Ha! (8 page)

In the forty-plus years since this experiment was first conducted, the design has been varied several times, and each time the subjects' reaction is the same—they find the last, incongruous weight funny. There's nothing humorous about the weights themselves. The subjects simply have to construct an expectation. And when that expectation proves false, they have no other choice but to laugh.

Reckoning in a Confusing World

Now that we've explored the concept of
constructing,
let's see what our brains do with all these wild expectations. Only by observing the consequences of our false starts can we understand why they so often lead to humor. This means familiarizing ourselves with
reckoning,
the jettisoning of our mistakes so that we can uncover new interpretations.

My guess is that if you asked a hundred experts what the key ingredient of humor is, most would say surprise. Surprise is special because it affects us in so many different ways. It's what makes insight problems unique, because for these tasks we have no idea how close we are to a solution until we already have it. That's what defines insight problems. Research by Janet Metcalfe at Indiana University showed that confidence in being close to an answer for insight problems is
inversely
related to actual progress. In other words, the closer we think we are to a solution, the farther away we really are. Surprise isn't a by-product of completing these tasks, it's a
requirement.

Surprise is important for humor the same way it's important for insight—we take pleasure in being pulled from false assumptions. Punch lines catch us by surprise, and the more we set our expectations on one interpretation, the more we allow ourselves to be caught off-balance by the actual turn of a joke. A joke that you've heard before isn't inherently less funny. It's just old news, and so it no longer gives you surprise. An insight problem that you've seen before isn't fun or challenging either, because you no longer need insight to solve it. You just need a bit of memory.

Reckoning
is the process of reevaluating these misperceptions, usually leading to a pleasant surprise. We enjoy discovering our mistakes because surprise is one of our most valued emotions, as fundamental as happiness or pride. Scientists have even quantified the importance of surprise by asking people about recent emotional experiences. This is what Craig Smith of Stanford University did when he asked subjects literally thousands of questions regarding recent events in their lives, questions like “How pleasant or unpleasant was it to be in this situation?” and “When you were feeling happy, to what extent did you feel that you needed to exert yourself to deal with this situation?” Using advanced data analysis, he was able to locate the subjects' emotions along certain dimensions, including pleasantness and the amount of effort they required from the person experiencing them.
Figure 2.2
shows how surprise ranked, compared to other emotions.

F
IGURE
2.2. Emotions as they vary by pleasantness and effort involved in their experience. Adapted from Craig Smith and Phoebe Ellsworth, “Patterns of Cognitive Appraisal in Emotion,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
48 (1985): 813–838. Published by the American Psychological Association. Adapted with permission.

As it turns out, surprise holds a special place, near the top of the diagram. Since the axes measure pleasantness and effort required for their experience, this means that surprise is one of the most positive and natural emotions we experience.

Surprise leads to pleasure in lots of contexts, not just humor. German psychologist and art theorist Rudolf Arnheim presented perhaps the most graceful example of pleasant surprises when he analyzed, of all things, a violin sonata by the Baroque composer Jean-Marie Leclair. Leclair, who wrote nearly a hundred major works in the mid-eighteenth century, was well known for creating sophisticated, cerebral violin concertos. In one of his last works, there's a point near the middle where he suddenly includes a note that is harshly out of key. At first it sounds dissonant, and the listener wonders if perhaps there has been a mistake. But the same note occurs again, and then another surprising note, and soon we realize that the composer has switched keys in the middle of the performance. An examination of the music in written form reveals that the change is entirely intentional—a note written as B flat is identified as A sharp later in the same measure, conveying Leclair's message that it serves different purposes for the old and new keys. In just a few notes the listener is compelled to discard previously held assumptions about the piece and to listen to it in an entirely new way. And the experience is richer for it.

Arnheim explains that such sudden shifts occur in architecture too. Take, for example, the Hôtel Matignon, the Paris mansion designed in 1725 by architect Jean Courtonne that now serves as the home of the French prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault. At the time it was built, tradition dictated that buildings be built symmetrically about an axis connecting the front and rear entrances. But this was impossible for the Hôtel Matignon given the surrounding streets, so the architect did the only thing he could—he shifted this axis inside the building itself. Visitors entering either entrance see everything laid out in the expected, symmetrical fashion. But further on, there's a point where everything suddenly shifts and they're off-center relative to the entrance they used, and are now centered about the opposite one. Some call it cheating,
others call it brilliance, but everyone appreciates that this shift is what makes the building so pleasurable to live in—including its current resident.

These phenomena have an equivalent in the realm of humor, and it's called paraprosdokia. Paraprosdokia is speech that involves a sudden and surprising shift in reference, usually for comedic effect. Take, for example, the following quote by Stephen Colbert: “If I am reading this graph correctly, I'd be very surprised.” Colbert was looking at polling data for the 2008 presidential elections—data that under even the best of circumstances would be difficult to interpret. At first it sounds like he's preparing an insightful and cutting remark. Instead, we realize he's basking in the ignorance we all feel when trying to interpret such numbers. The joke required no setup or punch line. All it needed was for the listener to “jump the gun” regarding what Colbert was actually saying.

Not surprisingly, the brain region responsible for catching these false starts is the anterior cingulate. We know this from studies like the one conducted by biologist Karli Watson of the California Institute of Technology, who wanted to see if any particular brain region was especially important for surprise. To do that, she showed subjects cartoons while they were monitored using an MRI scanner, and (as in previous studies) she made sure that some cartoons were funny whereas others were not. As an additional manipulation, she varied the nature of the cartoons so that some relied on sight gags whereas others depended on captions and language. Variations like this can have big impacts on how the brain responds, since visual centers are very different from language ones—so she expected the jokes to enlist entirely different regions. But were any regions activated in common?

The answer, of course, was yes. Both the dopamine centers and the anterior cingulate were active for each kind of joke. Not only that, but the funnier the jokes, the more engaged was each subject's anterior cingulate.

Studies like this provide a great example of
reckoning
because they show that what elicits laughter isn't the content of the joke but the
way our brain works through the conflict the joke elicits. This can be seen in Colbert's quip as well as in Leclair's violin sonata and Courtonne's Hôtel Matignon. We take joy in recognizing our mistakes. Though we often think of punch lines as involving misdirection, it's actually our anxious brains that supply the false interpretations. There were no dissonant notes in Leclair's sonata, just as there was no actual contradiction in Colbert's one-liner. The enjoyment of both comes solely from overriding a false expectation created within ourselves. In this way,
reckoning
builds on
constructing
by forcing us to reexamine false expectations.

To see how all this eventually turns into a joke, let's finally explore the concept of
resolving.

Resolving with Scripts

              
A large woman sits down at a lunch counter and orders a whole fruitcake. “Shall I cut it into four or eight pieces?” asks the waitress.

              
“Don't cut it,” replies the woman. “I'm on a diet.”

Is this joke funny? Unless you have a special affinity for fruitcake humor, your answer is probably no. But at first glance it seems like it should be, because the woman's response is definitely surprising. It's so surprising that it makes no sense at all. Consider, then, this alternate ending:

              
A large woman sits down at a lunch counter and orders a whole fruitcake. “Shall I cut it into four or eight pieces?” asks the waitress.

              
“Four,” replies the woman. “I'm on a diet.”

Now is it funny? Again, you probably didn't laugh out loud, but I bet you at least found it funnier than the first version. The reason is that this second version provides an explanation for the sudden shift in perspective. It isn't enough just to introduce surprise in a joke; we must also provide a shift in perspective. I call this third stage of the humor process
resolving.

When studying humor, we need a way to characterize the expected and actual outcomes of a joke. For our fruitcake story, we see there are several words signaling an expectation of gluttony. There's the fact that the woman orders a whole fruitcake, not just a slice. She's also described as large. All this background suggests that she's really looking forward to the cake. When she asks for four slices instead of eight, one interpretation—the one influenced by her weight—is that she thinks four slices means fewer calories. The other interpretation, the right one, is that strokes of the knife have nothing to do with calories or the amount of cake.

Pretty tedious, huh? After such an analysis, it's clear why dissecting humor is often likened to analyzing a spider's web in terms of geometry. It loses its grace.

I apologize for breaking down such a bland joke, and I promise not to do it again. But it's important to recognize that joke construction is complicated. To compare contrasting meanings, we need a scientific way to characterize all the false assumptions involved in the joke. We need a way to measure distances between intended and unintended meanings to get an idea how funny a joke can be. And, perhaps most importantly, we need to understand why people laugh at some incongruities—such as a woman thinking four large slices of fruitcake are healthier than eight small ones—when much bigger incongruities—such as a woman walking into a diner and ordering an entire fruitcake—are seemingly ignored. To do that, we need to understand scripts.

After graduating from the University of California with a PhD in psychology, I initially worked as a postdoctoral researcher with computer scientist and neurologist James Reggia. I was excited to work with Reggia because he was interested in nearly everything. He studied not only hemispheric laterality (my own specialty) but also language and memory. He specialized in artificial intelligence and chaotic swarming, an emerging field that uses artificial life to examine large-scale problem spaces. He even taught classes on machine evolution and expert systems. In short, he was the kind of person who knew something about
nearly everything. So, when we first met in a restaurant in Columbia, Maryland, his first words to me were a surprise.

“I'm looking forward to working with you. I've never worked with a boxologist before.”

Though I had no idea what he meant, when he explained I not only understood but agreed with Reggia's characterization, and we've become close friends. Reggia meant that we psychologists, by nature, love drawing boxes. We take complex cognitive and social phenomena, and to understand them we break components into processes and surround them with boxes. We draw arrows between the boxes to show how they influence each other, and when we get especially spirited we take the boxes away to make more room, leaving only words and arrows. It can seem silly at times, but often we have no choice because what we study is complex. Which is why I would like to direct you to the joke in
Figure 2.3
and let you see just how boxy our analyses can be.