Ha! (2 page)

One challenge arising from viewing humor as a social and psychological phenomenon is that it's not easily measured. Most scientists prefer to focus on laughter, which is a concrete behavior. As a result, laughter has been relatively well studied; surveys show that we're more likely to be seen sharing laughter than any other emotional response. This means that, on average, we laugh between fifteen and twenty times a day. There's lots of variation, though. Women tend to laugh less as they get older, but not men. And we all tend to laugh more in the afternoon and evening, though this tendency is strongest for the young.

It shouldn't be surprising, then, that our first attempts at understanding humor involved the study of laughter. Aristotle said that humans are the only species who laugh, and that babies don't have souls until they utter their first giggle. As if that wasn't enough, he further claimed that every baby first laughs on his or her fortieth day. Fried-rich Nietzsche described laughter as a reaction to existential loneliness. Freud had a more positive view (an unusual role for him), claiming that laughter is a release of tension and psychic energy. The problem with each of these definitions, of course, is that they're useless. There's no way to measure psychic energy or existential loneliness, and there never will be. Perhaps this is why Thomas Hobbes felt comfortable
confusing things entirely by calling laughter the “glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves.”

Laughter, which we can actually observe and measure, is indeed endlessly interesting, but humor reveals more about our humanity, about how we think and feel, and about how we relate to others. Humor is a state of mind. And that's what this book is about.

Ha!
is about an idea. The idea is that humor and its most common symptom—laughter—are by-products of possessing brains which rely on conflict. Because they constantly deal with confusion or ambiguity, our minds jump the gun, make mistakes, and generally get muddled in their own complexity. But this isn't bad. On the contrary, it provides us adaptability and a constant reason to laugh.

The reason Lenny Bruce was so funny that night, just like Pryor was a decade later and Louis C.K. is today, is that each found a way to address the prevailing concerns of his time. For Bruce, this involved telling stories about the hypocrisy of sex, prejudice, and drugs, allowing humor to shed light on topics that, in the late 1950s at least, weren't openly discussed. Being funny was how he helped his audience work through living in such volatile times. Indeed, though the traditional joke may be dead (or, more likely, gravely injured), humor remains as healthy as ever because that need for relating with others is timeless.

Over the next two hundred pages I will show that humor is closely associated with nearly every aspect of human cognition. For example, the same processes that give us humor also contribute to insight, creativity, and even psychological health. Studies indicate that the use of humor in everyday settings—for example, when we're responding to e-mails or using descriptive imagery—is strongly related to intelligence. In short, the smarter we are, the more likely we are to share a good joke. We don't even need to be outgoing to appreciate humor. The important thing is being able to enjoy a good laugh.

For years, scientists have known that humor improves our health, and now by viewing it as rigorous exercise of the mind, we understand why. Humor is like exercise for the brain, and just as physical exercise strengthens the body, keeping a funny outlook is the healthiest way to stay cognitively sharp. This also explains why watching Robin Williams's stand-up routines improves our ability to solve word-association puzzles; minds are meant to be constantly worked, stretched, and surprised. Such comedy pushes our brains to make new associations and tackle confusion head-on.

Though in this book we will explore how to incorporate humor more in your life, it's important to note early on that the goal isn't to learn how to make people laugh or tell the perfect joke. This isn't to say that by the end of the book you won't be equipped to be a funnier person. I will show that the key to being funny isn't to learn tricks or memorize jokes but, rather, to gain a firmer grasp of how humor is our natural response to living in a world filled with conflict. Then you will see why comedy follows no simple checklists or rules, and why no single joke pleases everyone. Humor is idiosyncratic because it depends on the one thing that makes each of us unique—how we deal with disagreement in our complex brains.

Some people have argued that there's little point in studying humor because it's too mysterious to understand. The American writer E. B. White even wrote that analyzing humor is like dissecting frogs: few people are interested and the subject always dies in the end. In some ways this is true, since humor is constantly changing and, like a frog on a table, without restraint the subject tends to move on without us. But now scientists are discovering that humor is our natural response to conflict and confusion—a topic absolutely worthy of our attention. What better way to understand what makes us tick than finding out how we cope with uncertainty?

Another common argument against studying humor is that it's as much art as science. Joel Goodman, director of an organization called The Humor Project, once claimed that people learn to become funny the same way a musician gets to Carnegie Hall. That is, they follow the
Rule of the Five Ps:
they practice—and practice—and practice—and practice—and practice. It's true that humor is so complex, and the causes of laughter so diverse, that no rules apply from one situation to the next. Yet humor has some very clear ingredients, ones that science is just now beginning to reveal. These ingredients explain puns, riddles, and even lawyer jokes. And they all depend on conflict and ambiguity resolution within our highly modular brains.

I will start by introducing you to the latest humor research, showing that it's only through owning indecisive brains that we take pleasure in a cognitively and emotionally demanding world. This raises the
What is?
question of humor: What is it, and why is it so enjoyable? As we will see, humor relies on stages, starting with making premature predictions about the world and ending with resolving the misinterpretations that inevitably result. Without this beginning and end, we don't laugh. Too much in between just muddles the punch line.

The next question is
What for?
What purpose does humor serve, and why do we need such complicated brains? Wouldn't life be easier if our minds were like computers and more predictable? Not at all. First, computers fail all the time, especially when confronted with ambiguity. If a computer gets confused, it must be shut down and rebooted. The brain, by contrast, must keep working even in the face of the unexpected. Second, when was the last time a computer wrote a decent sonnet or composed a catchy song? With simplicity comes a cost.

The last question is
So what?
In other words, how can we use inner conflict to better our lives, and how do we become funnier people? Though this isn't a self-help book, I will show how improving your humor affects your health, helps you get along with strangers, and even makes you smarter. Nearly every aspect of our lives is improved by focusing on humor. This book explains why.

Although my background as a cognitive neuroscientist certainly helped me write this book, I've tried to keep the science accessible to the general reader. One of the most exciting aspects about any emerging science is that at the beginning, everybody is both an expert and an outsider. While many scientists take the subject down some unusual
roads—a recent study by researchers at the University of Louisville on the humor of French author Albert Camus comes to mind—the research is still so new it's easy to follow. It also helps that humor has only recently become a legitimate topic of study for academic fields like linguistics, psychology, and sociology. My goal in this book is to act as translator, and perhaps mediator too, pulling out interesting findings from each of these fields. And, by combining their insights, to form a new field altogether—Humorology.

Lastly, I should mention that my goal in writing this book isn't to be funny, though if I occasionally stumble into that too, I don't mind. In fact, I think our overwhelming desire to be funny is the largest impediment to humor research. Humor scientists are notoriously serious about their work, as they should be, because the topic requires precision and academic rigor. But because the subject is humor, many people see the field as an opportunity to tell jokes. And that's a problem. To paraphrase Victor Raskin in his preface to the first issue of
The International Journal of Humor Research,
psychiatrists don't try to sound neurotic or delusional when describing schizophrenia, so why should humor researchers try to be funny? It's a good argument, and one I intend to respect.

Now, on to a laughter epidemic, a disaster movie—and the dirtiest joke in the world.

   
PART ONE

       
“What Is?”

            
T
HE
E
LUSIVE
C
ONCEPT OF
M
IRTH

1

   
C
OCAINE
, C
HOCOLATE, AND
M
R
. B
EAN

              
There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them.

—R
OBERT
B
ENCHLEY

L
ET
'
S START WITH THREE DIFFERENT INSTANCES OF LAUGHTER
—what I call “Kagera,” “Stopover at the Empire State Building,” and “Titanic.” Each is unique, yet together they say something important about what humor is and how laughter is about a lot more than just being funny.