The Humor Code (8 page)

But other than that, UCB instructor Joe Wengert turned out to be right: the personalities of stand-up comedians and improvisers are far more alike than different. Despite their cheerful and engaging on-stage demeanor, the improv students ended up being just as disagreeable and introverted as stage comics.

So are all comedians jackasses? Not necessarily. In his solo research, Greengross found one other bit of data: Those comedians who seemed to have the most success, in that they reported having the most shows booked, were those who tended to use friendly, more affiliative humor in their daily lives and were more open-minded, agreeable, and extroverted than their counterparts.
²⁰
As Greengross put it to me, “There might be something in the combination of being nice to others, and not being an asshole, that pushes you over the top.”

We heard the same thing from Chris Mazzilli, the cool-as-ice co-owner of Gotham Comedy Club, the poshest stand-up joint in New York City. “It's a business,” Mazzilli told us about comedy. “A lot of people don't treat it as such.” If you want to be successful, he concludes, “don't be an asshole.” Yes, comics make their living by creating conflict and turmoil in front of an audience, but if they hope to succeed with managers, agents, club owners, producers, and directors, that conflict and turmoil had better stay on stage.

So why is it that people assume successful comics are the opposite, that they're screwed up both on stage and off? It could be because by nature of their career, all they do is talk about what's wrong with themselves, says Pete: If you're going to mine your life for comedy material, for benign violations, you're going to start with the violations—relationship struggles and health problems and other topics—that people don't talk about in polite company, but are great for a laugh.

To test his hypothesis, Pete recruited grad student Erin Percival Carter and Colorado State University professor Jennifer Harman to run an experiment in which they had 40 people come up with a short story they might tell to others at a get-together. Half had to recount a funny story, while the others just had to be interesting. Among the humorous stories were tales of a dog swallowing a box of tampons, a guy getting caught singing in the men's room to Cyndi Lauper's “Time After Time,” and someone deciding one drunken night to
let a buddy burn a lightning bolt into his forehead so he'd look like Harry Potter. When others read the stories and chose which authors seemed the most “messed up,” the funny storytellers were rated significantly more screwy than the others.
²¹

But maybe these storytellers were viewed as screw-ups simply because they weren't very good at telling funny stories. So the team re-ran the experiment, this time employing the talents of our new friends at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Alex Berg, UCB LA's artistic director, was so excited about the partnership, he launched a whole UCB “science department” to handle it (cute, we know). Once again, when the findings came in, the UCB performer who penned a funny story about teaching grade-school kids to swim when he didn't know how to swim himself was judged to be significantly more messed up than the UCB member who described in a serious manner saving a guy who'd fallen onto the subway tracks—even though both stories were actually written by the same person.

In conclusion, maybe we're all equally screwed up. The rest of us just aren't as motivated as comedians to share those screw-ups with others in the guise of jokes.

That is, except for the Harry Potter lightning-bolt guy. He needs professional help.

On our last
night in Los Angeles, we head back to the UCB Theatre to catch the hottest stand-up show in town: “Comedy Bang Bang.” The small black-box theater is crammed with twentysomethings in hipster T-shirts and baseball hats, swigging booze from brown paper bags beneath the venue's prominent “No drinking” signs. As usual for the show, nobody knows who's going to perform. But that doesn't matter to folks in the know. Tickets for the event sold out days ago, as they do most weeks.

When the show starts, Pete and I sit in back, taking it all in. We've seen so much stand-up lately we act like snooty connoisseurs, nodding and whispering to each other, “Oh, that's funny,” rather than laughing like normal people.

Then, at the end of the night, the big special guest: Aziz Ansari,
co-star of the sitcom
Parks and Recreation
and, alongside Louis C.K., one of the biggest comedy names around. He's here to work on material.

Ansari works the audience, asking what dating sites people frequent, and segues into an extended bit on internet matchmaking. He complains that as a child he was ignored by pedophiles, something he doesn't understand: “For child molesters, I must've been like the hot chick at the bar.” The crowd eats it up, but with one graphic molestation joke, he takes it too far. The laughter dies.

“Oh, come on!” he cracks in mock annoyance, gesturing at a digital recorder he has running nearby. “Other people have laughed at that. I've taped it. Want me to play it for you?”

Later, Pete realizes something: “Comedians are using science.” While comics like Louis C.K. might deny there's a formula behind what's funny, they've all developed their own formulas—by experimenting bit by bit, recording their shows night after night and gauging the results. As we've learned here in LA, it's not about whether or not you're funny, it's
how
you're funny: how you learn the ins and outs of the business, how you develop your comic perspective, how you mix honesty and humor, how you deal with bad venues, and how you handle your shot at fame. And the only way to learn is through hard, repetitive, empirical work. “Comedians are experimenting every time they go up on stage and try a new bit and they gauge how the audience responds,” says Pete. “They tweak it, see how it changes, tweak it, see how it changes.”

Yes, non-scientific stuff plays a role, too. Several months after our trip to Los Angeles, comic hopeful Josh Friedman sends us an e-mail. He's turned his attention to improv, he tells us: “As an art form and personal activity, I find I enjoy it a whole lot more,” he writes.

The talent scouts' gut feeling was right. He didn't have stand-up in his soul.

Call it whatever you want, but experimentation is integral to being funny. “To say that science can't help comedy is to ignore what comedians have learned throughout the years,” Pete says.

Yes, comedy's a bit messy, a bit dangerous. But then again, so is science.

Pete and I are staring at a cartoon from the
New Yorker
magazine, willing our brains to come up with the perfect caption for a drawing of a wolfman sitting in a barbershop.

The caption has to fit—but it also has to be funny. And how do you do that? In Los Angeles, we poked around in the strange and off-kilter minds of the gatekeepers of comedy and came away with a rough idea of what makes them tick. But how do they create those jokes and routines in the first place? Not to mention, how do people come up with all the other forms of comedy—narrative poems and plays and animated cartoons and novels and sketches and sitcoms and short stories and movies and satire and caricatures and puns?

That's what Pete and I aim to find out—starting by creating a funny caption for a wolfman getting a haircut. How about, “Be sure to cover up my bald spot”? Or, “Somewhere in here, I lost my keys”? Or maybe something a little more risqué—a request for a Brazilian wax?

What we're doing isn't all that unusual. Thousands undertake this task every week. Since 2005, when the
New Yorker
began devoting the last page of its weekly issue to a cartoon caption contest, the magazine has received more than 1.7 million total caption submissions from people all over the world. And at this point, 1.7 million minus 300 or so have lost. Comic actor Zach Galifianakis might be funny enough to earn $15 million for
Hangover 3
, but his submission for a 2007
cartoon of a dog throwing a stick (“He's his own best friend”) didn't get a finalist nod. Michael Bloomberg turned himself into one of the richest people in the world and a three-term mayor of New York, but he swears he can't come up with an idea good enough to submit.
¹

Sure, it's possible to win the
New Yorker
Cartoon Caption Contest, but keep in mind that your chances are 5,666 to one. It's about the same chance as getting a hole in one—if you are very good at golf.

Disregarding the odds, Pete and I are taking a shot at it, but this particular contest is special: we're doing it on the twentieth floor of a gleaming skyscraper in New York City's Times Square—more specifically, in the offices of
The New Yorker
. We're sitting in a swanky conference room with floor-to-ceiling undulating glass walls. All around us are well-dressed doctors, engineers, and other professionals sipping mimosas from champagne flutes and trying to outwit each other captioning drawings of man-sized babies and guys wearing horse costumes. We're taking part in a live caption contest, part of the annual
New Yorker
Festival—Lollapalooza for the New York literati.

Attendees have been broken into a dozen or so teams of eight people, and our table is stymied. Floundering, we've been experimenting with different strategies. For the first round, we tried brainstorming a single list of captions. But that soon devolved into wild tangents and rambling, and our final list was pitifully short. So for round two, each team member submitted a caption and we consolidated the best options. Output was much improved, but it felt like a homework assignment. And it didn't get us on the leaderboard. So far, not one of our options has cracked the three finalists.

Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves, since creating things that are funny is really hard. For starters, how people create
anything
unique and brilliant is downright mysterious. For centuries, the talents of artists and inventors were thought to be either a gift from the gods, a satanic trick, or some sort of comic book–type genetic mutation. Creating stuff that is supposed to be hilarious is especially strange. Humorists will slave endlessly to find just the right combination of words or images that will get people to laugh, a body spasm that seems to occur subconsciously. It's as if the point of the Sistine Chapel ceiling were to get the Pope to sneeze.

Add to that, as Pete's discovered in his research, most things just aren't funny. In a marketing study with his collaborator Caleb Warren, he had research assistants ask undergraduates to create funny advertising headlines for the made-up company “ThriftOnline.” Of all the headlines generated, only 10 percent were deemed by a second group to be gut-busters. (Best of the best? “Because looking this bad never had to be expensive.”) The vast majority instead skewed toward stinkers such as “Come get your nerd.”

So, then, what's the secret to making people laugh—especially when your audience numbers in the hundreds of thousands? How does someone come up with material that's novel enough, inoffensive enough, and hilarious enough to tickle funny bones the world over? Is it better to use a team-based approach, bouncing humorous ideas back and forth? Or is one single funny person all you need? And what about the giant industry that's sprung up around comedy, from Hollywood films to sitcoms to meme-filled websites? Has the rise of big-budget comedy made things funnier—or dampened the joke?

We hope to find the answers here in New York, a mass production and distribution center of American comedy, a place teeming with the film studios, television sets, publishing operations, ad firms, and theater stages that help generate, shape, and dispense one of the nation's biggest cultural exports. It's why we're at the
New Yorker
offices, racking our brains about werewolves getting haircuts. Sure, we don't really fit in with the swanky crowd, but we happen to be pals with
New Yorker
cartoon editor Bob Mankoff.

In a famous episode of
Seinfeld
, the character Elaine comes up with a
New Yorker
cartoon and in the process tangles with the magazine's cartoon editor. Although Bruce Eric Kaplan, a long-time
New Yorker
cartoonist, wrote the episode, the editor is nothing like Mankoff. The
Seinfeld
Bob Mankoff is an uppity
New Yorker
stereotype in a sweater vest and sports coat. The real Bob Mankoff is cool and engaging, if a bit intense, sporting a tailored jacket and wavy locks of shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair. (Regarding his portrayal in this book, Mankoff quipped, “The main thing I will be concerned with is how my hair is represented.”)

The
Seinfeld
version of Bob Mankoff resists all attempts to explain the
New Yorker
cartoons, insisting, “Cartoons are like gossamer. And one doesn't dissect gossamer.” But the real version of Bob Mankoff has never met a thread of gossamer he hasn't sliced, diced, and stuck under a microscope. A onetime PhD student in experimental psychology—he taught pigeons how to sort addresses by ZIP code—he's a member of the International Society of Humor Studies. We'd first met Mankoff when he was making the rounds of humor conferences, presenting on the science of why LOLCat images would never be set among the publication's rarefied Adobe Caslon typeface.