The Humor Code (37 page)

An equally sizable number of people helped on the academic part of our journey. Pete's Humor Research Team (aka HuRT) at the University of Colorado at Boulder never balked at his strange requests, so credit goes to team members Ryan Brauchler, Erin Percival Carter, Robert Collins, Caley Cuneo, Christina Kan (HuRL's Lab Manager), Robert Keenan, Bridget Leonard, Linds Panther, Roxanne Ross, Julie Schiro, Abigail Schneider, and Rachel Stermer. They were far from Pete's only collaborators. In the academic realm, Elise Chandon Ince, Phil Fernbach, Dan Goldstein, Gil Greengross, Jennifer Harman, Kathleen Vohs, Lawrence Williams, and Max Justicz contributed their time and expertise. Outside the ivory tower, Alex Sidtis, Alex Berg, and Joe Wengert at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre; Jaime Kopke, Sonnet Hanson, and Lindsey Housel at the Denver Art Museum; Steve Krauss and Ari Halper at Grey New York; Larry Swiader, Danny Rouhier, and Liz Sabatiuk at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy; and Jeff Richins, Ryan Smith, and Danny Anderson at Qualtrics Online Survey Software all provided access to their expertise, resources, work spaces, and humorists, no questions asked. Meanwhile, Andrea Grimes at San Francisco Public Library's Schmulowitz Collection of Wit and Humor and Reaux Flagg at U.C. Berkeley's Folklore Archive proved invaluable sleuths when detective work arose. Finally, our gratitude goes out to the entirety of the University of Colorado library staff, especially Janet Freeman and Betty Grebe, for handling with patience and grace our hundreds upon hundreds of book, journal, and interlibrary loan requests. Sorry about the late returns.

We can't forget the folks who helped spread the word about what we were up to, plus those who made sure what we were saying was a polished as possible. Tor Myhren at Grey New York was so taken with our idea that he gave us an offer we couldn't refuse. Lewis Wallace at
Wired.com
, Bryan Maygers at the
Huffington Post
, Lauren Friedman at
Psychology Today
, and John Swanburg at
Slate
offered us invaluable online soapboxes, and Josh Mishell crafted the logo and Venns we proudly sported there and a hundred other places around the world. John Wenzel and Grace Hood, among others, covered our exploits; Kristen Sink snapped our publicity photos; and Sean Guillory, Andy Wood, Ben Roy, Paul Ronca, and Alf LaMont helped get us on stage all over North America, before we had much to show for our efforts. We looked and sounded much better than we deserved thanks to a crack team of wordsmiths and videosmiths, namely Rick Griffith, Josh Johnson, Daniel Junge, Vanessa Martinez, Shane Mauss, and Evan Nix. We owe McKenzie Binder a weekend for the one she spent tidying our bibliography. Jane Le added a final sheen to our prose, courtesy of her passion for terminating dangling modifiers with extreme prejudice and her unrivaled knowledge of Yiddish. Ron Doyle, founder and president of the Humor Code Fan Club, understood what we were up to better than we did, and deserves his own media empire for the marketing work he did on our behalf. Brit Hvide, Marie Kent, Leah Johanson, Richard Rhorer, and everyone else at Simon & Schuster deserve accolades for their endless patience and support, despite all our odd questions and rookie mistakes. And of course, we are beyond grateful to our editor, Ben Loehnen, for his incredibly enthusiastic embrace of our project and his unrivaled skill at making every word, sentence, and paragraph shine.

Last but not least, there are a select few who were always there for us, providing feedback, encouragement, and support in numerous unquantifiable ways. For Pete, that includes his mother, Kathleen McGraw, Mark Ferne, Joni Klippert, Mike Koenig, Jeff Larsen, Julie Nirvelli, Michael Sargent, Janet Schwartz, Marcel Zeelenberg, Jaclyn Allen, Adam Alter, Adam Grant, Chip Heath, and especially Dan Ariely. Most of all, Pete wants to thank Caleb Warren and his sister, Shannon Sorino. His research would be rubbish if it weren't for Caleb's time, effort, and
impressive intellect, and he never would have thought that he was funny enough to get on stage (twice) if Shannon hadn't always laughed at his jokes.

My shortlist of personal advocates includes George Smith, Vince Darcangelo, Jared Jacang Maher, Hester McNeil, Kelly Warner, and above all, my parents, Jim and Barb Warner. And I can never fully repay my family, Emily, Gabriel, and Charlotte, for the fatherless weeks, spotty Skype calls, unanswered e-mails, late nights in the home office, and moments of grouchiness. All I can say to them is through good times and bad, the funny and not-so-funny stuff, you've been a wonderful audience—and a wonderful team.

1.
 Don L. F. Nilsen and Alleen Pace Nilsen, “Twenty-Five Years of Developing a Community of Humor Scholars,”
http://www.hnu.edu/ishs/ISHSDocuments/Nilsen25Article.pdf
(accessed December 30, 2012).

2.
 Caleb Warren and A. Peter McGraw, “Humor Appreciation,”
Encyclopedia of Humor Studies
(forthcoming).

3.
 Elliot Oring,
The Jokes of Sigmund Freud: A Study in Humor and Jewish Identity
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 114.

4.
 John Morreall, “A new theory of laughter,”
Philosophical Studies
, 42(2) (1982), 243–254.

5.
 Howard R. Pollio and Rodney W. Mers, “Predictability and the Appreciation of Comedy,”
Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society
(1974): 229–232.

6.
 Caleb Warren and A. Peter McGraw, “Beyond Incongruity: Differentiating What Is Funny From What Is Not” (under review).

7.
 Thomas C. Veatch, “A Theory of Humor,”
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
(1998): 161–215.

8.
 A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren, “Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny,”
Psychological Science
(2010): 1141–1149.

9.
 Ibid.

10.
 Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Daniel Wolpert, and Chris Frith, “Why Can't You Tickle Yourself?”
NeuroReport
(2000): R11–R16.

11.
 McGraw and Warren, “Benign Violations,” 1141–1149.

1.
 Willibald Ruch, ed.
The Sense of Humor: Explorations of a Personality Characteristic
(Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998), 7–9.

2.
 Alan Feilgold, “Measuring Humor Ability: Revision and Construct Validation of the Humor Perceptiveness Test,”
Perceptual and Motor Skills
(1983): 159–166.

3.
 Herbert M. Lefcourt and Rod A. Martin,
Humor and Life Stress: Antidote to Adversity
(Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1986), 17.

4.
 Victor Raskin,
Semantic Mechanisms of Humor
(Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston: D. Reidel, 1985), 32.

5.
 Greg Dean,
Greg Dean's Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), 125.

6.
 Salvatore Attardo and Lucy Pickering, “Timing in the Performance of Jokes,”
Humor: International Journal of Human Research
(2011): 233–250.

7.
 Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering, and Amanda Baker, “Prosodic and Multimodal Markers of Humor in Conversation,”
Prosody and Humor: Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition
(2011): 194, 224–247.

8.
 Joe Boskin, ed.,
Humor Prism in the 20th Century
(Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 111.

9.
 Lawrence Epstein,
The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2001), x.

10.
 Mel Watkins,
On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy
(Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 26.

11.
 Jonathan Levav and R. Juliet Zhu, “Seeking Freedom though Variety,”
Journal of Consumer Research
(2009): 600–610; J. Meyers-Levy and R. J. Zhu, “The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing That People Use,”
Journal of Consumer Research
(2007): 174–186.

12.
 Joseph A. Bellizzi and Robert E. Hite, “Environmental Color, Consumer Feelings, and Purchase Likelihood,”
Psychology & Marketing
(1992): 347–363.

13.
 C. B. Zhong, V. K. Bohns, and F. Gino, “Good Lamps Are the Best Police,”
Psychological Science
(2010): 311–314.

14.
 Edward Diener, “Deindividuation: The Absence of Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation in Group Members,” ed. P. B. Paulus,
Psychology of Group Influence
(Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1980), 209–242.

15.
 Timothy J. Lawson and Brian Downing, “An Attributional Explanation for the Effect of Audience Laughter on Perceived Funniness,”
Basic and Applied Social Psychology
, 243–249.

16.
 Richard Zoglin,
Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 5.

17.
 “Richest Comedians,”
http://www.therichest.org/celebnetworth/category/celeb/comedian/
(accessed February 15, 2013.)

18.
 Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves,
Only Joking: What's So Funny About Making People Laugh?
(New York: Gotham Books, 2006), 103.