The Humor Code (6 page)

Dean admits that his joke-writing trick doesn't a comedian make. That's why in his classes and his book,
Step-by-Step to Stand-Up Comedy
, he also tackles all sorts of other stuff, like how to hold a microphone and use words with hard consonants because “k” sounds are funnier than “r” sounds, and how to “tag” your punch lines with follow-up punch lines to turn jokes into ongoing bits. And how to riff.

The first on stage for Dean's riffing exercise at the Santa Monica Playhouse is a student named Jack. He looks around the room and focuses on a guy near the front.

“What's your name?” asks Jack, grasping an imaginary microphone.

“Er, Herb,” the guy ad-libs.

“And what do you do, Herb?”

“Work in a salon.”

“Oh,
really
,” purrs Jack, flashing bedroom eyes at Herb. “I never would've guessed—you look so strong and tough!”

The bit's a hit, as are many of his classmates' ad-libbed riffs. Pete and I are impressed. But does that mean that Dean and his comedy-class colleagues are on to something? Is rote instruction the best way to become funny? Questions like this leave many established comics fuming. There's no shortcut to stand-up, they declare; the only way to do it is to put in your years at the clubs, working your way from show opener to feature to headliner, developing your voice through endless nights of blood, sweat, and other sorts of liquids. Does it make sense to pay somebody to teach you what to do, they argue, when some of the most famous comedians of all, like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Steve Martin, are the ones who broke all the rules?

These critics might have a point—or they might not. Sooner or later, aspiring comics need to put in stage time. But could taking classes or working with an expert speed up the process? It's hard to know, says Pete. Nobody's ever tested it. “None of these processes are scientific,” he says. And without the science, it's tough to make promises about anything.

Take a basic concept that many comedy teachers agree on: you
need to stick a big, pregnant pause between your set-ups and punch lines—sometimes as long as several seconds. As Dean notes in his book, quoting from his comedy-expert predecessors, “Timing is knowing when to stop speaking in the midst of a routine in order to allow thinking time for the audience to prepare itself for the laugh that is coming up.”
⁵
On the surface, this advice seems obvious: when someone tells a joke, he or she pauses between the set-up and punch line—right?

Recently, Salvatore Attardo, linguistics professor at the University of Texas A&M and former editor-in-chief of
HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research
, along with his wife, Texas A&M colleague Lucy Pickering, decided to find out. The two analyzed recordings of ten speakers reciting a pre-written joke as well as a gag they came up with on the spot. What they found was unexpected: the participants didn't pause before punch lines, and the mean length of time between set-ups and punch lines was in fact slightly shorter than the pauses between sentences in the set-up.
⁶

“It was absolutely counterintuitive for us,” Attardo told me on the phone. For more than a year, they couldn't get anyone to publish their results, because no one believed them. When they presented their work at academic conferences, they were told, “You must have gotten the worst joke-tellers in the universe.” But their findings withstood scrutiny, and with additional analysis, Attardo and Pickering also found that punch lines aren't marked by any sort of unusual pitch, speed, or volume.
⁷
There's nothing differentiating a punch line from the rest of a joke other than it's supposed to be funny.

So why do we assume otherwise? The best theory Attardo's heard is that it could be thanks to one of the most famous one-liners of all: comedian Henny Youngman's iconic 1930s quip, “Take my wife—please.”

“This joke only works if there is a long pause,” said Attardo. “Because Youngman was so famous and it was such a prominent joke, people essentially said, ‘Because there is a huge pause in that joke, there is a pause in all jokes.' ”

So maybe it's time for people everywhere to retire the idea of pausing before punch lines. Or as Youngman might put it, take Attardo's research—please.

I'm a dog.
I'm not just any dog, I'm Boy George's dog.

Pete and I are on stage at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre at the foot of Hollywood Hills, in an unobtrusive storefront space across the street from the ornate headquarters of the Church of Scientology. The location is fitting. These days, people flock to the classes at UCB Theatre and its counterpart in New York like religious converts. The country's only accredited improv and sketch-comedy school, UCB teaches roughly 9,000 students a year, with many more on the waitlist. Improvisation appears to have eclipsed stand-up as the way to get hilariously huge; Mike Myers, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Jimmy Fallon, and Conan O'Brien are just some of the celebrities who came out of improv groups. And right now, UCB Theatre, founded by comedy star Amy Poehler and her colleagues in 1999, is on the top of the improv hierarchy, boasting alumni that have gone on to write and perform for
Saturday Night Live, The Office, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Late Show with David Letterman, The Ellen DeGeneres Show
 . . . the list goes on.

We're participating in an improv class taught by Joe Wengert, a wonkish, bespectacled guy who's one of UCB LA's top instructors. We're among some of the program's most advanced pupils, the ones most likely to be tomorrow's comedy elite. Since improv is all about creating performances on the spot, for my first assignment of the day, Wengert teams me with student Darwyn Metzger and tells the two of us to act out a made-up movie called
Wilmer Grace and His Dog
. “Set in the late 1980s,” somebody suggests. “Starring Boy George,” adds another. “And his dog.”

Instinctively, I drop to my hands and knees, ready to be Boy George's dog: “Woof!” Darwyn looks at me like I'm an idiot. I've just broken one of improv's most important rules: “Yes, and . . .” The seemingly obvious thing to do if you're trying to be funny with somebody else is to disagree with them, for the same reason disagreements are useful to me as a writer: Arguments are funny! Conflict is interesting! But in improv, it's all about letting the interaction of the performers progress to see what sort of things unfold. An argument
stops that process cold. Instead, improvisers are trained to agree with whatever their colleagues say, then use it to further the action: “Yes, and . . .” “No” is a no-no. But I didn't even get that far. By pretending to be a dog that can't do anything but bark, I'd killed all potential interaction between Darwyn and me before we'd even begun.

It's not about being funny, it's about being honest. That's what Charna Halpern told me weeks earlier on the phone: “There is nothing funnier than the truth.” Alongside the late improv master Del Close, Halpern co-founded the influential Improv Olympic Theater in Chicago, now known as iO; helped develop the “Harold,” the three-act long-form technique that's the triathlon of improv; and wrote the definitive book on the subject,
Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation
. The improv system laid out in
Truth in Comedy
reads like a self-help book: Be honest. Agree with one another. Stay in the moment. Welcome silence. Listen to your inner voice. There is no such thing as a mistake.

There's a reason the rules sound so life-affirming, said Halpern: improv is all about building bonds with one another, forming order out of the chaos. “We are saving our corner of the world,” she said. Halpern has run improv workshops for warring factions in Cyprus, and once flew to Switzerland to teach the physicists working on the $9 billion Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator to loosen up. “I should get a Nobel Prize,” she declared. It's unclear whether she was joking.

Our UCB class lasts for hours, but the time flies. Improv is play, and it's a lot of fun. Afterward, at a nearby coffee shop, the students seem ready to do it all again. “I love using another person to succeed or fail on stage,” one of them tells us. “It's freeing,” says another. “It's like therapy light,” raves a third.

We haven't heard anything like this from the stand-up comics we've been talking to in LA, folks who seem like a whole different comedic species than these improvisers. “It's a different beast,” a UCB student says about stand-up. “It is flexing two completely different muscles.”

Are different people really funny in different ways? Scientists believe so, and they've gotten good at parsing those differences. Take the Humorous Behavior Q-sort Deck, a 100-item test developed
at the University of California, Berkeley, that measures how people use humor in their everyday lives. Pete and I subjected ourselves to the Q-sort Deck, discovering its procedure is every bit as ungainly as its name. Going through the assignment's 100 cards, each labeled with a different humor statement, and organizing them in piles from least to most representative of how I use humor, I was soon asking questions I'd never asked before: Do I laugh heartily from head to heel? (Probably more than I care to admit.) Am I bored by slapstick comedy? (Who isn't?) Do I find humor in the everyday behavior of animals? (Is it possible to say no to this once you've been exposed to the miracle website “Animals Being Dicks”?) To ensure I was as honest as possible, I recruited my wife, Emily, to help out. Soon she was grumbling, “Why in the world are we doing this?”

Once I had my answers, added up the totals, and plugged in some mathematical formulas that brought back nightmares of high school algebra, I had my five humor-style scores for the five different ways people tend to create and appreciate humor. Incredibly, my results were almost identical to Pete's. We both scored positively for “socially warm versus cool” and “competent versus inept” humor styles, meaning we both use humor to encourage positive morale, and we're both witty (although Pete is more confident in his schtick than I am in mine). Unfortunately for those we chat up at cocktail parties, we both scored negatively for the “reflective versus boorish” style, suggesting our humor can be unappealingly competitive and clownish, and we're both a bit negative in “benign versus mean-spirited” humor, so we're equally likely to tell cruel jokes. The only difference was in “earthy versus repressed” humor, which means Pete likes dirty jokes while I'm a bit of a prude.

So maybe the UCB students are right. There are different comedic muscles. And it does seem that different muscles come into play in stand-up and improv. But Wengert the UCB teacher, who has a thriving stand-up career on the side, thinks the two share more similarities than most people realize. “All good comedy talks about what is wrong and what is funny about a situation,” he tells us later. “A lot of times, the approach for both is, what bothers you about this situation, what's truthful about it.”

Again and again, we've heard that the best comedians are at some level outsiders, the people who can stand apart from everyone and everything and ask themselves, “What's funny about this?” As scholar Stephanie Koziski noted, comics have more in common with anthropologists than either group is likely to admit: “The comedian and the anthropologist share a way of seeing. This involves the capacity to stand outside themselves and to empathize with people who are different in order to more fully understand their actions and beliefs.”
⁸

Maybe that's why ethnic and cultural outsiders in America, those with one foot in the mainstream and one foot outside, have long thrived in comedy. A 1979
Time
magazine article estimated that while Jews constituted just 3 percent of the U.S. population, they were responsible for an astounding 80 percent of all comedians.
⁹
While Jewish comic supremacy has surely since declined, their ranks have been replaced in part by African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and, more recently, Muslim Americans. Among this influx was Chris Rock, who grew up in a working-class section of Brooklyn but was bused to predominantly white schools. That made him an outsider in both places, a painful situation for a young kid, but a great state of affairs for a future stand-up icon.

Of course, you don't have to be a minority to be a great comic. But either way, it seems helpful to cultivate what W.E.B. Du Bois called your “double-consciousness,” your “two-ness.”
¹⁰
Yes, in the United States this phenomenon has been a bad thing, something that's kept people fractured and suspicious and struggling with self-identity. But on the bright side, it also makes for good comedy.

For something that's
conceptually so basic—joke-telling in its primal form—all we hear from stand-up comics in LA is how complicated it is to do their job right. In comedy, they explain, context is everything. There are too many outside variables, they tell us, too many ways those simple jokes can get mucked up by quirks of the comedy club or audience or a million other factors. “Comedy is seldom performed in ideal circumstances,” wrote Steve Martin in his memoir,
Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life.
“Comedy's enemy is distraction, and
rarely do comedians get a pristine performing environment. I worried about the sound system, ambient noise, hecklers, drunks, lighting, sudden clangs, latecomers, and loud talkers, not to mention the nagging concern, ‘Is this funny?' ”

And more than anything else, comedians seem to worry about the space they're trying to be funny in. Is it a “good” room or a “bad” room? But what does that even mean? What constitutes a comedy club, after all, is all over the map. In Los Angeles alone, we've visited venues ranging from brightly lit halls to shadowy bars to back-alley alcoves to black-box theaters to the back room of a comic book store. But if the comedians we've talked to had it their way, clubs would all look more or less the same: a densely packed, dimly lit space with low ceilings, red curtains, and nothing at all that's blue. As Jordan Brady, a comedian turned director whose 2010 documentary
I Am Comic
explored comedy-club designs, put it to us, “A great club experience is best served dark and intimate.”