Ha! (6 page)

His project, called LaughLab, started with a simple question: What makes a joke funny? To research this question, he asked people to answer a few short questions about themselves, then to rate the funniness of a random sample of jokes, based on a “giggle-o-meter” scale of 1 to 5. Since he also wanted to keep a fresh supply of jokes, he added a section where people could submit their own personal favorites. Thanks to some free publicity and plenty of international interest, millions of people flocked to his website. In all, Wiseman received over forty thousand jokes, many of which had to be rejected because they were too vulgar to be shared with a wider audience. Wiseman included jokes that he didn't think were particularly funny, in case he accidentally missed the humor. For example, the joke
What's brown and sticky? A stick
was submitted more than three hundred times, and Wiseman left
it in, because he figured that such a large number of people must know something he didn't.

In addition to telling him what jokes people found most funny, the experiment produced vast amounts of information, thus allowing for some very specific analyses. For example, Wiseman found that the funniest jokes were 103 letters long. This particular number wasn't special; there just had to be some length where ratings peaked, and 103 letters was it. Since many of the jokes included references to animals, he was also able to identify what animal was the funniest. Ducks, interestingly, won that prize. Maybe it's the webbed feet, Wiseman mused, but if a joke-teller has the option of giving the starring role to a talking horse or a talking duck, the choice is clear. The funniest time of day: 6:03 in the evening. The funniest day: the fifteenth of the month. Wiseman's data yielded an almost endless supply of discoveries.

One of the most interesting findings was how humor varies based on nationality. Germans thought every joke was funny. Scandinavians ranked closer to the middle, and also had the unfortunate tendency to include the words “ha ha” at the end of their entries, as if reassuring the reader that they had just experienced a joke. Americans showed a distinctive affinity for jokes that included insults or vague threats.

Here's a joke particularly liked by Americans, less so by others:

              
T
EXAN:
“Where are you from?”

              
H
ARVARD GRADUATE:
“I come from a place where we do not end sentences with prepositions.

              
T
EXAN:
“Okay
—
where are you from, jackass?”

Europeans, in turn, showed an affinity for jokes that were absurd or surreal. Here are two more examples:

              
A patient says: “Doctor, last night I made a Freudian slip. I was having dinner with my mother-in-law and wanted to say, ‘Could you please
pass the butter.' But instead I said, ‘You silly cow, you have completely ruined my life.'”

              
A German Shepherd went to the telegram office, took out a blank form, and wrote: “Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof.”

              
The clerk examined the paper and politely told the dog: “There are only nine words here. You could send another ‘Woof' for the same price.”

              
“But,” the dog replied, “that would make no sense at all.”

British people's taste for the absurd is informative, and also well supported by separate laboratory work. From sense-of-humor questionnaires, we know that the British consistently express a preference for deadpan or irreverent humor, just as Americans enjoy teasing and kidding. What else would you expect from a country that gave us this zinger:
Mommy, what do you call a delinquent child? Shut up and hand me the crowbar!

Wiseman also discovered that humor varies widely based on gender. Women responders to his website distinguished themselves not in terms of their favorite jokes but in terms of what jokes they rated lowest. For example, although male responders consistently rated put-down humor highly, women seldom agreed, especially when the targets were women. We'll discuss this issue more later, but for now, in the interests of science, let's look at a joke that more than half the men enjoyed but only 15 percent of the women rated positively:

        
A man driving on a highway is pulled over by a police officer. The officer asks: “Did you know your wife and children fell out of your car a mile back?” A smile creeps onto the man's face and he exclaims: “Thank God! I thought I was going deaf!”

Future chapters will examine what makes each of these jokes funny, but a general observation can still be made here—each is short, just under
half the “maximum funniness” length of 103 letters. The comedy writer Brent Forrester refers to this preference for brevity as the Humor and Duration Principle, otherwise known as “The shorter the better.” He even gave it a formula:
F = J/T.
If
F
represents the level of funniness, then funniness depends on both the quality of the joke,
J
, and the amount of time needed to tell it,
T.
The best jokes are always lean. No fat, no extra words.

Wiseman's study did have its shortcomings too. For example, only English-speaking people were able to participate, and the funniest jokes didn't always succeed. (That isn't just my opinion; it's Wiseman's too.) That's because the jokes that avoided extremes, the “safe” jokes, tended to receive the most votes, leading to an unfortunate tendency toward mediocrity. This shouldn't be surprising since we've already learned that humor is by nature confrontational—sometimes cognitively, sometimes emotionally, and sometimes both. Because people vary in terms of how much they like to be provoked by their jokes, the most popular jokes tend to cluster near, but still below, the most typical “provocation threshold.” Too high, and some people laugh wildly but others not at all. Too low, and nobody is impressed.

Fortunately, Wiseman was pleased with the eventual winner, if only because it just barely beat out the second-place competitor. The latter wasn't a bad joke, per se; it just wasn't all that good and most people have heard it too many times already. (The punch line reads “Watson, you idiot, it means that someone stole our tent,” in case you want to look it up.) Wiseman frequently tells both of these jokes in front of audiences because his research is often featured on television and at conferences, and most of the time neither one gets a laugh. One problem is the jokes themselves, for sure. But another is the delivery. Like most humor researchers, Wiseman has no comedic training, and so by his own admission he doesn't know how to tell a joke. That's another big issue in humor research, one that will get plenty of attention in
Chapter 7
.

What was the winner? Don't say I didn't warn you.

        
Two hunters from New Jersey are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed over. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency service. He gasps, “I think my friend is dead! What should I do?” The operator says, “Calm-down. I can help. First, make sure he's dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, “Okay, now what?”

2

   
T
HE
K
ICK OF THE
D
ISCOVERY

              
The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick of the discovery.

—R
ICHARD
F
EYNMAN

T
O INTRODUCE THE IMPORTANT ROLE OF DISCOVERY IN HUMOR
, let's look at a 2008 experiment conducted at Northwestern University. In contrast to our previously described studies, this one had nothing to do with humor. Instead, the scientists asked subjects to solve problems notorious for being exceptionally hard. So hard, in fact, that they couldn't be solved analytically. The problems required what scientists call
insight.
Insight is what happens when we have no idea how to solve a problem and, instead, must rely on answers that pop into our heads for no apparent reason.

Another distinctive aspect of the Northwestern study is that a huge, multi-ton magnet surrounded subjects' heads as they worked, altering
the spin of protons in their brains so that scientists could tell what parts were most active.

The machine was an MRI, which allowed the subjects' brain activity to be viewed as they followed the experimenters' instructions. Three words were shown at a time, and though these words were unrelated, each was closely associated with another common word that wasn't shown. The task was to guess that fourth word. As soon as subjects had an answer, they pressed a button, and for each set of words they were given fifteen seconds to identify a solution before the next three words appeared. Let's see an example so you can try it yourself:

            
tooth

            
potato

            
heart

Obviously, the task isn't easy. For most people, the first word that comes to mind after reading
tooth
is
ache.
That fits with
heart
, but not
with potato.
The first word most people associate with
potato
is
peel
, but that doesn't fit with either of the other two. You can see why this is called an insight problem. Brute force analysis doesn't work. Let's consider another example:

            
wet

            
law

            
business

This time, let your mind relax. Even if the answer feels close, don't let your brain slip into an analytical mindset. Ignore any similarities you might perceive between the words
law
and
business,
because those will hold you back. The only way you'll come up with an answer is to let your mind go blank. Here's one last example:

            
cottage

            
Swiss

            
cake

This last triad is easier, and hopefully you came up with the answer
cheese
—just as you may have come up with
sweet
for the first example and
suit
for the second. The task is called the Remote Semantic Associates, and it's known for being exceptionally difficult. So difficult, in fact, that a study involving hundreds of people found that fewer than 20 percent were able to solve either of the first two problems within fifteen seconds. When given thirty seconds, most were able to solve the second one. And the last one, the one with the solution
cheese
(the easiest of the nearly 150 original problems), was solved by 96 percent of the subjects, most in two seconds or less.

Human insight is an amazing thing, and it's especially important for humor, as we'll soon see. Some connections between insight and humor may already be apparent, such as the close link they both share with pleasure. We enjoy coming up with solutions, whether in the form of punch lines or insight problems like the ones above. That's what physicist Richard Feynman meant when he described “the kick of the discovery.” His greatest award wasn't the Nobel Prize, he claimed, but the pleasure of having a job that involved discovering new things. We take pride and pleasure in solving problems because our brains are programmed with an inherent desire to explain. According to Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik, this drive is as fundamental as our desire for sex. “Explanation is to cognition as orgasm is to reproduction,” she says. Thinking without understanding is as unsatisfying as sex without . . . well, you know.