by Peter McGraw
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
But beyond watching America’s Funniest Home Videos or doing improv all day, how else can budding humorists put their minds in the best possible position to combine all these disparate concepts? Koestler believed cleverness played a factor, as well as being worldly or well-read enough to have many frames of reference.
This recipe for humor production seems so simple (acquire a lot of information, then combine it in unusual ways), it’s a wonder that no one has programmed a computer to do it for them. In fact, folks have been hard at work designing robo-jokesters for decades. There’s JAPE, the Joke Analysis and Production Engine; STANDUP, the System To Augment Non-speakers’ Dialogue Using Puns; LIBJOB, the lightbulb-joke generator; and DEviaNT, the Double Entendre via Noun Transfer program. And for computer programmers looking for just the right witty acronym for the next big comedy computer, there’s the HAHAcronym Generator.10
Unfortunately, all these attempts have proven is that, yes, computers can tell jokes, but only dumb ones. Consider the following computer-generated zingers:
What kind of animal rides a catamaran?
A cat.
What is the difference between leaves and a car?
One you brush and rake, the other you rush and brake.11
If robots ever conquer the world, we’re in for a dystopian future of horrible puns. That’s because jokes, like puns, involve simple, fixed data sets like word lists and definitions, where computers excel. But most comedy trades in concepts that aren’t simple or fixed at all. The best comedy mines a wide world of attitudes, assumptions, morals, and taboos, and getting any computer to get the joke—much less to come up with its own and know when and to whom to tell it—would require uploading into it all of humanity.12
Maybe that’s why Koestler figured creating jokes wasn’t as simple as being intelligent and creatively combining different subjects. Successful humor creators also have to be comfortable with “thinking aside,” he wrote.13 It’s not about following rules. It’s about breaking them—shifting perspectives, exploring the absurd, and probing the outer limits of what’s acceptable.
Kanin is well versed in thinking aside. “My best ideas seem to be combinations of items that come out of nowhere,” he says as we take a walk through Park Slope, meandering past the triumphal arch and martial statuary of Grand Army Plaza. And yes, he admits, he does tend to be a bit adventurous and inquisitive. If he were dropped into an alien metropolis, he says, “I would want to go in every room in every building in the city.” Of course, he admits with a smirk, then he might be going about this cartooning thing all wrong: “Here I am, sitting in a single room, drawing pictures and not getting around.”
We ponder this as Kanin stops by a streetside fruit vendor, buying three bananas. We each eat one, to help prevent Bananageddon.
The mass-market humor ch
urned out by Kanin and all the other humorists, big-time and small, who populate New York not only has to make people laugh; it also has to sell. It has to sell New Yorker issues and Broadway tickets; it has to turn books into bestsellers and websites into viral sensations; it has to fill movie theaters and primetime television blocks. And nowhere is the line between what’s funny and what sells finer than on Madison Avenue, where the country’s ad firms attempt to churn out one humorous marketing message after another to encourage everybody to buy, buy, buy.
But does it work? When it comes to creating humor for advertising, does funny sell?
A few weeks before our trip to New York, Pete received an unexpected call from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the country’s biggest nonprofit focusing on teenage pregnancy. The Washington, DC–based organization had launched a new birth-control campaign that pushed the comedic envelope to get the attention of 18- to 29-year-old men. There were YouTube videos of talking condoms and Saturday Night Live Digital Short–inspired hip-hop songs and cartoons of Coca-Cola douches. But the folks in charge weren’t sure the public service announcements were working. Did adding all those jokes make for more compelling marketing messages?
The advertising industry seems to think so. In 2008, U.S. advertisers spent somewhere between $20 and $60 billion on humorous marketing.14 By that time, more than three-quarters of all Super Bowl ads were designed to be funny.15
There might be a method to this marketing madness. Researchers have nailed down a few ways in which funny ads succeed. Humorous marketing does tend to get people’s attention, and if the source of humor is well connected to the message, folks are more likely to remember the ads and recall the products being advertised.16 As the ad world is quick to point out to their clients, humorous ads are also more enjoyable and more likely to be discussed. But as for all the other things funny marketing is supposed to do—like getting people to actually buy the product—conclusive proof just isn’t there.
The best humorous marketing is all about nuance and positioning, believes Pete. As he’s found with his colleague Caleb Warren, it’s not the comedy that matters; it’s how the comedy is carried out. According to the benign violation theory, humor is caused by something potentially wrong, unsettling, or threatening. That means even if an ad is funny, if marketers aren’t careful, they could end up hurting the brand.17
It’s one of the reasons, although far from the only one, that a 1999 commercial for the shoe chain Just for Feet is considered among the worst of all time. In the spot, a Humvee full of white hunters chases down a Kenyan distance runner, tranquilizes him, and slaps a pair of Nikes on his feet. The fallout was so extensive that Just for Feet sued the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi for malpractice to the tune of $10 million.18
Aside from high-profile flops, though, it’s difficult to figure out whether most funny ads succeed or bomb. That’s why the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy had come to Pete. The organization wanted to know for sure if its new funny ads were working—so it was hoping HuRL would run experiments on condom jokes in PSAs.
Of course, we replied. Anything in the name of science.
Pete decided to focus on one of their latest spots, a web video featuring a spokesman losing it while reading cue cards about birth control statistics among young adults. (“One in five guys believes having sex standing up reduces the chance of pregnancy. . . . What, are you bleeping kidding me?! That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard in my bleeping life!”) Pete thought the video might be turning off its intended audience, since it made the people who don’t use birth control the butt of the joke.
We worked with the production team behind the PSA, producing three new versions of the video. Two employed a gentle, affiliative form of teasing: “One in five guys believes having sex standing up prevents pregnancy. . . . Seriously? You know better! Just take two seconds and go, ‘Yeah, you know what, that’s not how sperms work.’ ” The final video was a control version, a straight reading of the facts in a somber fashion.
With the help of cognitive scientist Phil Fernbach and graduate student Julie Schiro, Pete recruited a group of 18- to 29-year-old males and assigned each to watch one of the four videos. The results were surprising: subjects who watched the dry, boring control version of the PSA were far more likely to seek out more information about sexual health than those who saw any of the funny versions. As Pete figures, while the funny versions might have been attention-grabbing and entertaining, they also signaled that the situation wasn’t serious. Teen pregnancy was something to laugh about, not ponder. Pete has taken to referring to the results as the “Jon Stewart Effect,” after the allegation that while political-satire shows like The Daily Show might get people to pay attention to unpleasant news, the comedy involved could make them less likely to right the wrongs that they’re learning about.19
Does that mean we’d all be better served if commercials and ads were just a solemn laundry list of facts? Probably not. Maybe a better way to create effective funny marketing is to think of it like a good wedding toast, suggests Pete. Start with attention-grabbing jokes, then put all kidding aside and make your point.
Tuesdays have always been cartoonist open-call day at the New Yorker. As far back as the 1930s, artists referred to it as the “Tuesday Inquisition.” It made the magazine’s founder, Harold Ross, so nervous he was constantly rearranging the desks to make the place as presentable as possible.20 For the cartoonists who show up on Tuesdays, it’s the first step in a multistage selection process, the first gauging of whether the cartoon is funny enough to appear in the magazine and earn its creator upward of $1,000.
On a Tuesday, we go with Zach Kanin to cartoonist open call.
I always pictured the New Yorker offices as a big, ornate smoking lounge, with everyone sipping cognac in leather arm chairs and pontificating on the decline of the Euro. In reality, it looks like every other newsroom I’ve ever worked in: a maze of nondescript, slightly messy cubicles, with oddball marketing swag tucked away in random nooks and review copies of books stacked here and there in precarious towers. It’s the inevitable detritus of an unceasing production schedule, of a place where there’s never downtime for deep cleaning.
A dozen or so cartoonists mill about in front of Bob Mankoff’s office, catching up and waiting to be called in. Most are regulars, though it’s not unusual to find a new face or two in the crowd. The weekly event is open to anybody. You don’t have to hoof it all the way here to have your work considered, but getting a chance to meet with the cartoon editor of the New Yorker is an opportunity most aspiring cartoonists aren’t likely to pass up.
Mankoff, looking sharp in a seersucker jacket and collared shirt, calls the cartoonists one by one into his small office, which has a view of Midtown and piles of drawings sprawled across every surface. First up is Sidney Harris, who’s been publishing cartoons in the New Yorker since 1962. Mankoff greets him like an old friend, reminiscing about the weekly pilgrimages Harris and his colleagues, cartoons in hand, used to undertake around New York decades ago, from the New Yorker offices to Look magazine, from Saturday Evening Post to National Lampoon. Mankoff throws in a good-natured barb, razzing the old-timer about how he’s not good at drawing deer. “Leonardo couldn’t draw a cat!” harrumphs Harris before handing over his latest cartoon submissions.
Then there’s Sam Ferri, a younger guy who’s had success in other publications such as Time Out and The New York Press, but is still trying to break into the New Yorker. With him, Mankoff takes more time. He scrutinizes Ferri’s submissions—dense vignettes of New York daily life that are strikingly different from the cartoons that usually make the magazine. Here and there he offers feedback: “Make your stuff less fussy.” “You don’t need these extra lines on this guy’s arms.” But he tells Ferri not to give up, to keep going in this unique direction, even though it may take a while to pay off. “You are doing something different, and you are doing something harder,” Mankoff says w
ith a sigh. “There are no medals for that.”
Mankoff knows what it’s like to be in Ferri’s shoes. On his wall is a framed copy of one of Mankoff’s own cartoons published in the magazine, one of the most popular among those purchasing online reprints. In it, a CEO says into his telephone, “No, Thursday’s out. How about never—is never good for you?” It took Mankoff years to produce stuff like that. When he was still a struggling cartoonist, he submitted more than a thousand cartoons here before he ever got one accepted.
Last one in is Kanin. “Zach, of course, is my protégé,” says Mankoff as he flips through his submissions. “I taught him everything I know. It took me half an hour.” He pauses on Kanin’s cartoon featuring the bowling ball and pins meeting at the street corner. He likes it—a lot. “But here is the problem,” he says, pointing to the leash that’s tied around the bowling ball. “How is it going to roll? The fact checkers might catch that.” He’s not joking. Like everything else in the magazine, New Yorker cartoons must endure the rigors of the publication’s infamous fact-checkers. One time, a cartoon featuring a talking bluebird nearly got nixed—not because birds can’t talk, but because the bluebird involved wasn’t the correct size for the genus Sialia.
Mankoff likes to joke, “Basically what I do is I reject cartoons.” Truthfully, he’s quite good at doing it. When he first became cartoon editor, the famous playwright David Mamet sent him a letter noting, “I’ve taken the liberty of sending you this batch of cartoons.” Mankoff responded, “Thank you very much for your submission. I’ve taken the liberty of sending you a play.” But sitting here in his office, it’s clear he’s doing far more than just rejecting. He’s working with each cartoonist, editing them, helping them understand what separates regular cartoons from New Yorker cartoons.
