The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  “I can’t say the theory is perfect,” says Pete. There are funny things that don’t easily fit the formula. But then again, he says, the benign violation theory certainly holds up better than its alternatives, theories like superiority, relief, or incongruity. “It’s definitely better than what was out there before,” he says. And even Victor Raskin, the theory’s number-one critic, seems to have come around somewhat. “I hadn’t realized that Peter was a psychologist,” he writes in an e-mail to me once he’s learned more about Pete’s work. “His use of the term ‘theory’ is casual: it does not mean more than a certain feature that may be loosely associated with humor. Moreover, he measures the distance from a person or event and correlates it with humor appreciation. That’s all there is to it.” For someone like Raskin, that’s downright effusive.

  I’ve been impressed with the benign violation theory, too. But once again, I want to see the theory in action before final judgment. That’s why we’re here at the Just For Laughs festival, and that’s why we asked Andy Nulman to provide a complete unknown and coveted spot at one of the festival’s big, final-night events.

  It’s time, in other words, for the ultimate test.

  “We have a little something different here,” says Debra DiGiovanni to the Comedy Nest audience. “He’s actually a professor at the University of Colorado, and he’s studying what makes things funny. Please welcome up to the stage Peter McGraw!”

  I could say that what happens next is a triumph, a coup, a stunning success. That every joke kills, that he turns that terrible audience around. That by the time his eight minutes are up, he’s left in his dust his precursors, all those ringers from Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. That the festival is soon buzzing about the unknown upstart who got on stage for the second time in his life and proved beyond a doubt that science has nailed comedy once and for all.

  But I’d be lying.

  Here’s what happened:

  “From studying comedy, I’ve learned that you have to get a laugh right away,” begins Pete, flashing a confident smile. “Which is why I wore this sweater vest.” The self-deprecating dig works, earning hearty guffaws from the audience.

  “So does anyone know the famous quote by E. B. White about deconstructing humor?” he continues. “E. B. White wrote ‘Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.’ ”

  Pausing for laughs, he carries on. “You know who says that? Comedians. Comedians say, ‘If you figure out what makes things funny, that’s like telling people the trick behind the magic. And then people won’t like magic acts anymore.’ But that’s a silly argument. NOBODY likes magic.”

  The punch line gets just a few meager chuckles. But we prepared for this. “Ah,” Pete remarks thoughtfully, turning to a flip chart he’s positioned on a metal tripod beside him. He flips over the first page, revealing an algorithm:

  He adds a square root symbol to the capital “A” on the first line. “We’ll be good from this point on,” he cracks, to the bemused laughter of the crowd. Then he continues.

  “I do like hanging out with comedians. They are lot of fun. And they have a lot of advantages over professors. For instance, comedians can drink on the job. Scratch that. They HAVE to drink on the job. And they fall into one of three categories: they’re either on their way to being alcoholics, they’re alcoholics, or they’re recovering alcoholics. So when someone comes up to me and says, “You know, Pete, I am thinking about getting into stand-up,’ I have to ask them, ‘How are you at alcoholism?’ ”

  He pauses for laughter, but it’s largely silent.

  “But I haven’t just been looking at comedians. I’ve actually been traveling the world, looking at humor in all of its forms. I recently was in Osaka, Japan. And if you don’t know this, Osaka is the humor capital of Japan. The funniest people in Japan live in Osaka. You can walk up to someone on the street in Osaka and go BANG!”—Pete mimes pointing a gun at an audience member—“and they will spontaneously act like they’ve been shot.”

  He waits a beat. “What’s fascinating about that is that no one has used this technique to rob the banks of Osaka.” The laughs are back.

  Pete wraps up with a discussion of our Mad Men experiment in New York. “I got an ad team from one of the big ad agencies drunk and asked them to create funny content.” He turns to the flip chart. “I am going to show you the outcome of this study, in order from least-drunk to most-drunk Venn diagrams. This is after round one of drinks.” He flips the page.

  There’s mild laughter. “After two or three drinks, they started to get a little more bold.” Next page:

  By now, a couple folks seem to be wheezing. So Pete pulls out all the stops. “And by the time that they were wasted . . .”

  “Awwww.” He’s taken it too far. The laughter turns to groans. In this crowd, nothing about this diagram is benign.

  “So, if jokes are like frogs, and this set is any type of example, there’s a lot of sick frogs out there,” Pete says in conclusion. “And I think cutting up a few frogs might actually benefit the world a little bit. So you can say, ‘I’ve dissected this frog, and I know its problem.’ ” He holds aloft an imaginary amphibian, like Hamlet clasping the skull of poor jester Yorick. “It thinks that wearing a sweater vest is funny.”

  The crowd claps and laughs as Pete steps off the stage. “I didn’t kill,” he tells me. “But I didn’t bomb, either.” He’s right: he got far more laughs than he scored at the Squire, and who knows, maybe more than if he’d developed his routine the traditional way.

  “It’s not surprising, knowing what we know,” says Pete, standing in the back of the club with the other comics who’ve already gone on. A place like this is never going to be a perfect comedy lab, he says, gesturing around the darkened club. It’s too wild, too messy, there are just too many variables outside of anyone’s control. But that’s okay, he says, celebrating with a whiskey and looking ever more like an old, road-tested comic. “After all,” he says, “it’s not like we were trying to cure cancer.”

  I’m still pondering Pete’s stand-up routine in Montreal when my buddy Ron says something that surprises me. “You know,” he tells me one night over beers a few weeks later, “I think you’ve gotten funnier.”

  “Really?” I’m taken aback. I’ve spent so much time scrutinizing other people’s funny bones I haven’t spent much time considering my own. But now that I think about it, maybe Ron’s right. Maybe I am funnier. I’m more willing to crack jokes with my friends and family, even with relative strangers—and more often than not, these jokes work. I’m more playful, more quick to laugh, and, in truth, happier than I’ve ever been. I goof around with my son, Gabriel, try harder than ever to make my wife, Emily, giggle, and am excited to teach my clown tricks to the new baby girl we will soon be welcoming into our family. And while I’ve never been one for the spotlight, these days when I do speak in front of an audience, I’m more confident, even a bit cocky. It’s as if I’m turning into a comedian.

  Is it due to Pete’s benign violation theory? Maybe in part. I have started to notice all the potential violations lying around that are waiting for me to make benign. And knowing what I now know about humor’s balance of pleasure and pain, I’ve gotten more thoughtful and precise about what I joke about—and with whom.

  But that can’t be the full explanation for why I’m funnier. After all, as our time in Montreal demonstrated, we haven’t managed to find a secret shortcut to becoming the world’s greatest comedians. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s probably perfect. Yes, we’ve come a bit closer to cracking the code behind humor, a bit closer to comedy’s underlying DNA. But we’re far from finding the algorithm that will mass-produce great jokes like Big Macs. Humor is and will continue to be strange and complex and illusory and just a bit dangerous. It’s always going to be part art and part science. That’s what makes it so much fun. And if you want to become a world-class humorist, a good formula or
two might set you in the right direction—but it won’t get you all the way. To do that, you have to explore new ideas and challenge your assumptions. You have to venture out of your comfort zone.

  That’s exactly what we’ve been doing. We subjected our laughs to Hollywood’s top humor headhunter, and acted out our Don Draper fantasies at one of Manhattan’s ritziest watering holes. We tracked a mythical laughter disease across the African savanna and compared the size of our manhoods with Japanese game-show stars. We trudged through the frozen Swedish wilderness in search of an illegal fairy castle, embroiled ourselves in a Palestinian controversy of international proportions, and became way too touchy-feely with an Amazonian clown brigade. We now count among our friends stand-up comics and cartooning pariahs, joke connoisseurs and expat improv performers, rat ticklers and revolutionaries, and one sweaty Patch Adams. A couple of times we nearly got arrested. Traveling by airliner, rental car, bullet train, African dinghy, Israeli techno-cab, and clown-filled cargo plane, we each covered enough miles to circumnavigate the globe—repeatedly.

  I’m not the same guy I was all those months ago, cowering in the corner at the Squire Lounge. For one, I have a lot more witty yarns in my comic repertoire. And now that I’ve hit five of the seven continents (Australia and Antarctica, we still hold you in our hearts), it’s far easier for me to put my daily foibles and faux pas in perspective, to find a way to laugh them off. Let’s not forget that I’ve tangled with Israeli soldiers and Scandinavian commandos, strapped on a clown nose in one of the poorest places on earth, and temporarily paralyzed my pinkie for the good of science. After all that, putting myself out there by telling a joke or two doesn’t seem so daunting. All in all, I’ve found there’s a lot more to life—not to mention a lot more to laugh at.

  Credit has to go to the professor whose off-the-wall research started it all. Pete’s no longer just another story subject for me. He’s a colleague, a close friend, a partner in crime. He’s pushed me out from behind my reporter’s notebook and forced me out of my shell. The process hasn’t always been easy, but it’s been more than a little worthwhile. In return, he tells me, I’ve helped him think less like an academic and more like a journalist, an explorer, a vagabond. He’s back in touch with his adventurous side, the part that got lost in the shuffle when he was busy engineering his life to be productive and comfortable. Now his hypotheses are a little messier; his variables aren’t so constrained. He’s learned it’s okay for his experiments to not always go as planned.

  Like the best manzai duos, we make a good team.

  “I understand humor better now,” Pete tells me; it makes sense to him in a much broader way. “Most people could stand to laugh more,” he says. “Life gets serious. Our world is full of mortgages and careers and retirement funds and horrible headlines on the nightly news. And when you live in a world that’s really serious,” he says, “it’s hard to be playful about things.”

  So how can we hope to change that? I ask. “One way to do so is to be really systematic about it,” Pete replies—the way he usually goes about things. Watch fewer dramas and more sitcoms. Join a laughter yoga club. Increase your visits to your local comedy club.

  But there’s a better way to do it, he says: “Surround yourself with the people and things that make you laugh. Seek out interesting places and interesting people. Focus on the friends who make you laugh, not the ones who bring you down. Choose as a partner someone with whom you share a sense of humor, someone who helps you see the lighter side of life.”

  “And maybe it’s clichéd,” he continues, “but remind yourself that everything is going to be okay.” That thing that seems so scary in the moment, so catastrophic and worrisome, is only scary because you’re paying so much attention to it. It’s okay to complain, but add a bit of wit to your grumbling. Figure out a way to make that violation benign.

  Above all else, he concludes, “Remind yourself that life’s meant to be enjoyed, to be delighted in, to be laughed at.” In short, that our world is one big joke. Sure, the set-ups aren’t always perfect, but keep an eye out. Sooner or later, you’ll find a punch line waiting to happen.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In the same way the best comedy is often a team effort, this book would never have been possible without a great many people helping us in many different ways.

  Pete never would have made it to where he is today without the guidance of his academic mentors, Barb Mellers, Phil Tetlock, and Danny Kahneman. Now that he’s made it, he’s grateful to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, particularly Marketing Division Chair Donnie Lichtenstein and Dean David Ikenberry, for the plentiful resources and assistance they’ve provided him, support that was all the more generous considering part of the project occurred while he was on sabbatical.

  I, on the other hand, have had the benefit of being coached, edited, and yelled at by some of the best people in journalism. But none of it compared to what I received from Westword editor Patty Calhoun, especially in the yelling department. From her I learned the secret of magnificent obsessives, the value of seeking out people whose passion draws readers into unparalleled worlds—people like Pete.

  Pete’s path and my own never would have crossed, much less taken us around the world, if not for a fortuitous string of helping hands along the way. I never would have heard of Pete if not for superhuman matchmaker Andrew Hyde. The resulting Westword story surely would have been the end of it, but Jonathan Levav kindly mentioned Pete’s work to a literary agent in New York. And that agent just happened to be Sasha Raskin at the Agency Group, who took one look at what I’d written about Pete and came up with an idea as outlandish as it was brilliant. Chris Baker at Wired helped build momentum by taking a shot on a nutty story idea pitched by an unknown freelancer, Susan Davis and Andrew Hartman walked two neophytes through all the legalese, and Adam Cayton-Holland came up with the perfect long-shot conclusion. Dominick Anfuso’s enthusiasm helped seal the deal with Simon & Schuster. And we’re grateful to Amy Gibb for helping us figure out how to get that deal done without going broke.

  To pull off our global adventure, we are indebted to a small army of good Samaritans who connected us with just the right people and opened (if not barged through) just the right doors. In Los Angeles and elsewhere, no one worked harder to gain us entry to the world of comedy than Alonzo Bodden, though several others came close, most notably Dan Altmann, Geoff Plitt, Kevin Goetz, Gary Stiffelman, Ryan Kartels, A. J. Jacobs, Sarah Klegman, Judi Brown-Marmel, Brett Carducci, Jordy Ellner, Bart Coleman, J. P. Buck, Bruce Kaplan, and Neal Brennan. In New York, Bob Mankoff scored us access to all sorts of incredible places, including a few he probably shouldn’t have. We never would have known where to start looking for omuneepo in Tanzania without the help of Latif Nasser, and even then we wouldn’t have been able to get there without the wherewithal of William Rutta (it was our pleasure to be Rutta’s “number-one most flexible and happy travelers”). Our excursion to Japan was far less daunting thanks to the tireless work of Goh Abe, Aki Yorihiro, Moka Umehara, Araki Takahiro, Jocelyn Martinez, Jessica Milner Davis, Daniel Feit, Terje Langeland, Nami Moto, Katsura Asakichi, Megumu Tanigawa, and several other members of the Japanese Humor and Laughter Society, not to mention the energetic and sometimes debaucherous assistance of Bill Reilly, Mike Staffa, and all their randy pirates. Jytte Klausen, in her work and over the phone, provided us the lay of the land in Denmark and Sweden. And when we got there, Kurt Westergaard and Lars Vilks had no good reason to let us into their homes, considering the sort of people who sometimes show up at their door. But they let us in anyway, and for that we are grateful. Naomi Zeveloff, Erin Breeze, Vanessa Rousselot, Yaniv Shani, Chaya Ostrower, and Rami Mehdawi prepared us for the places and issues we’d explore in the West Bank and Israel; hopefully someday we can all get together over a conciliatory Mediterranean breakfast. (If Israeli omelets and Palestinian yogurt can’t bring about lasting peace, we don’t know what can.) For professional and person
al reasons, we are beholden to Steve and Pam Wilson for providing us access to the American Association for Therapeutic Humor, just as we are indebted to John Glick, Patch Adams, and everyone else we met in Peru for welcoming us into their clown family. And last but not least, much gratitude goes to Andy Nulman for granting us VIP treatment (twice) at the world’s greatest comedy festival, before we had the guts to ask.

  An equally sizable number of people helped on the academic part of our journey. Pete’s Humor Research Team (aka HuRT) at the University of Colorado at Boulder never balked at his strange requests, so credit goes to team members Ryan Brauchler, Erin Percival Carter, Robert Collins, Caley Cuneo, Christina Kan (HuRL’s Lab Manager), Robert Keenan, Bridget Leonard, Linds Panther, Roxanne Ross, Julie Schiro, Abigail Schneider, and Rachel Stermer. They were far from Pete’s only collaborators. In the academic realm, Elise Chandon Ince, Phil Fernbach, Dan Goldstein, Gil Greengross, Jennifer Harman, Kathleen Vohs, Lawrence Williams, and Max Justicz contributed their time and expertise. Outside the ivory tower, Alex Sidtis, Alex Berg, and Joe Wengert at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre; Jaime Kopke, Sonnet Hanson, and Lindsey Housel at the Denver Art Museum; Steve Krauss and Ari Halper at Grey New York; Larry Swiader, Danny Rouhier, and Liz Sabatiuk at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy; and Jeff Richins, Ryan Smith, and Danny Anderson at Qualtrics Online Survey Software all provided access to their expertise, resources, work spaces, and humorists, no questions asked. Meanwhile, Andrea Grimes at San Francisco Public Library’s Schmulowitz Collection of Wit and Humor and Reaux Flagg at U.C. Berkeley’s Folklore Archive proved invaluable sleuths when detective work arose. Finally, our gratitude goes out to the entirety of the University of Colorado library staff, especially Janet Freeman and Betty Grebe, for handling with patience and grace our hundreds upon hundreds of book, journal, and interlibrary loan requests. Sorry about the late returns.