The Humor Code (9 page)

No wonder we get along. And when he offered us a behind-the-scenes look at the
New Yorker
's cartoon operation, we didn't hesitate. After all, the magazine looms large in the world of American humor creation. Before the
New Yorker
was filled with names like Truman Capote, E. B. White, and Malcolm Gladwell, it started as the 1920s version of
The Onion
. As Ohio University communications professor Judith Yaros Lee wrote in
Defining
New Yorker
Humor
, the humor publication was one of the first to target a specific socioeconomic demographic (college-educated, upwardly mobile urban professionals), and to match this population's sense of humor, the magazine's jokes were groundbreakingly intelligent, topical, and a bit dangerous. In the world of published comedy, the
New Yorker
was a turning point. According to literature professor and author Sanford Pinsker, when the first issue rolled off the press on February 21, 1925, “The ‘character' of American humor changed.”
²

Part of that transformation was due to the magazine's cartoons. Harold Ross, the
New Yorker
's founder, once joked that because of all the visual gags, his magazine had been described to him as “the best magazine in the world for a person who cannot read.”
³
But they weren't just silly drawings. The entire cartoon medium changed thanks to the
New Yorker
's one-two punch of a concise, clever image combined with a witty, short caption. As Lee put it to me over the phone, “The central discovery of the
New Yorker
cartoon was not the one-line caption, but rather the idea that the caption and the drawing worked together to convey a comic idea.” That combination stuck around, revolutionizing the funny-drawing industry, and has
come to define what most people now recognize as cartoons. No wonder former
New Yorker
editor Tina Brown once noted that
New Yorker
cartoons are “a sort of national treasure.”
⁴

And Mankoff offered us the keys to the vault.

To start, Mankoff suggests we try our hand at this live caption contest. Pete jumps right in, filling his yellow legal pad with captions and bouncing ideas around our table. Meanwhile, I'm staring wide-eyed at the blank page in front of me, feeling like a Pop Warner benchwarmer who's been dropped in the middle of the Super Bowl. As a writer, the
New Yorker
is my Valhalla. Being here leaves me feeling awed and unworthy. And that I'm being asked to come up with concise writerly brilliance after two flutes of mimosa? Forget about it.

Thanks to Pete, however, we've come armed with a few tricks. Not long ago, Mankoff handed over to HuRL all the submissions for a recent caption contest, one featuring a man and a woman struggling through a desertlike parking lot and coming to section “F,” with no car in sight. With the help of cognitive scientist Phil Fernbach, Pete compared the several thousand losing entries to the 43 captions short-listed by the
New Yorker
as potential finalists. They found that the short-listed entries tended to have four things in common: They were novel, in that they didn't rely on words common in other entries such as “park” and “desert.” They were concise—on average, 8.7 words long, a full word shorter than the rest. They didn't go overboard with punctuation; losing entries were nearly twice as likely to use question marks, and nearly seven times more likely to use exclamation points. And they featured imaginative imagery, playing with abstract concepts that weren't represented in the drawing.

“I am shocked—shocked—by the results,” responded Mankoff sarcastically. “When I went to cartoon college, I was taught that long, heavily punctuated, commonplace captions were the key to success.” (The final results of the contest that HuRL analyzed suggests a final secret: have lots of experience writing. The winning caption—“I'm not going to say the word I'm thinking of”—was submitted by none other than the late celebrated film critic Roger Ebert, his first win in 108 attempts.)

Considering the four criteria Pete discovered, maybe our caption ideas for the wolfman in the barbershop aren't so bad after all. Take this caption: “Be sure to cover up my bald spot.” It's a concise eight words, doesn't bother with exclamation points or question marks, is pretty abstract, and seems novel. Who knows, maybe we have a winner.

Our colleagues at the table agree, and submit it to the judges. And sure enough, when the results are in, there's our caption, standing strong at second place!

I'm thrilled, until I realize that at the
New Yorker
, second place will never cut it.

So where do
the mass-market jokes begin that get churned out from New York's sprawling comedic sausage factory? Where do the raw doodles originate that become polished
New Yorker
cartoons? According to Bob Mankoff, many of them come from a second-story walk-up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. When we stop by one morning, a 28-year-old named Zachary Kanin meets us at the door. Kanin's small and compact, built like a high-school wrestler. There's a somberness to him, a quiet seriousness, which we weren't expecting. Mankoff, after all, calls Kanin a comic genius.

In Kanin's apartment, which he shares with his wife, an enormous blackboard scrawled with a lengthy to-do list takes up much of the living-room wall:

Banjo (done)

Start band (done)

Order dresser

Go on
Wheel of Fortune

Get sexy (done)

The last item sounds ominous, if not a bit racy: “July 24th: Bananageddon!” Kanin explains it refers to the time when he and his wife bought too many bananas. They figured if they didn't eat them all by July 24, they'd have a bananageddon on their hands.

Kanin has already accomplished a lot of things that aren't on the board. Like attending Harvard and serving as president of its illustrious humor magazine, the
Harvard Lampoon
(at five three, Kanin is proud to point out he's the shortest-ever president). And scoring the job when Mankoff called the
Lampoon
's offices his senior year in college, looking for a new assistant. And once at the magazine, becoming one of its youngest-ever staff cartoonists.

According to Mankoff, cartooning is “idea creativity on overdrive.” Scientists, inventors, and artists don't have to come up with that many good ideas to get by. A good year for a research professor like Pete entails publishing one peer-reviewed journal article. As a journalist, I am in good shape if I come up with a dozen solid magazine articles a year. Cartoonists? We're talking about a different order of magnitude. If someone like Kanin hopes to cut it at the
New Yorker
, he or she has to come up with dozens upon dozens of funny ideas each week.

Kanin shows us where he tries to do so: a room at the back of his apartment not much larger than a storage closet. On a small white desk, a MacBook is surrounded by piles of drawings in various stages of germination. There's a doodle of an overweight man grasping his rumbling stomach. A Chewbacca look-alike is wearing a hobo outfit. An amoeba-like tree sprouts branches with mouths. In the margins of the pages, Kanin has scribbled down random words and phrases, hints of other odd ideas: “tap dance,” “hard work,” “trunk of car.”

Each week, Kanin will spend hours here, doodling away until he has 100 ideas in various stages of completion, the best eight to ten of which he'll submit to Mankoff. Sometimes he lets his hand draw freely to see what it comes up with. Other times he plays with a vague concept over and over, maybe endless variations of birds, in the hope they turn into something.

If his work is good enough, the resulting cartoon won't require a caption at all, since the entire joke is contained in the drawing. This week, for example, he plans on submitting a captionless cartoon that features two people walking toward the same street corner from opposite directions. One is walking ten bowling pins on leashes. The other is walking a bowling ball.

“As a cartoonist, these are the most pleasing,” Kanin tells us. “It's a puzzle you solve with just the drawing.

How, exactly, did Kanin come up with the image of people walking bowling balls and pins? How do we take all the un-funny elements of the world and distill from them humor? Any sizable bookstore has several shelves devoted to answering the question. There are how-to guides and step-by-step workbooks and so-called comedy bibles, designed mostly for wannabe comedy writers for TV and film. A few compile interviews with as many funny creative people as possible. The most interesting of these is one of the oldest: William Fry and Melanie Allen's 1975 work
Life Studies of Comedy Writers
, and mostly it's because in it, Norman Lear, the television titan behind
All in the Family, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons
, and
Good Times
, compares comedy writing to an orgasm: “Everything is gushing, everything is just gushing.” As Archie Bunker might have said, those were the days.

One of the longest-lasting theories of how we make things funny doesn't come from a comedian or humor researcher or comedy aficionado at all. It comes from a man named Arthur Koestler. And it's not all that surprising that Koestler tried to deconstruct humor creation. During his 78 years, there was little he didn't do. As an Austrian-born journalist and international man-about-town, he hobnobbed with Langston Hughes and W. H. Auden and rode a Zeppelin to
the North Pole, all before being imprisoned by Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War. Later, while fleeing the Gestapo in France, he swallowed some suicide pills he'd received from famed philosopher Walter Benjamin. The pills killed Benjamin, but not Koestler, allowing him to continue on with his eventful life—taking LSD with Timothy Leary, getting drunk with Dylan Thomas, buddying up with George Orwell, giving political advice to Margaret Thatcher, teaching a young Salman Rushdie, and sleeping with Simone de Beauvoir.

In between all that activity, Koestler managed to tackle the philosophy of making jokes in his 1964 book
The Act of Creation
. Koestler described humor as “the clash of two mutually incompatible codes”—the fusion of two frames of reference that for the most part have nothing to do with each other.
⁵
For Koestler, the point where the two frames of reference bisect each other equals the punch line. Puns are the simplest case, since they play with two different meanings of the same word. Greg Dean's joke-creation process that we learned about in Los Angeles fits, too, since it involves combining two opposing scripts with a single connecting concept. But the theory also works with visual humor. Take the captionless cartoon Kanin is submitting this week: it plays with two incompatible frames of reference—the tendency of people to take their dogs for walks, and the sport of bowling. There's nothing inherently comical about either, but intersect the two concepts—have pet walkers and bowling paraphernalia run into each other all at once—and you've found something funny.

Pete's fond of Koestler's work as one way to approach humor creation, but he's not ready to concede it's the be-all, end-all of humor-creation theories. Not surprisingly, he prefers his own benign violation approach: come up with something that seems wrong to you, then find a way to make it okay (or vice versa). He's also quick to point out that the process of combining two otherwise disconnected concepts sometimes just results in gobbledygook. Other times it results in smartphones (“cell phone” plus “internet browser”).
⁶

Koestler believed the “clash of two mutually incompatible codes” wasn't just about making jokes. He saw it as the recipe behind many other forms of human creation, from scientific innovation to artistic genesis. As he wrote, when two planes of reasoning intersect, “the
result is either a
collision
resulting in laughter, or their
fusion
in a new intellectual synthesis, or their
confrontation
in an aesthetic experience.”
⁷

However you build jokes, creativity helps. What's fascinating is that the reverse is true, too: humor helps with creativity. In a 1987 experiment, psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues had subjects try to solve a classic puzzle: attach a candle to a blank wall using only the candle, a box of tacks, and some matches. Folks who first watched a funny blooper reel were more successful at solving the task—tack the box to the wall and then use a match to melt the candle onto the box—than those who exercised or watched a math video.
⁸
And in a more recent MIT study on idea generation, improvisational comedians asked to brainstorm new products generated, on average 20 percent more ideas than professional product designers, and the improv comic's ideas were rated 25 percent more creative than those of the pros.
⁹