The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  And that’s what he did with the idea that women aren’t funny. He examined all the valid experiments on gender and humor, from comedy-appreciation surveys to joke-telling contests to self-report questionnaires to observational experiments, and came to a succinct conclusion, which he relayed at a recent International Society for Humor Studies Conference: “I think Christopher Hitchens is wrong.” By nearly every scientific measure, men and women are far more alike than different in how they perceive, enjoy, and create humor. The same goes for naughty stuff: when you do away with sexist material, women go for a good dirty joke just as much as men.13

  One of the few areas where there are gender distinctions is in dating and mating. These days, that tends to mean Match.com. In 2011 researchers analyzed more than 250 online dating profiles posted by people in London and several Canadian cities. They found that men were nearly two times as likely as women to boast of their humor-production abilities (“I’m an aspiring stand-up comic”), whereas women were nearly two times as likely as men to be looking for a humor producer (“I want someone who can make me giggle”).14

  This discrepancy could tie in to what we learned in Tanzania about humor’s evolutionary origins. A sense of humor in men could be seen as a sign of intelligence, social desirability, and overall genetic fitness. In other words, good jokes are a guy’s version of colorful peacock plumes. Since women have an evolutionary incentive to find the best possible mate, it helps to be on the lookout for the funniest possible peacock.

  All those eons of comedic courting seem to have left a mark. The few studies that have found differences between male and female humor creation do tend to conclude that men might have a small edge over women. But before anyone crowns Adam Carolla the Einstein of comedic gender studies, consider that men might be slightly better at jokes simply because they’re more likely to be encouraged to joke around. It’s far more acceptable for boys to be class clowns than girls.

  This social encouragement gives budding male comics a head start over their female counterparts. But it might come with a disadvantage. For guys, all those overeager humor attempts can have a cost.

  Pete asked several of his classes to take part in a joke-writing competition. Working with colleagues Caleb Warren and Kathleen Vohs, as well as HuRL researchers, he found that of the 50 or so zingers submitted, those written by men were rated by a second group of students to be somewhat funnier than those written by women, but the difference was so slight that it wasn’t statistically significant. The guys’ jokes were far more offensive, however. Take two of the top three funniest-rated jokes, both of which were written by men:

  What’s the first thing a co-ed does when she wakes up? Walks home.

  Penn State football: Go in as a tight end and leave as a wide receiver.

  Participants rated both jokes highly distasteful, with the Penn State joke rated the most offensive of all submissions.

  The funniest joke of all, on the other hand, was somewhat offensive, but not as much as the two runners-up:

  How do you know you’ve been robbed by an Asian? Your homework is all finished, your computer has been upgraded, and he’s still trying to back out of your driveway.

  This gem was written by a woman.

  In short, men should stop wasting their time calling their better halves the less-funny sex. They’d be far better served working on improving their own jokes. Judging from the guys at the New Star Creation class, they could use the extra effort.

  There’s something else missing at the New Star Creation classes: political jokes. We’ve hardly heard any political humor during our time in Japan. “The pillars of American comedy, like politics, are completely off the radar here,” we learn from Patrick Harlan, a Colorado-born Harvard graduate who’s the boke in Pakkun Makkun, one of the few successful manzai acts featuring an international duo. The Japanese government is too stable and the elections here too sedate—and the emperor too sacred—for people to crack wise about political affairs.

  These days, it’s hard to imagine any part of U.S. politics being considered too sedate or sacred for comedic skewering. From the pointed satire of The Colbert Report to the snarky rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh to presidential candidates rubbing elbows with their impersonators on Saturday Night Live, making fun of politicians has become America’s pastime.

  But who wins the prize for being funnier—Democrats or Republicans? Judging from the makeup of the comedy industry, it’s easy to think the political left has it won hands down. Aside from Dennis Miller, P. J. O’Rourke, and Victoria Jackson, it’s not easy to come up with big-name conservative comedians. So why isn’t there a Republican version of Jon Stewart? Some people think it’s because Republicans tend to have a sunnier disposition on life (“Social inequity? What social inequity?”). Using Pete’s terminology, that means they aren’t as likely to come across violations that are ripe for making benign.

  Speculation aside, are Democrats quantifiably better at being funny? In his book Debatable Humor: Laughing Matters on the 2008 Presidential Primary Campaign, University of Arkansas political science professor Patrick Stewart catalogued and analyzed every use of humor in the Republican and Democratic primary debates during the 2008 presidential election. All in all, he says, “I didn’t find anything in the last election on which party is funnier.”

  He did find some differences in how the Democratic and Republican candidates tended to joke. Democrats, for example, often relied on the kind of comedy that was inclusive and convivial. “The Democratic party is a highly egalitarian party,” says Stewart. “Anyone can get in or drop out. So you really have to be charismatic like Clinton or Obama to draw people in.” Obama was particularly skilled in this area: Stewart found that in the debates he often flashed smiles of genuine amusement and engaged in loose-jawed laughter, the sort of visual signals that suggest, “Join me, I’m here to play.”

  Republicans, on the other hand, tended to rely on what’s called “encrypted humor,” says Stewart, the sort of “wink, wink” in-jokes that separate insiders from outsiders. Take Republican candidate Mike Huckabee’s 2008 quip that “we’ve had a Congress that has spent money like [John] Edwards at a beauty shop.” By using the term “beauty shop,” as opposed to, say “barber shop,” Huckabee’s joke was “not just an attack on Congress, but also an attack on John Edwards’s masculinity,” says Stewart.

  So Democratic officials don’t have a leg up on Republicans in the funny business. But what about how average Democrats and Republicans go about their daily lives? In general, do liberals have a better sense of humor than conservatives? In 2008, Pete’s colleague Duke University psychology and behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely and Mount Holyoke College student Elisabeth Malin asked 300 people, half liberal and half conservative, to rate the funniness of 22 jokes on various topics. Not too surprisingly, the conservatives were more apt to enjoy the jokes that reinforced traditional racial and gender stereotypes—including a zinger about a guy choosing a game of golf over his wife’s funeral. But conservatives also gave higher ratings to absurdist quips of Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, right-wingers found all kinds of jokes funnier than their liberal counterparts.15 Maybe, then, the concept of humorless Republicans is just a matter of circumstance. After all, the history of American stand-up is littered with hard-core liberals, from Charlie Chaplin to Lenny Bruce to Bill Hicks. It could be that funny conservatives have never been welcomed into the club.

  “When you look at a baby, you laugh and smile,” says company CEO Hiroshi Osaki. “That’s what it’s like with Yoshimoto. All you have to do is drop our name and someone might laugh.”

  We’re sitting in a conference room, talking with the Yoshimoto CEO about baby faces, in the company’s humble Tokyo headquarters: a retrofitted elementary school near the busy Shinjuku commercial center. The modest surroundings mesh with Osaki’s demeanor. While the formal conventions of the meeting unfold around us—assistants whisk in multiple servings of iced tea; a team of media personnel
stand at attention in the corner until the CEO gestures for them to sit; a company representative presents us with gift bags overflowing with Yoshimoto-branded paraphernalia—Osaki, in a suit and tie, remains chipper as he smokes a Lucky Strike. Later, when we pose for a photo, the CEO pretends to feel us up to ensure we’re all laughing in the shot.

  Yoshimoto rose to its place of prominence thanks to savvy decisions the company made decades ago, says Osaki. In the 1920s, executives took note of the slapstick and rapid-fire jokes of American vaudeville and decided it was the perfect way to shake up the stagnant culture of manzai. It had remained more or less unchanged since the Middle Ages. According to the scholarly book Understanding Humor in Japan, Yoshimoto brass told their performers to wear “ ‘glasses like Lloyd’s’ and ‘a mustache like Chaplin’s.’ ” And later, as Japanese broadcasting came into its own in the wake of World War II, Yoshimoto again borrowed from the comedy industry across the Pacific. Taking inspiration from the skits, bits and banter of The Bob Hope Show, the company developed its own, enduringly popular version of the variety show.

  What Osaki seems to be telling us is that Japanese comedy is a cultural Galapagos Island. All those bizarre Japanese jokes and gags that leave Americans confused? They’re U.S. comedy’s bastard stepchildren.

  Lately, Yoshimoto has been going global with this unique brand of hilarity. The company has started producing television programs and live shows in China, Taiwan, and Korea. And now, Osaki tells us, Yoshimoto is ready to show America that the student has become the master. The company has announced plans to build a Second City training center in Tokyo, the improv group’s first-ever foreign affiliate. And Yoshimoto has inked deals with several U.S. and European TV production companies, among them the operations that created Survivor and The Office.

  There may be a problem with Yoshimoto’s plan: could a single kind of comedy ever be popular worldwide? Yes, some examples of comedy have been found to be incredibly, even eerily ubiquitous. The trickster motif, the concept of a wily clown who relies on his wits and ruses to get in and out of trouble, has been found in Native American culture, Ancient Greek myths, Norse legends, African folk tales, Tibetan Buddhist practices, Polynesian religious tales, Islamic fables, and even 17,000-year-old cave paintings in France.16 But still, these trickster tales vary from culture to culture. There’s far from one joke that rules them all.

  So is it even possible for a single example of hilarity to achieve global domination? In 2001, a British psychology professor named Richard Wiseman decided to find out. He and his colleagues launched the LaughLab, a website where people uploaded jokes and rated others’ submissions using a scale called the “Giggleometer.” Over twelve months, the website clocked 40,000 joke submissions and nearly 2 million ratings from people in 40 different countries—the largest-ever scientific humor study, earning a Guinness World Record. And on October 3, 2002, Wiseman announced they’d done it: they’d come up with the world’s funniest joke.

  During our brief stop in London, we met Wiseman at a busy coffee shop. Since retiring the LaughLab, Wiseman has continued to probe humanity’s psychological skeleton closets, deconstructing bad luck, confidence schemes, and ghost hunting. “We deliver, no matter how mad the scientific proposal,” he said between sips of cappuccino.

  But no proposal was as mad—or as attention-grabbing—as the LaughLab. The world was eagerly watching when Wiseman and his team revealed the winning joke:

  Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says, “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a gunshot. Back on the phone, the guy says, “Okay, now what?”

  So what does Wiseman think of his scientific findings? “I think the world’s funniest joke isn’t very funny,” he told us. “It’s terrible. I think we found the world’s cleanest, blandest, most internationally accepted joke.”

  In hindsight, the joke’s blandness makes sense. The world’s funniest-rated joke isn’t going to be the zinger that the most people find hilarious, it’s going to be the zinger that the least number of people find offensive. Any joke that makes fun of a particular people, religion, occupation, or viewpoint isn’t going to fly. It has to be something that’s acceptable to everybody—or incredibly ho-hum. And a quip about a couple of bumbling hunters from Jersey is as ho-hum as you can get. As Wiseman grumbles, “It’s the color beige in joke form.”

  Pete, ever the competitor, wanted to know if he could use experiments to seek out a funnier variation of the hunter joke without increasing its offensiveness. To do so, he once again partnered with Upright Citizens Brigade LA’s “science department.” For a control version, one team of UCB participants, using lots of fake blood, made a 30-second web video that stuck as closely as possible to the original hunter joke. Other UCB teams tried to make funnier web versions, and they were given various constraints on how far off script they could go.

  A couple of the hunter joke variations—one that turned the scenario into a dubbed kung fu movie, and another that featured a hysterical clown using a squeaking plastic hammer to beat to death a kid choking on a balloon animal—turned out to be no more funny or offensive than the baseline version when Pete submitted them all to a Qualtrics survey panel. But the other two adaptations, one an extreme variation and one a mild variation, were rated significantly funnier while also less offensive. The “less offensive” part is somewhat surprising, considering one of the videos featured an emergency-services operator plagued by all sorts of callers misinterpreting his instructions, leading to a two-minute stretch of death and dismemberment, while the other involved a hunter horribly inept at killing his friend, leading to gunshots, hand-to-hand combat, and a Good Samaritan passerby offering to help by running the guy over with his truck.

  But it’s all about how the jokes were crafted, Pete pointed out. In the two funniest videos, all the unpleasantness occurred off camera, the violence only hinted at through sound effects. Yes, the hunter joke can be made funnier without becoming more offensive, but it takes some serious work—relying on a subtle medium like video, enlisting comedy masters like those at UCB. “The study illustrates that in some cases, severe violations can be really funny to lots of people if they are done really well,” he concludes.

  But at Yoshimoto, CEO Osaki concedes he isn’t sure severe violations can have international appeal, even when they’re being handled by professionals. “I personally don’t find American stand-up that funny,” he tells us. “Maybe it’s lost in translation.”

  Remember when I called watching the rakugo performance akin to torture? Forget I said that. That’s nothing compared to what we witness on “Ogata Impossible.”

  We’re on a soundstage in downtown Tokyo, on the set of Power Purin, a Yoshimoto variety show that airs late on Wednesday nights on the Japanese station TBS. Most of Power Purin is devoted to Saturday Night Live–style comedy skits. But every now and then, the comedians engage in a batsu, or “penalty,” game, a one-off game-show stunt. That’s what’s happening now.

  “Welcome to ‘Ogata Impossible!’ ” shouts the game-show host, who for some reason is dressed up like a demon. “You gamble with your life here!”

  The one doing the gambling is Takohiro Ogata, a young Japanese actor with a mop of shaggy brown hair. He tries to look brave as he’s presented with a tureen full of scalding hot soup. Ogata, says the demon-host, has 60 seconds to transfer the soup’s chunky bits—radish, fish, octopus—onto a plate. Using only his teeth.

  At least, that’s what we think is happening. Araki, our translator, is trying to explain what is going on, but he looks like he doesn’t understand it all himself.

  Japanese game shows, with their oddball set-ups and sadistic challenges, have become the most iconic example of Japanese entertainment. And they’re intimately tied
to Japanese comedy. Yoshimoto produces many of the shows itself. According to Yorihiro, Yoshimoto’s U.S.-based CEO, 80 percent of all Japanese game-show contestants are comedians, since the typical Japanese person is too reserved to demonstrate the fear and anguish necessary to sell a bit about diving face-first into a bowl of soup.

  An air horn wails, dramatic lights flash and Ogata dunks his head into the tureen. He jerks back up, soup flying, clutching in pain at his face. His mouth is empty. I try to imagine “Ogata Impossible!” going global, with footage like this being a hit in Seattle and Philadelphia, in London and Rio, in Moscow and Dubai.

  The soup can’t really be hot, Araki assures me. Ogata is just acting. But later, after the shoot, Ogata, his face pink, assures me Araki is wrong. The soup is skin-searing hot. Teeth-aching hot. “Hot!” he tells me, the only English word I’ve heard him use all day.

  A shrill buzzer marks the end of the challenge—with Ogata several soup ingredients short of his goal. The Power Purin comedians retire in exhaustion to their messy dressing room. Araki’s off somewhere, so we make do without him. The comedians scratch at their dyed, spiky hair and in broken English compare their best comedic horror stories, boasting like they’re battle wounds. For a batsu game, one had to eat a raw lemon, skin and all. Another was once elbowed so hard by his manzai partner that he broke a rib.

  One of the comedians nods at Pete and makes a crack about his height. “Big!” he cries, then points at Pete’s pants. “Big?” Pete shrugs, smiling mischievously.

  “Me small-small,” grumbles the diminutive comic, gesturing in disappointment at his groin.

  “But you’re famous!” I cry.

  Sure, he concedes, but he’d rather be “big-big, not famous!”