The Humor Code (35 page)

Then we got to Montreal.

Athletics have the
Olympics. Film has Cannes. Music has South by Southwest. Comedy? It has the
Just For Laughs.

The night before we arrived at the festival, I had a disturbing dream. When we touched down in Montreal, even though it was July, snow was everywhere. Everyone was in parkas, sitting around roaring fires in frosted ski chalets. And here I was, freezing in my light-weight summer clothes.

“Oh, my God,” I thought. “I've made a terrible mistake.”

While there wasn't a snowflake at the festival, that didn't make it any less intimidating.

In the heart of Montreal, a large swath of downtown had been fenced off from cars and transformed into an open-air bacchanalia. Colossal stages showcased free dance concerts and magic shows all hours of the day and night. Quirky parades of huge pickle puppets snaked through the crowds. Giant balloon incarnations of Victor, Just For Laugh's red-horned, green-snouted mascot, hovered over the revelry like Canadian castoffs from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. And aromatic food trucks lined the streets, offering up various international delicacies—including, I was surprised to discover,
takoyaki
, the balls of deep-fried octopus that were so huge in Osaka.

The next day, we forced ourselves awake just in time for a catered festival luncheon. “We're turning into comedians,” cracked Pete. “Out of bed at noon for free food.” As we prepared to leave, we discovered a letter from hotel management by our door. Don't expect much in terms of housecleaning, warned the note: labor negotiations with the city's hospitality workers had just broken down. The city was packed with a thousand comedians with something to prove, and everywhere the hotel staff was on strike. Things would get messy.

So how did Pete and I gain access to this red-carpet hoopla? Did I use my crack reportorial skills to pull the right strings behind the scenes? Did Pete score VIP passes through sheer force of personality? Neither.

A few weeks after we first came up with our plan to storm the Just For Laughs festival, Pete received an e-mail. “I heard about your research,” wrote the author. “We gotta become connected.” It was signed Andy Nulman—president of Festivals and Television for Just For Laughs.

Nulman, a suave character who's always the best-dressed person in the room, was just the sort of guy we wanted to be connected with. In 1985, Nulman joined the nascent Just For Laughs festival, then a small-time francophone event. By the time he departed, fourteen years later, Just For Laughs was an international powerhouse. Then, after founding the tech company Airborne Mobile and selling it for millions, Nulman came back. Now, as part of Just For Laughs' thirtieth anniversary celebration, he wanted to innovate—and that included inviting as his guests two outsiders trying to deconstruct all of comedy. As he put it to Pete, “Our event is the playground for your research.”

Access to that playground came with a price. Nulman wanted us to present our findings at the Just For Laughs Comedy Conference. To keep it interesting, we'd be facing off against Kenny Hotz. Hotz is
famous in Canada for his shock-and-awe brand of comedy. On one television series, he made a go at cannibalism and tried to convince a Jewish community to build a mosque. In another stunt, he ran afoul of the British Columbia Human Rights Commission by flying a banner over Toronto that read “Jesus Sucks.” But speaking to us over the phone before the festival, Hotz seemed like a reasonable guy. There was nothing to worry about, he told us; everything was going to go fine.

We believed him—right up until we got on stage with him at the conference. Pete hardly had time to go over his benign violation theory before Hotz pulled out the heavy artillery. On a video screen, he flicked on a comedy clip he'd put together linking the Pope and pedophilia. “Is that funny, and why?” probed Hotz over the mixture of groans and chortles in the packed conference hall. “Is that a benign enough violation?” Continuing on, he played a real-life video of horribly misguided New Age do-gooders crooning “You're the Sweetest Thing” to a suffering denizen of an Indian leper colony. Hotz, for one, found this hilarious. So, he grilled Pete, how do you explain why, Professor?

“Yeah, um . . .” started Pete. The usually gregarious academic was at a loss for words.

But then Pete caught a break, courtesy of a video clip Hotz played of a neighborhood fireworks show gone horribly wrong. The seminar audience was mostly silent as the man filming the scene hollered in terror as his video camera captured fireworks exploding all around him. Then, halfway through, the cameraman exclaimed, “That was awesome!” In response, the crowd erupted in applause and laughter. Afterward, Pete seized his chance. “I don't know if you noticed this, but one of the biggest laughs was when the gentleman recording this said, ‘That was awesome,' ” he said. “I put this to the audience. Why did that moment in time get the biggest laughs?”

Immediately, people saw where he was going. “That's when it became benign!” someone exclaimed.

The rest of the seminar went well, and conference organizers seemed excited and appreciative for our involvement. (“What are you thanking them for?” cracked Hotz. “I did everything!”) It's not
the first time in our adventures that the benign violation theory has come through in a clutch. If anything, Pete's journey with me beyond the ivory tower have made him ever more confident in the theory.

Take the “violation” half of the theory, says Pete, the idea that humor is born from situations that are wrong, threatening, or disruptive. We witnessed this concept all over the world, from the Japanese
manzai
duos, where the dim-witted
boke
always started the joke by doing something incorrectly, to the clown mission in the Amazon, which was all about turning the world upside down and breaking social norms. And let's not forget the comedy we found in Palestine: if that isn't proof that humor arises amid threats and violations, we don't know what is. Find something wrong, and you're likely to find somebody joking about it.

Of course, our findings weren't all doom and gloom. For Pete, it was clear from our travels that the “benign” half of his theory was just as essential as the violation, that humor can only take root when situations are seen as playful, safe, or otherwise okay. In New York, we'd learned from Todd Hanson of
The Onion
that even something as terrible as the 9/11 terrorist attacks can be joked about, just as long as the butt of the joke deserves it. In Los Angeles, we'd found that comedians do best in environments where audiences feel secure—such as dark rooms or in crowds planted with professional laughers, folks skilled in letting others know that everything is okay and therefore funny.

We found additional evidence for the “benign” half of the theory in comedy's potential downside, in how it signals that the stuff being joked about is harmless and doesn't have to be taken seriously. It's how people get away with derogatory humor by claiming, “It's just a joke,” and it's likely why the funny sex-ed PSAs we created for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy might have been catchy but didn't get the job done.

Finally, our journey proved to Pete that both conditions of the benign violation theory have to be perceived simultaneously—that timing does matter. It's why most things in the world aren't funny, and it's why even so-called funny things are boring to some people
and offensive to others. It's hard to find the balance between what's a violation and what's benign, especially when everybody has a different idea of what's okay and what's not, what's a horrible tragedy and what's a ho-hum mishap. That's why it helps to be diligent and observant like the stand-up comics we met in LA, not to mention creative and open-minded like the cartoonists we got to know in New York. All of those qualities are essential to landing your jokes in the comedic sweet spot.

“I can't say the theory is perfect,” says Pete. There are funny things that don't easily fit the formula. But then again, he says, the benign violation theory certainly holds up better than its alternatives, theories like superiority, relief, or incongruity. “It's definitely better than what was out there before,” he says. And even Victor Raskin, the theory's number-one critic, seems to have come around somewhat. “I hadn't realized that Peter was a psychologist,” he writes in an e-mail to me once he's learned more about Pete's work. “His use of the term ‘theory' is casual: it does not mean more than a certain feature that may be loosely associated with humor. Moreover, he measures the distance from a person or event and correlates it with humor appreciation. That's all there is to it.” For someone like Raskin, that's downright effusive.

I've been impressed with the benign violation theory, too. But once again, I want to see the theory in action before final judgment. That's why we're here at the Just For Laughs festival, and that's why we asked Andy Nulman to provide a complete unknown and coveted spot at one of the festival's big, final-night events.

It's time, in other words, for the ultimate test.

“We have a
little something different here,” says Debra DiGiovanni to the Comedy Nest audience. “He's actually a professor at the University of Colorado, and he's studying what makes things funny. Please welcome up to the stage Peter McGraw!”

I could say that what happens next is a triumph, a coup, a stunning success. That every joke kills, that he turns that terrible audience around. That by the time his eight minutes are up, he's left in his dust
his precursors, all those ringers from
Late Show with David Letterman
and
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
. That the festival is soon buzzing about the unknown upstart who got on stage for the second time in his life and proved beyond a doubt that science has nailed comedy once and for all.

But I'd be lying.

Here's what happened:

“From studying comedy, I've learned that you have to get a laugh right away,” begins Pete, flashing a confident smile. “Which is why I wore this sweater vest.” The self-deprecating dig works, earning hearty guffaws from the audience.

“So does anyone know the famous quote by E. B. White about deconstructing humor?” he continues. “E. B. White wrote ‘Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.' ”

Pausing for laughs, he carries on. “You know who says that? Comedians. Comedians say, ‘If you figure out what makes things funny, that's like telling people the trick behind the magic. And then people won't like magic acts anymore.' But that's a silly argument. NOBODY likes magic.”

The punch line gets just a few meager chuckles. But we prepared for this. “Ah,” Pete remarks thoughtfully, turning to a flip chart he's positioned on a metal tripod beside him. He flips over the first page, revealing an algorithm:

He adds a square root symbol to the capital “A” on the first line. “We'll be good from this point on,” he cracks, to the bemused laughter of the crowd. Then he continues.

“I do like hanging out with comedians. They are lot of fun. And they have a lot of advantages over professors. For instance, comedians can drink on the job. Scratch that. They HAVE to drink on the job. And they fall into one of three categories: they're either on their way to being alcoholics, they're alcoholics, or they're recovering alcoholics. So when someone comes up to me and says, “You know, Pete, I am thinking about getting into stand-up,' I have to ask them, ‘How are you at alcoholism?' ”

He pauses for laughter, but it's largely silent.

“But I haven't just been looking at comedians. I've actually been traveling the world, looking at humor in all of its forms. I recently was in Osaka, Japan. And if you don't know this, Osaka is the humor capital of Japan. The funniest people in Japan live in Osaka. You can walk up to someone on the street in Osaka and go BANG!”—Pete mimes pointing a gun at an audience member—“and they will spontaneously act like they've been shot.”

He waits a beat. “What's fascinating about that is that no one has used this technique to rob the banks of Osaka.” The laughs are back.

Pete wraps up with a discussion of our
Mad Men
experiment in New York. “I got an ad team from one of the big ad agencies drunk and asked them to create funny content.” He turns to the flip chart. “I am going to show you the outcome of this study, in order from least-drunk to most-drunk Venn diagrams. This is after round one of drinks.” He flips the page.