Ha! (32 page)

“I thought the book was supposed to be about science,” Laura replied. “Not a how-to book.”

Laura was less enthusiastic about my proposal than I had hoped. Still, I didn't blame her because she was right. The book wasn't intended to
be a practical guide, and I had no interest in comedy as either a hobby or profession. But I still felt like I needed to apply what I had learned in a real-life setting. Just as an art professor would never teach a class without having slapped a brush against canvas, I had to see what “doing comedy” was like. Didn't I?

“I need to at least try what I've been talking about. I might not be any good, but I want to know what it feels like to tell a joke in front of an audience.”

Laura stared at me with blank eyes, as if I'd just said I was taking up professional baseball because I knew the batting stats of the entire Red Sox lineup. There's a difference between understanding what makes a joke funny and being able to share that joke in an entertaining way. Laura recommended I take an improv class first, which I agreed was probably a good idea. But that would also defeat the point. I wasn't actually trying to be funny, at least any funnier than I already was. I simply wanted to know what performing felt like. I wanted to know where to draw the line between science and art, so that I could share just how far knowledge of incongruity and surprise can take an aspiring humorist. I wanted to know where theory ended, and where fluid performance began.

In short, I wanted to get in over my head. And I did.

The night of the performance I was nervous, of course, but I comforted myself by practicing the act I had written down on 3x5 cards. Because the show was held on a Sunday night and only amateur performers were taking the stage, I expected the turnout to be small. I was wrong. With only a small cover charge and cheap food and drinks, the comedy club was packed. I wound up being the third person to perform that evening, and by the time I stepped onto the stage I was seriously regretting my decision. But it was too late to change my mind.

“How is everybody doing tonight?” I asked as I took the microphone and looked out onto the crowd, knowing I had to say something to get the show started. As expected, many audience members cheered, fueled by cheap beer and buffalo wings.

I froze. After all the late nights I'd spent in libraries trying to find sixty-year-old articles about people's reactions to Benny Goodman albums, I was lost. It didn't help that I knew laughter increases with intoxication or that Beavis and Butthead share striking similarities with the seventeenth-century Russian folk duo Foma and Yerema. I was alone, with only my hard-earned knowledge of humor to save me.

“So, two hunters from New Jersey were walking in the woods when one accidentally shoots the other. Frantic, the man calls 911. . . . ”

Yes, I told the joke from the LaughLab joke contest that ended the first chapter. But I didn't start with that. I wanted to, though Laura warned me against it. Instead, once I collected myself I told a few warm-up anecdotes about my personal life, then used the humor of the situation—that I was a scientist trying to be funny—to get some audience sympathy. I followed my own advice to relax and be myself. I shared personal stories and let the funniest part of myself shine through. And in the end, I still bombed. So much for the infallibility of science.

The strangest aspect of the show was that I got a few laughs, but they weren't in the places I expected them. It was as though my connection with the audience turned on and off at random points during my performance. And many of my jokes were funnier than those of other performers who got much more applause. That's not just my opinion, it's something several audience members told me afterward. But they shared other things, too. “You held the microphone too low,” one lady said as I tried to make a quick exit. “I couldn't hear what you were saying.”

Who would have guessed that being unfamiliar with microphones would be such a problem? “I laughed when I heard what you were saying,” my friend Jette added, her tone mixed with amusement and pity. “But you sped up a lot too. You're a fast talker, which made you hard to understand. Did you know that?”

Yes, I knew that. I blame six years of living in New England, where it's talk or be talked over. I talk even faster when I'm nervous, which I'm sure made things worse.

Still, I have positive memories of the performance, because there were moments when I felt myself easing into the routine. I simply let my mind go. I wasn't thinking about jokes or the audience, only allowing my unconscious knowledge of humor to express itself naturally. It was a great feeling, although short-lived, and it made me understand why people seek it out. Despite the embarrassment of having performed so badly, then receiving so much advice from friends and strangers afterward, those brief moments made it all worthwhile.

That feeling of being in the moment, which the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls
flow
, is what most athletes and artists strive for, too. Kevin Durant doesn't consciously adjust the arc of his three-point throw just before its release, just as Serena Williams doesn't remind herself to bend her knees as she tosses a ball up for a serve. Our best performance comes when our knowledge, both implicit and explicit, becomes instinct.

Few professional comedians start out successfully because it takes time for humor to become part of who we are, connected to the inner conflicts that define our personalities. When George Carlin started performing, his act was relatively tame, with hardly any cursing or political commentary. He became an icon only after letting loose his contempt for hypocrisy. Richard Pryor didn't attract audiences until he stepped out from Bill Cosby's shadow and tackled race head-on, a subject already prominently on his mind but seldom directly addressed. Steve Martin didn't make it big until he finally accepted that he was the opposite of artists like Carlin and Pryor and embraced his clean-shaven, nonpolitical self by highlighting the farcical aspects of comedy in general.

Though most of us don't aspire to be professional comedians, we can still learn from artists like these by making humor an unconscious part of our lives. When we refer to someone as having a humorous personality, what we mean is that this person sees the ambiguity, confusion,
and strife inherent in life and turns them into pleasure. If you really want to be funnier, you can take a seminar—or you can just internalize all you've learned and make it part of a new outlook. By reading this book, you already have the knowledge. All you need to do is use it.

For early organisms on this planet, conflict was simple, involving a single issue: Is something about to kill and eat me? Life soon became more complicated—and so did the human brain. No longer was a puny nerve center enough for keeping us out of trouble. We needed parts for thinking ahead, focusing not just on what might kill us today but also on what might kill us tomorrow. We needed parts for figuring out how to communicate with others and for training future generations not to be killed too. Eventually, millions of years later, we developed parts that began questioning what all these parts were actually for, and why we have so many parts in the first place.

Humor is simply a consequence of having so many parts. It's not wrong we're so complicated, it's just who we are. Some people feel sad most of the time, even though their lives are pretty okay. Some people have to constantly check and recheck locked doors because their anxiety is overwhelming if they don't. These are consequences of owning brains that do so much, and though that might seem like a hassle, consider this—when was the last time a squirrel performed a stand-up comedy routine? A squirrel's brain weighs about 6 grams. With that 6 grams you get a remarkable ability to climb trees and distinguish different kinds of nuts. Multiple that by 250, and you get a whole lot more.

I hope that you've received from this book an appreciation of our complex, modular minds. I also hope you agree that by thinking more deeply about humor we gain a better understanding of how our minds work. Before reading this book you probably knew that surprise is a big part of why jokes are funny. But I doubt you gave much thought to why being surprised by a punch line makes us laugh but being surprised by an intruder doesn't. You probably didn't know that the same chemical responsible for giving drug users a high after snorting cocaine helps us appreciate cartoons and one-liners. Or that simply watching a
funny movie lowers stress, improves our immune system response, and even makes us smarter and better problem solvers.

So, the next time you hear a joke that isn't particularly funny, please laugh anyway, knowing that everybody benefits. Not only will you enjoy a happier, healthier life, but others will likely laugh along with you. And it's hard to be in a bad mood while you're laughing.

Oh, and that last joke about the two hunters in the woods, the one I told as part of my comedy routine—it actually got a lot of laughs, more than any other part of my performance. Perhaps it's because I practiced it dozens, maybe hundreds of times. Or maybe it really is the funniest joke in the world. I doubt it, but I recommend practicing it yourself anyway. It never hurts to have a joke or two in your back pocket, in case the occasion ever presents itself.

That's not science, but I stand by the recommendation anyway.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Dan and Mary Weems, thank you for teaching me that nothing else is important if you can't laugh.

Thank you to Laura for the constant good humor over twenty years of marriage, especially the last couple in which humor became more than just an outlook. Guess what? Chicken butt!

Special appreciation goes to my friends who attended my comedy performance described in the book's conclusion: Jette Findsen, Brian Goddard, Dave and Roxy Holyoke, Andrew Oliver, and Charlotte Stewart. I'm not sure if I'm happy or sad you got to see the massacre, but at least you know I tried. Thanks also to Magooby's Joke House in Baltimore for not recording the evening.

Thank you to all the scientists who provided interviews and other useful thoughts regarding the book: Salvatore Attardo, Margaret Boden, Jeffrey Burgdorf, Seana Coulson, and Christie Davies. Also thanks to Jenna, who shared her personal stories of gelastic epilepsy. I am especially indebted to Eran Zaidel and James Reggia, who taught me that education, like humor, should continue throughout a lifetime.

Thanks to my agent Ethan Bassoff, who shepherded me through a foreign world, and to the folks at Basic Books for making it all possible.

Much appreciation to Steven Cramer, Leah Hager Cohen, Chris Lynch, and everybody else at Lesley University. You rock.

N
OTES

I
NTRODUCTION

On the frequency of laughter, see Rod Martin and Nicholas Kuiper, “Daily Occurrence of Laughter: Relationships with Age, Gender, and Type A Personality,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
12, no. 4 (1999): 355–384; also Dan Brown and Jennings Bryant, “Humor in the Mass Media,” in
Handbook of Humor Research, Volume II: Applied Studies
, eds. Paul McGhee and Jeffrey Goldstein (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1983): 143–172.

On humor and intelligence, see Daniel Howrigan and Kevin MacDonald, “Humor as a Mental Fitness Indicator,”
Evolutionary Psychology
6, no. 4 (2008): 652–666.

On the humor of Albert Camus, see Anne Greenfeld, “Laughter in Camus'
The Stranger, The Fall, and The Renegade,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
6, no. 4 (1993): 403–414.

On the origins of “Humorology,” see Mahadev Apte, “Disciplinary Boundaries in Humorology: An Anthropologist's Ruminations,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
1, no. 1 (1988): 5–25.

C
HAPTER
1: C
OCAINE
, C
HOCOLATE, AND
M
R.
B
EAN

Kagera

On the laughing epidemic in Kagera, see A. Rankin and P. Phillip, “An Epidemic of Laughing in the Bukoba District of Tanganyika,”
Central African Journal of Medicine
9 (1963): 167–170; also Christian Hempelmann, “The Laughter of the 1962 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
20, no. 1 (2007): 49–71.

What Is Humor?

For the interview with Conchesta, as well as an informative review of laughter in general, I recommend
RadioLab
's excellent podcast titled “Laughter.”