The Humor Code (2 page)

So when he started contemplating what makes things funny and found that little about it made sense, that wouldn't stand. He had to find a nice, tidy explanation.

Then there's me, Joel Warner, the more cautious half of our duo. As a journalist, I've always suspected that there's something about me that's not quite right. While my colleagues thirst for tips on dirty cops and City Hall corruption, I prefer stories on real-life superheroes and beer-delivering robots. As an upbeat newshound, I've never been fully comfortable in an industry that relishes tragedy over comedy. Maybe, I figure, if I can help Pete solve the riddle behind the lighter side of life, I won't be so confused.
^I

Considering our pedestrian backgrounds, it might seem unlikely that we can outperform some of history's greatest minds in our quest to crack the humor code. But we have a couple advantages. For one thing, we suspect we have the timing right. Although comedy has been around since the dawn of civilization, it has never been so pervasive and accessible. Comedians such as Will Ferrell and Tina Fey are among America's biggest celebrities. Satirical news shows such as
The Daily Show
and
The Colbert Report
have become news sources for an entire generation. Roughly a quarter of all television commercials attempt to be humorous, and the internet has become a 24-hour one-stop shop for laughs. Everywhere you look, somebody is making a joke—which means those jokes have never been so easy to study.

Plus, we have science and technology on our side. (And we don't just mean we have Google.) Aided by increasingly advanced technologies, scientists are piecing together the intricacies of the human
condition. Psychologists are probing our unconscious motivations, biologists are tracking down our evolutionary origins, and computer scientists are building new forms of artificial intelligence. While these efforts are helping to solve some of the universe's greatest mysteries, they could also help us figure out why we laugh at farts.

Our plan, simply put, merges the best of both worlds, a mash-up of science and comedy—two topics that don't always get along. We'll apply cutting-edge research techniques to the wide world of humor while subjecting the zingers, wisecracks, and punch lines we've all taken for granted to hard-and-fast analysis back in the lab.

Along the way, we aim to answer tough questions that are bound to turn heads of scientists and comedians alike: Do comics need to come from screwed-up childhoods? What's the secret to winning the
New Yorker
cartoon caption contest? Why does being funny make you more attractive? Who's got a bigger funny bone—men or women, Democrats or Republicans? What is, quantifiably, the funniest joke in the world? Is laughter
really
the best medicine? Can a joke ruin your life—or lead to revolution? And, most important of all, do the French love Jerry Lewis?

As with all the best experiments, not everything will go as planned. There will be bickering, bruised egos, and, yes, more than a few bad jokes. Still, we're confident that the two of us make a good team. Pete's got a way with data, while I have a way with words. Pete's willing to pursue his research in the most outrageous circumstances imaginable, while I have the wherewithal to keep us out of trouble. At least, that's what we've told ourselves.

To cap off our expedition, we'll tackle one final challenge, one that's either the ultimate high-stakes experiment or a scheme as harebrained as they come. We'll use our newfound knowledge to try to kill it on the largest comedy stage in the world.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Our journey begins, appropriately enough, with a set-up straight out of a joke:

Did you hear the one about the professor and the journalist who walk into a bar?

I
. We thought long and hard on how best to write this book. A third-person account: “We ask Louis C.K. way too much about his physical anatomy”? A God's-eye-view of our hijinks: “Pete's busy getting an exfoliation scrub when Joel gets chased naked out of the Japanese spa”? We decided to go with my personal point of view: “Pete naps and I worry about dengue fever as we fly into the Amazon in a Peruvian Air Force cargo plane packed with 100 clowns.”

We walk into the Squire Lounge just as the Denver watering hole is gearing up for its weekly open-mike comedy night. Looking around, Pete grins. “This is fantastic!” he yells over the ruckus, sounding like a field biologist who's just discovered a strange new animal species. The mirrored walls display awards for “Best Dive Bar in Denver,” the stench of industrial cleaner hangs in the air, and the sound of clanging beer bottles blends into the police sirens wailing through the night outside. The clientele sports tattoos and ironic mustaches, lumberjack shirts, and plastic-rimmed glasses.

Pete is wearing a sweater vest.

The professor sticks out here like a six-foot-five, 40-year-old sore thumb. He's also calm for someone who's about to do stand-up for the first time. Or for someone who's been warned that this open mike is the toughest one around. As a local comic put it to me, “If you fail at the Squire, you will not only fail hard, but then you will be cruelly, cruelly mocked.”

Rolling up the sleeves of his button-down shirt, Pete orders us a couple whiskeys on the rocks. “This is a welcoming crowd,” he cracks sarcastically.

I'm soon ordering another round. I don't know why I'm the more nervous of the two of us. I have little at stake in Pete's stand-up routine. We've only known each other for a few weeks, but I'd like him to succeed. I fear that's not likely to happen.

Pete's already working the room. He zeroes in on a woman by the pool table. She turns out to be another open-mike first-timer. “Did you think about your outfit tonight?” he asks. “I put this on so I look like a professor.”

He glances around the room. The neon Budweiser signs on the walls cast a bluish, sickly hue on the grizzled faces lined up at the bar.

Turning back to the woman, Pete offers an unsolicited piece of advice: “No joking about Marxism or the military-industrial complex.”

I'd stumbled upon
Pete after having written an article about gangland shootings and fire bombings for
Westword
, the alternative weekly newspaper in Denver. I was eager for a palate cleanser. I hoped that it wouldn't involve cultivating anonymous sources or filing federal open-records requests. Yes, such efforts have brought down presidents, but I'm no 31-year-old Woodward or Bernstein. I'd rather find another story like the profile I wrote of a McDonald's franchise owner who used his arsenal of fast-food inventions to break the world record for drive-thru Quarter Pounders served in an hour. Or the coffee connoisseur I'd followed to Ethiopia in search of the shadowy origins of the world's most expensive coffee bean. (The expedition broke down several dozen miles short of its goal thanks to caffeine-fueled bickering, impassable muddy roads, and reports of man-eating lions.)

When I heard about a Boulder professor who was dissecting comedy's DNA, I'd found my story.

It's true, Pete told me when I first got him on the phone. He'd started something he called the Humor Research Lab—also known as HuRL. His research assistants (the Humor Research Team, aka HuRT) were just about to run a new round of experiments. Maybe I'd like to come by and watch.

A week later, sitting in a large, white conference room at the University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business, I witnessed Pete's peculiar approach to humor research. Four student volunteers filed into the room, signed off on the appropriate consent forms, and then sat and watched as a somber-faced research assistant dimmed the lights
and played a clip from the hit comedy
Hot Tub Time Machine
. After ten minutes of scatological gags and off-color sex jokes, the students filled out a questionnaire about the film. Did they find the scene in which the BMW keys were removed from a dog's butt funny? What about the line “A taxidermist is stuffing my mom”? Or the part where a character breaks his catheter and sprays urine on everybody?

The experiment, Pete explained to me, was the latest chapter in HuRL's attempts to understand what makes things funny. Other tests included forcing subjects to watch on repeat a YouTube video of a guy driving a motorcycle into a fence, to determine when, exactly, it ceases to be amusing. Another exposed participants to a real-life ad of an anthropomorphized lime peeing into a glass of soda, then had them drink lime cola to see if they thought it tasted like pee.

For someone like Pete, there was nothing unusual about this research. Over the course of his relatively short career, he's haggled with casket manufacturers at a funeral directors' convention, talked shop with soldiers of fortune at a gun show, and sung hymns at a Fundamentalist Baptist church in West Texas, all for the sake of science.

His experiments aren't limited to his day job. The professor has a tendency to live his research, no matter the disastrous results. While he was working toward his PhD in quantitative psychology at Ohio State University, a mentor invited him to Thanksgiving dinner. Pete offered to pay for his meal just to see the reaction to the obvious faux pas.

Pete puts himself and others in uncomfortable situations to make sense of human behavior—or figure out why so much of it doesn't make sense. There have to be logical rules behind humanity's illogical decisions, he figures. He just has to find them. “It's a way to keep control in an uncertain world,” Pete told me the first time we met. Growing up in a working-class town in southern New Jersey, he sometimes faced the harsh realities of that uncertain world. Yes, there was always food on the table for him and his younger sister, Shannon, but his single mother had to work two or three jobs and sometimes rely on food stamps to do it. Yes, his mom took care of them, but her headstrong and forceful manner didn't always make her household a fun place to be. And, yes, he sported high-tops and Ocean Pacific T-shirts like the other boys in high school, but by age fourteen, he
was working as a stock boy at the local Woolworth's to pay for it all himself. Maybe that's why ever since, he's always been determined to keep everything tidy and under control.

I could identify with Pete's compulsive tendencies, maybe more than I liked to admit. In an industry populated by ink-stained shlubs and paper-cluttered offices, I come off as a tad neurotic. To streamline my reporting process, I've assembled a small, über-geeky arsenal of digital cameras, foldaway keyboards, and electronic audio-recording pens. In the Denver home I share with my wife, Emily McNeil, and young son, Gabriel, every bookshelf is arranged alphabetically by author and segregated into fiction and nonfiction. (I'd say this drives Emily up the walls, but she's my perfect match: as orderly and organized as they come.) In my world, unhappiness is a sink full of dirty dishes.

Pete offered me an all-access tour of his scholarly world. He explained to me that a chunk of his research could be classified as behavioral economics, the growing field of psychologists and economists who are hard at work proving that people don't make rational financial decisions, as classical economists have long suggested. Instead, they've discovered, we do all sorts of odd stuff with our money. While completing his post-doctoral training at Princeton, Pete shared an office with Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychology professor who helped establish the field. Kahneman's office would never again be so organized.

But Pete's interests extend well beyond behavioral economics. He's not just interested in why people act strangely with their money. He wants to know why they act strangely all the time. A few years ago, he became fascinated by what could be the most peculiar human phenomenon of all.

While giving a talk at Tulane University about how people are disgusted when churches and pharmaceutical companies use marketing in morally dubious ways, Pete mentioned a story about a church that was giving away a Hummer H2 to a lucky member of its congregation. The crowd cracked up. And then one of the audience members raised her hand with a question. “You say that moral violations cause disgust, yet we are all laughing. Why is that?”

Pete was stumped. “I'd never thought about it,” he told me.

He decided to figure it out.

It doesn't take
long for the Squire to fill up with patrons ready to cheer—or jeer—the comics tonight. Folks are soon packed in so tightly that the communal body heat overwhelms the slowly rotating fans overhead.

“Welcome to the Squire,” cracks the night's MC, grinning into the microphone from the bar's cramped corner stage. “It's the only place with an indoor outhouse.” He follows the bit up with a joke about accidentally smoking crack. The room roars, and he turns his attention to three innocent-looking audience members who've unwisely chosen to sit at the table closest to the stage. Soon he's detailing the horrendous sexual maneuvers the wide-eyed threesome must perform on one another. The three, it turns out, are friends of Pete's who thought it would be nice to cheer him on.