The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  Praise for

  THE HUMOR CODE

  “Peter and Joel’s globe-spanning search for what makes things funny is a wonderful page-turner that entertains as much as it informs.”

  —Dan Ariely, author of The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty and Predictably Irrational

  “This book tickled my hippocampus. Joel Warner and Peter McGraw gave me paradigm-altering insights into humor, but also creativity, business, happiness, and, of course, flatulence.”

  —A.J. Jacobs, author of Drop Dead Healthy and The Year of Living Biblically

  “If you’ve ever wondered why we laugh at what we do, you have to read this book about the DNA of humor. The odd-couple authors take us on a journey from the halls of science to the backstage of Los Angeles comedy clubs, and they show us why people can laugh amidst tensions in Palestine or a clown brigade in the Amazon. It’s part Indiana Jones, part Tina Fey, and part Crime Scene Investigation, and it will make you smarter and happier.”

  —Chip Heath, author of Decisive, Switch, and Made to Stick

  “Engaging, wise, and of course funny, The Humor Code is a wonderful quest to discover who and what makes us laugh. Pete McGraw and Joel Warner are the best of company, and you’ll be glad you took this trip with them.”

  —Susan Cain, bestselling author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

  “I’ve always been fascinated by how humor works. I’m not willing to say that The Humor Code solves the puzzle once and for all, but it comes pretty close—and along the way it’s a hell of a ride.”

  —Jimmy Carr, stand-up comedian, television host, actor, and coauthor of Only Joking: What’s So Funny About Making People Laugh?

  “The Humor Code is a fun narrative of how a serious scientific theory is born, tested, and lived.”

  —Ben Huh, CEO, The Cheezburger Network

  “Spanning five continents, McGraw and Warner’s quest for a unified field theory of funny may be quixotic, but like Don Q and Sancho, their misadventures are irresistible and their enthusiasm is as infectious as the laughter they chronicle. Together they manage to find the science in comedy and the comedy in science, and share it all with the reader in this playful Baedeker of humor.”

  —Barnet Kellman; Emmy Award–winning director of Murphy Brown and Mad About You, professor at the University of California School of Cinematic Arts, and codirector of Comedy@SCA

  “The Humor Code is so good that I wish I wrote it. In fact, I’ve already started telling people I did. Luckily, Pete McGraw and Joel Warner are givers, so they won’t mind. They’ve given us a remarkable look at what makes us laugh, with the perfect blend of science, stories, satire, and sweater vests. This book has ‘bestseller’ written all over it.”

  —Adam Grant, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author of Give and Take

  “McGraw and Warner have done something quite remarkable and commendable. They’ve taken an intriguing question regarding the nature of humor and artfully mined answers from both the outcomes of scientific research and their own ‘worldwide comedy tour’ experiences. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  —Robert Cialdini, bestselling author of Influence

  “The Humor Code is a rollicking tour de farce that blends academic insights and amusing anecdotes to answer some of the most serious (and frivolous) questions about humor, from what makes us laugh and why we laugh at all, to how the world’s cultures came to have completely different senses of humor.”

  —Adam Alter, New York Times bestselling author of Drunk Tank Pink and assistant professor of marketing and psychology at New York University

  “If you’ve ever been interested in trying comedy, this book will either scare you away from it or force you to do it. I consider both options a success.”

  —Mike Drucker, standup comedian and writer for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

  “If you’re doing business in the global marketplace, The Humor Code is a must-read. Not only did I learn what makes things humorous around the world, now I understand why nobody in Japan ever laughed at my jokes!”

  —Marty St. George, senior vice president of marketing, JetBlue Airways

  “Blending cutting-edge science and clever stories, The Humor Code will help you find a funnier world—whether you are on Twitter or not.”

  —Claire Diaz-Ortiz, author of Twitter for Good and innovator at Twitter, Inc.

  “Funny, poignant, and inspiring, Peter and Joel manage the tricky task of vivisecting comedy without losing the patient.”

  —Andy Wood, cofounder and producer of the Bridgetown Comedy Festival

  “Humor is like happiness—universal but subjective. What’s great about The Humor Code is that it takes a scientific look at how humor differs across cultures [while] vitally connecting us at the same time.”

  —Jenn Lim, CEO and chief happiness officer of Delivering Happiness

  “A harrowing tale of men obsessed with understanding a gargantuan and enigmatic beast called Funny. This book might as well be titled ‘Moby Dick Jokes.’ ”

  —Baron Vaughn, comedian; as seen on Comedy Central, Conan, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and his podcast Deep S##!

  “Leave it to a reporter and a scientist to try to ruin something beautiful by dissecting it, and instead create something wonderful. The Humor Code is a tremendous book.”

  —Shane Snow, technology journalist and cofounder of Contently

  “The search for what makes things funny was one we found we could not stop reading. Two thumbs up (Andrew hated it).”

  —The Grawlix (comedians Adam Cayton-Holland, Andrew Orvedahl, and Ben Roy)

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  CONTENTS

  Authors’ Note

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. COLORADO: Set-up

  2. LOS ANGELES: Who is funny?

  3. NEW YORK: How do you make funny?

  4. TANZANIA: Why do we laugh?

  5. JAPAN: When is comedy lost in translation?

  6. SCANDINAVIA: Does humor have a dark side?

  7. PALESTINE: Can you find humor where you least expect it?

  8. THE AMAZON: Is laughter the best medicine?

  9. MONTREAL: Punch line

  Acknowledgments

  About Peter McGraw and Joel Warner

  Notes

  Index

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  Portions of this book—a line here, a paragraph there—previously appeared under one or both of our bylines in various publications, including Wired, Wired.com, Westword newspaper, Salon, The Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and our personal websites (PeterMcGraw.org and JoelWarner.com). Please don’t hold it against us. We were eager to spread the word about what we were up to.

  Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

  —E. B. White, 1941

  Let’s kill some frogs.

  INTRODUCTION

  People a lot smarter and more important than the two of us have pondered what makes things funny. Plato and Aristotle contemplated the meaning of comedy while laying the foundations of Western philosophy. Thomas Hobbes probed the issue within the pages of his momentous tome Leviathan. Charles Darwin looked for the seeds of laughter in the joyful cries of tickled chimpanzees. Sigmund Freud sought the underlying motivations behind jokes in the nook
s and crannies of our unconscious.

  None of them got it right. Yet for some reason, we think we can succeed where they all failed.

  Who are we? A dream team of Nobel Prize–winning scientists and Emmy-laden comedy writers? Not exactly.

  Let’s start with my co-author: Peter McGraw, the so-called “brains” of the operation. An academic with an adventurous side, he’s the guy who set this outlandish quest in motion. As a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, he’s obsessed with making sense out of insanity, order out of chaos. His university office is impeccably organized, with piles of journal articles and academic surveys—on topics ranging from the economics of gun shows to mega-church marketing strategies—arranged by subject, stacked in perfect columns, and labeled with orderly Post-it notes. To try to understand the odd ways the world works, he’s circumnavigated the globe on a ship. Twice. He’s just as exacting regarding his teaching techniques. Lately, before classes, he’s been telling himself he’s going to a big, exciting party, to ensure his lectures are as energetic and engaging as possible. For a professor who goes by “Pete” instead of “Dr. McGraw,” stuffy and long-winded doesn’t cut it.

  So when he started contemplating what makes things funny and found that little about it made sense, that wouldn’t stand. He had to find a nice, tidy explanation.

  Then there’s me, Joel Warner, the more cautious half of our duo. As a journalist, I’ve always suspected that there’s something about me that’s not quite right. While my colleagues thirst for tips on dirty cops and City Hall corruption, I prefer stories on real-life superheroes and beer-delivering robots. As an upbeat newshound, I’ve never been fully comfortable in an industry that relishes tragedy over comedy. Maybe, I figure, if I can help Pete solve the riddle behind the lighter side of life, I won’t be so confused.I

  Considering our pedestrian backgrounds, it might seem unlikely that we can outperform some of history’s greatest minds in our quest to crack the humor code. But we have a couple advantages. For one thing, we suspect we have the timing right. Although comedy has been around since the dawn of civilization, it has never been so pervasive and accessible. Comedians such as Will Ferrell and Tina Fey are among America’s biggest celebrities. Satirical news shows such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have become news sources for an entire generation. Roughly a quarter of all television commercials attempt to be humorous, and the internet has become a 24-hour one-stop shop for laughs. Everywhere you look, somebody is making a joke—which means those jokes have never been so easy to study.

  Plus, we have science and technology on our side. (And we don’t just mean we have Google.) Aided by increasingly advanced technologies, scientists are piecing together the intricacies of the human condition. Psychologists are probing our unconscious motivations, biologists are tracking down our evolutionary origins, and computer scientists are building new forms of artificial intelligence. While these efforts are helping to solve some of the universe’s greatest mysteries, they could also help us figure out why we laugh at farts.

  Our plan, simply put, merges the best of both worlds, a mash-up of science and comedy—two topics that don’t always get along. We’ll apply cutting-edge research techniques to the wide world of humor while subjecting the zingers, wisecracks, and punch lines we’ve all taken for granted to hard-and-fast analysis back in the lab.

  Along the way, we aim to answer tough questions that are bound to turn heads of scientists and comedians alike: Do comics need to come from screwed-up childhoods? What’s the secret to winning the New Yorker cartoon caption contest? Why does being funny make you more attractive? Who’s got a bigger funny bone—men or women, Democrats or Republicans? What is, quantifiably, the funniest joke in the world? Is laughter really the best medicine? Can a joke ruin your life—or lead to revolution? And, most important of all, do the French love Jerry Lewis?

  As with all the best experiments, not everything will go as planned. There will be bickering, bruised egos, and, yes, more than a few bad jokes. Still, we’re confident that the two of us make a good team. Pete’s got a way with data, while I have a way with words. Pete’s willing to pursue his research in the most outrageous circumstances imaginable, while I have the wherewithal to keep us out of trouble. At least, that’s what we’ve told ourselves.

  To cap off our expedition, we’ll tackle one final challenge, one that’s either the ultimate high-stakes experiment or a scheme as harebrained as they come. We’ll use our newfound knowledge to try to kill it on the largest comedy stage in the world.

  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Our journey begins, appropriately enough, with a set-up straight out of a joke:

  Did you hear the one about the professor and the journalist who walk into a bar?

  * * *

  I. We thought long and hard on how best to write this book. A third-person account: “We ask Louis C.K. way too much about his physical anatomy”? A God’s-eye-view of our hijinks: “Pete’s busy getting an exfoliation scrub when Joel gets chased naked out of the Japanese spa”? We decided to go with my personal point of view: “Pete naps and I worry about dengue fever as we fly into the Amazon in a Peruvian Air Force cargo plane packed with 100 clowns.”

  1

  COLORADO

  Set-up

  We walk into the Squire Lounge just as the Denver watering hole is gearing up for its weekly open-mike comedy night. Looking around, Pete grins. “This is fantastic!” he yells over the ruckus, sounding like a field biologist who’s just discovered a strange new animal species. The mirrored walls display awards for “Best Dive Bar in Denver,” the stench of industrial cleaner hangs in the air, and the sound of clanging beer bottles blends into the police sirens wailing through the night outside. The clientele sports tattoos and ironic mustaches, lumberjack shirts, and plastic-rimmed glasses.

  Pete is wearing a sweater vest.

  The professor sticks out here like a six-foot-five, 40-year-old sore thumb. He’s also calm for someone who’s about to do stand-up for the first time. Or for someone who’s been warned that this open mike is the toughest one around. As a local comic put it to me, “If you fail at the Squire, you will not only fail hard, but then you will be cruelly, cruelly mocked.”

  Rolling up the sleeves of his button-down shirt, Pete orders us a couple whiskeys on the rocks. “This is a welcoming crowd,” he cracks sarcastically.

  I’m soon ordering another round. I don’t know why I’m the more nervous of the two of us. I have little at stake in Pete’s stand-up routine. We’ve only known each other for a few weeks, but I’d like him to succeed. I fear that’s not likely to happen.

  Pete’s already working the room. He zeroes in on a woman by the pool table. She turns out to be another open-mike first-timer. “Did you think about your outfit tonight?” he asks. “I put this on so I look like a professor.”

  He glances around the room. The neon Budweiser signs on the walls cast a bluish, sickly hue on the grizzled faces lined up at the bar.

  Turning back to the woman, Pete offers an unsolicited piece of advice: “No joking about Marxism or the military-industrial complex.”

  I’d stumbled upon Pete after having written an article about gangland shootings and fire bombings for Westword, the alternative weekly newspaper in Denver. I was eager for a palate cleanser. I hoped that it wouldn’t involve cultivating anonymous sources or filing federal open-records requests. Yes, such efforts have brought down presidents, but I’m no 31-year-old Woodward or Bernstein. I’d rather find another story like the profile I wrote of a McDonald’s franchise owner who used his arsenal of fast-food inventions to break the world record for drive-thru Quarter Pounders served in an hour. Or the coffee connoisseur I’d followed to Ethiopia in search of the shadowy origins of the world’s most expensive coffee bean. (The expedition broke down several dozen miles short of its goal thanks to caffeine-fueled bickering, impassable muddy roads, and reports of man-eating lions.)

  When I
heard about a Boulder professor who was dissecting comedy’s DNA, I’d found my story.

  It’s true, Pete told me when I first got him on the phone. He’d started something he called the Humor Research Lab—also known as HuRL. His research assistants (the Humor Research Team, aka HuRT) were just about to run a new round of experiments. Maybe I’d like to come by and watch.

  A week later, sitting in a large, white conference room at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, I witnessed Pete’s peculiar approach to humor research. Four student volunteers filed into the room, signed off on the appropriate consent forms, and then sat and watched as a somber-faced research assistant dimmed the lights and played a clip from the hit comedy Hot Tub Time Machine. After ten minutes of scatological gags and off-color sex jokes, the students filled out a questionnaire about the film. Did they find the scene in which the BMW keys were removed from a dog’s butt funny? What about the line “A taxidermist is stuffing my mom”? Or the part where a character breaks his catheter and sprays urine on everybody?

  The experiment, Pete explained to me, was the latest chapter in HuRL’s attempts to understand what makes things funny. Other tests included forcing subjects to watch on repeat a YouTube video of a guy driving a motorcycle into a fence, to determine when, exactly, it ceases to be amusing. Another exposed participants to a real-life ad of an anthropomorphized lime peeing into a glass of soda, then had them drink lime cola to see if they thought it tasted like pee.

  For someone like Pete, there was nothing unusual about this research. Over the course of his relatively short career, he’s haggled with casket manufacturers at a funeral directors’ convention, talked shop with soldiers of fortune at a gun show, and sung hymns at a Fundamentalist Baptist church in West Texas, all for the sake of science.