The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  The criteria for Mankoff aren’t as simple as what’s funny and what’s not. As he’s the first to admit, the funniest cartoons often don’t make it. As in advertising, the comedy here is all about context. “The cartoons in the rejection pile make no point aside from being funny,” Mankoff tells us after the open call over lunch at a fashionable French restaurant, where he orders a veggie burger and herbal tea. The ones that make it in are funny, too, but also have a point. For Mankoff, it’s all about insight—a great New Yorker cartoon has an “aha!” moment, alongside the “ha ha.” That “aha!” it turns out, is crucial; a large body of psychological research suggests that making creative connections, whether it’s understanding a witty punch line or solving a tricky math problem, is an innately pleasurable experience.21

  It’s why Mankoff is fond of Kanin’s bowling-ball image: it’s a smile-and-nod joke. It takes two common cartoon tropes—bowling and street-corner mishaps—and combines them in a cunning way. It’s the sort of gag that fits into the witty yet respectable legacy handed down by some of the New Yorker’s comedy giants—the doughy simplicity of James Thurber, the shadowy macabre of Charles Addams, the eccentric doodles of Saul Steinberg. “One of the objectives of the New Yorker is to advance cartooning as an art,” Mankoff says. He hopes to do that by working hand in hand with cartoonists, essentially creating comedy by committee.

  That’s the de facto way of doing things in the big business of humor creation—comedy by committee, jokes via brainstorm. Sitcoms are produced by writers’ rooms, funny movies by one or more screenwriters plus a director, editors, producers, and all sorts of hangers-on. Probably only in stand-up is joke creation still mostly a solitary exercise, and even there, many comics work with other comedians and writers to fine-tune their routines.

  The communal comedy strategy makes sense. If you’re aiming to come up with something that’s going to make millions of people laugh, a good way to go is the shotgun approach: stick ten funny people in a room and hope for the best. Do you want to risk your multimillion-dollar film, TV or magazine budget on a single schmuck with a good sense of humor?

  Still, Mankoff knows that all his communal work here, culling and editing and crafting burgeoning talent like Kanin’s, isn’t going to produce even a single cartoon that everyone everywhere is going to find hilarious. “It turns out it’s funny enough,” he says, and he’s not saying that to be pessimistic. New Yorker cartoons are different from stand-up comedy, he tells us, where each joke has to work with just about everyone in the comedy-club audience. There are just too many New Yorker readers, too large a comedy audience, to have any cartoon appeal to everyone. “These are like heat-seeking missiles,” Mankoff says of the cartoons. “For each one of these, there will be one you don’t like, but like a heat-seeking missile, it will find its home.” Sure, maybe you don’t love the New Yorker cartoon of one amoeba saying to another, “You’re wasting your time. I’m asexual.” But if Mankoff’s done his job right, enough other people will, snipping it out and fastening it to their refrigerator or tacking it to their cubicle wall or even purchasing a copy from the New Yorker’s online “Cartoon Bank” database, which Mankoff helps run.

  And Mankoff, for one, believes Kanin’s bowling-ball cartoon is funny enough that it will find a home among the magazine’s readers. So it makes the cut, landing in the pile of submissions that will move up the production chain. Let’s just hope the fact-checkers don’t get too picky about the bowling-ball leash.

  Mass-produced comedy also comes with its fair share of risks. While attending an academic conference in Chicago, Pete visited the headquarters of Groupon, the gigantic daily-deal website known for injecting comedy into its online deal descriptions. He visited a cavernous editorial office staffed with hundreds of 20- and 30-year-olds, all of whom seemed to be wearing hoodies, tight sweaters, and ironic glasses. “Groupon is run by hipsters!” he told me when he returned.

  Since every day Groupon puts out the equivalent of a 400-page novel in marketing copy, the challenge, according to Groupon editor in chief Aaron With, is getting all those hipsters to write like a single, tight-sweater-wearing Kurt Vonnegut. It’s why With developed an editorial manual that lays down specific rules about how to inject hilarity into Groupon’s materials. The guide reads like a Groupon coupon making fun of editorial manuals: produce 20 percent humorous content to 80 percent informative content. Include a funny moment every two to four sentences. Stay away from the natural hipster tendency to write about unicycles, mimes, mullets, Snuggies, ligers, hipsters, zombies, pirates, and ninjas. And unicorns—definitely don’t write about unicorns.

  Later, Pete spoke with one of the longest-running writers for Groupon. When he asked him what the hardest part of the job was, the writer responded, “Making something that is actually funny.”

  Still, compared to most mass-market attempts at humor, Groupon is freewheeling. There are just too many people involved, argue critics of Hollywood comedies and sitcoms, too many writers and directors and producers and network executives and studio chiefs and key advertisers. The goal of these gargantuan operations? Maximize the number of people chuckling and minimize those offended. In the television development world, there’s a term for this practice: “Least Objectionable Programming.” The results don’t usually equal hilarity, but then, that’s not the point. It’s to move movie tickets and score high Nielsen ratings.

  Jokes can suffer within the factory system of funny. But what about the comedians themselves? What does the production process do to the folks who come up with the jokes to begin with? We figure the best person to ask is Todd Hanson, the guy behind one of the most celebrated examples of modern American comedy. For the last 21 years, Hanson has been a writer for the satirical newspaper The Onion. Many people consider being among the anointed few to come up with fake Onion news articles such as “Drugs Win Drug War” and “Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid” to be a dream job. If that’s the case, Hanson, who’s been an Onion writer longer than anybody, should have the perfect gig—right?

  A beleaguered-looking Hanson ushers us into his Brooklyn apartment. “There’s massive trauma going on,” he tells us, rubbing his eyes. He looks like he just got out of bed. Either that, or he’s been up for days. The catastrophe, he tells us, is that the company that now owns The Onion is consolidating its operation. That means the writing staff will be relocating from New York to the corporate headquarters in Chicago. There is much more at stake than just changing ZIP codes, says Hanson, slumping into a ratty couch surrounded by empty whiskey bottles and overflowing ashtrays. He rolls up the left sleeve of his T-shirt, revealing a tattoo that reads “Satire.” “I didn’t want to get this tattoo till I felt like I earned it,” he says. When The Onion relocated in 2001 from its original home in Madison, Wisconsin, to New York, he says, “I felt like I earned it.” But now, with the impending move . . . his head slumps, his voice trails off.

  Hanson pulls it together to walk us through The Onion’s production schedule. On Mondays, everyone on the writing staff gets together and offers up 25 potential funny headlines. Of the hundreds submitted, the vast majority are rejected by the group, never to be suggested again. The best fifteen, however, evolve into full stories for the paper. But the person who came up with a winning headline usually isn’t the one to write the story. Another person will edit it, and then nobody in particular will get a byline.

  “Everything at The Onion is in a collaborative voice,” explains Hanson. It’s a dignified approach, one that does away with the cutthroat nature of most comedy writing teams. It’s part of the reason that Hanson and his colleagues are responsible for sticking the landing on one of the most difficult comedic feats in recent memory: figuring out how to be funny right after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

  Hanson watched the Twin Towers disappear from the Manhattan skyline from his Brooklyn window that morning, seemingly taking with them all potential for humor. Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show—all the late-night talk sh
ows halted production. Time magazine declared, “The Age of Irony Comes to an End.” The Onion, as the flagship of everything ironic, seemed to be included in that death knell. The staff had just arrived in New York, and hadn’t yet put out a single issue in their new home. Now, before they had a chance to do so, says Hanson, “We wondered, ‘Is this the end?’ ”

  Timing in comedy has always been tricky. When is it too soon to joke about something, and when is it too late? The trauma of the 9/11 attacks brought the conundrum to a different level. Mark Twain is famously credited with saying, “Humor is tragedy plus time.” But would any amount of time be enough to make the tragedy of 9/11 funny?

  As Pete points out, however, timing is far from the only variable that can be tweaked to help land a joke in its comedic sweet spot. The secret, he says, is understanding that in comedy, emotional attachment is key. To make a joke more or less funny, you can make the violation involved more or less benign by shifting the psychological distance between the violation and the person perceiving it. Waiting for days, months, or years before tackling a taboo subject is an obvious way to make an event feel distant and thus safer. But there are other, less drastic ways to do so, too.

  To prove it, Pete has been running experiments in HuRL. In one study, participants read about a young woman who texted “Haiti” to a mobile charity program more than 200 times without realizing that the nearly $2,000 donation would be added to her cell-phone bill. People found this story more amusing when the woman was described as a stranger rather than a close friend. In other words, an extreme violation like accidentally spending $2,000 was funnier when researchers increased the psychological distance between the person experiencing the tragedy and the person who’s supposed to laugh. But the reverse happened, too. In the same study, other participants read a story about a woman texting “Haiti” five times and accidentally charging $50 to her account. These participants were more likely amused when the woman was described as a friend rather than a stranger. This means less threatening situations such as a $50 mistake can be made funnier by shrinking the distance between the subject of the joke and the person who’s supposed to get it.22

  So maybe folks have it all wrong when they ask whether a joke is “too soon.” Maybe a better way to put it is, “When is the subject matter too close for comfort, and when is it too distant to matter?”

  Hanson and his colleagues looked at 9/11 this way. “To me, it’s not about timing; it’s about validity,” Hanson tells us. “If what you are saying is honest and legitimate and has a valid point, it’s going to be valid the day after, and it’s going to be valid 500 years later.” That’s why less than two weeks after the towers came down, they tackled the tragedy head-on, creating a whole issue devoted to the terrorist attacks.

  Around that same time, comedian Gilbert Gottfried caught flack for making a crack about taking a flight that made a stop at the Empire State Building. In their 9/11 issue, the staff at The Onion didn’t make the same mistake. They didn’t joke about the planes hitting the towers or the civilians who died that day. The subjects were too raw, too close for comfort. Instead, they turned the horrifying terrorists into fools (“Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell” read one article) and cracked wise about the strange aura of confusion and despair that had settled over the country. Hanson wept when he wrote an article titled “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule.”

  The day after the issue came out, The Onion’s fax machine went ballistic with grateful comments, and fan mail started to flow in by the thousands. To this day, it remains the most commented-on issue in The Onion’s history.

  That was a career highlight for Hanson. Since then, things have gone downhill. The Onion is no longer the plucky upstart it once was. It now boasts a national readership in the hundreds of thousands, a major web presence and a daily web broadcast called The Onion News Network. In 2003, Hanson co-wrote an Onion film. But for years, the movie was stuck in development limbo, then released straight to video. Hanson has since disowned his part in it. Now market forces and consumer segmentation play a part in The Onion’s wit, and it’s no longer so easy for Hanson to be so honest without stepping on corporate toes. “Now they measure comedy in terms of quantity, not quality,” he says.

  For Hanson, the move to Chicago might be too much. He admits that he’s not sure how much longer he can be a part of The Onion. But if he leaves, what else could he do? While some Onion writers have gone on to jobs at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Hanson might not be built to handle a move like that. He’s 42 years old and has never done anything in his professional life other than dream up make-believe news stories. In many ways he’s stuck with The Onion, just as he’s stuck with his “Satire” tattoo, which is starting to seem more like a battle wound than a badge of honor.

  We’ve been talking for hours when Hanson’s phone rings. “I’m okay,” he says into the receiver when he picks it up. It’s his therapist. Every night he’s supposed to call her at a specific time. When he doesn’t, she calls him—just to make sure he hasn’t done anything drastic.

  When Hanson hangs up, he’s on the verge of tears. “The world is a sad place,” he says to us. He’s being honest and legitimate, but nothing about it is funny.

  Our time in New York nearly over, we decide to let loose, to get a little debaucherous. Of course, to be productive, we aim to do it the scientific way.

  The idea arose from our obsession with the TV show Mad Men. Is the show correct in its portrayal of well-dressed 1960s ad guys whiling away the noon hour with liquid lunches of Old Fashioneds, then popping back into the office and whipping off a whimsical ad campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes? Does this sort of depravity really lead to successful humorous advertising? More specifically, can booze fuel comedy creation?

  As anyone who’s ever been to a comedy club can attest, alcohol and laughs go hand in hand. And scientists know booze can boost humor appreciation, since it lowers inhibition, decreases anxiety, and increases positive mood. In a 1997 study, social drinkers watched twenty minutes of the goofball comedy The Naked Gun. Those who were two drinks in found O.J. Simpson’s bumbling Officer Nordberg significantly funnier than those who watched stone-cold sober.23

  But little research has been done on the other side: whether Lenny Bruce–style decadence leads to Lenny Bruce–level jokes. We decide to look into the matter—by arranging an evening of drinks with a couple of creative directors at advertising powerhouse Grey New York, the firm responsible for making E-Trade synonymous with talking babies and producing a DirecTV ad featuring a baby in a dog collar that former U.S. president Bill Clinton called the most hilarious commercial he’d ever seen. As enticement, we tell the folks at Grey we’ll foot the bill for our night on the town.

  The ad guys are eager to participate, and before we know it, they’ve invited along their entire creative team, all on our dime. They also have a destination in mind: “Let’s go to the Hurricane Club,” they tell us. The name evokes a cozy corner bar, hopefully one that won’t put too much strain on our wallet.

  When the evening arrives and we step into the Hurricane Club, we realize we’re in trouble. Waiters in white dinner jackets glide under crystal chandeliers, delivering exotic drinks served in carved-out coconuts, watermelons, and red peppers. Pete glances at the drink menu and laughs nervously. “This is going to cost us.”

  Putting our anxiety aside, we launch into the experiment. We show the ad team a Venn diagram we’ve been using to illustrate the benign violation theory:

  Next we tell each participant to polish off a cocktail and come up with a funny new Venn diagram that illustrates and promotes the benign violation theory. We want them to deconstruct a joke into its benign and violation parts, with the intersection labeled “funny.” The ad creatives also have to fill out a survey rating how funny they consider their ad idea. After that, they down another cocktail and draw a new diagram. Repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

  They’re off, in a flurry of mai tais, be
llinis, and mojitos. What we don’t expect is how seriously everybody takes it, especially the Grey creative directors. The bosses heckle their underlings and demand that everybody give 110 percent, dammit. In the stress and depravity that ensues, everyone goes waaay over the line in terms of decency. Here’s one of the completed Venn diagrams:

  Compared to other diagrams, that’s sedate. So here we are, in one of the city’s ritziest juice joints with some of New York’s most powerful creative minds, watching comedy—or at least attempts at it—get made. And judging from some of the preliminary results, it’s one more bit of proof that most things in the world aren’t funny. So if you aim to be hilarious like these ad creatives or New Yorker cartoonist Kanin, the best thing to do is to come up with as many jokes as possible, then come up with more. Or as Pete likes to put it, think up as many violations as possible, and then find lots of ways to make those violations okay. Most will end up as duds, but every now and then you’ll come up with your own version of Kanin’s bowling-ball cartoon.

  As for that cartoon? It turns out Mankoff might have been right when he called Kanin a comic genius. The bowling-ball gag makes it up the production chain, past the ornery fact-checkers, and gets the green light from New Yorker editor David Remnick, who makes the final decision with Mankoff on the twelve to twenty cartoons in each issue. A few months later, on the bottom right corner of page 85 of the New Yorker, there’s the bowling-ball walker and the bowling-pin walker, strolling toward their inevitable street-corner collision. But by this point, Kanin is probably too busy to notice it. He’s taken a new job, one that might be even more celebrated in the annals of comedy creation: he’s been hired as a writer for Saturday Night Live.

  At the Hurricane Club, is all the booze we’re buying turning the ad team into Kanin-level humorists? They believe so. The more drinks they down, the funnier they rate their comedy attempts. But later, when Pete submits the Venns to an online survey panel, he finds the inebriated ad team is off the mark. According to the panel’s respondents, the shenanigans went downhill by the time the ad team reached its fifth drink. Take, for example, one creative director who went by the code name Blaze. After his third drink, Blaze rated himself about halfway up the drunkenness scale and came up with this gem: