Ha! (26 page)

The dancing analogy also highlights the important but elusive role of tempo. With dancing, there's always a clear beat. Humor has a beat too, and we call it comedic timing, but there's no rhythm section, only our instincts and our ability to read the audience. So, uncoordinated guys like me, who may not be able to dance but can fake our way through a song by biting our lip and listening closely for the bass line, have no safety net. Put us in front of an audience and ask us to tell a joke, and we might as well perform a mamba wearing earplugs.

It's worth addressing comedic timing because, as noted earlier, humor requires a connection between people, and that means being in sync with our audience. Some comedians, like Robin Williams, tend to speed up before a punch line. Others, like Steven Wright, slow down.
Perhaps that's why humorologists liken comedic timing to jazz. Improvisation is key for both, with the onset and duration of each note depending on all the ones that came before it. This makes for playfulness and the constant risk of surprise.

One of the few actual experiments to measure comedic timing was conducted by our old friend Salvatore Attardo, who, as we learned in
Chapter 2
, also developed the General Theory of Verbal Humor. Attardo recorded ten speakers as they performed jokes, and then he broke down those recordings in three important ways. First, he measured their rate of speech—essentially how fast the joke-tellers talked during the setup and the punch line. Second, he measured their pitch and volume, looking for changes that signaled upcoming humorous turns. Third, he looked for pauses, ranging from less than a fifth of a second (200 milliseconds) to more than four times that long. His hypothesis was that speakers would pause before delivering punch lines and that the punch lines themselves would be delivered faster and louder than the rest of the joke.

Sadly, his hypotheses weren't borne out. Not a single aspect of the punch lines was different than the rest of the joke.

“It caught me absolutely by surprise,” says Attardo. “It was to be one of those studies where you expect to confirm what everybody already knows is true, then everybody applauds and moves on. But we found just the opposite. . . . It took quite a bit of work to show that we hadn't screwed anything up, though now it's pretty well recognized that these markers don't distinguish punch lines like we thought they did.”

This finding countered what scientists call the folk-theory of joke delivery. Folk-theories are beliefs that everyone “knows are true” without ever having seen the proof. “We use only 10 percent of our brains.” “Blind people hear better than those with sight.” “Subliminal messages influence our behavior.” The problem with such beliefs is that even though they're common, they're also incomplete or wrong. Yes, a small percentage of the brain possesses functions predetermined at birth, but that doesn't mean the rest isn't important too. Blind people do sometimes experience superior hearing, but only when the blindness
occurs during infancy, while their brains are still plastic. And unless you're a character in a bad sitcom, being exposed to a subliminal message won't make you do something you wouldn't ordinarily do, like tell off your boss or make a public scene. It might make a word come to mind slightly faster than usual, but there's little proof that the effects are broader than that.

The folk-theory of humor is that punch lines are distinguished by pauses and higher pitch—a belief that, like those other folk-theories, contains a small kernel of truth. The complication comes in the form of “paratones,” which is what linguists call spoken paragraphs. Paratones tend to end with
lower
volume and pitch, not higher like jokes. Since jokes often come at the end of paratones, any changes in volume or pitch cancel each other out. This explains why Attardo saw no differences in his measures: the jokes weren't salient enough to overcome the speakers' natural tendency to end on a low note.

Although timing effects don't show up experimentally, we still know they exist. We've all heard people butcher a joke by skipping a needed pause or speeding up just when they needed to slow down. Those pauses and changes in tempo convey important information. Indeed, effective communication involves a lot more than just words; it also depends on what's left unsaid, or what's implied through hesitation and changes in pitch. These cues introduce many layers of meaning, and as we've seen, humor is all about multiple meanings. Expert comedians use pauses and tempo changes to build up expectations and signal upcoming turns, and without those manipulations there's no humor. Just the prolonged telling of a story.

Which is why we wouldn't expect to measure the funniness of a joke using pauses and inflection, because these are only symptoms of a much broader phenomenon. That phenomenon is ambiguity, which occurs not just within our brains but between people too. Punch lines aren't the bang of the jokes, only the tools we use to bring on a final resolution. The build-up—filled with pauses, changes in volume, and all sorts of other subtle indicators—is where the humor starts, because
this is where the ambiguity is sowed. You can't just look at a specific part of a joke to find the humor, because it's everywhere.

To see how humor depends on more than just the punch line, just listen to any funny joke or story and note when people laugh. Laughter almost always occurs over the course of entire jokes, not just at the end. A recent survey of nearly two hundred narrative jokes, which are typically lengthy and told in natural conversation, showed that the majority involved setups that elicited laughter well before the end. These “early” jokes are called jab lines, and any particular narrative joke can have several. Not all jab lines will make listeners laugh, but they're important parts of the joke because they establish a connection with the audience. Consider the following joke that contains several different jab lines, each marked in underline:

        
A man wanted to get a pet to keep him company around the house. After some deliberation, he decided on a parrot and chose one that, the sales clerk assured him, was well trained with a full vocabulary of words. He took the parrot home and discovered
that it knew quite a lot of words, most of them vulgar, and that it had a bad attitude to match.
The parrot
spewed out rudeness and vulgarity every time the man entered the room,
and the man set out to change the parrot's attitude. He tried repeating nice and polite words around the bird,
playing soft music,
withholding special treats when it cursed, but nothing seemed to work.
The bird just seemed to get angrier and cursed at him even more.
Finally, desperately tired of the cursing,
he opened up the freezer and shoved the parrot inside.
After a few minutes, the cursing and squawking stopped and all was quiet. The man was afraid he had hurt the bird, so he opened the freezer door to check.
The parrot looked around, blinked, bowed politely, and recited, “Sir, I am so very sorry I offended you with my language and actions. I ask your forgiveness, and I shall try to control my behavior from now on.”
Astonished, the man just nodded and carried the parrot back to its cage. As he closed the door, the parrot looked at him and said, “By the way . . .
What did the chicken do?
”

In this example, six different jab lines precede the punch line. I challenge you to omit any one of them without softening the joke.

Taking the idea of jab lines a step further, most comics live by what is known as “The Law of Three.” This law states that when rhythm is needed to establish the tone or pace of a joke, at least three parts are necessary. As an example, consider this Jon Stewart quip:
I celebrated Thanksgiving the old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, then I killed them and took their land.
The joke wouldn't be funny without mention of the invitation or the feast because the timing would be off. Humor requires a chance to warm up, and this needed time is very difficult to measure. Perhaps that's why comedians work so hard on the order and theme of their routines—a simple string of jokes without order isn't much of a comedy routine. It's also not likely to build a relationship with the audience.

Like dancing, humor is a form of interpersonal communication, though a complex one. What we find funny depends not just on timing and pace but also on the cumulative build-up of ideas working toward some final point. What sets humor apart from other forms of communication is that it seeks out rules so that it can break them. In our language we expect ideas to be presented clearly. Humor violates that expectation by leading us to believe one thing, then surprising us with the true, intended meaning. We observed this earlier in relation to scripts, and we see it now in relation to communication between people.

Paul Grice is a philosopher of language, best known for developing what he calls the “cooperative principle.” First presented in 1968 during a series of lectures at Harvard, the cooperative principle outlines four rules governing polite and effective communication—essentially a guide for proper conversation. For example, Grice's first rule, the Maxim of Quantity, maintains that we should communicate at least as much information as required, but not more. If someone asks me if I know what time it is, and I respond “yes” in an attempt to be funny, this would be a violation of Grice's Maxim of Quantity
because, in addition to being a jerk, I'm also providing significantly less information than was requested.

Grice's rules—or maxims, as they are called within the field of linguistics—highlight humor's social nature. They're also useful for identifying the types of social violations exploited by jokes. As an example, consider Grice's second rule, the Maxim of Relation, which holds that our statements must remain relevant, without unwarranted changes in direction or topic. If I tell the joke
How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Fish!,
then I'm violating this maxim, because my response has nothing to do with the actual question, despite its implicit statement about surrealism itself. And if I say that
I believe in clubs for young people, but only when kindness fails,
I'm violating Grice's third rule, the Maxim of Manner, which holds that we should always avoid obscurity and ambiguity. Lastly, Grice's Maxim of Quality maintains that we should state only what is definitely true.
What's the difference between in-laws and outlaws? Outlaws are wanted.

Some jokes work based on what
isn't
said, thus demonstrating that we can violate more than one of Grice's maxims at a time based on what's left implicit. The joke
How did Helen Keller burn her ear? She answered the phone
initially appears to violate Grice's Maxim of Manner, because the answer doesn't relate to the question at all. But if you know that Helen Keller was blind, then the joke implies additional actions barely hinted at by the answer. In fact, it violates at least three of Grice's maxims by being minimal, irrelevant, and obscure, all at the same time. It doesn't explain why Keller was answering the phone, since she was also deaf, but I suppose that just introduces even more obscurity.

Have you ever e-mailed a joke, only to see it backfire because the humor was lost without tone or context? Of course you have, which brings us to a rare exception—irony. Most humor involves subtle switchings of hidden and intended meanings. By contrast, irony—particularly in the form of sarcasm—isn't subtle. It involves direct confrontations between
apparent and secondary meanings. This makes it the only kind of humor where comic delivery is easily measurable.

Studies show that, depending on the nature of the conversation, ironic language either varies widely in pitch or stays completely flat. In other words, when people start speaking ironically, the degree of variation in their tone of voice will either increase or decrease. That may sound difficult to spot, but in fact it isn't—if someone suddenly starts talking differently than a moment before, that person is probably being ironic. Irony shows itself in the face, too. When people use ironic language such as sarcasm, their faces tend to go blank—much like a poker face, except that the expression reveals hidden knowledge rather than concealing it. For this reason, someone speaking ironically can be recognized on a videotape even when the volume is turned off.

Humor is indeed a social phenomenon. It involves the building of personal and social expectations, and when those expectations are broken, funny things happen. Like dancing with a partner and then suddenly giving that person a twirl, a good joke adds spice to ordinary conversation.