by Ken Jennings
Today, a joke like this one would not be a hand grenade with a four-second fuse. The pause stood out to me because “she said no” immediately struck me as the punch line of a pretty well-constructed joke, and I couldn’t believe it was being met with silence. A modern crowd, I thought, would catch on immediately. Some of the quicker comedy minds might even see it coming, based on other contraception jokes they’ve heard with a similar premise—like the old military joke of calling ugly frames “birth control glasses.”
Funny doesn’t just change; it evolves. It shambles out of the mire, learns to stand up straight, discovers new tricks and tools. Individual species branch off from the tree of comedy life and thrive and eventually die when there’s no longer an ecological niche for them. When the “Tupac is still alive” trope caught on, “Elvis is alive” jokes went away. They were competing for the same resources, and we didn’t need both. But the field as a whole advances as well. Woody Allen’s birth control joke could blow minds in 1965; today it’s old hat. This is true of all of yesterday’s comedians, even the greats. David Brenner was one of the sharpest observational comics of all time, but in his 1971 Tonight Show debut, he did a full six minutes on how men don’t like to ask for directions. On his landmark album Class Clown, George Carlin got big laughs and even applause for demonstrating how kids make farting sounds with their armpits. The routines are still funny, but today they immediately strike you as period pieces, like when you see a car or a hairstyle from the same era. They’re a little quaint, even silly. They cover old ground.
In contrast, jokes today have evolved into forms that a 1965 audience would probably not even be able to identify as comedy. We’ve already seen how the endless hunger for novelty has pushed comedy into new frontiers of absurdity, but the advances in speed, sophistication, and complexity have been just as dramatic. Familiarity breeds contentment, at best. Laughter, on the other hand, comes from sudden discovery.
Monkey Puzzles
Many scientists today wonder if laughter’s relationship to discovery could be evolutionary for humans as well—if we as a species might have been evolving along with the jokes. The ancient Greeks believed that the diaphragm muscle was the seat of humor appreciation, which is why the nearby armpits are the most ticklish part of the body. Our knowledge about the neurology of humor has advanced since then, but it’s still rudimentary, because humor processing is so complex that it seems to encompass pretty much every part of human cognition. In 2001, a group of London scientists used MRIs to scan the brains of people listening to jokes, as well as those of a control group listening to unfunny jokelike constructions.II This study, and a similar one done at Stanford in 2003 using cartoons, found that there is no one “humor area” of the brain. Instead, when humor was processed, the whole brain lit up like Times Square. Neural activity rose in all four lobes of the cerebral cortex, though different areas were more involved in different types of jokes. Conceptual jokes led to activity in parts of the brain that process language semantically, while puns were handled by the part of the brain that interprets the sounds of speech. A UCLA neurosurgeon discovered in 1998 that he could make a patient feel enough amusement to laugh out loud, just by zapping a certain area in her frontal lobe. When the doctors asked her why she was laughing, she said, “You guys are just so funny, standing around.”
Beneath all that, the MRIs found that emotional response to jokes was just as important. Funnier jokes led to bigger responses in the brain’s pleasure centers—the neurons that fire when you eat a cookie, have sex, enjoy art you like, or shoot up heroin—as well as the parts of the prefrontal cortex that integrate reason with emotion. So you “get” a joke up in your smarty-pants frontal and temporal cortices, and then “enjoy” it deep down in your early-mammalian limbic system.
In 2004, a Tufts undergraduate named Matthew Hurley proposed an honors thesis on the evolutionary origins of humor. Because his thesis adviser was Daniel Dennett, the bestselling writer and philosopher, the thesis was later expanded into a book, Inside Jokes. In the book, Hurley, Dennett, and psychologist Reginald Adams argue that our ability to understand and survive the world is directly connected to what our brain finds funny. They propose that joking arose at some point in our primate past as a way to make sense of life’s little weirdnesses, the juxtaposed incongruities at the core of Kant’s humor theory. Your great-great-[130 full pages of “great”s omitted]-great-grandmother reached for a fish in a stream but was misled by the refraction of the water and grabbed her own foot instead. Your great-great-[same joke]-great-grandfather was standing too close to the cooking fire when the wind changed and got a lungful of smoke. The hominids who merely got frustrated with little glitches like these died out; the ones who could analyze them solved the problem and lived long enough to contribute to the gene pool. Evolution in action.
But this process only works if there’s a short-term reward involved—in other words, if doing the “fittest” thing also feels good. So the pleasures of eating and sex evolved to make sure our dumb brains didn’t die out from never feeling like eating and having sex. In the same way, amusement or mirthIII evolved to make it pleasurable for us to notice the little absurdities and mistakes in our thinking, so we could understand and fix them. For immediately life-threatening stimuli (lightning, large snakes) we had already evolved good responses like “running away” and “hitting things with rocks,” so the humor response was a finer-tuned thing, which evolved so we would enjoy figuring out mistaken assumptions too innocuous to be immediately harmful. Humor researcher Peter McGraw calls this the “benign violation” theory of humor: we laugh at things that are somehow wrong, but not dangerously so. A situation that’s not quite wrong enough doesn’t produce a laugh, but neither will a situation that’s too wrong.
If Hurley’s reasoning is correct, then we owe our brains—we owe our very civilization—to our sense of humor.
Formula and Novelty
Fast-forward one million years. Humor for modern humans is very different than it was in the Stone Age. Like the smartest rat in the lab, we learned how to get to the food dispenser without running the maze. We invented jokes.
When our primitive ancestors laughed because Ogg had tripped over a vine in the path, there was an evolutionary advantage there: we had to figure out how to avoid the vine. But today, organic, “in the wild” humor stimuli like that one are outnumbered by hundreds of examples of engineered humor, designed to get a laugh. Most of our modern jokes are cheats, ways for us to stimulate the amusement reflex without actually learning anything useful. In other words, our multibillion-dollar laff industry exists to create fake little bugs in our worldview, and then quickly demolish them.
If you open up Facebook and your dad has posted a joke like, “I bought the world’s worst thesaurus yesterday. Not only is it terrible, but it’s terrible,” there’s a moment where the brain has to close a loop. Not only is it terrible, but it’s . . . terrible? That’s literally the last adjective your brain expected to hear there. Oh right, “worst thesaurus”! Got it. The glitch has been understood, and you’re rewarded with the little charge of mild amusement. In 1965, Woody Allen stood silently on a nightclub stage for over three seconds while he waited for this same evolutionary process to finish.
But that little short circuit only works once. The next time it hears a similar joke, the brain will already know the trick, and the trigger to our reward system won’t be so intense. That explains our insatiable appetite for the new in comedy. I can watch It’s a Wonderful Life twenty Christmases in a row and get a little weepy every time, but the same jokes in Groundhog Day weren’t laugh-out-loud funny to me anymore on a second or third rewatch. For a testament to the short shelf life of funny, check out the “Humor” section of any used-book store, the endless rows of old P. J. O’Rourke books and Garfield collections. Whether they’ve aged well or not, the owner never wanted to reread them. For the most part, jokes are a single-use item, like Kleenex.
There have always been more
people who wanted to tell jokes than people who could think up good ones. The stereotype of the unoriginal jokester goes back to the Roman playwright Plautus, who in his comedy Stichus introduced the character Gelasimus (“laughable”). Gelasimus is a social parasite who uses a book of prewritten jokes to wangle invitations to things, the ancestor of the twentieth-century traveling salesman trying to close a deal with tired jokes and saucy French postcards. In fact, many of the ancient world’s gags still circulate today, to judge by Philogelos, the fourth-century Roman text that’s the world’s oldest surviving joke collection. Here’s one excerpt from the Philogelos: “When the garrulous barber asks him, ‘How shall I cut your hair?’ a quick wit answers, ‘Silently.’ ” The same joke was still being told about the notorious British politician Enoch Powell well into the 1980s.
So Mark Twain was right in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court when he speculated about the ancient origins of today’s old-chestnut jokes. The time-traveling Yankee, listening to a medieval after-dinner speech by a knight of the Round Table, says,
I think I never heard so many old played-out jokes strung together in my life. He was worse than the minstrels, worse than the clown in the circus. It seemed peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen hundred years before I was born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years afterwards. It about convinced me that there isn’t any such thing as a new joke possible. Everybody laughed at these antiquities—but then they always do; I had noticed that, centuries later.
Twain noticed that comedy audiences would put up with old material, though I imagine no one liked it much. There was just no other game in town. In the vaudeville era, even the best comedians cycled through the same quasi–public domain trove of sketches and routines—you could go years without having to write a joke. Abbott and Costello made their “Who’s on First” routine a hit when they performed it on Kate Smith’s radio show in 1938, but it was based on a standard baseball routine that had been making the rounds in burlesque for almost a decade. Milton Berle lifted so many bits from other performers that he would even joke about his own joke theft in his act.IV
But with literally thousands of comedy outlets available today, recycled jokes don’t get far. Whole art forms have largely vanished in the rush for novelty. Take newspaper comics, which lean heavily on repetition and familiarity. Even a genuinely inspired strip like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat could repeat the same simple setup—a mischievous mouse trying to throw a brick at a deeply flattered cat—every single day for thirty years. Critic Gilbert Seldes loved Krazy Kat, but that didn’t prevent him from quipping, “According to my records, the last time a grown man laughed at a comic strip was in February of 1904, but that may be a typographical error. So far as I know, no child, male or female, has ever laughed at the funny pages. Something is wrong. Perhaps with the comics. Perhaps with the name.”
Or consider the midcentury sitcom, which would often repeat the same formulaic plots week after week. Beaver gets into trouble and needs some sage advice from Pop. Samantha’s magical powers screw up Darrin’s important business whatever. Familiar stories would even recur on show after show, like Aristotle’s six basic plots: a power outage, two dates at once, an egg babysitting assignment. In the sitcom, everything is okay: all families are happy, and all problems get resolved in twenty-five minutes. It’s not exactly what you’d call the funniest take on life, but it was the dominant comedic form in America for decades.
I always associate the decline of the sitcom formula with Paul Feig and Judd Apatow’s short-lived teen comedy Freaks and Geeks, because I still bear the scars of its unforgettable sixth episode, the one where Jason Segel’s character Nick pursues his dreams of rock stardom as a drummer. Nick’s hardcase father is threatening him with the army, but then his friend Lindsay sees a flyer about a top local band in need of a drummer. This is it, a way out! Years of TV watching had taught me, I believed, where this was going. But then I got to the painful audition scene, where Nick flames out behind the drum kit and everyone—the band, Lindsay, the viewer, Nick himself—realizes at the same time that he’ll never be a professional musician. As is true for most of us, his enthusiasm for something he loves outstrips his talent. It was the first time I’d ever seen a TV comedy subvert the familiar sitcom life lesson with such honest, brutal abandon.
In hindsight, we can see that unsurprising, conservative genres like newspaper comics and three-camera family sitcoms were perfect at what they were designed to do: not offend anyone enough for them to cancel their subscription or change the channel. In an era of little choice, comedy didn’t actually have to be funny. As soon as there was more interesting competition—Mad magazine was funnier than Blondie, David Letterman was funnier than Happy Days—they hurriedly adapted, produced a late flowering of great art (The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes, Frasier and Roseanne), and faded away.
Mockumentaries and Callbacks
When we move on from old jokes and forms, the replacement can’t be merely different. The next joke has to be a little more advanced in some way: a little more complex, a little more subtle, a little more outré. As Jim Downey, the veteran Saturday Night Live writer, said of comedy, “Advances are made, and we must always move forward, never backward. . . . Once something has been done, it should perhaps be built upon, but never repeated.”
These might be advances in structure. Gone are the days when a comedy routine was just a series of one-liners, maybe grouped into chunks by topic if the comic had two or three good lines that could be linked up. Mike Birbiglia’s solo comedy shows have the joke density of a modern stand-up routine, but cleverly shaped into a single virtuoso monologue, an overarching whole. My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, his second one-man show, jumps back and forth in time from a 2007 car crash to his courtship of his wife, Jen Stein, to his romantic misadventures in adolescence. Flashbacks are nested within flashbacks, and the routine is packed with comic asides on subjects from airport Cinnabon stalls to unsafe carnival rides, but the audience is so invested in Birbiglia’s relationship history that it never loses its place. If you were to graph the routine, it would look something like this:
There are entire genres today that no one would have even recognized as comedy a few decades ago. When Albert Brooks created his ersatz “Famous School for Comedians” in a 1971 Esquire article and subsequent short film,V the “mockumentary” didn’t really exist yet. As a result, the magazine got thousands of real letters inquiring about admission to the fictional comedy school. Likewise, I once rented This Is Spinal Tap in high school and couldn’t figure out why my friend’s date wasn’t laughing. After the movie, we found out she thought it was a real documentary about a real band.VI It’s hard to believe if you grew up on Christopher Guest movies and Larry Sanders and Modern Family, but audiences needed years of training to process fake documentaries.
Old devices might stick around, but they need to adapt. The callback, for example, has long been a staple of comedy in almost every medium. The canonical callback is a simple reference to a joke earlier in the act, a little joke encore. For example, on Hannibal Buress’s first comedy record, he does a couple absurd minutes on an unusual Christmas present he just bought for himself: a set of metal prosthetic arms. “You never know when you’re gonna lose an arm, and I want to be prepared for the situation.” He describes some of the advantages of owning spare metal arms and moves on. But then, half an hour later, as he’s finishing his set, he does a joke about insulting his one-year-old nephew who’s always playing with his computer keyboard: “You can’t type!” He then imagines his nephew growing up to get revenge by cutting off his Uncle’s hands. “Naw, you can’t type!” When the laughter dies down, he adds, “I’ll be like, ‘Whatever, dude, I got these metal arms right over here.’ ” Huge audience response! Buress hasn’t actually mined any new jokes out of the metal-arms premise; he’s just reminded the crowd about the good times we had laughing about it earlier in t
he evening. It’s like we have a little in-joke with him now! The satisfying sense of closure makes it a good way to finish up an act.
But too many of those can start to seem formulaic, so the callback had to mutate in increasingly baroque ways. In his Netflix specials, Bill Burr has tried callbacks to favorite bits from other routines, and sure enough, the audience remembered. In March 2016, John Oliver interrupted a Last Week Tonight monologue about a Mexican border wall to talk seriously about ladder shopping for a moment. “Avoid Werner,” he said. “Do yourself a favor and get a DeWalt ladder. And I’m not being paid to say that!” This might sound like nothing more than a committed bit of ladder-brand silliness, but hard-core fans remembered that this was a callback to a quick 2015 joke on college basketball, when Oliver had complained that Werner, despite being the official ladder of the NCAA, was “pure shit.” “I’m a DeWalt man,” he had assured the audience. “I’m not a ladder idiot.” The Last Week Tonight writers had waited a full year to do the callback. Now that’s commitment.
But nobody played twelve-dimensional chess with callbacks like Mitchell Hurwitz, the creator of the cult single-camera comedy Arrested Development. Taking advantage of the shift in TV watching to DVRs and DVDs, Hurwitz and the show’s writers filled each episode of the series to the brim with tiny micro-gags and odd bits of business that might only make sense with repeated viewings. If these were Easter eggs, they were as finely filigreed as a Fabergé. Hurwitz’s most extravagant innovation was probably the “call-forward”: dropping in references to jokes that hadn’t even happened yet. For example, the first half of the show’s second season is filled with perplexing little gags about the left hand of Tony Hale’s character Buster. Then, in episode eleven, he loses that hand when a seal bites it off. The call-forwards don’t even rise to the level of jokes (at one point, Buster sits down on a bench that reads “Army Surplus Office Supply,” covering most of the ad so the only visible letters read “Arm Off”)—except in retrospect. Only on a second viewing, or to higher-dimensional beings who can see all of time and comedy as a single geometric solid, do they get a laugh.VII When the show was revived on Netflix in 2013, Hurwitz took advantage of the new streaming video paradigm to push the weird comedy math as far as it would go. Each episode followed different characters through interwoven, overlapping timelines, so that in theory the season could be watched in any order at all. The plan didn’t quite come off, but it was certainly ambitious. Long stretches of early episodes were virtually incomprehensible until later episodes circled back and filled in the plot gaps.