The Humor Code (12 page)

As anyone who's ever been to a comedy club can attest, alcohol and laughs go hand in hand. And scientists know booze can boost
humor appreciation, since it lowers inhibition, decreases anxiety, and increases positive mood. In a 1997 study, social drinkers watched twenty minutes of the goofball comedy
The Naked Gun
. Those who were two drinks in found O.J. Simpson's bumbling Officer Nordberg significantly funnier than those who watched stone-cold sober.
²³

But little research has been done on the other side: whether Lenny Bruce–style decadence leads to Lenny Bruce–level jokes. We decide to look into the matter—by arranging an evening of drinks with a couple of creative directors at advertising powerhouse Grey New York, the firm responsible for making E-Trade synonymous with talking babies and producing a DirecTV ad featuring a baby in a dog collar that former U.S. president Bill Clinton called the most hilarious commercial he'd ever seen. As enticement, we tell the folks at Grey we'll foot the bill for our night on the town.

The ad guys are eager to participate, and before we know it, they've invited along their entire creative team, all on our dime. They also have a destination in mind: “Let's go to the Hurricane Club,” they tell us. The name evokes a cozy corner bar, hopefully one that won't put too much strain on our wallet.

When the evening arrives and we step into the Hurricane Club, we realize we're in trouble. Waiters in white dinner jackets glide under crystal chandeliers, delivering exotic drinks served in carved-out coconuts, watermelons, and red peppers. Pete glances at the drink menu and laughs nervously. “This is going to cost us.”

Putting our anxiety aside, we launch into the experiment. We show the ad team a Venn diagram we've been using to illustrate the benign violation theory:

Next we tell each participant to polish off a cocktail and come up with a funny new Venn diagram that illustrates and promotes the benign violation theory. We want them to deconstruct a joke into its benign and violation parts, with the intersection labeled “funny.” The ad creatives also have to fill out a survey rating how funny they consider their ad idea. After that, they down another cocktail and draw a new diagram. Repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

They're off, in a flurry of mai tais, bellinis, and mojitos. What we don't expect is how seriously everybody takes it, especially the Grey creative directors. The bosses heckle their underlings and demand that everybody give 110 percent, dammit. In the stress and depravity that ensues, everyone goes
waaay
over the line in terms of decency. Here's one of the completed Venn diagrams:

Compared to other diagrams, that's sedate. So here we are, in one of the city's ritziest juice joints with some of New York's most powerful creative minds, watching comedy—or at least attempts at it—get made. And judging from some of the preliminary results, it's one more bit of proof that most things in the world aren't funny. So if you aim to be hilarious like these ad creatives or
New Yorker
cartoonist Kanin, the best thing to do is to come up with as many jokes as possible, then come up with more. Or as Pete likes to put it, think up as many violations as possible, and then find lots of ways to make those violations okay. Most will end up as duds, but every now and then you'll come up with your own version of Kanin's bowling-ball cartoon.

As for that cartoon? It turns out Mankoff might have been right when he called Kanin a comic genius. The bowling-ball gag makes
it up the production chain, past the ornery fact-checkers, and gets the green light from
New Yorker
editor David Remnick, who makes the final decision with Mankoff on the twelve to twenty cartoons in each issue. A few months later, on the bottom right corner of
page 85
of the
New Yorker
, there's the bowling-ball walker and the bowling-pin walker, strolling toward their inevitable street-corner collision. But by this point, Kanin is probably too busy to notice it. He's taken a new job, one that might be even more celebrated in the annals of comedy creation: he's been hired as a writer for
Saturday Night Live
.

At the Hurricane Club, is all the booze we're buying turning the ad team into Kanin-level humorists? They believe so. The more drinks they down, the funnier they rate their comedy attempts. But later, when Pete submits the Venns to an online survey panel, he finds the inebriated ad team is off the mark. According to the panel's respondents, the shenanigans went downhill by the time the ad team reached its fifth drink. Take, for example, one creative director who went by the code name Blaze. After his third drink, Blaze rated himself about halfway up the drunkenness scale and came up with this gem:

Blaze gave this a 4 out of 7 on the funniness scale, and the online-survey respondents rated it 3.5. Pretty similar. However, after his fifth and final drink, Blaze drew a diagram and rated it an utterly hilarious 7. The online panel disagreed, awarding it an average humor rating of 1.95 and an offensiveness rating of 4.2.

What was the Venn behind such wildly diverging opinions?

Don't say we didn't warn you:

So there you have it. Proof that alcohol makes things funnier, but only for those making the funny. All it cost us was $1,272.96—the most expensive bar tab either of us has ever paid. It inspired us to create one final Venn, one we're still waiting on to see if it comes true:

We come away from New York knowing that a killer funny bone isn't necessarily a gift from the gods. But it does take a whole lot of work—and, paradoxically, a whole lot of fun. If you're going to combine esoteric topics in clever and funny ways, you need to live large. Read up on odd topics. Explore new places. Head off on wild adventures. If nothing else, have long, rambling conversations over drinks.

Just don't offer to foot the bill.

Good news greets us in Uganda as we disembark our plane: “Uganda has defeated the outbreak of Ebola,” announces a large placard standing in the airport's main hall. “Please have a nice stay.”

Well, that's a relief.

We actually have a different malady in mind—one far less lethal than Ebola, but evocative nonetheless. We're here in East Africa on the trail of the so-called 1962 Tanganyika laughter epidemic. As the story goes, in 1962 in the northwest corner of Tanganyika (a country now known as Tanzania), hundreds of people began laughing uncontrollably. The affliction, if you could call it that, spread from one person to the next, and nothing seemed to stop it. Schools shut down. Entire villages were caught in its throes. When the laughing stopped months later, a thousand people had come down with the “disease.”

Since then, the Tanganyika laughter epidemic has captured imaginations the world over. Newspaper articles have been written about it, radio shows have explored it, and documentaries have dramatized it. But many of these accounts detailed the incident from afar, relying on secondhand sources, scraps of information, and rumors. Few people have investigated the event themselves, tracking the laughter all the way to its source. That's why we're here.

To be honest, we're a bit skeptical of the whole account. Uncontrollable laughter, jumping from person to person like a devilish
possession, doesn't make sense. But
something
happened in Tanganyika in 1962. There are enough firsthand accounts and medical reports to confirm that. But what that something is—and what, if anything, it has to do with humor—is still up for debate.

We're hoping our time here will provide us with clues about laughter in general, a phenomenon that's mysterious in itself. We've investigated a lot of funny stuff between all that stand-up in Los Angeles and all those cartoons in New York, but the laughs generated by professional comedy are just a fraction of the chuckles, giggles, and titters in our daily lives. Why is that? Why would we have developed this odd vocal mannerism? Why do we have an innate need to vocally share what we find funny with others? And why, come to think about it, do laughter and humor not always go hand in hand? Why did hundreds of people in 1962 East Africa start laughing when nothing was funny at all? And why is laughter so contagious, so compelling, that it can act like an out-of-control disease?