The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  His experiments aren’t limited to his day job. The professor has a tendency to live his research, no matter the disastrous results. While he was working toward his PhD in quantitative psychology at Ohio State University, a mentor invited him to Thanksgiving dinner. Pete offered to pay for his meal just to see the reaction to the obvious faux pas.

  Pete puts himself and others in uncomfortable situations to make sense of human behavior—or figure out why so much of it doesn’t make sense. There have to be logical rules behind humanity’s illogical decisions, he figures. He just has to find them. “It’s a way to keep control in an uncertain world,” Pete told me the first time we met. Growing up in a working-class town in southern New Jersey, he sometimes faced the harsh realities of that uncertain world. Yes, there was always food on the table for him and his younger sister, Shannon, but his single mother had to work two or three jobs and sometimes rely on food stamps to do it. Yes, his mom took care of them, but her headstrong and forceful manner didn’t always make her household a fun place to be. And, yes, he sported high-tops and Ocean Pacific T-shirts like the other boys in high school, but by age fourteen, he was working as a stock boy at the local Woolworth’s to pay for it all himself. Maybe that’s why ever since, he’s always been determined to keep everything tidy and under control.

  I could identify with Pete’s compulsive tendencies, maybe more than I liked to admit. In an industry populated by ink-stained shlubs and paper-cluttered offices, I come off as a tad neurotic. To streamline my reporting process, I’ve assembled a small, über-geeky arsenal of digital cameras, foldaway keyboards, and electronic audio-recording pens. In the Denver home I share with my wife, Emily McNeil, and young son, Gabriel, every bookshelf is arranged alphabetically by author and segregated into fiction and nonfiction. (I’d say this drives Emily up the walls, but she’s my perfect match: as orderly and organized as they come.) In my world, unhappiness is a sink full of dirty dishes.

  Pete offered me an all-access tour of his scholarly world. He explained to me that a chunk of his research could be classified as behavioral economics, the growing field of psychologists and economists who are hard at work proving that people don’t make rational financial decisions, as classical economists have long suggested. Instead, they’ve discovered, we do all sorts of odd stuff with our money. While completing his post-doctoral training at Princeton, Pete shared an office with Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychology professor who helped establish the field. Kahneman’s office would never again be so organized.

  But Pete’s interests extend well beyond behavioral economics. He’s not just interested in why people act strangely with their money. He wants to know why they act strangely all the time. A few years ago, he became fascinated by what could be the most peculiar human phenomenon of all.

  While giving a talk at Tulane University about how people are disgusted when churches and pharmaceutical companies use marketing in morally dubious ways, Pete mentioned a story about a church that was giving away a Hummer H2 to a lucky member of its congregation. The crowd cracked up. And then one of the audience members raised her hand with a question. “You say that moral violations cause disgust, yet we are all laughing. Why is that?”

  Pete was stumped. “I’d never thought about it,” he told me.

  He decided to figure it out.

  It doesn’t take long for the Squire to fill up with patrons ready to cheer—or jeer—the comics tonight. Folks are soon packed in so tightly that the communal body heat overwhelms the slowly rotating fans overhead.

  “Welcome to the Squire,” cracks the night’s MC, grinning into the microphone from the bar’s cramped corner stage. “It’s the only place with an indoor outhouse.” He follows the bit up with a joke about accidentally smoking crack. The room roars, and he turns his attention to three innocent-looking audience members who’ve unwisely chosen to sit at the table closest to the stage. Soon he’s detailing the horrendous sexual maneuvers the wide-eyed threesome must perform on one another. The three, it turns out, are friends of Pete’s who thought it would be nice to cheer him on.

  As the MC introduces the first of the night’s amateurs, Pete slips to the back of the room to look over his note cards. “I’m worried my routine may be a little benign,” he admits to me, as the comic on stage fires off a bit about slavery and watermelons.

  I pat him reassuringly on the back, but secretly I’m glad that I’m not the one getting on stage. I’m far from spineless, but anything I’ve done that would be considered gutsy has been under the guise of reporting. I’ve always been content being the guy in the corner taking notes, the one asking the tough questions, and not the one who answers them. When one of the comedians hears there’s a Westword reporter in the house, he can’t help but make a joke about the paper’s numerous medical marijuana dispensary ads. “It should just be a bunch of rolling papers,” he ad-libs as the crowd laughs at my expense. I try, and fail, to turn myself invisible.

  Other aspiring comics take their turn at the mike, trotting out one offensive subject after another: masturbation, misogyny, Jim Crow laws, drug overdoses.

  It’s Pete’s turn. “This next guy isn’t a comedian,” says the MC, “but a moderately funny professor from the University of Colorado. Give it up for Dr. Peter McGraw!”

  Pete bounds onto the stage and grabs the microphone from the stand—promptly disconnecting it from its cord. The audience goes silent as the professor fumbles with the device.

  Comedy 1, science 0.

  Pete is far from the first scholar to dive into the wild world of humor. There’s an entire academic association dedicated to the subject: the International Society for Humor Studies. Launched in 1989 as an outgrowth of an earlier organization, the World Humor and Irony Membership, or WHIM, the ISHS now includes academics from disciplines ranging from philosophy to medicine to linguistics, a group that has little in common other than a shared fascination with humor and a tendency to be snubbed by colleagues in their own fields for their offbeat scholarly interests.1

  Altogether they’re a productive lot, organizing an annual international conference covering topics like “The Messianic Tendency in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy” and “Did Hitler Have a Sense of Humor?”; founding HUMOR: The International Journal of Humor Research, a quarterly publication chock-full of fascinating reads like “The Great American Lawyer Joke Explosion” and “Fartspottings: Reflections on ‘High Seriousness’ and Poetic Passings of Wind”; and compiling the soon-to-be-released Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, a 1,000-page behemoth covering the whole of humor research from absurdist humor to xiehouyu (a humorous Chinese figure of speech).

  What’s fascinating about the ISHS, though, is that its members can’t seem to agree on a single theory of what makes things funny.2

  It’s not as if the experts don’t have enough humor theories to choose from. Over the centuries, efforts have been made to explain why we laugh at some things and not at others. The problem, however, is that the world has yet to agree on the right answer. Plato and Aristotle introduced the superiority theory, the idea that people laugh at the misfortune of others. But while their premise seems to explain teasing and slapstick, it doesn’t work for a simple knock-knock joke.

  Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, had a different view. In his 1905 work, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, he argued that humor was a way for people to release psychic energy pent up from repressed sexual and violent thoughts. His so-called relief theory works for dirty jokes—it’s one of the few cases in polite society in which folks are at liberty to talk about their naughty bits. The theory also apparently works for Freud’s own witticisms. In 1984, enterprising humor scholar Elliot Oring set about psychoanalyzing the 200 or so jests, riddles, and pithy anecdotes in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. He concluded that the famously private psychotherapist had hang-ups around money lending, sex, marriage, personal hygiene, and, last but not least, Freud’s self-described “instructress in sexual mat
ters,” his randy old Czech nanny.3

  Score one for relief theory. Still, it’s hard to fit a lot of things people find funny, like puns and tickling, into Freud’s model. It doesn’t help that the rest of Freud’s theory of the unconscious has been abandoned by research psychologists.

  Most experts today subscribe to some variation of the incongruity theory, the idea that humor arises when people discover there’s an inconsistency between what they expect to happen and what actually happens. Or, as seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal put it when he first came up with the concept, “Nothing produces laughter more than a surprising disproportion between that which one expects and that which one sees.”4 Incongruity has a lot going for it—jokes with punch lines, for example, fit this model well. But even the incongruity theory falls short when it comes to tickling or play fighting. And scientists have found that in comedy, unexpectedness is overrated. In 1974, two University of Tennessee professors had 44 undergraduates listen to a variety of Bill Cosby and Phyllis Diller routines. Before each punch line, the researchers stopped the tape and asked the students to predict what came next. Then another group of students was asked to rate the funniness of each of the comedians’ jokes. Comparing the results, the professors found that the predictable punch lines were rated considerably funnier than those that were unexpected. The level of incongruity of each punch line was inversely related to the funniness of the joke.5

  There’s another dilemma with all these theories. While they all have their strengths, they also share a major malfunction: they short-circuit when it comes to explaining why some things are not funny. Accidentally killing your mother-in-law would be incongruous, assert superiority, and release pent-up aggressive tensions, but it’s hardly a gut-buster.6

  It might seem that there’s no way to cover the wide world of comedy with a single, tidy explanation. But for someone like Pete, a guy who yearns for order, that wouldn’t do. “People say humor is such a complex phenomenon, you can’t possibly have one theory that explains it,” he told me. “But no one talks that way about other emotional experiences. Most scientists agree on a simple set of principles that explain when most emotions arise.” It’s generally accepted that anger occurs when something bad happens to you and you blame someone else for it, while guilt occurs when something bad happens to someone else and you blame yourself.

  It has to be the same for humor, Pete figured. There has to be a simple explanation that the authorities have long overlooked. He thinks he found it by doing a Google search for “humor theory.”

  One of the first results led to “A Theory of Humor,” an article published in a 1998 issue of HUMOR: The International Journal of Humor Research, written by a man named Thomas Veatch.7 Veatch posited what he called the “N+V Theory,” the idea that humor occurs when someone perceives a situation is a violation of a “subjective moral principle” (V) while simultaneously realizing that the situation is normal (N). To prove that his idea worked, Veatch, who had a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, laid out point after compelling point, meandering from computational linguistics to developmental psychology to predicate calculus. It’s heady, compelling stuff, and to Pete, Veatch’s theory was closer to the truth than anything he’d come across. But it hadn’t rocked the field of humor scholarship. Why had Veatch and his N+V Theory sunk into obscurity?

  While Veatch had once taught linguistics at Stanford University, he’d since dropped off the academic radar. It took several weeks of online sleuthing and unreturned voice mails to get Veatch on the phone from his home in Seattle.

  The N+V Theory started with a simple joke, Veatch told me:

  Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?

  Because it was dead.

  “I first heard it in ’85 or ’86, and I laughed for like an hour,” said Veatch. That didn’t make sense to him, so he thought long and hard about it—as he did about most things. Growing up, Veatch says, he was a loner who read every book in his grade-school library. It was the first inkling of a prodigious mind that, according to Veatch, would later dream up the MP3 player long before anyone had heard of MP3s and devise a phonetics chart that he believes can teach literacy to downtrodden people around the world.

  Before those endeavors, he decided to explain the dead-monkey joke. So he sat down in his Stanford office one day in 1992 and came up with the N+V theory. The concept seemed to explain the joke. The lifeless monkey was a violation, but the situation was normal because dead monkeys will fall out of their trees. The premise seemed to work for every other kind of humor Veatch could think of, too. So in 1998, he published his theory in HUMOR and waited for a response. And waited. And waited. And waited.

  It wouldn’t be the last time Veatch’s plans wouldn’t go as expected. After his stint at Stanford, he tried to make a go of it in the business world, but his attempt to build a speech-synthesizing e-mail reader fell through, as did Teachionary, a language-learning program he developed. He’s since tried other jobs: construction manager, carpenter, pizza delivery guy, plumber’s helper.

  Veatch’s tale seems like a testament to just how daunting a task it is to define humor once and for all. But his predecessor’s fate hardly gave Pete pause. Veatch’s theory engrossed him. As far as he could tell, Veatch had nearly hit the theoretical bull’s-eye. But something about it still seemed not quite right.

  Pete’s department chair, Donnie Lichtenstein, summed up the problem when doctoral student Caleb Warren tried to illustrate Veatch’s theory by referring to a fictional story used in psychological surveys that often got people chuckling. As the tale goes, a man decides to use his kitten as a sex toy, with the feline purring in enjoyment. That situation may be funny, said Lichtenstein, but nothing about it is normal.

  So Pete and Caleb set upon improving Veatch’s work and ended up with a new comedic axiom: the benign violation theory. According to this amended theory, humor only occurs when something seems wrong, unsettling or threatening (i.e., a violation), but simultaneously seems okay, acceptable, or safe (i.e., benign). When something is just a violation, such as somebody falling down the stairs, people feel bad about it. But according to Pete and Caleb, when the violation turns out to be benign, such as someone falling down the stairs and ending up unhurt, people often do an about-face and react in at least one of three ways: they feel amused, they laugh, or they make a judgment—“That was funny.”

  To them, the term “benign,” rather than “normal,” better encapsulated the many ways a violation could be okay, acceptable, or safe—and gave them a clear-cut tool to determine when and why a violation such as the feline-turned-sex-toy story can be funny. While heavy petting with a kitten may not be normal, according to the story, the kitten purred and seemed to enjoy the contact. The violation was benign—no kittens were harmed in the making of the joke. Later, when Pete and Caleb used this story in an experiment, participants who read a version in which the kitten whined in displeasure at the heavy petting found the tale far less funny than the “happy kitty” scenario.8

  Then there’s the story of the church-raffle Hummer that got Pete pondering what makes things funny in the first place. The idea of mixing the sanctity of Christianity with a four-wheeled symbol of secular excess strikes people as a violation. But when Pete presented the raffle story to regular churchgoers as well as people who rarely go to church, those less committed to Christianity were more likely to find a holy Hummer benign and therefore found it funnier.9

  Immoral behaviors are not the only kind of humorous situation that could be explained by the benign violation theory. A dirty joke trades on moral or social violations, but it’s only going to get a laugh if the person listening is liberated enough to consider risqué subjects such as sex okay to talk about. Puns can be seen as linguistic violations that still make grammatical sense, though they’re typically only funny to cerebral types and grammarians who care about the nuances of the English language. Sarcasm violates conversational rules by meaning the opposite of
what’s said. No one is going to be amused by a crack like “You’re good at basketball? Yeah, right!” if they don’t notice the exaggerated tone and grasp the intended meaning. Nor is the guy who thinks he’s good at basketball.

  And tickling, long a sticking point for other humor theories, fits perfectly. After all, tickling involves violating someone’s physical space in a benign way. People can’t tickle themselves—a phenomenon that baffled Aristotle—because it isn’t a violation. Nor will people laugh if a creepy stranger tries to tickle them, since nothing about that is benign.

  Pete’s ideas about tickling were recently boosted by, of all things, a tickle robot. Cognitive neuroscientists at University College London devised an apparatus in which subjects could control, via a joystick, a mechanical arm brushing a piece of foam over their other hand. When the arm corresponded to the joystick movements, participants didn’t find the feeling all that ticklish, but the more the experimenters delayed or shifted the direction of the arm’s movements from that of the joystick, the more ticklish folks rated the sensation.10 These findings meshed with the idea that laughter occurs when tickling is a benign violation: adding a small delay or change in direction of the robotic arm added just enough of a violation to make it ticklish.

  Almost as soon as Pete unveiled the benign violation theory, people began to challenge it, trying to come up with some zinger, gag, or “yo momma” joke that doesn’t fit the theory. Although Pete is willing to engage in such rhetorical debates, he’s weary of doing so. For one thing, humor theorists had been relying far too long on such “thought experiments,” trying to shoehorn as many jokes as possible into their theory of choice. But outside of philosophy, thought experiments only get you so far. For another, says Pete, it’s fine to criticize the theory, but you’d best offer up a better alternative. And Pete’s confident that the benign violation theory outperforms incongruity, relief, superiority, and all other humor-theory contenders. To prove it, he and Caleb turned to science—hence the founding of HuRL. “Your intuition often leads you astray,” Pete said to me. “But within the lab, you can set theories against one another.”