Quirkology (25 page)
Authors: Richard Wiseman
Plato’s view was echoed by the later writings of his fellow Greek thinker, Aristotle. Unfortunately, we have only indirect references to Aristotle’s thoughts on the subject because the original treatise is lost (and is the manuscript that lies at the heart of Umberto Eco’s mystery
The Name of the Rose
). Aristotle apparently argued that many successful clowns and comedians make us laugh by eliciting a sense of superiority. It is easy to find support for the theory. In the Middle Ages, dwarves and hunchbacks caused much merriment. In Victorian times, people laughed at the mentally ill in psychiatric institutions and at those with physical abnormalities in freak shows. There is also the 1976 study showing that when the public were asked to list adjectives describing comedians, they tended to produce the words “fat,” “deformed,” and “stupid.”
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The Name of the Rose
). Aristotle apparently argued that many successful clowns and comedians make us laugh by eliciting a sense of superiority. It is easy to find support for the theory. In the Middle Ages, dwarves and hunchbacks caused much merriment. In Victorian times, people laughed at the mentally ill in psychiatric institutions and at those with physical abnormalities in freak shows. There is also the 1976 study showing that when the public were asked to list adjectives describing comedians, they tended to produce the words “fat,” “deformed,” and “stupid.”
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The superiority theory is also used to poke fun at entire groups of people. The English traditionally tell jokes about the Irish, the Americans like to laugh at the Polish, the Canadians pick on the Newfies, the French on the Belgians, and the Germans on the Ostfriedlanders.
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All are about one group of people trying to make themselves feel good at the expense of another.
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All are about one group of people trying to make themselves feel good at the expense of another.
In 1934, Harold Wolff and his colleagues from Harvard University published the first experimental study of the superiority theory.
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The researchers asked groups of Jews and Gentiles to rate how funny they found various jokes. To ensure that the presentation of jokes was as controlled as possible, the researchers printed them on strips of cloth 140 feet long and four inches wide; they passed the strips behind an aperture in the laboratory wall at a constant speed, ensuring that participants saw each joke one word at a time. When participants saw the symbol of a star that had been printed at the end of each strip, they were asked to shout out how funny they had found the joke on a scale between minus 2 (very annoying) and plus 4 (very humorous).
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The researchers asked groups of Jews and Gentiles to rate how funny they found various jokes. To ensure that the presentation of jokes was as controlled as possible, the researchers printed them on strips of cloth 140 feet long and four inches wide; they passed the strips behind an aperture in the laboratory wall at a constant speed, ensuring that participants saw each joke one word at a time. When participants saw the symbol of a star that had been printed at the end of each strip, they were asked to shout out how funny they had found the joke on a scale between minus 2 (very annoying) and plus 4 (very humorous).
As predicted by Aristotle and Plato, the Gentiles tended to laugh more at jokes disparaging Jews, and the Jews preferred the jokes that put down the Gentiles. Another part of the experiment explored whether a “control” group—the Scots—would prove equally amusing to both Jews and Gentiles. The researchers presented participants with a series of anti-Scottish jokes, such as the classic “Why are Scotsmen so good at golf? The fewer times they hit the ball, the less it will wear out,” and were surprised to find that the Gentiles found them significantly funnier than the Jews. The experimenters initially wondered whether this might have been because Gentiles have a better sense of humor than Jews, but then realized that the anti-Scots jokes were a bad choice of control. Both the Jews and Scots are often portrayed as “stingy” in jokes, and this had caused the Jews to sympathize with the Scots and find the anti-Scottish jokes unfunny.
Taking part in this groundbreaking study apparently wasn’t easy on people. Some participants complained that they had heard many of the jokes before, and one man noted that he would rather be subjected to electric shocks than additional one-liners. Modern researchers have worked hard to overcome these problems, and their findings have helped expand and refine the superiority theory.
We now know that the more superior a joke makes people feel, the harder they laugh. Most of us do not find a disabled person slipping on a banana skin funny, but replace the disabled person with a traffic warden and suddenly people are slapping their thighs. This simple idea explains why so many jokes attack those in power, such as politicians (thus David Letterman’s famous quip: “The traffic was so bad I had to squeeze through spaces that were narrower than President Clinton’s definition of sex”), and judges and lawyers (“What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 10? A lawyer. What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 15? Your honor”). People in positions of power often do not see the funny side of these and so treat them as a real threat to their authority. Hitler was sufficiently concerned about this potential use of humor that he set up special “Third Reich joke courts” that punished people for many acts of inappropriate humor, including naming their dogs “Adolf.”
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Some research suggests that such jokes can have surprisingly serious consequences. In 1997, Gregory Maio, a psychologist from Cardiff University of Wales, and his colleagues, looked at the effect that reading superiority jokes had on people’s perception of those who were the butt of the jokes.
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The study was carried out in Canada, and so centered around the group who were frequently portrayed as stupid by Canadians, namely, Newfoundlanders (“Newfies”). Before the experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The people in each group were asked to read one of two sets of jokes into a tape recorder, supposedly to help determine the qualities that make a voice sound funny or unfunny. Those in one group read jokes that did not involve laughing at Newfies (such as Seinfeld material); the other group read classic Newfie put-down humor (such as the classic thigh slap-per: “A Newfie friend of mine heard that every minute a woman gives birth to a baby. He thinks she should be stopped”). Afterward, participants were asked to indicate their thoughts about the personality traits of Newfoundlanders. Those who had just read out the Newfie jokes rated Newfoundlanders as significantly more inept, foolish, dim-witted, and slow than those who had delivered the Seinfeld material.
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The study was carried out in Canada, and so centered around the group who were frequently portrayed as stupid by Canadians, namely, Newfoundlanders (“Newfies”). Before the experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The people in each group were asked to read one of two sets of jokes into a tape recorder, supposedly to help determine the qualities that make a voice sound funny or unfunny. Those in one group read jokes that did not involve laughing at Newfies (such as Seinfeld material); the other group read classic Newfie put-down humor (such as the classic thigh slap-per: “A Newfie friend of mine heard that every minute a woman gives birth to a baby. He thinks she should be stopped”). Afterward, participants were asked to indicate their thoughts about the personality traits of Newfoundlanders. Those who had just read out the Newfie jokes rated Newfoundlanders as significantly more inept, foolish, dim-witted, and slow than those who had delivered the Seinfeld material.
Just as worrying, other work has revealed that superiority jokes have a surprisingly dramatic effect on how people see themselves.
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Jens Förster, a professor from the International University Bremen in Germany, recently tested the intelligence of eighty women of varying hair color. Half were asked to read jokes in which blondes appeared stupid. Then all participants took an intelligence test. The blond women who had read the jokes obtained significantly lower scores than their blond counterparts in the control condition, suggesting that jokes have the power to affect people’s confidence and behavior and so actually create a world in which the stereotypes depicted in the jokes become a reality.
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Jens Förster, a professor from the International University Bremen in Germany, recently tested the intelligence of eighty women of varying hair color. Half were asked to read jokes in which blondes appeared stupid. Then all participants took an intelligence test. The blond women who had read the jokes obtained significantly lower scores than their blond counterparts in the control condition, suggesting that jokes have the power to affect people’s confidence and behavior and so actually create a world in which the stereotypes depicted in the jokes become a reality.
Very early in LaughLab, we saw the superiority theory appear by virtue of the age-old battle of the sexes. The following joke was rated as being funny by 25 percent of women, but just 10 percent of men:
A husband stepped on one of those penny scales that tell you your fortune and weight and dropped in a coin. “Listen to this,” he said to his wife, showing her a small white card. “It says I’m energetic, bright, resourceful, and a great person.” “Yeah,” his wife nodded, “and it has your weight wrong, too.”
One obvious possibility for the difference in ratings between the sexes is that the butt of the joke is a man, and so appeals more to women. However, that is not the only possible interpretation of the result. It could, for example, be that women generally find jokes funnier than men. A year-long study of 1,200 examples of laughing in everyday conversation revealed that 71 percent of women laugh when a man tells a joke, but only 39 percent of men laugh when a woman tells a joke.
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To help try to tease apart these competing interpretations, we studied the LaughLab archive to find jokes that put down women, such as:
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!”
On average, 15 percent of women rated jokes putting down women as funny, compared to 50 percent of men. The points awarded to these jokes revealed that the superiority theory did explain the differences between what makes men and women laugh. But this is not to say that there are no differences between the sexes when it comes to humor and jokes. Research suggests that men tell a lot more jokes than women. In one study, two hundred college students were asked to record all of the jokes that they heard during a one-week period and make a note of the joke-teller’s sex. The group reported 604 jokes, with 60 percent of them coming from men rather than women.
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This difference has been observed in many countries, and is present even when children first start to tell jokes to other another.
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This difference has been observed in many countries, and is present even when children first start to tell jokes to other another.
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Some scholars believe that these differences occur because women avoid jokes that are of a sexual nature or involve acts of aggression (“What do you call a monkey in a minefield? A BABOOM!”). Others think that the difference has its roots in the link between laughter, jokes, and status. People with high social status tend to tell more jokes than those lower down in the pecking order. Traditionally, women have had a lower social status than men, and thus may have learned to laugh at jokes rather than to tell them. Interestingly, the only exception to this status/joke-telling relationship concerns self-disparaging humor, by which people who have low social status tell more self-disparaging jokes than those with high status. In line with this idea, researchers examining the amount of self-disparaging humor produced by male and female professional comedians found that 12 percent of male scripts contained self-disparaging humor, compared to 63 percent of female scripts.
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We took our first in-depth look at our data three months into the project. The project’s technical guru, Jed Everitt, downloaded the 10,000 jokes and ratings from the 100,000 people who had agreed to tell us how funny they found each of the rib-ticklers. The top joke at that early stage had been rated as funny by 46 percent of participants. It had been submitted by Geoff Anandappa, from Blackpool in the northwest of England, and involved the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and his long-suffering sidekick, Dr. Watson:
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were going camping. They pitched their tent under the stars and went to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes woke Watson up and said: “Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you see.”Watson replied: “I see millions and millions of stars.”Holmes said: “And what do you deduce from that?”Watson replied: “Well, if there are millions of stars, and if even a few of those have planets, it’s quite likely there are some planets like Earth out there. And if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life.”And Holmes said: “Watson, you idiot, it means that somebody stole our tent.”
It is a classic example of two-tiered superiority theory. We laugh at Watson for missing the absence of the tent and also at the pompous way in which Holmes delivered the news to Watson.
Two thousand years ago, Plato speculated that the sense of superiority plays a key role in the creation of humor. Our findings suggested not only that he was right but also that the animalistic release of a victorious roar at other people’s misfortune is still alive and well in the twenty-first century.
JUST
A JOKE”
Although the initial stages of the experiment had been a huge success, we still wanted more people to visit our virtual laboratory. Because of this, we announced our initial findings to the media. After the success of our “Why did the chicken cross the road?” photograph, we staged a second striking photograph involving an actor dressed as a clown lying on the actual couch used by Sigmund Freud. Why Freud? Well, he was fascinated by humor, and in 1905 he produced his classic treatise on the topic,
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
Freud’s basic model of the mind revolved around the notion that we all have sexual and aggressive thoughts, but that society does not allow us to express these ideas openly. As a result, they are repressed deep into the unconscious and emerge only in the odd slip of the tongue (the “Freudian slip”), in dreams, and in certain forms of psychoanalysis.
According to Freud, jokes act as a kind of psychological release valve that help prevent the repressed pressure from becoming too great—in other words, a way of dealing with whatever it is that causes us to feel anxious. The simple act of telling a joke, or of laughing at someone else’s joke, reveals a great deal about the unconscious, and caused Freud to once quip: “A cigar is sometimes just a cigar, but a joke is never
just
a joke.” Given that in Freudian terms a cigar is often seen as symbolizing a penis, I have always found Freud’s choice of image for his famous line interesting.
just
a joke.” Given that in Freudian terms a cigar is often seen as symbolizing a penis, I have always found Freud’s choice of image for his famous line interesting.
There is a great deal of debate about Freud’s contribution to the psychology of humor, with one group of academics noting that “it would be exceedingly difficult to find a person of at least average intelligence who knows less about humor than did Freud.”
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This from a group of researchers who described the superiority theory of humor using the following paragraph:
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This from a group of researchers who described the superiority theory of humor using the following paragraph:
Let S believe J is a joke in which A seems to S victorious and/or B appears the butt. Then the more positive S’s attitude towards A and/or towards the “behaviour” of A, and/or the more negative S’s attitude towards B and/or towards the “behaviour” of B, the greater the magnitude of amusement S experiences with respect to J.
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