’t imagine a better handler.

  Watching the New Star Creation students, I notice one routine that’s more polished than the others. I turn to Araki: “Were those guys any good?” He shakes his head. “No one is good.”

  After class, we introduce ourselves to the teacher, Daiku. He looks drained. The students were practicing manzai, the two-man comedy style comprised of a straight man, or tsukkomi, trading gags with and smacking around a boke, his goofball partner, which is the backbone of Japanese comedy. But according to Daiku, all of his pupils have a ways to go until any are manzai superstars. If this class is typical, he says, only 3 percent of the students will have a successful job in comedy in five years.

  The few who make it through will earn a spot on Yoshimoto’s payroll. They’ll work their way up the company’s hierarchy of theaters and, if all goes well, hit the airwaves on the company’s shows. While most comedians’ salaries remain meager, a few become superstars and score Hollywood-level windfalls. Sure, it’s a long shot, but consider that Downtown, one of the most successful Japanese comedy acts of all time, started as a couple of kids in New Star Creation’s first-ever class in 1982.

  In Osaka we’d visited Yoshimoto’s flagship theater, Namba Grand Kagetsu, a multistage behemoth that’s designed to celebrate how far the company has come from its humble beginnings in 1912 as a family-owned Osakan theater company. Yoshimoto cultivates Osaka’s comedy-capital reputation, like Jack Daniel’s has linked whiskey and its Tennessee origins. All around Namba Grand Kagetsu, colorful shops sell Yoshimoto-branded cookies, golf balls, instant ramen meals, and cell-phone cleaners. In a touristy restaurant, workers grill up aromatic batches of takoyaki, the mayonnaise-smothered, ball-shaped nuggets of deep-fried octopus that are the signature snacks of Osaka.

  “It’s like a Disneyland devoted to Yoshimoto,” Pete remarked in amazement. That is, if Mickey Mouse were all about octopus balls and branded toilet paper.

  To make it to the main stage of Namba Grand Kagetsu, aspiring comedians should hope they’re guys. There are only a couple of women in the entire manzai class.

  “It’s like something out of Mad Men,” says Spring Day, a U.S. native who performs with the Tokyo Comedy Store, an English-language, ex-pat stand-up troupe. (The operation has no relation to the original Comedy Store in Los Angeles, other than that one of the Tokyo group’s founders realized they could mooch off the American icon’s name without legal ramifications.) We take Day out for dinner one night, and over barbecued chicken wings and horsemeat sashimi, it becomes clear that nearly everything about Japan disagrees with the blond-haired, feisty comedian (whose real name really is Spring Day—“hippie parents,” she explains with a shrug). Her pet peeves about the country include the xenophobia, the outmoded cultural stereotypes, even the cuisine (she’s allergic to fish). At the same time, she can’t imagine living anywhere else. “It’s a messed-up place,” she says, “but I love it.”

  The misogyny is especially frustrating, says Day. Things are especially bad for put-upon housewives. According to Day, if you Google “Japanese husbands,” the top results are how-tos on slowly killing your significant other by limiting nutrient intake and encouraging him to smoke. (When I try it, the first result is a news article titled, “Some wives wish their husbands would hurry up and drop dead.”)

  Gender bias in comedy isn’t limited to Japan. Big names ranging from celebrated polemicist Christopher Hitchens to podcast host Adam Carolla have considered the evidence and concluded that women just aren’t as funny as men—and they aren’t the only ones who believe this. A recent experiment involving New Yorker cartoons found that participants of both genders were more likely to attribute funny cartoon captions to men.11

  Empirically, are women less funny? In the nascent years o
f humor research, scientists seemed to think so. Researchers found that men were more likely than women to enjoy jokes and cartoons presented to them, and differences were pronounced for sexual or aggressive material. But later reviews of these experiments found the conditions involved were less than pristine. It turned out many of the jokes used were downright sexist, such as this one: “Why did the woman cross the road? Never mind that—what was she doing out of the kitchen?!” So it wasn’t necessarily that the female participants didn’t enjoy jokes. They just didn’t enjoy jokes at their own expense.12

  More recently, the task of analyzing gender and humor was taken up by University of Western Ontario Psychology professor Rod Martin, whose name should strike fear into the hearts of all comedy dogmatists. Martin is the unofficial dean of humor studies, and with good reason: his textbook, The Psychology of Humor, is the bible of the field, 446 lucid pages detailing everything there is to know about academic humor research in eleven tidy chapters. It’s proven invaluable to Pete and me, a trusty guidebook to the wild and woolly extremes of humor science. “People have felt that humor is such a difficult thing to study, that it is nebulous and hard to define,” Martin told me at a psychology of humor conference we attended in San Antonio, his bespectacled eyes welcoming and kind. “People have shied away from it because of that. I would argue that’s all the more reason to put effort into it.” But don’t let his grandfatherly appearance and genial Canadian demeanor fool you. When Martin gets his academic teeth into any of the comedy world’s unsubstantiated ideologies, he doesn’t let go until it’s torn to shreds.