The Humor Code (17 page)

What is the Japanese word for “torture”? Whatever it is, Pete and I are experiencing it.

We'd faced the prospect of our fourteen-hour, 6,063-mile flight to Osaka with resolve. We'd pegged Japan as the perfect place to figure out why comedy is so diverse, why what people find funny varies widely depending on their background, gender, and numerous other factors. After all, it was hard for us to imagine a location with a more dissimilar style of hilarity to our own. But we'd heard horror stories about crossing the fifteen time zones between Colorado and Japan, how it can turn an entire trip into one long, unpleasant waking dream. To prepare, we'd watched and re-watched how-to travel videos online and studied journal articles on the roots of jet lag. Pete also studied the film
Lost in Translation
to take pointers from Bill Murray's karaoke routine. Then we'd calibrated the perfect sleep and meal schedule to ensure we'd disembark chipper and alert on the other side of the world. That the entertainment system on our trans-Pacific flight was on the fritz, leaving us with no entertainment other than the GPS sky map updating itself every few minutes? That was no match for the neurotic planning of two anal-retentive geeks like us.

But no amount of groundwork, no possible research or regimen, could have prepared us for what awaited us in Osaka.

We'd been excited to discover that Japan had a thriving academic humor scene. Several top members of the Japanese Humor and
Laughter Society even offered to help us. Before we knew it, the scholars had arranged for us to attend a performance of
rakugo
, a traditional form of comic storytelling, on our first evening in Osaka. Never mind that the show was to begin a few hours after we arrived, with little wiggle room if we had a flight delay. We were told via e-mail the experience was “once in a lifetime,” that “you cannot miss it.”

So we dashed off the plane, dropped our bags at our hotel, and raced to the performance. And now here we are, sitting in a grand theater filled with several thousand Japanese people, most of whom appear to be past retirement age. On stage, kimono-clad men take turns kneeling on a pillow and reciting long, rambling soliloquys. In Japanese. With no translation. Or helpful props. Or evocative gestures.

We try our best to seem engaged even though we don't understand a word of it. On either side of us, our hosts—humor scholars Heiyo Nagashima and Shinya Morishita—smile and nod, but they aren't much help. “Husband and wife,” whispers Nagashima to me, using his broken English to explain the subject of one segment. I try to look illuminated, as if the words “husband and wife” make the hour of unintelligible Japanese I've been listening to clear.

Exhaustion sweeps over us, our bodies giving in to fatigue and monotony. Soon I'm so tired it's painful, my head bobbing up and down as I struggle to focus. “Now I understand sleep deprivation,” Pete whispers to me, the color drained from his face. We try to elbow each other awake, but it's no use. I distract myself by writing random thoughts and details into my reporter's notebook, only to look down and discover that halfway through a sentence, I'd started scribbling incoherently all over the page. Pete tries a different tack, composing a haiku in his journal:

Hear but can't listen

Watching kneeling men in robes

Laughter surrounds us

Any oomph it provides him doesn't last long. He's soon staring off into space with half-closed eyes, as if in a Zen-like trance. Glancing around the auditorium, I find we're not the only ones nodding off. Next to Pete, Professor Morishita appears to slumber in his seat.

I give in. As my eyelids slip closed, Pete murmurs a final, half-asleep
thought in my ear: “We flew all this way to understand Japanese humor, but how are we going to understand it if we can't speak the language?”

In New York
and Los Angeles, we'd hobnobbed with some of the best of the best of the country's joke creators. But even these guys and gals admit that their brand of comedy doesn't travel well. Action films are far more likely to be global blockbusters than comedies. That's because humor appreciation might be even more complex and confounding than humor creation. Sense of humor varies by upbringing and age and gender and political affiliation and other factors. What one person finds hilarious can be boringly dull to a second person, and offensive to a third.

Different cultures even have different forms of “joking relationships,” as anthropologists call them, the societal rules about who can joke with whom. Among Ojibwe Native Americans, if you don't joke with your cross-cousin, you're downright rude.
¹
In East Africa, the Zaramu tribe can joke with the Sukuma tribe and Sukuma members can rib Zigua tribe members, but when someone from Zigua runs into someone from Zaramu, everybody remains serious.
²

For many Westerners, there's one particular foreign flavor of humor creation and appreciation that's particularly befuddling. Time and again, we've been asked the same question: “Can you explain Japanese humor?” There's something about Japanese culture, with its sadistic game shows, pornographic anime, intergalactic battle robots, and French-maid-themed restaurants, that triggers serious head scratching on the other side of the Pacific. That goes double for Japanese comedy—especially since there is no wholly accurate Japanese translation for words like “comedy” and “humor.”
³

So maybe the best way to get to the bottom of humor's chameleon-like properties, we'd figured, was to immerse ourselves in Japanese funny business. But we had to make sure Christie Davies hadn't beat us to it.

Christie Davies is the Indiana Jones of hilarity. The British sociologist and past president of the International Society for Humor
Studies has spent decades cataloguing and analyzing jokes from every corner of the globe, from Australia and Bulgaria to Tajikistan and Yugoslavia.

That's why, during a stopover in London, we took a train to Davies's home in the town of Reading, where he teaches at the local university. Davies, a heavyset man with a scraggly gray beard, watery eyes, and a beak of a nose, met us at the train station wearing the sort of khaki, multipocketed vest folks wear on a safari. I imagined it was stuffed with academic keepsakes: a joke-laden papyrus scroll, a Victorian whoopee cushion, a charcoal rubbing of a dirty ditty from an Incan temple wall.

Davies invited us back to his home, a two-story brick duplex that was clearly the home of a man who's spent his career focused on things elsewhere. A mountain of empty de-icer cans littered his front stoop, topped by a dead Christmas wreath. In his sitting room, a sagging couch and a couple of mismatched armchairs threatened to be subsumed by piles of miscellanea rising nearly to the ceiling—assorted foreign-language dictionaries, tangles of power cords, random pieces of clothing. Tacked to the paint-chipped walls were grotesque wooden masks and wrinkled photos from Davies's various adventures: running with the bulls in Pamplona, standing on a frigid ship's deck off Cape Horn. I'll refrain from describing the bathroom.

Clearing space among the clutter and slumping onto the couch, Davies explained that his quasi-nomadic joke-chasing existence began while he was lecturing in India in 1974. When he mentioned that the English liked to joke about the Irish being stupid, his Indian students replied they told the same sort of jokes about Sikhs. For Davies, that was the “aha!” moment, a hint that within comedy's odd connections and quirks lay unmined clues about how different cultures think and operate. As he later put it in one of his many academic humor tomes, for him jokes are “social puzzles, puzzles I have had to try to solve.”

And more often than not, he's solved those puzzles. He dug into premarital-sex rates and personal hygiene in pre-revolution France to ascertain the origins of randy-Frenchmen bon mots. He traced the spread of dumb-blonde jokes from their origins in the United States
to Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Brazil, deducing that the zingers emerged as women, long seen as mindless sex objects, shook up gender roles by entering highly skilled professions all over the world. And when the so-called Great American Lawyer Joke Cycle of the 1980s didn't spread anywhere beyond the United States, Davies became an expert in U.S. jurisprudence to figure out why. He concluded that lawyer jokes were a uniquely American phenomenon because no other country is so rooted in the sanctity of law—and in no other country are those who practice it so reviled.
⁴

Inspired by Davies's work, Pete would go on to do some academic sleuthing of his own. “What about the idea that the French love Jerry Lewis?” he asked me later. Is the concept real—and if so, what does it mean about the French, not to mention Jerry Lewis? He wasn't the first scholar to ponder this conundrum. In 2002, French literature and culture professor Rae Beth Gordon wrote a whole book on the subject.
Why the French Love Jerry Lewis
, as it was titled, argued that the wild, convulsive physical comedy of cabaret shows and early films in France meshed with Lewis's hysterical mannerisms in movies like
The Bellboy
and
The Nutty Professor
.

Pete wasn't convinced. He enlisted two French speakers, University of Colorado graduate student Bridget Leonard and professor Elise Chandon Ince at Virginia Tech, to design the ultimate
Nutty Professor
experiment. Working with the survey software company Qualtrics, they surveyed 200 people, half from France and half from the States, asking them to rate fourteen things stereotypically associated with France: berets, Brie, mimes, red wine—you get the idea. Included on the list was Jerry Lewis, along with another pseudo-French comedian:
Pink Panther
star Peter Sellers.

As it turned out, Jerry Lewis was a far bigger hit in the States than across the pond, coming in fourth out of the fourteen items among American respondents and eighth among the French. Even when Pete re-ran the study, replacing several items with stuff American respondents might like more—cowboys, apple pie, beer—results didn't change much, with Jerry Lewis still scoring equally high among both nationalities. Other findings? The French
really
like French kissing, but not as much as they like baguettes. Americans, on the other hand,
apparently have a thing for scarves. As for Peter Sellers? Nobody liked him anywhere.

But these results are nothing compared to Davies's biggest discovery: inspired by the connection he made between Irish and Sikh put-downs, he started tracking similar examples of humor around the world—and uncovered a universal joke. He's named this the stupidity joke, the sort of barbed zinger that makes fun of outsiders, simpletons, and others on the fringes of society. In America, the obvious version is the Polish joke, but that's just the tip of the mean-spirited iceberg. Take the
Philogelos,
the oldest-known joke book in the world. Of the 265 zingers in the ancient Greek tome, nearly a quarter concern folks from cities renowned for their idiocy, like Cyme in modern-day Turkey and Abdera in Thrace.
⁵
Later, in medieval England, cracks about the dunces who lived in the village of Gotham were all the rage. (New York's nickname, “Gotham,” doesn't sound so impressive once you learn that author Washington Irving coined it to suggest the place was a city of fools.
⁶
)

Since then, stupidity jokes have spread like a healthy fungus. According to Davies's research, Uzbeks get made fun of in Tajikistan, while in France, it's the French-speaking Swiss. The list goes on: Brazilians joke about the Portuguese, Finns knock the Karelians, Nigerians rib the Hausas. The model even extends to the work world: orthopedic surgeons, with their rough-and-tumble musculoskeletal work, are the laughingstock of the medical sphere. (“What's the difference between an orthopedic surgeon and a carpenter? The carpenter knows more than one antibiotic.”)

The Irish, it turns out, have a particularly bad lot. Dumb-Irish jokes are equally common in England, Wales, Scotland, and Australia. But it could be worse: if you happen to be an Irishman from County Kerry, you also get made fun of by your fellow Irish.
⁷

“Nearly every country has stupidity jokes,” Davies told us, pulling a tissue from a bulky vest pocket and loudly blowing his nose. From another pocket he retrieved an inhaler and took a puff. Europe, India, the Middle East, Latin America, Australia—everywhere he looked, the same pattern emerged.

But does the pattern always work? Are there some places that don't fit the mold?

Davies nodded. “East Asia.” In Japan, there is no “chucklehead” part of the country. Nor do the Japanese make fun of their neighbors in China or Korea.

“It's a different world,” said Davies. Japanese humor, in other words, is a puzzle that still needs to be solved.

In Japan, the
history of humor is intimately tied to the samurai, the warrior class that ruled the country for centuries. We learn this from Hiroshi Inoue, president of the Japan Society for Laughter and Humor Studies. The problem, says Inoue, is that samurai aren't funny.

“For samurai, timing was very important,” he tells us. There was no time or patience for shameful comedy. “You are laughing at me, so I kill you,” says Inoue, pantomiming skewering a wiseass with an imaginary sword.

We're sitting in a conference room overlooking a busy stretch of downtown Osaka, sipping iced green tea and listening to Inoue's lengthy history lesson. To avoid the sort of translation disaster we'd experienced at the
rakugo
performance, we've brought along someone who speaks the language: Bill Reilly. A cheerful 28-year-old from New Jersey, Reilly is the manager of the Pirates of the Dotombori, one of only two bilingual improv groups in the country (the other is the group's sister operation in Tokyo, the Pirates of Tokyo Bay). When he heard we were looking for a translator in Osaka, Reilly volunteered. “Sarcasm doesn't really happen here,” Reilly told us when he arrived at our hotel this morning, armed with an umbrella despite the clear skies. (The government had declared that today was the first day of the rainy season. Apparently in Japan, politicians have been granted the power to establish weather patterns.) Reilly welcomed the opportunity to brush up on his sarcasm with us, a couple of fresh-faced
gaijin
—the Japanese word for “foreigners.” We are happy to provide him with lots of fodder for sardonic eye-rolling: Pete's constant risk of smacking his head on every low-lying door frame, my inability to extract yen from Japan's
bewildering ATMs, our plan to interview one somber-faced Japanese humor researcher after another.