by Ken Jennings
FUNNY FOR NO REASON
Through all of recorded history, the basic structural and functional unit of humor has been the joke. But that’s getting it backward. It would probably be more accurate to say that “joke” is the word we invented for any unitary thing that gets a laugh.
Consider all the different things that a joke can be. At its most formalized level, a joke is a little folktale—a one-act play with characters and a beginning, middle, and end.
A grasshopper walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Wow, funny you should come in here. We have a drink named after you!” The grasshopper says, “You have a drink called Stanley?”I
The act of inventing a whole fictional setting and story to generate a laugh seems a little try-hard in our no-effort age. Today, a professional joke-teller is unlikely to start a joke, “So these three guys get on a train . . .” A “joke” in stand-up comedy is typically a first-person anecdote, or at least purports to be one. Here’s Wanda Sykes on a cheap boyfriend:
Whenever we go out, I pay all the tolls. Yeah—he backs up to the tolls so that the booth would be on my side.
The anecdote usually leads to observations about life’s little oddities. John Mulaney on ordering a chicken sandwich:
“That comes with a choice of either salad or fries.” Those were the choices: salad or fries, the two most different foods in the universe. “Oh, you’re getting a chicken sandwich? Well, with that, you can go for a jog, or smoke crack cocaine.”
In daily life, a “joke” is even less formal than that. It’s situational humor, a quippy reaction. It’s running into someone for the second time in the same day and saying, “Long time, no see!”
Books about humor always seem stodgy and square because they focus almost entirely on the first kind of joke, which all feel exactly fifty years old, even if they actually date back to ancient Greece or were written yesterday. They’re usually full of midcentury things that don’t really exist anymore: traveling salesmen, priests, golf. That’s understandable, though. Before we entered our modern joke-savvy age, retold jokes were the most accessible form of humor to most people. They require no original thought, and they’re hard to screw up even with lousy delivery. That makes them a perfect fit for academics who study humor—not always the world’s most naturally funny people, you’ll be shocked to learn. They also have the clinical virtue of sounding completely generic, from the culture itself rather than from any particular author or style of humor. But most importantly, academics prefer prepackaged jokes to situational humor for the same reason that geneticists prefer fruit fly DNA: simplicity. Fruit flies don’t last long, they’re easy to raise in captivity, they have only four chromosomes, and they’re a universally recognized standard. Airless, formulaic joke scenarios—a crashing plane, a genie offering three wishes—allow “humor studies” experts to tease apart joke mechanics, either in theory or in a lab, without worrying that the experiment will be contaminated by any actual complexity or fun.
But not everything that’s funny is a joke in any meaningful sense. Off the top of my head, here are some things I think are funny: tiki bars, murder mystery parties, vaping, water fluoridation, jigsaw puzzles, ska, egg salad sandwiches, “couponing,” astronauts, tugboats, babies, calling money “some serious coin,” haiku, carpet sweepers, Hollywood movies dubbed into Spanish, foot fetishists, those motorcycles with the weird high handlebars, turtlenecks, elementary school plays, Costco, interventions, Ken Burns, adults who don’t know how to drive, local news shows, vegan pizza, karaoke videos, state birds and minerals and whatnot, Henry and Beezus but not Ramona, Wikipedia entries for regular stuff like “soup,” time travel, Canada, those narcotic leaves that Somali pirates chew, public radio, exotic pets, spelling words in the “NATO phonetic alphabet” with lots of Romeos and Tangos, putting a pencil behind your ear, people who own hot tubs, Roman numerals, CB radio lingo, supermarkets and snack companies that have to call the Super Bowl “the Big Game” so they don’t get sued, those fancy Japanese toilet seats, the Chinese zodiac, media names for blizzards, movies where somebody thinks they see the person they’re looking for but when they spin them around it’s somebody totally different, Weight Watchers “points,” acronyms that were clearly reverse-engineered to make words, podracing, at Christmas when the Wise Men are three different races, soap opera comic strips in newspapers, Marilyn vos Savant, the Boy Scouts of America, off-brand anything, Velcro, quesadillas, “dry goods” stores, high school gym teachers, roller derby, that weird Gnomes book from the seventies, “finger guns,” moths eating holes in clothing, mothballs, moths in general now that I think about it, the Amish, dogs wearing bandannas, ghosts, forty-minute IMAX movies at science museums about coral reefs and airplanes and so forth, farmers’ markets, Guam, food that comes with “all the fixin’s,” Tom Cruise running, capitalizing pronouns for God and Jesus, dockworkers and stevedores, those bird stickers on glass doors, hot yoga, Will Shortz, pro wrestlers from the 1980s and early ’90s but no later, the harpsichord, fabric stores, identical twins, Betty Boop, homeschooling, elongated-penny machines, Korean pop music, dolphins, dolphins talking, “dance floor lasso,” personalized license plates, 3-D printers, fire ants, when movie theaters show livecast operas on weeknights for some reason, yogurt, sword stores in malls, Batman, prospectors, monocles, jukeboxes, gratitude journals, bubble wands, Objectivism, being hydrated, spaghetti and meatballs (but neither of the two separately), upside-down calculator words, owls, large novelty checks, origami, the Irish, Irish Spring soap, nature walks, Roombas, Mount Rushmore, mommy bloggers, churros, Kidz Bop, the word “bodacious,” the Church of Satan, citizen’s arrests, the Wiggles, fake search engines in movies, composting, Uno, the “tall tales” unit in elementary school, cavemen, buttermilk, auctioneer patter, T.J. Maxx, people leaning very close into table microphones, string cheese, little kids in sailor suits, white people saying they’re part Cherokee, ten-foot party subs, when Darryl Dawkins used to name his dunks, revolving restaurants, Victorian euphemisms for sodomy, yearbook signatures, all Winter Olympic sports, when British people call dish soap “washing-up liquid,” anything dogs or cats do with their butts or the butts of others, pudding, TV judges who say things like “I’ll allow it, but you’re on thin ice here, counselor,” magnetic poetry, Kegels, the sign in my son’s first-grade classroom that said “Use Furniture Correctly,” swim diapers, the Super Mario Bros. music, shirtless driving, when hungry cartoon characters look at someone and they turn into a chicken leg, tetherball, hobo codes, “Polar Bear Plunge” dudes, the word “rollicking,” backyard trampolines, raisins, Magic Eye posters, football announcers having to read plugs for tomorrow night’s shows, atheists, sumo loincloths, boom boxes, Burt’s Bees, “Battles of the Bands,” Bob Balaban, calling a phone call “a jingle,” the mini-pencils they have at the library, when you have a slight whistle in one nostril, Wall Street Journal stipple portraits, “infotainment,” swear jars, sexting, fondue sets, the San Diego Chicken, Crispix, beatboxing, Jamaican slang, the warnings in movie ratings, Mad Libs, people who say “namaste,” people who really love sports bloopers, pop-up calendar kiosks, Pilgrims, flossing, literally all anime, seersucker suits, libertarians, European cheek-kissing, the short urinal, Soviet art with lots of sturdy women on tractors, Ouija boards, shadow animals, “Mambo No. 5,” people at spas with cucumbers on their eyes, square-dance callers, parkour, fake street drugs in sci-fi, cranberry bogs, Cyclopses, Jimmy Buffett fans, that creationist museum (or museums?) down south somewhere, koi ponds, cartoon suns wearing sunglasses, Garrison Keillor, “Coexist” bumper stickers, cursed Indian burial grounds, when Hooters had an airline, boxing kangaroos, stage magic, Temple Grandin “hug boxes,” the NIT basketball tournament, wicker, folk dancing, books about briefly dead Christians or New Agers visiting heaven, coin-op massage chairs in airports, the “Kiss Cam,” horses wearing floppy hats with ear holes and a flower on top, Jim Morrison’s poetry, the word “sensual,” Eeyore, harmonicas, muesli, gentleman callers sitting
in the parlor, ships in bottles, quinceañeras, Christian Science reading rooms, “free sandwich” punch cards, and bow ties.
When I say that all those things are funny to me, it doesn’t mean that I get paralyzed with laughter at the mere sight or mention of Crispix cereal or a harpsichord. That would be stupid. But each of them has at least a faint halo of amusement to me, if I look at them through comedy-nerd goggles. They’re slightly funny as isolated concepts, but more importantly they’re pregnant with possibility. They have, in joke terms, potential energy. And in the same way that a baseball stats guru might develop equations to compute how much better a given player is than a “replacement-level player,” comedy writers get a sense for which breakfast cereals or musical instruments are better joke fuel than others. They’ll just burn hotter. Crispix is funnier than Wheat Chex. Harpsichords are funnier than pianos. You might object that there’s nothing inherently funny about a harpsichord, that my perception has been colored by media depictions of them (e.g., being played by foppish movie dandies in powdered wigs) or my own experiences with them (e.g., in the background of museum audioguides). That’s true to a point, but look: all humor is a web of cultural associations. No elemental thing is that funny in a vacuum, as a pure Platonic ideal. But let me be clear: my list isn’t just a collection of “things that I’ve learned are stock stand-up material or have been the punch line of a particularly memorable Simpsons gag.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard a joke about a cranberry bog in my life, or even seen a cranberry bog, but let’s be honest: cranberry is a pretty funny kind of bog. For the most part, things don’t become funny because joke-tellers seize on them. Joke-tellers seize on things that are already funny.
But breaking down the comedy atom into tiny spinning electrons of probabilistic funniness doesn’t actually explain how humor operates—it just kicks the can farther down the road. The alchemy of where the laugh comes from remains mysterious and ineffable. It’s the comedy equivalent of the unanswerable metaphysical question “Why is there something instead of nothing?” Why a laugh here but not here? What makes one story/quip/cartoon/breakfast cereal funny and another one not?
The Internet of Dead Frogs
To most of the world, the animals most closely associated with author E. B. White are a pig and a spider, because he wrote the universally loved 1952 children’s classic Charlotte’s Web.II But in the rarefied world of humor studies, E. B. White’s spirit animal is the frog. In the preface to a 1941 humor collection, White first used the simile later popularly paraphrased this way: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies of it.” The observation that explaining a joke is a singularly unfunny pursuit was not new to White; as early as 55 BC, Cicero was writing that “a man with any tincture of humor in him can discuss anything in the world more wittily than actual witticisms.” But the analysis of humor was suddenly in vogue in the early twentieth century, with very serious Europeans like Freud and Bergson and Pirandello having turned their coolly appraising eyes and neatly trimmed beards to the subject. In 1937, Robert Benchley parodied the genre in one of his best New Yorker pieces, “Why We Laugh—or Do We?”
In order to laugh at something, it is necessary (1) to know what you are laughing at, (2) to know why you are laughing, (3) to ask some people why they think you are laughing, (4) to jot down a few notes, (5) to laugh. Even then, the thing may not be cleared up for days.
White and Benchley were trivially correct: no joke becomes funnier once explained. But ask any biology teacher: Frog-dissecters aren’t trying to save the frog. They’re trying to see how frogs work.
Humor studies is a surprisingly new academic field, dating back to a 1976 conference on humor in Cardiff, Wales, which led to the creation of the World Humor and Irony Membership, or WHIM.III The academic establishment had previously considered humor to be, by definition, too lightweight a subject for serious research, but by the 1970s, the slow creep of comedy into modernity was too obvious to be ignored. WHIM wisely abandoned its acronymic name when it was reorganized in 1989 as the International Society for Humor Studies, and today boasts more than five hundred members from universities on six continents, who work in dozens of different scholarly disciplines. Their quarterly journal, Humor, has all the solemn frog dissection you could ever hope for. A quick browse of the table of contents reveals articles with titles like “Why All Dictators Have Moustaches: Political Jokes in Contemporary Belarus” and “Poor Wee Souls and Fraggle Rock: The Visceral Humor of Nurse-Peers in a Non-Accomplishment Setting.” Most university libraries don’t subscribe to Humor, which is a tragedy because it’s the only place you’ll ever find a graph of René Thom’s cusp function from catastrophe theory used to diagram a joke, or an eleven-column “Laugh Utterance” table recording all the glottal stops in the first laughter of a seventeen-month-old baby playing peekaboo. To the professional humor researcher, being funny is a deadly serious business.
I have no doubt that every single scholar who has ever published in Humor has the very drollest sense of humor in their department, and the selection of photocopied Gary Larson Far Side panels on their office door is impeccable, but you’d never know that from reading them. It’s not just that their scholarship is unfunny, which you’d expect in any field. It’s how weirdly divorced it feels from the way that professional funny people talk about their work—which they will do, incessantly. But real comedy people just aren’t interested in the academic brand of analysis. In their 2014 book The Humor Code, humor researcher Peter McGraw and journalist Joel Warner tell an unbearably cringe-y story about landing a backstage interview with Louis C.K. before a show. In the dressing room, McGraw begins to explain his pet humor theory, but C.K. isn’t interested, cutting him off with a grumbled objection that jokes can’t be codified so simply. In the awkward silence that ensues, McGraw asks him if he has a small penis. (A woman they’d met earlier in the lobby wanted to know.)IV The interview ends at this point.
My favorite thing about this story is not what an epic disaster of both journalism and humor studies it is, blowing the chance to pick the brain of a performer who was widely considered at the time to be one of the most interesting comedy thinkers on the planet, though that is pretty great.V It’s Louis C.K.’s utter disinterest—almost bordering on aversion—when it comes to the topic of what makes jokes funny.
“I’ve never known really funny people to be that interested in dissecting how it works,” comedy writer George Meyer told me. That’s largely because it’s such an unconscious and intuitive gift. “If you asked Robert Plant after the show, ‘Why did you say ooh yeah after that particular bar?’ or ‘Why did you twirl the mike with your right hand?’ he doesn’t know he’s doing that so he can’t tell you. He’s just going with the flow.”
But sometimes there’s more to the aversion than that. People who have based their livelihood (and self-image) on something as ineffable as humor might think twice about looking under the hood. What if you start overthinking it and it goes away, like an athlete with the “yips”? “They’re almost superstitious about it; they get freaked out,” explained Meyer. “Many of the people have no idea how they do it, and that’s how it should be.”
Even if comedy professionals are hesitant, in general, to pierce the veil of mystery, it’s a favorite pastime in the peanut gallery of comedy nerds, largely thanks to the power of the Internet. Pop culture sites rank and taxonomize jokes endlessly, while the lawless frontier of social media and message boards churns and froths over the comedy it collectively loves and hates. Online wars can be waged for weeks over the interpretation of a single Adult Swim gag. Are they just kibitzers, or could this kind of geekery be a gateway for the next generation of comedy talent? The results from the academic world aren’t promising so far, but that’s starting to change in our more comedy-savvy age. After all, every student who ever grew up to be a great neurologist or biochemist started out with frog dissection.
A Grand Unified Theory of Jokes
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sp; Cosmologists have spent the last century in search of a “theory of everything,” a single framework that would explain all physical interactions in the universe. Things are much the same in the humor studies world: every scholar wants to be the one who unveils the One Overarching Secret that explains why we laugh. But the great minds who have weighed in on humor have described it so differently that to an outside observer, it’s not even clear that they’re thinking of the same phenomenon. It’s the old fable of the blind men trying to describe an elephant, only the elephant is one of those elephant jokes from the sixties.
The ancient Greeks, back to Plato and Aristotle, originated what was the dominant humor theory for most of Western civilization: superiority theory. We make jokes to put others down. As Thomas Hobbes put it: “The passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others.” Laughter, in other words, is always scorn.
The conflation of humor and ridicule meant that philosophers only wrote about humor to warn against it. Plato, his followers said, was an “intensely melancholy” man who “was never seen to laugh excessively,” even as a youth. “As sad as Plato” went the proverb. Aristotle took such a hard line on jokes that he even wondered in his Nicomachean Ethics if they should be banned. “Most people delight more than they should in amusement and in jesting,” he wrote. “Jest is a sort of abuse, and there are things that lawgivers forbid us to abuse; and they should, perhaps, have forbidden us even to make a jest of such.” Joking about the gods should be just as illegal as vandalizing a temple, in other words. Making fun of a friend should be just as illegal as popping him in the mouth.
It’s true that many jokes do have a target (or “butt,” which is a funnier word), and that even today the undercurrent of hostility in a lot of comedy is underappreciated. Jokes end with punch lines, a witty remark is sharp. Both might crack us up. If enough people crack up, then the comedian killed, knocked ’em dead. If not, he died, she bombed. But ancient humor must have been pretty limited (or the philosophers overly concerned with one then-trendy and caustic strain of it) for no one to have thought of any counterexamples. Sure, superiority theory is easy to apply to political satire or insult comedy, but how does it explain puns?VI How does it explain the epidemic of self-deprecation in modern comedy: Jim Norton on his sexual depravity, Bernie Mac on his hypocrisies as a parent, Amy Schumer on her looks, Tina Fey on her social awkwardness?VII We don’t laugh because we’re mocking them—in fact, it’s crucial to all these comic personas that we identify closely with them. If I’m laughing at a David Mitchell bit about his nerdy misanthropy because I also recognize it in myself, who exactly is feeling superior to whom? Comedy, in other words, can be powered by fellow feeling and empathy as well as by ridicule. Saying that superiority is the secret essence of humor is like hearing a few jokes set in restaurants and concluding that all comedy can be reduced to waiters.
