The Humor Code (20 page)

“When you look
at a baby, you laugh and smile,” says company CEO Hiroshi Osaki. “That's what it's like with Yoshimoto. All you have to do is drop our name and someone might laugh.”

We're sitting in a conference room, talking with the Yoshimoto CEO about baby faces, in the company's humble Tokyo headquarters: a retrofitted elementary school near the busy Shinjuku commercial center. The modest surroundings mesh with Osaki's demeanor. While the formal conventions of the meeting unfold around us—assistants whisk in multiple servings of iced tea; a team of media personnel stand at attention in the corner until the CEO gestures for them to sit; a company representative presents us with gift bags overflowing with Yoshimoto-branded paraphernalia—Osaki, in a suit and tie,
remains chipper as he smokes a Lucky Strike. Later, when we pose for a photo, the CEO pretends to feel us up to ensure we're all laughing in the shot.

Yoshimoto rose to its place of prominence thanks to savvy decisions the company made decades ago, says Osaki. In the 1920s, executives took note of the slapstick and rapid-fire jokes of American vaudeville and decided it was the perfect way to shake up the stagnant culture of
manzai
. It had remained more or less unchanged since the Middle Ages. According to the scholarly book
Understanding Humor in Japan
, Yoshimoto brass told their performers to wear “ ‘glasses like Lloyd's' and ‘a mustache like Chaplin's.' ” And later, as Japanese broadcasting came into its own in the wake of World War II, Yoshimoto again borrowed from the comedy industry across the Pacific. Taking inspiration from the skits, bits and banter of
The Bob Hope Show
, the company developed its own, enduringly popular version of the variety show.

What Osaki seems to be telling us is that Japanese comedy is a cultural Galapagos Island. All those bizarre Japanese jokes and gags that leave Americans confused? They're U.S. comedy's bastard stepchildren.

Lately, Yoshimoto has been going global with this unique brand of hilarity. The company has started producing television programs and live shows in China, Taiwan, and Korea. And now, Osaki tells us, Yoshimoto is ready to show America that the student has become the master. The company has announced plans to build a Second City training center in Tokyo, the improv group's first-ever foreign affiliate. And Yoshimoto has inked deals with several U.S. and European TV production companies, among them the operations that created
Survivor
and
The Office
.

There may be a problem with Yoshimoto's plan: could a single kind of comedy ever be popular worldwide? Yes, some examples of comedy have been found to be incredibly, even eerily ubiquitous. The trickster motif, the concept of a wily clown who relies on his wits and ruses to get in and out of trouble, has been found in Native American culture, Ancient Greek myths, Norse legends, African folk tales, Tibetan Buddhist practices, Polynesian religious tales, Islamic fables,
and even 17,000-year-old cave paintings in France.
¹⁶
But still, these trickster tales vary from culture to culture. There's far from one joke that rules them all.

So is it even possible for a single example of hilarity to achieve global domination? In 2001, a British psychology professor named Richard Wiseman decided to find out. He and his colleagues launched the LaughLab, a website where people uploaded jokes and rated others' submissions using a scale called the “Giggleometer.” Over twelve months, the website clocked 40,000 joke submissions and nearly 2 million ratings from people in 40 different countries—the largest-ever scientific humor study, earning a Guinness World Record. And on October 3, 2002, Wiseman announced they'd done it: they'd come up with the world's funniest joke.

During our brief stop in London, we met Wiseman at a busy coffee shop. Since retiring the LaughLab, Wiseman has continued to probe humanity's psychological skeleton closets, deconstructing bad luck, confidence schemes, and ghost hunting. “We deliver, no matter how mad the scientific proposal,” he said between sips of cappuccino.

But no proposal was as mad—or as attention-grabbing—as the LaughLab. The world was eagerly watching when Wiseman and his team revealed the winning joke:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says, “Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.” There is a silence, then a gunshot. Back on the phone, the guy says, “Okay, now what?”

So what does Wiseman think of his scientific findings? “I think the world's funniest joke isn't very funny,” he told us. “It's terrible. I think we found the world's cleanest, blandest, most internationally accepted joke.”

In hindsight, the joke's blandness makes sense. The world's funniest-rated joke isn't going to be the zinger that the most people find hilarious, it's going to be the zinger that the least number of people find offensive. Any joke that makes fun of a particular people, religion, occupation, or viewpoint isn't going to fly. It has to be
something that's acceptable to everybody—or incredibly ho-hum. And a quip about a couple of bumbling hunters
from Jersey
is as ho-hum as you can get. As Wiseman grumbles, “It's the color beige in joke form.”

Pete, ever the competitor, wanted to know if he could use experiments to seek out a funnier variation of the hunter joke without increasing its offensiveness. To do so, he once again partnered with Upright Citizens Brigade LA's “science department.” For a control version, one team of UCB participants, using lots of fake blood, made a 30-second web video that stuck as closely as possible to the original hunter joke. Other UCB teams tried to make funnier web versions, and they were given various constraints on how far off script they could go.

A couple of the hunter joke variations—one that turned the scenario into a dubbed kung fu movie, and another that featured a hysterical clown using a squeaking plastic hammer to beat to death a kid choking on a balloon animal—turned out to be no more funny or offensive than the baseline version when Pete submitted them all to a Qualtrics survey panel. But the other two adaptations, one an extreme variation and one a mild variation, were rated significantly funnier while also less offensive. The “less offensive” part is somewhat surprising, considering one of the videos featured an emergency-services operator plagued by all sorts of callers misinterpreting his instructions, leading to a two-minute stretch of death and dismemberment, while the other involved a hunter horribly inept at killing his friend, leading to gunshots, hand-to-hand combat, and a Good Samaritan passerby offering to help by running the guy over with his truck.

But it's all about how the jokes were crafted, Pete pointed out. In the two funniest videos, all the unpleasantness occurred off camera, the violence only hinted at through sound effects. Yes, the hunter joke can be made funnier without becoming more offensive, but it takes some serious work—relying on a subtle medium like video, enlisting comedy masters like those at UCB. “The study illustrates that in some cases, severe violations can be really funny to lots of people if they are done really well,” he concludes.

But at Yoshimoto, CEO Osaki concedes he isn't sure severe violations can have international appeal, even when they're being handled by professionals. “I personally don't find American stand-up that funny,” he tells us. “Maybe it's lost in translation.”

Remember when I
called watching the
rakugo
performance akin to torture? Forget I said that. That's nothing compared to what we witness on “Ogata Impossible.”

We're on a soundstage in downtown Tokyo, on the set of
Power Purin
, a Yoshimoto variety show that airs late on Wednesday nights on the Japanese station TBS. Most of
Power Purin
is devoted to
Saturday Night Live
–style comedy skits. But every now and then, the comedians engage in a
batsu
, or “penalty,” game, a one-off game-show stunt. That's what's happening now.

“Welcome to ‘Ogata Impossible!' ” shouts the game-show host, who for some reason is dressed up like a demon. “You gamble with your life here!”

The one doing the gambling is Takohiro Ogata, a young Japanese actor with a mop of shaggy brown hair. He tries to look brave as he's presented with a tureen full of scalding hot soup. Ogata, says the demon-host, has 60 seconds to transfer the soup's chunky bits—radish, fish, octopus—onto a plate. Using only his teeth.

At least, that's what we think is happening. Araki, our translator, is trying to explain what is going on, but he looks like he doesn't understand it all himself.

Japanese game shows, with their oddball set-ups and sadistic challenges, have become the most iconic example of Japanese entertainment. And they're intimately tied to Japanese comedy. Yoshimoto produces many of the shows itself. According to Yorihiro, Yoshimoto's U.S.-based CEO, 80 percent of all Japanese game-show contestants are comedians, since the typical Japanese person is too reserved to demonstrate the fear and anguish necessary to sell a bit about diving face-first into a bowl of soup.

An air horn wails, dramatic lights flash and Ogata dunks his head into the tureen. He jerks back up, soup flying, clutching in pain at his
face. His mouth is empty. I try to imagine “Ogata Impossible!” going global, with footage like this being a hit in Seattle and Philadelphia, in London and Rio, in Moscow and Dubai.

The soup can't really be hot, Araki assures me. Ogata is just acting. But later, after the shoot, Ogata, his face pink, assures me Araki is wrong. The soup is skin-searing hot. Teeth-aching hot. “Hot!” he tells me, the only English word I've heard him use all day.

A shrill buzzer marks the end of the challenge—with Ogata several soup ingredients short of his goal. The
Power Purin
comedians retire in exhaustion to their messy dressing room. Araki's off somewhere, so we make do without him. The comedians scratch at their dyed, spiky hair and in broken English compare their best comedic horror stories, boasting like they're battle wounds. For a
batsu
game, one had to eat a raw lemon, skin and all. Another was once elbowed so hard by his
manzai
partner that he broke a rib.

One of the comedians nods at Pete and makes a crack about his height. “Big!” he cries, then points at Pete's pants. “Big?” Pete shrugs, smiling mischievously.

“Me small-small,” grumbles the diminutive comic, gesturing in disappointment at his groin.

“But you're famous!” I cry.

Sure, he concedes, but he'd rather be “big-big, not famous!”

Soon we've devolved into a shouting match of “Big-big!” “Small-big!” and increasingly obscene hand motions. Araki looks in, drawn by the laughter. “You're missing all the fun!” cries Pete.

Our trip to Japan has proven that humor appreciation is very much culturally mediated. Comedy here is a wholly different entity than it is in the States, with specific social rules about when and where people laugh and what they laugh at. Yoshimoto's global strategy faces some hurdles, since the hijinks of “Ogata Impossible” and other examples of Japanese comedy are very, well,
Japanese
.

But what's going on here in this dressing room isn't professionally crafted, strategically calibrated, big-business comedy. It's humor, in the most organic sense of the word. Humor that occurs without planning or preparation, humor that's all the more hilarious because of it. It's rude-gesture humor, late-night-drinking humor, your-fly-is-down
humor, banging-your-head-on-a-door-frame humor. The same sort of stuff that gets us cackling with friends and loved ones back home.

In other words, while Japanese
comedy
may be different from what we're used to in America, the way the Japanese experience
humor
is mostly the same.

And with a realization such as that, maybe we've discovered what makes the Japanese really, truly laugh: the same thing that makes you and me and everyone else bust a gut, too.

What's the key to universal harmony and hilarity? It's simple: peace, love, and dick jokes.

The attack comes out of the blue. First we hear the yelling, an eruption of deranged Danish that shatters Copenhagen's wintry early morning tranquility. We spot a hulking woman across the street from us, eyes blazing as she hollers in our direction. But she's not just yelling. She's on the move, head down and legs pumping in bulky black snow pants. And she's charging at us.

Maybe she believes that Pete, who's been taking pictures of eighteenth-century brick façades and colorful Danish graffiti, snapped a shot of her. Maybe she doesn't like the look of us. All we know is that she's enraged, and we're the cause.