Ha! (33 page)

On chimpanzee laughter, see Frans de Waal,
Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes
(New York: Harper & Row, 1982).

On dog laughter, see Patricia Simonet, Donna Versteeg, and Dan Storie, “Dog-Laughter: Recorded Playback Reduces Stress-Related Behavior in Shelter Dogs,” in
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Environmental Enrichment
(New York, 2005).

The Elusive Concept of Mirth

On the Mirth Response Test, see Jacob Levine and Robert Abelson, “Humor as a Disturbing Stimulus,” in
Motivation in Humor
, ed. Jacob Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1969), pp. 38–48.

On humorous cartoons and the dopamine reward circuit, see Dean Mobbs, Michael Greicius, Eiman Abdel-Azim, Vinod Menon, and Allan Reiss, “Humor Modulates the Mesolimbic Reward Centers,”
Neuron
40 (2003): 1041–1048.

On musical chills, see Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre, “Intensely Pleasurable Responses to Music Correlate with Activity in Brain Regions Implicated in Reward and Emotion,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
98, no. 20 (2001): 11818–11823.

On Mr. Bean and dopamine rewards, see Masao Iwase, Yasuomi Ouchi, Hiroyuki Okada, Chihiro Yokoyama, Shuji Nobezawa, Etsuji Yoshikawa, Hideo Tsukada, Masaki Takeda, Ko Yamashita, Masatoshi Takeda, Kouzi Yamaguti, Hirohiko Kuratsune, Akira Shimizu, and
Yasuyoshi Watanabe, “Neural Substrates of Human Facial Expression of Pleasant Emotion Induced by Comic Films: A PET Study,”
NeuroImage
17 (2002): 758–768.

On rat vocalizations, see Jeffrey Burgdorf, Paul Wood, Roger Kroes, Joseph Moskal, and Jaak Panksepp, “Neurobiology of 50-kHz Ultrasonic Vocalizations in Rats: Electrode Mapping, Lesion, and Pharmacology Studies,”
Behavioral Brain Research
182 (2007): 274–283; also Jaak Panksepp and Jeff Burgdorf, “Laughing Rats and the Evolutionary Antecedents of Human Joy?”
Physiology and Behavior
79 (2003): 533–547; also Jaak Panksepp and Jeffrey Burgdorf, “Laughing Rats? Playful Tickling Arouses High-Frequency Ultrasonic Chirping in Young Rodents,” in
Toward a Science of Consciousness III: The Third Tucson Discussions and Debates
, eds. Stuart Hameroff, Alfred Kaszniak, and David Chalmers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

The Funniest Joke in the World

On the LaughLab experiment, see Richard Wiseman's
Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things
(New York: Basic Books, 2008).

C
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2: T
HE
K
ICK OF THE
D
ISCOVERY

On explanation as a major drive, see Alison Gopnik, “Explanation as Orgasm,”
Minds and Machines
8 (1998): 101–118.

On word triads and positive facial reactions, see Sascha Topolinski, Katja Likowski, Peter Weyers, and Fritz Strack, “The Face of Fluency: Semantic Coherence Automatically Elicits a Specific Pattern of Facial Muscle Reactions,”
Cognition and Emotion
23, no. 2 (2009): 260–271.

On insight and positive mood, see Karuna Subramaniam, John Kounios, Todd Parrish, and Mark Jung-Beeman, “A Brain Mechanism for Facilitation of Insight by Positive Affect,”
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
21, no. 3 (2008): 415–432. For more on semantic associates, see Edward Bowden and Mark Jung-Beeman, “Normative Data for 144 Compound Remote Associate Problems,”
Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers
35, no. 4 (2003): 634–639.

Constructing and the Anterior Cingulate

On emotion and the Stroop task, see Julius Kuhl and Miguel Kazén, “Volitional Facilitation of Difficult Intentions: Joint Activation of
Intention Memory and Positive Affect Removes Stroop Interference,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
128, no. 3 (1999): 382–399.

On weight judging and laughter, see Göran Nerhardt, “Humor and Inclination to Laugh: Emotional Reactions to Stimuli of Different Divergence from a Range of Expectancy,”
Scandinavian Journal of Psychology
11 (1970): 185–195; also Lambert Deckers, “On the Validity of a Weight-Judging Paradigm for the Study of Humor,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
6, no. 1 (1993): 43–56.

Reckoning in a Confusing World

On confidence and insight tasks, see Janet Metcalfe, “Premonitions of Insight Predict Impending Error,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
12, no. 4 (1986): 623–634.

On surprise and pleasure, see Craig Smith and Phoebe Ellsworth, “Patterns of Cognitive Appraisal in Emotion,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
48, no. 4 (1985): 813–838.

On the pleasantness of surprise in music and architecture, see Rudolf Arnheim,
The Dynamics of Architectural Form
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977).

On brain activation during cartoon viewing, see Karli Watson, Benjamin Matthews, and John Allman, “Brain Activation During Sight Gags and Language-Dependent Humor,”
Cerebral Cortex
17 (2007): 314–324.

Resolving with Scripts

On scripts, see Salvatore Attardo, Christian Hempelmann, and Sara Di Maio, “Script Oppositions and Logical Mechanisms: Modeling Incongruities and Their Resolutions,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
15, no. 1 (2002): 3–46.

On the General Theory of Verbal Humor, see Salvatore Attardo and Victor Raskin, “Script Theory Revisited: Joke Similarity and Joke Representation Model,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
4, no. 3/4 (1991): 293–347.

On background incongruities in jokes, see Andrea Samson and Christian Hempelmann, “Humor with Background Incongruity: Does More Required Suspension of Disbelief Affect Humor Perception?”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
24, no. 2 (2011): 167–185.

On EEG responses to jokes and punch lines, see Peter Derks, Lynn Gillikin, Debbie Bartolome-Rull, and Edward Bogart, “Laughter and Electroencephalographic Activity,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
10, no. 3 (1997): 285–300.

Beyond the Stages

On ambiguity in headlines, see Chiara Bucaria, “Lexical and Syntactic Ambiguity as a Source of Humor: The Case of Newspaper Headlines,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
17, no. 3 (2004): 279–309.

On political orientation and the anterior cingulate, see Ryota Kanai, Tom Feilden, Colin Firth, and Geraint Rees, “Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults,”
Current Biology
21 (2011): 677–680.

On brain activity and religious belief, see Michael Inzlicht and Alexa Tullett, “Reflecting on God: Religious Primes Can Reduce Neuro-physiological Response to Errors,”
Psychological Science
21, no. 8 (2010): 1184–1190; also, interesting background in James Austin,
Zen and the Brain
(New York: MIT Press, 1998).

C
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3: S
TOPOVER AT THE
E
MPIRE
S
TATE
B
UILDING

Humor Gets a Bad Rap

On humor and the Bible, see John Morreall, “Comic Vices and Comic Virtues,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
23, no. 1 (2010): 1–26; also John Morreall, “Philosophy and Religion,” in
The Primer of Humor Research
, ed. Victor Raskin (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 211–228; also Jon Roeckelein,
The Psychology of Humor: A Reference Guide and Annotated Bibliography
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002).

On joke latencies following disasters, see Bill Ellis, “A Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center Disaster Jokes,”
New Directions in Folklore
5 (2001): 1–9.

On insult humor, see Christie Davies's “Undertaking the Comparative Study of Humor,” in
The Primer of Humor Research
, ed. Victor Raskin (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 162–175; also Christie Davies,
Ethnic Humor Around the World: A Comparative Analysis
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990); also
Mirth of Nations
(New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002). The quotations in the text are from personal interviews.

On jokes about the handicapped, see Herbert Lefcourt and Rod Martin,
Humor and Life Stress: Antidote to Adversity
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986).

On humor and the recovery process, see Dacher Keltner and George Bonanno, “A Study of Laughter and Dissociation: Distinct Correlates of Laughter and Smiling During Bereavement,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
73, no. 4 (1997): 687–702; also Charles Carver, Christina Pozo, Suzanne Harris, Victoria Noriega, Michael Scheier, David Robinson, Alfred Ketcham, Frederick Moffat, and Kimberly Clark, “How Coping Mediates the Effect of Optimism on Distress: A Study of Women with Early Stage Breast Cancer,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
65, no. 2 (1993): 375–390.

On the role of cruelty in humor, see Thomas Herzog and Beverly Bush, “The Prediction of Preference for Sick Humor,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
7, no. 4 (1994): 323–340; also Thomas Herzog and Joseph Karafa, “Preferences for Sick Versus Nonsick Humor,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
11, no. 3 (1998): 291–312; also Thomas Herzog and Maegan Anderson, “Joke Cruelty, Emotional Responsiveness, and Joke Appreciation,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
13, no. 3 (2000): 333–351.

On humor in the media following disasters, see Giselinde Kuipers, “Where Was King Kong When We Needed Him? Public Discourse, Digital Disaster Jokes, and the Functions of Laughter after 9/11,”
Journal of American Culture
28, no. 1 (2005): 70–84.

Scary Movies and Relief

On emotional experience during horror movies, see Eduardo Andrade and Joel Cohen, “On the Consumption of Negative Feelings,”
Journal of Consumer Research
34 (2007): 283–300.

On Great Humor, see Hans Vejleskov, “A Distinction Between Small Humor and Great Humor and Its Relevance to the Study of Children's Humor,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
14, no. 4 (2001): 323–338.

On prisoner-of-war humor, including the story of Gerald Santo Venanzi, see Linda Henman, “Humor as a Coping Mechanism:
Lessons from POWs,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
14, no. 1 (2001): 83–94.

Jokes with a Target

For a general overview on spindle cells, see John Allman, Atiya Hakeem, and Karli Watson, “The Phylogenetic Specializations in the Human Brain,”
The Neuroscientist
8, no. 4 (2002): 335–346; also Karli Watson, T. K. Jones, and John Allman, “Dendritic Architecture of the Von Economo Neurons,”
Neuroscience
141 (2006): 1107–1112.

On the Emotional Stroop task, see John Allman, Atiya Hakeem, Joseph Erwin, Esther Nimchinsky, and Patrick Hof, “The Anterior Cingulate: The Evolution of an Interface Between Emotion and Cognition,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
935 (2001): 107–117.

On David Levy jokes, see Hagar Salamon, “The Ambivalence over the Levantinization of Israel: David Levi Jokes,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
20, no. 4 (2007): 415–442.

On elephant jokes and latent racism, see Roger Abrahams and Alan Dundes, “On Elephantasy and Elephanticide,”
Psychoanalysis Review
56 (1969): 225–241.

On lawyer jokes, see Christie Davies, “American Jokes About Lawyers,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
21, no. 4 (2008): 369–386; also Marc Galanter, “The Great American Lawyer Joke Explosion,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
21, no. 4 (2008): 387–413.

On the Dyak tribes of Borneo, see V. I. Zelvys, “Obscene Humor: What the Hell?”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
3, no. 3 (1990): 323–332.

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PECIALIZATION
I
S FOR
I
NSECTS

A.K.

On patient A.K., see Itzhak Fried, Charles Wilson, Katherine MacDonald, and Eric Behnke, “Electric Current Stimulates Laughter,”
Nature
391 (1998): 650.

On gelastic epilepsy, see R. Garg, S. Misra, and R. Verma, “Pathological Laughter as Heralding Manifestation of Left Middle Cerebral Artery Territory Infarct: Case Report and Review of the Literature,”
Neurology India
48 (2000): 388–390; also Mario Mendez, Tomoko
Nakawatase, and Charles Brown, “Involuntary Laughter and Inappropriate Hilarity,”
Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences
11, no. 2 (1999): 253–258.

States and Traits

On Peter Derks's humor formula, see Antony Chapman and Hugh Foot,
Humor and Laughter: Theory, Research, and Applications
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996).

On humor and religiosity, see Vassilis Saroglou, “Being Religious Implies Being Different in Humour: Evidence from Self- and Peer Ratings,”
Mental Health, Religion, and Culture
7 ,no. 3 (2004): 255–267.