Ha! (16 page)

Often, researchers conduct studies involving only one or two experiments, with only a couple of different measures, because science takes effort. There's the issue of getting participants, plus practical matters like what tests to administer and how long to gather data before finally publishing. Which makes the following study performed by German psychologist and former president of the International Society for Humor Studies Willibald Ruch all the more impressive. He knew that to understand the complicated connection between personality and humor, he had to be comprehensive. So he didn't just target humor in a single population, he studied more than one hundred adults whose ages ranged from seventeen to eighty-three. He didn't just give one or two personality tests, either; he gave twelve. And rather than administer surveys and questionnaires, he put his subjects to work. In one task, for example, he instructed them to view fifteen cartoons and then come up with as many humorous captions as they could within thirty minutes. Knowing that the captions would vary in quality, he asked a team of independent observers to rate the wittiness and originality of each one.

Ruch's findings were clear—extraverted subjects produced the most humor. The more outgoing they were, the more captions they created. They were also the most cheerful, least serious, and most likely to selfreport a sense of humor. In short, they were the most fun to be around.

The subjects who rated high on psychoticism proved quite different. They scored low on seriousness and produced fewer captions. However, they distinguished themselves by the quality of those captions. Specifically, their contributions were judged by the independent observers to be significantly funnier than everybody else's. So, being assertive, manipulative, and dogmatic might make you less prone to tell jokes, but at least the jokes will be funnier and more likely to make people laugh.

This finding helps explain why some studies find relationships between certain personality characteristics and humor, and others don't. It's not sufficient just to measure how many jokes a person tells, because quantity is very different from quality. We've all known people who love to tell jokes and amuse others around them. Sometimes they're funny, but other times they're simply annoying. I'm not saying that a person needs to be mentally unbalanced to crack a good joke, or that all good comedians are necessarily schizophrenic. Rather, my point is that when we “cultivate” conflict, both within our brains and with others around us, we're more likely to find our humorous side. By the same token, overactive brains aren't a bad thing, at least when it comes to humor. As we've seen, it's important to have a bit of edginess, just enough to make those jokes funny. Too little and we become boring. Too much and we become institutionalized.

One implication is that psychotic individuals (again, I'm not implying any pathology) are more likely than others to speak out in awkward or socially unacceptable ways to make a good joke. But we haven't yet considered the difference between being funny and having a good sense of humor. As we all know, there's a difference between telling a joke and being able to enjoy one when it's presented to us. It's a matter of production versus appreciation. Are certain people better at “getting jokes” than others?

The answer is “yes”—and here, too, the explanation has to do with overactive brains. There's another group of individuals who are highly tuned for appreciating humor, and it's because their minds are more active than those around them. We call these individuals sensation-seekers.

Sensation-seeking individuals can be thought of as combining all three of Eysenck's key personality traits. Like extraverts they're highly excitable, always seeking out new social situations. Yet they're not always sociable. True sensation-seekers don't care whether their actions are harmful to themselves or others—and if unchecked the result can be dangerous lifestyles and antisocial behavior. This makes them more than a little neurotic. And like psychotics, sensation-seekers frequently have high levels of testosterone, which itself is strongly correlated with
drug use and sex. In a sense, then, sensation-seeking is like turning the dial of one's personality to ten and letting the chips fall as they may.

We know that sensation-seeking individuals are especially responsive to humor because we can look at their brains as they process jokes. Which brings us to the topic of absurd humor, the kind that doesn't lead to easily resolved punch lines (e.g.,
What's yellow and can't swim? A bulldozer!
). Most of us respond to absurd humor with “quiet” brains, primarily because we're not sure what to make of it. But we see a different reaction among sensation-seekers. For them, it leads to
more
brain activation, because it's seen as a challenge. This form of humor allows them to work as hard as they want to get the joke, and since it's ridiculous, there's no boundary for how much exercise their brains can get. So if you want to know if any of your friends have a particularly keen sense of the absurd, show them the cartoon in
Figure 4.1.
An inactive, lazy brain will immediately give up trying to make sense of it. A sensation-seeker's brain will keep probing.

F
IGURE
4.1. An example of absurd humor, as used in a study showing that sensation-seeking individuals experience high levels of brain activation when processing nonsense jokes. Reprinted from
Neuropsychologia,
Vol. 47, Andrea Sampson, Christian Hempelmann, Oswald Huber, and Stefan Zysset, “Neural Substrates of Incongruity-Resolution and Nonsense Humor,” 1023–1033, 2009, with permission from Elsevier.

Other findings linking personality characteristics to humor appreciation are just strange or surprising. Herbert Lefcourt found that people with a strong sense of humor are also more environmentally conscious. Rod Martin and Nicholas Kuiper found that men with strong Type A characteristics, such as ambition and adherence to deadlines, enjoy jokes more than their laid-back colleagues do (but women showed no such difference). And then there are the truly strange studies, like the one titled, appropriately, “Humor and Anality.” It tested Freud's theory that laughter is our way of dealing with sensitive topics, such as defecation. According to Freud, a lot in life is forbidden. Without getting into details, anality is one of those forbidden things, stemming from the need to discharge waste while also keeping ourselves clean and orderly. A person who feels the need to control everything is anal. And, according to the study, so is a person who particularly likes this joke:

        
An agitated mother rushed into a drugstore, screaming that the infant in her arms had just swallowed a .22-caliber bullet. “What shall I do?” she cried. “Give him a bottle of castor oil,” replied the druggist, “but don't point him at anybody.”

The anality study looked for connections between preferences for jokes like this one and extreme organization, though I'm not going to discuss the results here, mostly because I find the topic silly. But as we can all agree, we humans are a complicated species, and we vary in many ways, including how much we enjoy jokes about poop. Ultimately, our sense of humor can be a great way of telling us apart. It can help us better understand ourselves and who we really are.

T
HE
F
AIRER
S
EX

“It is axiomatic in middle-class American society that, first, women can't tell jokes—they are bound to ruin the punch line, they mix up the order of things, and so on. Moreover, they don't ‘get' jokes. In short, women have no sense of humor.”

In my job at the University of Maryland I'm surrounded by incredibly smart women. According to a 2007 survey by the National Institutes of Health, 43 percent of postdoctoral fellows in the biomedical sciences are women. In fields like mine, which includes psychology and sociology, that number is even higher. So it's almost wrong to call women a minority, at least in academia. Yet they're still often treated with less respect than men, paid less, and subjected to generalizations like the one above.

What's even more amazing is that the author of that quotation isn't a man but a woman, and a well-respected one at that—namely, Robin Lakoff, a prominent sociolinguist and feminist who frequently writes about language differences between the sexes. What Lakoff actually meant, though lost when taken out of the context, is that women communicate differently than men and, consequently, are often subjected to misunderstandings in male-dominated environments. Because their language tends to be powerless, they can't tell jokes, at least not effectively, and so are robbed of an important social function. The idea is controversial, though it does raise a good question: Are women less funny than men?

I have a hard time believing so, but this question does highlight several important differences between men and women, including how they communicate. Many such differences are subtle and difficult to recognize, but humor is not subtle. Humor is direct, and it can be useful for recognizing gender differences. If women really are less skilled at cracking jokes, what does that say about how they think?

One of the largest scientific studies on gender and humor was conducted by the psychologist and noted laughter researcher Robert Provine. Like Richard Wiseman (whom we met in
Chapter 1
), Provine wanted to examine humor in a natural setting. However, he had no interest in jokes. Rather, he wanted to see how men and women differ in terms of frequency of laughter. To do that, he sent assistants out to eavesdrop on people in public places. They listened to conversations at parties, took notes on subways, and monitored people ordering coffee in diners—all to collect what Provine calls “laugh episodes.” Finally,
after almost a year of collecting more than a thousand such events, Provine was finally able to say who laughed more in natural settings.

Women, he found, laughed more than men, up to 126 percent more. So, it certainly isn't true that women have no sense of humor. Women talking to other women generated the most laughter, accounting for 40 percent of the recorded episodes. Men talking to other men led to laughter only about half as often. In addition, women laughed more in mixed conversations (i.e., between men and women), and it didn't even matter who was speaking. Whether it was the man or the woman doing the talking, females were over twice as likely to laugh as their male counterparts.

These data reveal that women do indeed laugh and enjoy a good joke, though probably for different reasons than men. Laughter isn't offered easily among men. Perhaps it's a macho thing, or maybe they're by nature more reserved, but men are far likelier to elicit laughter from the person next to them than to laugh themselves. Put two women in a room and they'll soon share a laugh, but when genders are mixed, it's the men who are the clowns and the women who are the audience.

Perhaps this explains why women are less likely to go into professional comedy. In 1970, the percentage of professional female stand-up comics was approximately 2 percent. It rose to 20 percent in the 1990s and is now close to 35 percent, but this last figure may be deceptive. Shaun Briedbart, a comedian who has written for Jay Leno and appeared on the television show
The Last Comic Standing,
came up with that last number by counting the number of women performers at open mike nights in New York City, which is far from a professional setting. “The percentage of professional working comics is probably much lower . . . because it takes years to go from starting out to making money,” noted Briedbart. “And maybe only one percent ever make it to the professional level.”

Why do women struggle in the world of comedy? One way to find out is to look at the brains of comic artists and comedians. So far, we've seen that several areas of the brain are activated when we process humor, including those associated with conflict and reward. Yet, we
haven't looked to see if that pattern is the same for everybody. Maybe men and women have different kinds of brains, and that's why they find different things funny.

Allan Reiss is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, and his interest in humor began with a simple question: What triggers cataplexy? A disease affecting about one in ten thousand Americans, cataplexy involves the occasional, sudden loss of voluntary muscle control. Although it's different from the epileptic fits described at the beginning of this chapter, its consequences can be just as troubling. Cataplectic incidents usually start with a slackening of the facial muscles, followed by weakness of the knees and legs. Muscles begin to tremble, speech starts to slur, and finally the entire body collapses. Then, the sufferer is left to wait, lying motionless yet completely alert, killing time until the spell ends. Reiss knew that many cataplectic incidents start as laughter, a fact that made him wonder why so little is known about the brain's emotional responses. To understand the disease, he would have to study what happens in our brains when we find something funny.