The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  We can’t forget the folks who helped spread the word about what we were up to, plus those who made sure what we were saying was a polished as possible. Tor Myhren at Grey New York was so taken with our idea that he gave us an offer we couldn’t refuse. Lewis Wallace at Wired.com, Bryan Maygers at the Huffington Post, Lauren Friedman at Psychology Today, and John Swanburg at Slate offered us invaluable online soapboxes, and Josh Mishell crafted the logo and Venns we proudly sported there and a hundred other places around the world. John Wenzel and Grace Hood, among others, covered our exploits; Kristen Sink snapped our publicity photos; and Sean Guillory, Andy Wood, Ben Roy, Paul Ronca, and Alf LaMont helped get us on stage all over North America, before we had much to show for our efforts. We looked and sounded much better than we deserved thanks to a crack team of wordsmiths and videosmiths, namely Rick Griffith, Josh Johnson, Daniel Junge, Vanessa Martinez, Shane Mauss, and Evan Nix. We owe McKenzie Binder a weekend for the one she spent tidying our bibliography. Jane Le added a final sheen to our prose, courtesy of her passion for terminating dangling modifiers with extreme prejudice and her unrivaled knowledge of Yiddish. Ron Doyle, founder and president of the Humor Code Fan Club, understood what we were up to better than we did, and deserves his own media empire for the marketing work he did on our behalf. Brit Hvide, Marie Kent, Leah Johanson, Richard Rhorer, and everyone else at Simon & Schuster deserve accolades for their endless patience and support, despite all our odd questions and rookie mistakes. And of course, we are beyond grateful to our editor, Ben Loehnen, for his incredibly enthusiastic embrace of our project and his unrivaled skill at making every word, sentence, and paragraph shine.

  Last but not least, there are a select few who were always there for us, providing feedback, encouragement, and support in numerous unquantifiable ways. For Pete, that includes his mother, Kathleen McGraw, Mark Ferne, Joni Klippert, Mike Koenig, Jeff Larsen, Julie Nirvelli, Michael Sargent, Janet Schwartz, Marcel Zeelenberg, Jaclyn Allen, Adam Alter, Adam Grant, Chip Heath, and especially Dan Ariely. Most of all, Pete wants to thank Caleb Warren and his sister, Shannon Sorino. His research would be rubbish if it weren’t for Caleb’s time, effort, and impressive intellect, and he never would have thought that he was funny enough to get on stage (twice) if Shannon hadn’t always laughed at his jokes.

  My shortlist of personal advocates includes George Smith, Vince Darcangelo, Jared Jacang Maher, Hester McNeil, Kelly Warner, and above all, my parents, Jim and Barb Warner. And I can never fully repay my family, Emily, Gabriel, and Charlotte, for the fatherless weeks, spotty Skype calls, unanswered e-mails, late nights in the home office, and moments of grouchiness. All I can say to them is through good times and bad, the funny and not-so-funny stuff, you’ve been a wonderful audience—and a wonderful team.

  © KRISTEN HATGI

  PETER McGRAW, PhD, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he directs HuRL (the Humor Research Lab), is a leading expert in the interdisciplinary fields of emotion and behavioral economics. His work has been covered by NPR, Nightline, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, The New York Times, and the BBC. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. Visit him at petermcgraw.org and on Twitter (@petermcgraw).

  © ANTHONY CAMERA

  JOEL WARNER, an award-winning former staff writer for Westword, Denver’s alternative newsweekly, has written for Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Boston Globe, Slate, Grantland, and other publications. He lives in Denver, Colorado. Visit him at joelwarner.com and on Twitter (@joelwarner).

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  NOTES

  Chapter 1: Colorado

  1. Don L. F. Nilsen and Alleen Pace Nilsen, “Twenty-Five Years of Developing a Community of Humor Scholars,” http://www.hnu.edu/ishs/ISHSDocuments/Nilsen25Article.pdf (accessed December 30, 2012).

  2. Caleb Warren and A. Peter McGraw, “Humor Appreciation,” Encyclopedia of Humor Studies (forthcoming).

  3. Elliot Oring, The Jokes of Sigmund Freud: A Study in Humor and Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 114.

  4. John Morreall, “A new theory of laughter,” Philosophical Studies, 42(2) (1982), 243–254.

  5. Howard R. Pollio and Rodney W. Mers, “Predictability and the Appreciation of Comedy,” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society (1974): 229–232.

  6. Caleb Warren and A. Peter McGraw, “Beyond Incongruity: Differentiating What Is Funny From What Is Not” (under review).

  7. Thomas C. Veatch, “A Theory of Humor,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research (1998): 161–215.

  8. A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren, “Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny,” Psychological Science (2010): 1141–1149.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Daniel Wolpert, and Chris Frith, “Why Can’t You Tickle Yourself?” NeuroReport (2000): R11–R16.

  11. McGraw and Warren, “Benign Violations,” 1141–1149.

  Chapter 2: Los Angeles

  1. Willibald Ruch, ed. The Sense of Humor: Explorations of a Personality Characteristic (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998), 7–9.

  2. Alan Feilgold, “Measuring Humor Ability: Revision and Construct Validation of the Humor Perceptiveness Test,” Perceptual and Motor Skills (1983): 159–166.

  3. Herbert M. Lefcourt and Rod A. Martin, Humor and Life Stress: Antidote to Adversity (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1986), 17.

  4. Victor Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston: D. Reidel, 1985), 32.

  5. Greg Dean, Greg Dean’s Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), 125.

  6. Salvatore Attardo and Lucy Pickering, “Timing in the Performance of Jokes,” Humor: International Journal of Human Research (2011): 233–250.

  7. Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering, and Amanda Baker, “Prosodic and Multimodal Markers of Humor in Conversation,” Prosody and Humor: Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition (2011): 194, 224–247.

  8. Joe Boskin, ed., Humor Prism in the 20th Century (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 111.

  9. Lawrence Epstein, The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001), x.

  10. Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 26.

  11. Jonathan Levav and R. Juliet Zhu, “Seeking Freedom though Variety,” Journal of Consumer Research (2009): 600–610; J. Meyers-Levy and R. J. Zhu, “The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing That People Use,” Journal of Consumer Research (2007): 174–186.

  12. Joseph A. Bellizzi and Robert E. Hite, “Environmental Color, Consumer Feelings, and Purchase Likelihood,” Psychology & Marketing (1992): 347–363.

  13. C. B. Zhong, V. K. Bohns, and F. Gino, “Good Lamps Are the Best Police,” Psychological Science (2010): 311–314.

  14. Edward Diener, “Deindividuation: The Absence of Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation in Group Members,” ed. P. B. Paulus, Psychology of Group Influence (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1980), 209–242.

  15. Timothy J. Lawson and Brian Downing, “An Attributional Explanation for the Effect of Audience Laughter on Perceived Funniness,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 243–249.

  16. Richard Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 5.

  17. “Richest Comedians,” http://www.therichest.org/celebnetworth/category/celeb/comedian/ (accessed February 15
, 2013.)

  18. Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves, Only Joking: What’s So Funny About Making People Laugh? (New York: Gotham Books, 2006), 103.

  19. Gil Greengross, Rod. A. Martin, and Geoffrey Miller, “The Big Five Personality Traits of Professional Comedians Compared to Amateur Comedians, Comedy Writers, and College Students,” Personality and Individual Differences (2009): 79–83.

  20. Gil Greengross, Rod. A. Martin, and Geoffrey Miller, “Personality Traits, Intelligence, Humor Styles, and Humor Production Ability of Professional Stand-up Comedians Compared to College Students,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (2011), 74–82.

  21. A. Peter McGraw, Erin Percival Carter, and Jennifer J. Harman, “Disturbingly funny: Humor production increases perceptions of mental instability” (working paper).

  Chapter 3: New York

  1. Russell Adams, “How About Never—Is Never Good for You? Celebrities Struggle to Write Winning Captions,” Wall Street Journal (2011), A1.

  2. Judith Yaros Less, Defining New Yorker Humor (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 10.

  3. Judith Yaros Less, Defining New Yorker Humor, 56.

  4. Ibid., 11.

  5. Arthur Koestler, Act of Creation (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1964), 35.

  6. Caleb Warren and A. Peter McGraw, “Beyond Incongruity: Differentiating What is Funny From What is Not” (under review).

  7. Arthur Koestler, Act of Creation, 45.

  8. A. M. Isen, K. A. Daubman, and G. P. Nowicki, “Positive Affect Facilitates Creative Problem Solving,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1987): 1122–1131.

  9. Barry Kudrowitz, “Haha and Aha!: Creativity, Idea Generation, Improvisational Humor, and Product Design” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010).

  10. Chloe Kiddon and Yuriy Brun, “That’s What She Said: Double Entendre Identification,” Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2011): 89–94.

  11. Graeme Ritchie, “Can Computers Create Humor?,” AI Magazine (2009): 71–81.

  12. C. F. Hempelmann and A. C. Samson, “Computational Humor: Beyond the Pun?” in The Primer of Humor Research, ed. V. Raskin (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), 335–341.

  13. Koestler, Act of Creation, 93.

  14. Fred K. Beard, “Humor in the Advertising Business: Theory, Practice, and Wit”(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 2.

  15. Charles S. Gulas, Kim K. McKeage, and Marc G. Weinberger, “Violence Against Males in Humorous Advertising,” Journal of Advertising (2010): 109–20.

  16. Ibid., 112.

  17. Caleb Warren, and A. Peter McGraw, “When Humorous Marketing Backfires: Uncovering the Relationship between Humor, Negative Affect, and Brand Attitude” (under review).

  18. Judith Yaross Lee, Defining New Yorker Humor, 159.

  19. A. Peter McGraw, Phil Fernbach, and Julie Schiro, “Humor Lowers Propensity to Remedy a Problem” (working paper).

  20. Judith Yaross Lee, Defining New Yorker Humor, 159.

  21. Sasha Topolinski and Rolf Reber, “Gaining Insight Into the ‘Aha’ Experience,” Current Directions in Psychological Science (2010): 402–405.

  22. A. Peter McGraw, et al., “Too Close for Comfort, or Too Far to Care? Finding Humor in Distant Tragedies and Close Mishaps,” Psychological Science (2012): 1215–1223.

  23. Geoff Lowe and Sharon B. Taylor, “Effects of Alcohol on Responsive Laughter and Amusement,” Psychological Reports (1997): 1149–1150.

  Chapter 4: Tanzania

  1. Robert Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (New York: Penguin, 2001), 27, 37, 40.

  2. McGraw, et al., “Too Close for Comfort, or Too Far to Care?,” 1215–1223.

  3. Provine, Laughter, 45.

  4. Ibid., 157, 163, 172, 173.

  5. A. M. Rankin and P. J. Philip, “An Epidemic of Laughing in the Bukoba District of Tanganyika,” Central African Journal of Medicine (1963).

  6. Susan Sprecher and Pamela C. Regan, “Liking Some Things (In Some People) More Than Others: Partner Preferences in Romantic Relationships and Friendships,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (2002): 463–481.

  7. Robert H. Lauer, Jeanette C. Lauer, and Sarah T. Kerr, “The Long-Term Marriage: Perceptions of Stability and Satisfaction,” The International Journal of Aging and Human Development (1990): 189–195.

  8. Dacher Keltner, Randall C. Young, Erin A. Heerey, Carmen Oemig, and Natalie D. Monarch, “Teasing in Hierarchical and Intimate Relations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1998): 1231–1247.

  9. Rod A. Martin, The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (Burlington, MA: Elsevier, 2007), 187–188.

  10. V. S. Ramachandran, “The Neurology and Evolution of Humor, Laughter, and Smiling: the False Alarm Theory,” PubMed (1998): 351–354.

  11. Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams, Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 4.

  12. André Parent, “Duchenne De Boulogne: A Pioneer in Neurology and Medical Photography” (2005): 369–377; Guillaume Duchenne, The Mechanism of Human Physiognomy (1862).

  13. Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson, “The Evolution and Functions of Laughter and Humor: A Synthetic Approach,” The Quarterly Review of Biology (2005): 395–430.

  14. Marina Davila-Ross, M. Owren, and E. Zimmermann, “The Evolution of Laughter in Great Apes and Humans,” Communicative & Integrative Biology (2010): 191–194.

  15. Jaak Panksepp and Jeff Burgdorf, “ ‘Laughing’ Rats and the Evolutionary Antecedents of Human Joy?” Physiology & Behavior (2003): 533–547.

  16. L. Alan Sroufe and Jane Piccard Wunsch, “The Development of Laughter in the First Year of Life,” Child Development (1972): 1326–1344.

  17. Rod A. Martin and Nicholas A. Kuiper, “Daily Occurrence of Laughter: Relationships with Age, Gender, and Type A Personality,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research (1999): 355–384.

  18. Martin, The Psychology of Humor, 233, 239–240.

  19. Jane E. Warren, et al., “Positive Emotions Preferentially Engage an Auditory Motor ‘Mirror’ System,” The Journal of Neuroscience (2006): 13067–13075.

  20. Karen O’Quin and Joel Aronoff, “Humor as a Technique of Social Influence,” Social Psychology Quarterly (1981): 349–357.

  21. John A. Jones, “The Masking Effects of Humor on Audience Perception of Message Organization,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research (2005): 405–417.

  22. Christian F. Hempelmann, “The Laughter of the 1962 Tanganyika ‘Laughter Epidemic,’ ” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research (2007) 49–71.

  23. Leslie P. Boss, “Epidemic Hysteria: A Review of the Published Literature,” Epidemiologic Reviews (1997): 233–243.

  24. Robert E. Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford, Hoaxes, Myths, and Manias: Why We Need Critical Thinking (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2003), 94.

  25. Susan Dominus, “What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy,” New York Times Magazine, March 11, 2012.

  Chapter 5: Japan

  1. Mahadev Apte, Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, 33, 51.

  2. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, “On Joking Relationships,” Journal of the International African Institute (1940): 195–210.

  3. Jessica Milner Davis, Understanding Humor in Japan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 8.

  4. Christie Davies, Jokes and Targets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 41, 82–93, 198–201.

  5. Jan Bremmer, A Cultural History of Humour from Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Herman Roodenburg, 16–17, 98.

  6. Carr and Greeves, Only Joking, 193.

  7. Christie Davies, Jokes and Targets, 255.

  8. Eric Romero et al., “Regional Humor Differences in the United States: Implications for Management,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research (2007): 189–201.

  9. Salvatore Attardo, “Translation and Hum
our: An Approach Based on the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH),” The Translator (2002): 173–194.

  10. Mahadev L. Apte, Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 17.

  11. Laura Mickes, Drew E. Hoffman, Julian L. Parris, Robert Mankoff, and Nicholas Christenfeld, “Who’s Funny: Gender Stereotypes, Humor Production, and Memory Bias” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (2011): 108–112.

  12. Martin D. Lampert and Susan M. Ervin-Tripp, “Exploring Paradigms: The Study of Gender and Sense of Humor Near the End of the 20th Century,” in The Sense of Humor: Explorations of a Personality Characteristic, ed. Willibald Ruch (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998): 231–270.

  13. Thomas R. Herzog, “Gender Differences in Humor Appreciation Revisited,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, (1999): 411–423.

  14. Christopher J. Wilbur and Lorne Campbell, “Humor in Romantic Contexts: Do Men Participate and Women Evaluate?” Personality And Social Psychology Bulletin (2011): 918–929.

  15. Dan Ariely, “Who Enjoys Humor More: Conservatives or Liberals?” Psychology Today, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/predictably-irrational/200810/who-enjoys-humor-more-conservatives-or-liberals (October 23, 2008).

  16. Arnold Krupat, “Native American Trickster Tales,” in Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide, ed. Maurice Charney (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 447–460.