A Quest to Understand What Makes Things Funny - The New Yorker

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APRIL 1, 2014

A Quest to Understand What Makes ThingsFunnyBY SHANE SNOW

What would happen if Communism were

introduced to Saudi Arabia? Nothing—at first. But

soon there’d be a shortage of sand.

This—one of many political jokes circulating inside

the Soviet Union during the late Cold War—is Joel

Warner’s favorite. Warner is the co-author, with

Peter McGraw, of “The Humor Code,” which was released on April Fool’s Day. “It can

be analyzed all sorts of ways,” he told me. “Did Soviet citizens tell jokes like this as a

form of coping, of using humor to lessen their psychological distress? Or was it a

reflection of changing attitudes and growing unease among the populace? Or was the

oke actually planted by the K.G.B., allowing folks to make light of their plight instead

of fighting against it?”

Warner and McGraw recently travelled the world in an attempt to answer a question

that has eluded us for millennia: What makes things funny? Laughter is thought by

evolutionary biologists to be an indicator, in pre-historic tribes, that all was well.Comedy has long been a source of relief for sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder

and for the terminally ill. In 2010, Raffi Khatchadourian wrote

(http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_khatchadourian)

about an international laughter-yoga movement. And, recently, a Northwestern

University professor named Jeffrey Burgdorf found that “tickling” rats to the point of

inducing “laughter” might help make them resilient to depression and anxiety. But a

scientific explanation for humor has been hard to pin down.

Many academics consider their humor-researching counterparts unserious, McGraw

said. “It’s just by nature not a serious thing,” he told me. “So that association carries

over.” And yet, in March, Salvatore Attardo, the dean of humanities, social sciences, and

arts at Texas A&M-Commerce, published a two-volume, nine-hundred-and-eighty-

four-page sledgehammer called the “Encyclopedia of Humor Studies,” meant as an

introduction for the growing number of humor-research students in today’s universities.

“It’s become respectable,” Attardo said. “There is an explosion of research, and in many

disciplines.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_khatchadourianhttp://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_khatchadourianhttp://www.newyorker.com/contributors/shane-snowhttp://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_khatchadourianhttp://www.newyorker.com/contributors/shane-snow


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As with other psychological experiences, like happiness or regret, scholars have long

hunted for a formula that can explain humor. The oldest known humor theory, known

as Superiority Theory, dates back to Plato and Aristotle. It says that we find humor in

others’ misfortunes and shortcomings. This may say more about Ancient Greek social

dynamics than it does about modern humor—when one gets past “The Three Stooges”

or YouTube, that is. It fails to explain, for example, knock-knock jokes. Freud one-

upped Superiority Theory with Relief Theory, which posited that humor is a sort of

release valve for our inner desires. The theory explained dirty jokes, but not others, like

puns. In the seventies, linguists rallied behind a more palatable idea, called Incongruity

Theory: essentially, that we laugh at surprises, violations of our expectations. This

explained verbal punch lines, slapstick, and other humor, like April Fool’s pranks. But

Incongruity Theory had a hard time explaining why we laugh when tickled. And it

managed to mispredict things that aren’t funny. The death of a very young person, for

example, is surprising and incongruous, but hardly humorous.

These days, many scholars still champion versions of Incongruity Theory, including

such prominent figures as Victor Raskin, a linguistics professor at Purdue University and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Humor , who refined Incongruity

Theory into the Script-Based Semantic Theory of Humor, in 1985. Raskin and

Attardo expanded this, in 1991, into the General Theory of Verbal Humor. “The idea is

that every joke is based on a juxtaposition of two scripts,” Raskin said. “The punch line

triggers the switch from one script to the other. It is a universal theory.”

McGraw doesn’t buy it. He claims that, while linguists rely on thought experiments to

back up Incongruity-based theories, researchers have used the scientific method todisprove it. In 1974, for example, two University of Tennessee professors asked

undergraduate students to watch Bill Cosby videos. Before each of Cosby’s punch lines,

the professors paused the tape and asked the subjects to predict the joke. Then they

monitored other groups whose members watched the same tapes, and recorded which

okes they laughed at the hardest. It turned out that the jokes that had been rated by the

first group as easier to predict generally drew more laughs than the unexpected punch

lines.

McGraw found his preferred universal theory in a 1998 journal article by a Stanford

University researcher named Thomas Veatch. Veatch proposed that humor emerges

when something seems wrong or unsettling but is actually benign. (His favorite joke

was the following: Why did the monkey fall from the tree? Because it was dead.)

Nobody paid much attention to Veatch’s theory, until McGraw, with a graduate student

named Caleb Warren, dug it up a decade later and dubbed it the Benign Violation

Theory.


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Benign Violation explained why the unexpected sight of a friend falling down the stairs

(a violation of expectations) was funny only if the friend was not seriously injured (a

benign outcome). It explained Jerry Seinfeld’s comedic formula of pointing out the

outrageous things (violation) in everyday life (benign), and Sarah Silverman’s hilarious

habit of rendering off-color topics (violation) harmless (benign) in her standup

routines. It explained puns (benign violations of linguistic rules) and tickling (a

perceived physical threat with no real danger).

And it explained something that had particularly vexed Incongruity theorists: humor’sability to help people cope with stress. Transforming actual violations into benign

violations also explained the famed hospital clown Patch Adams’s ability to cheer up

terminally ill children, Chris Rock-style racial humor that manages not to be racist, and

political satire.

Questions about McGraw’s theory remain. “It’s a perfectly decent piece of work,”

Raskin says. But, he adds, “It’s not at all universal.” Attardo tells me he’s “not a fan.”

First of all, he believes that a unified theory of humor is impossible—“much like youcan’t have a supertheory of poetry or justice that answers everything.” And he finds

Benign Violation’s simplicity underwhelming. “These are basic, not that exciting

things,” he said. “The question is what kind of violation? How do you know it is

benign?”

McGraw admits that Benign Violation Theory has some holes. (“I really haven’t nailed

why things that are absurd are funny,” he admitted.) And yet he feels that a unified

theory is within reach, and that skeptics will come around to Benign Violation Theory in time. I had been asking him to tell me his favorite joke, and, on a recent evening, he

called me on the phone and said, “Ask me the secret of good comedy.”

I replied, “What’s the sec—”

“Timing!” he blurted.

It’s an old joke. McGraw fell flat when he tried standup himself, as he and Warner

document at the beginning of the book. Armed with a sweater vest and a handful of

well-crafted benign violations, the only guffaws the fumbling professor elicited at

Denver’s Squire Lounge occurred when the m.c. took back the mic and said, “He has

this theory, see … well, who cares. Obviously, it’s wrong! ”

Shane Snow (https://twitter.com/shanesnow) is a technology journalist in New York City.

Photograph by Wayne Miller/Magnum.

https://twitter.com/shanesnow


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SHANE SNOW

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A Quest to Understand What Makes Things Funny - The New Yorker