The Humor Code (19 page)

That's how we ended up here at Yoshimoto's New Star Creation class, with our own Yoshimoto-employed translator, Takahiro Araki. Thanks to spending a few formative years in Indiana, Araki boasts impeccable English, as well as more than a few American mannerisms. The bespectacled, messenger bag–wearing 26-year-old appears perennially disheveled, has the very un-Japanese tendency to be ten minutes late for appointments and is more interested in gabbing about NBA stars Kobe Bryant and LeBron James over sushi at Tokyo's famous Tsukiji fish market than hammering home talking points about Yoshimoto. We couldn't imagine a better handler.

Watching the New Star Creation students, I notice one routine that's more polished than the others. I turn to Araki: “Were those guys any good?” He shakes his head. “No one is good.”

After class, we introduce ourselves to the teacher, Daiku. He looks drained. The students were practicing
manzai
, the two-man comedy style comprised of a straight man, or
tsukkomi
, trading gags with and smacking around a
boke
, his goofball partner, which is the backbone of Japanese comedy. But according to Daiku, all of his pupils have a ways to go until any are
manzai
superstars. If this class is typical, he says, only 3 percent of the students will have a successful job in comedy in five years.

The few who make it through will earn a spot on Yoshimoto's payroll. They'll work their way up the company's hierarchy of theaters and, if all goes well, hit the airwaves on the company's shows. While most comedians' salaries remain meager, a few become superstars and score Hollywood-level windfalls. Sure, it's a long shot, but consider that Downtown, one of the most successful Japanese comedy acts of
all time, started as a couple of kids in New Star Creation's first-ever class in 1982.

In Osaka we'd visited Yoshimoto's flagship theater, Namba Grand Kagetsu, a multistage behemoth that's designed to celebrate how far the company has come from its humble beginnings in 1912 as a family-owned Osakan theater company. Yoshimoto cultivates Osaka's comedy-capital reputation, like Jack Daniel's has linked whiskey and its Tennessee origins. All around Namba Grand Kagetsu, colorful shops sell Yoshimoto-branded cookies, golf balls, instant ramen meals, and cell-phone cleaners. In a touristy restaurant, workers grill up aromatic batches of
takoyaki
, the mayonnaise-smothered, ball-shaped nuggets of deep-fried octopus that are the signature snacks of Osaka.

“It's like a Disneyland devoted to Yoshimoto,” Pete remarked in amazement. That is, if Mickey Mouse were all about octopus balls and branded toilet paper.

To make it to the main stage of Namba Grand Kagetsu, aspiring comedians should hope they're guys. There are only a couple of women in the entire
manzai
class.

“It's like something out of
Mad Men
,” says Spring Day, a U.S. native who performs with the Tokyo Comedy Store, an English-language, ex-pat stand-up troupe. (The operation has no relation to the original Comedy Store in Los Angeles, other than that one of the Tokyo group's founders realized they could mooch off the American icon's name without legal ramifications.) We take Day out for dinner one night, and over barbecued chicken wings and horsemeat sashimi, it becomes clear that nearly everything about Japan disagrees with the blond-haired, feisty comedian (whose real name really is Spring Day—“hippie parents,” she explains with a shrug). Her pet peeves about the country include the xenophobia, the outmoded cultural stereotypes, even the cuisine (she's allergic to fish). At the same time, she can't imagine living anywhere else. “It's a messed-up place,” she says, “but I love it.”

The misogyny is especially frustrating, says Day. Things are especially bad for put-upon housewives. According to Day, if you Google “Japanese husbands,” the top results are how-tos on slowly
killing your significant other by limiting nutrient intake and encouraging him to smoke. (When I try it, the first result is a news article titled, “Some wives wish their husbands would hurry up and drop dead.”)

Gender bias in comedy isn't limited to Japan. Big names ranging from celebrated polemicist Christopher Hitchens to podcast host Adam Carolla have considered the evidence and concluded that women just aren't as funny as men—and they aren't the only ones who believe this. A recent experiment involving
New Yorker
cartoons found that participants of both genders were more likely to attribute funny cartoon captions to men.
¹¹

Empirically, are women less funny? In the nascent years of humor research, scientists seemed to think so. Researchers found that men were more likely than women to enjoy jokes and cartoons presented to them, and differences were pronounced for sexual or aggressive material. But later reviews of these experiments found the conditions involved were less than pristine. It turned out many of the jokes used were downright sexist, such as this one: “Why did the woman cross the road? Never mind that—what was she doing out of the kitchen?!” So it wasn't necessarily that the female participants didn't enjoy jokes. They just didn't enjoy jokes at their own expense.
¹²

More recently, the task of analyzing gender and humor was taken up by University of Western Ontario Psychology professor Rod Martin, whose name should strike fear into the hearts of all comedy dogmatists. Martin is the unofficial dean of humor studies, and with good reason: his textbook,
The Psychology of Humor
, is the bible of the field, 446 lucid pages detailing everything there is to know about academic humor research in eleven tidy chapters. It's proven invaluable to Pete and me, a trusty guidebook to the wild and woolly extremes of humor science. “People have felt that humor is such a difficult thing to study, that it is nebulous and hard to define,” Martin told me at a psychology of humor conference we attended in San Antonio, his bespectacled eyes welcoming and kind. “People have shied away from it because of that. I would argue that's all the more reason to put effort into it.” But don't let his grandfatherly appearance and genial Canadian demeanor fool you. When Martin gets his academic teeth
into any of the comedy world's unsubstantiated ideologies, he doesn't let go until it's torn to shreds.

And that's what he did with the idea that women aren't funny. He examined all the valid experiments on gender and humor, from comedy-appreciation surveys to joke-telling contests to self-report questionnaires to observational experiments, and came to a succinct conclusion, which he relayed at a recent International Society for Humor Studies Conference: “I think Christopher Hitchens is wrong.” By nearly every scientific measure, men and women are far more alike than different in how they perceive, enjoy, and create humor. The same goes for naughty stuff: when you do away with sexist material, women go for a good dirty joke just as much as men.
¹³

One of the few areas where there are gender distinctions is in dating and mating. These days, that tends to mean Match.com. In 2011 researchers analyzed more than 250 online dating profiles posted by people in London and several Canadian cities. They found that men were nearly two times as likely as women to boast of their humor-production abilities (“I'm an aspiring stand-up comic”), whereas women were nearly two times as likely as men to be looking for a humor producer (“I want someone who can make me giggle”).
¹⁴

This discrepancy could tie in to what we learned in Tanzania about humor's evolutionary origins. A sense of humor in men could be seen as a sign of intelligence, social desirability, and overall genetic fitness. In other words, good jokes are a guy's version of colorful peacock plumes. Since women have an evolutionary incentive to find the best possible mate, it helps to be on the lookout for the funniest possible peacock.

All those eons of comedic courting seem to have left a mark. The few studies that have found differences between male and female humor creation do tend to conclude that men might have a small edge over women. But before anyone crowns Adam Carolla the Einstein of comedic gender studies, consider that men might be slightly better at jokes simply because they're more likely to be encouraged to joke around. It's far more acceptable for boys to be class clowns than girls.

This social encouragement gives budding male comics a head start over their female counterparts. But it might come with a disadvantage. For guys, all those overeager humor attempts can have a cost.

Pete asked several of his classes to take part in a joke-writing competition. Working with colleagues Caleb Warren and Kathleen Vohs, as well as HuRL researchers, he found that of the 50 or so zingers submitted, those written by men were rated by a second group of students to be somewhat funnier than those written by women, but the difference was so slight that it wasn't statistically significant. The guys' jokes were far more offensive, however. Take two of the top three funniest-rated jokes, both of which were written by men:

What's the first thing a co-ed does when she wakes up? Walks home.

Penn State football: Go in as a tight end and leave as a wide receiver.

Participants rated both jokes highly distasteful, with the Penn State joke rated the most offensive of all submissions.

The funniest joke of all, on the other hand, was somewhat offensive, but not as much as the two runners-up:

How do you know you've been robbed by an Asian? Your homework is all finished, your computer has been upgraded, and he's still trying to back out of your driveway.

This gem was written by a woman.

In short, men should stop wasting their time calling their better halves the less-funny sex. They'd be far better served working on improving their own jokes. Judging from the guys at the New Star Creation class, they could use the extra effort.

There's something else
missing at the New Star Creation classes: political jokes. We've hardly heard any political humor during our time in Japan. “The pillars of American comedy, like politics, are completely off the radar here,” we learn from Patrick Harlan, a Colorado-born Harvard graduate who's the
boke
in Pakkun Makkun, one of the few successful
manzai
acts featuring an international duo. The Japanese government is too stable and the elections here too sedate—and the emperor too sacred—for people to crack wise about political affairs.

These days, it's hard to imagine any part of U.S. politics being considered too sedate or sacred for comedic skewering. From the pointed satire of
The Colbert Report
to the snarky rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh to presidential candidates rubbing elbows with their impersonators on
Saturday Night Live
, making fun of politicians has become America's pastime.

But who wins the prize for being funnier—Democrats or Republicans? Judging from the makeup of the comedy industry, it's easy to think the political left has it won hands down. Aside from Dennis Miller, P. J. O'Rourke, and Victoria Jackson, it's not easy to come up with big-name conservative comedians. So why isn't there a Republican version of Jon Stewart? Some people think it's because Republicans tend to have a sunnier disposition on life (“Social inequity? What social inequity?”). Using Pete's terminology, that means they aren't as likely to come across violations that are ripe for making benign.

Speculation aside, are Democrats quantifiably better at being funny? In his book
Debatable Humor: Laughing Matters on the 2008 Presidential Primary Campaign
, University of Arkansas political science professor Patrick Stewart catalogued and analyzed every use of humor in the Republican and Democratic primary debates during the 2008 presidential election. All in all, he says, “I didn't find anything in the last election on which party is funnier.”

He did find some differences in how the Democratic and Republican candidates tended to joke. Democrats, for example, often relied on the kind of comedy that was inclusive and convivial. “The Democratic party is a highly egalitarian party,” says Stewart. “Anyone can get in or drop out. So you really have to be charismatic like Clinton or Obama to draw people in.” Obama was particularly skilled in this area: Stewart found that in the debates he often flashed smiles of genuine amusement and engaged in loose-jawed laughter, the sort of visual signals that suggest, “Join me, I'm here to play.”

Republicans, on the other hand, tended to rely on what's called “encrypted humor,” says Stewart, the sort of “wink, wink” in-jokes that separate insiders from outsiders. Take Republican candidate Mike Huckabee's 2008 quip that “we've had a Congress that has
spent money like [John] Edwards at a beauty shop.” By using the term “beauty shop,” as opposed to, say “barber shop,” Huckabee's joke was “not just an attack on Congress, but also an attack on John Edwards's masculinity,” says Stewart.

So Democratic officials don't have a leg up on Republicans in the funny business. But what about how average Democrats and Republicans go about their daily lives? In general, do liberals have a better sense of humor than conservatives? In 2008, Pete's colleague Duke University psychology and behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely and Mount Holyoke College student Elisabeth Malin asked 300 people, half liberal and half conservative, to rate the funniness of 22 jokes on various topics. Not too surprisingly, the conservatives were more apt to enjoy the jokes that reinforced traditional racial and gender stereotypes—including a zinger about a guy choosing a game of golf over his wife's funeral. But conservatives also gave higher ratings to absurdist quips of Jack Handey's “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, right-wingers found
all
kinds of jokes funnier than their liberal counterparts.
¹⁵
Maybe, then, the concept of humorless Republicans is just a matter of circumstance. After all, the history of American stand-up is littered with hard-core liberals, from Charlie Chaplin to Lenny Bruce to Bill Hicks. It could be that funny conservatives have never been welcomed into the club.