by Ken Jennings
In the twentieth century, superiority theory has been gradually eclipsed by dozens of other contenders, most notably relief theory and incongruity theory. Relief theory is usually traced back to English political theorist Herbert Spencer, best known as the guy who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” When he studied “The Physiology of Laughter” in 1860, Spencer decided that it was an outlet for built-up psychic energy. “Nervous excitation always tends to beget muscular motion,” he wrote. Sometimes we vent that energy via aggression or flight, but sometimes we laugh. This line of argument was given a big boost in the twentieth century by Sigmund Freud, who saw humor in much the same way he saw dreams. Both were ways to release all the pent-up strain of reality, particularly repressed hostility and—Freud being Freud—sexuality. Laughter was a primal pleasure satisfied, our mouths open wide in imitation of the release from our mothers’ nipples as babies. The Freudian take on humor is a good match for the way laughter feels—liberating, a release—as well as the undeniable fact that edgy overtones of taboo subjects like sex or violence can make a laugh bigger. In 1968, a psychologist named Arthur Shurcliff conducted an experiment in which he told one group of subjects that they’d have to hold a mouse, a second group that they’d have to draw blood from a mouse, and a third group that they’d have to draw blood from an angry rat. In all three cases, the “rodent” was then revealed to be a stuffed toy. As Spencer and Freud would have predicted, laughter did correlate with relief. All the subjects laughed, and the ones who’d been feeling the most anxiety before the reveal laughed the most.
But relief theory doesn’t explain the mechanics of jokes at all (just naming a taboo thing isn’t funny: necrophilia!) and, again, it ignores all the things we laugh at that have no pent-up psychic energy behind them. An observational comic could tell a series of jokes on how much ducks love bread, but what would Freud say I’m laughing at there? What duck-related taboo is being violated? A sign that says “Please Don’t Feed the Ducks”?
More popular today among scholars than relief theory is incongruity theory, the notion that we laugh when something violates the normal order of things, or when two mismatched concepts are juxtaposed: a monkey on roller skates, a bottle of shampoo in the fridge. It’s often summed up using Immanuel Kant’s 1790 declaration that “laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” Our mental patterns must quickly shift to adjust to some unexpected collision of concept with reality.
Many proponents of incongruity theory have followed in Kant’s footsteps in focusing on that magical moment when the incongruity is resolved and humor is therefore produced: aha, “black and white and read all over,” I get it! In fact, the theory is often called “incongruity resolution” in the literature. But a Swedish psychologist named Göran Nerhardt was unconvinced. In a famous 1970 experiment, he had subjects lift a series of small weights, then handed them one that was unexpectedly light or heavy. Participants invariably smiled or laughed when they picked up the odd weight—and their reaction varied in proportion with just how much the last weight varied from the earlier ones.VIII Nerhardt’s implication was not that the true essence of humor is a man lifting a slightly-lighter-than-average weight—though I’d be willing to at least entertain the theory. He was pointing out that sometimes, incongruity itself can be funny. The humor is sometimes in the sheer oddity of something, not the neat resolution of it.
One frequent criticism of the incongruity theory is that it’s so broad as to be almost tautological: things are funny (ha-ha) because they’re funny (strange)—or they were but then they got resolved, which is funny too! Personally, I’m skeptical of the whole quest to find the One Fundamental Hidden Secret of Humor. What if there’s a whole range of factors that contribute to pushing a certain joke or situation over the humor threshold? We cry for many reasons (sadness, happiness, pepper spray, Brian’s Song). More to the point, even a single emotional response like “sadness” can be triggered by many different things: loss, guilt, loneliness, fear, disappointment, frustration, even music that swells in a certain way. Why should laughter and amusement be any different?
Even if the study of humor hasn’t produced its grand unifying theory yet—and maybe never will—you have to be impressed by that cast! The bigwigs in the field aren’t just associate professors at state universities with rubber chickens in their Facebook photos. They’re Aristotle and Plato and Cicero and Hobbes and Descartes and Locke and Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard and Darwin and Spencer and Freud and Bergson and Dewey. Even when humor wasn’t accepted by the academy as a legitimate field of study, great thinkers just couldn’t stay away from it, whether they were writing about rhetoric or biology or knowledge or ethics.
But that also means that the most influential opinions on humor have, for centuries, come from people with no actual humor on their résumés. Do we really think that philosophers, orators, churchmen, political theorists, and scientists are the ideal people to be weighing in on how jokes work, especially when their numbers include famous sourpusses like Plato and Schopenhauer? It seems like asking a bunch of famous celibates to explain sexual pleasure. When do actual funny people get to weigh in?
The Laugh Reflex
A few years ago, I watched a web video of a Virginia family releasing back into the wild an adorable baby bunny they’d been feeding for a week. Maybe you’ve seen the video too. “We’ve got to let Kermit go, so he can find his mommy,” Mom tells her cherubic little daughter. Then they see another rabbit watching from across their lawn. “There’s your mommy, go get her!” she says, setting Kermit down on the edge of the driveway. He scampers off across the field but doesn’t get more than sixty feet before a hawk swoops down and carries a screaming Kermit off in its talons, in full view of the shocked family—and, God help me, I burst out laughing. I laugh every time I see this video, and I’ve probably seen it twenty times.
The dad in the video, the one holding the camera, laughs immediately as well, even though he knows his daughter is probably traumatized for life. I laughed despite having said many a toilet-side eulogy for dead fish, and in one case having helped my teary-eyed daughter set up an incredibly elaborate backyard monument to a beloved golden retriever. We know that a child watching her pet die violently is sad, not funny. So why did we laugh? A superiority theorist would say we were laughing at the unfortunate rabbit, because Kermit’s troubles made us feel good about not currently being carried off by a hungry hawk. A relief theorist would say we laughed to vent our own discomfort around that most taboo subject of all: death. An incongruity theorist might say we were laughing because the hawk entered the frame at such an unexpected and inopportune moment, violating everything we know about the bittersweet decorum of releasing a pet back into the wild.
None of those answers feels quite right—even taking into account Max Eastman’s 1936 dictum “The correct explanation of a joke not only does not sound funny, but it does not sound like a correct explanation.” My sudden, almost automatic bark of laughter at Kermit’s painful death, as if it were just an exquisitely timed slapstick gag, didn’t seem to reflect anything about my conscious persona or convictions. If anything, it reflected only the idea that some things are just ineffably funny, denying all explication. We laugh at first sight.
In support of this, you might be able to think of a joke that you once liked but then found less funny once you learned why it was actually funny. For example, one of my favorite running gags in the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night is that everyone who meets Paul’s granddad, played by Irish actor Wilfrid Brambell, is impressed by how clean he is. (“Clean, though, isn’t he?” John Lennon remarks to the band’s road manager, Shake. “Oh, aye, he’s very clean,” agrees Shake.) I thought this was a hilarious non sequitur and laughed every time it recurred. But years later, I learned about the real genesis of the joke in a documentary. Brambell was, in 1964, famous for playing the grimy junkman Albert Steptoe in Steptoe and Son, the BB
C sitcom on which Sanford and Son was later based. Just like Redd Foxx’s Fred Sanford, Steptoe was often called a “dirty old man” by his son, and the filmmakers decided to have some fun with his casting as a more dapper type in the Beatles film. I was legitimately disappointed to learn that in seizing on the “clean old man” bit as an inspired bit of whimsy, I had actually misunderstood one of my least favorite kinds of joke: a wink at a then-contemporary pop culture reference. A sitcom catchphrase, of all things!IX
I enjoy plenty of jokes about things that I’ve never actually seen—not just cranberry bogs but also conga lines, Murphy beds, Limburger cheese—and some about things that I don’t think even exist, like poor people wearing barrels, or when a snootful of “alum” makes a cartoon character’s mouth shrink. But the first scientific work on the funniness of nonexistent things was done in 2015, by an Alberta professor named Chris Westbury. Westbury had a computer generate almost six thousand nonsense words and went through them by hand to eliminate any that seemed dirty: “whong,” “focky,” “clunt.” Then he had hundreds of students rate the nonwords’ inherent funniness. Results were surprisingly consistent: some made-up letter strings (“himumma,” “quaribbly,” “subvick”) immediately strike people as inherently funny, while others (“tessina,” “crester,” “mestead”) do not. Westbury published his study as a victory for incongruity theory, because his funny nonwords tended to include lots of unusual sounds and letter combinations, violating expectations about language, while the least funny words all looked like very promising Scrabble racks. But if that’s true, then it’s a victory for the “deceptive weight” school of incongruity humor, where it’s funny when something is strange and new, not when the newness gets explained away.
I’d go even further than that. Westbury’s experiment inclines me to think that humor theory should resign the game and go home. It suggests that something completely incomprehensible and devoid of any cultural associations whatsoever—a “proffin,” a “quingel”—can still strike hundreds of people as inherently funny. Explain that, Immanuel Kant.
“Sweaty” Republicans and Germans
Not everyone likes a joke that can’t be explained. Humor researchers now believe this to be one of the few real ideological divides when it comes to comedy. Both sides of the political spectrum like to paint themselves as the ones who really get humor. To liberals, conservatives are nuance-challenged puritans too repressed (or even too dumb) to get a joke; to conservatives, liberals are dour pedants more likely to take offense at a joke than to laugh at it. Comedy is such a self-evidently crucial pillar of society now that no one can afford to be on the side of the aisle without it.
In fact, many studies have shown little difference between the humor appreciation of the Left and the Right—except in two areas. People who identify as conservatives are much less comfortable with risqué humor, and they’re more likely to prefer tidy incongruity-resolution jokes. They want a punch line that “makes sense” in some way. Liberals go for nonsense humor, jokes with some leftover absurdity that doesn’t get resolved.
This cultural gap shows up between nationalities as well. In 1940, Charles Addams drew perhaps the most famous of his bizarre New Yorker cartoons: a skier looks back down the slope quizzically at another skier, whose tracks have somehow diverged around the trunk of a pine tree. Today Addams’s work seems quaintly charming, about as macabre as a middle school Halloween party, but its open absurdity was pretty edgy in its time. Addams’s friend Wolcott Gibbs joked in the preface to one of his collections that these cartoons were being used in hospitals to diagnose incipient lunacy—if you thought a panel like “The Skier” made sense, “the lunacy is no longer incipient.”
But when the “Skier” cartoon was reprinted in Germany, it created the opposite reaction. Where American readers smiled gently at the absurdity of the impossible ski tracks, a Heidelberg woman named Annemarie Hammer was bewildered. “I don’t see how this is possible,” she wrote the editors of Heute magazine. “Won’t you please print the answer to the puzzle?” “From Heute’s literal-minded German readers came a flood of confident answers,” Time reported. The skier had gone down the hill on one ski and back up on the other. He had slipped one foot out of his boot at just the right moment. Two amputees slid down the hill on one ski apiece. “A thoughtful Nürnberger suggested that it might be a kind of joke, [and] wrote six pages of tight Gothic script on the philosophy of humor.” The nation of Schopenhauer!
Comedy that can be cleverly explained is not the trend today, possibly not even among conservatives or Germans. We like our comedy to be as pure and irreducible as one of Chris Westbury’s nonsense words—funny for no reason, funny just because. “Himumma” and “proffin” really aren’t that different from David Letterman saying the word “pants” until it’s funny, or Charles Schulz using the word “Zamboni” until it’s funny. It’s not the article of clothing or the ice-smoothing machine; it’s the word, the spell cast, the willing suspension of disbelief.
According to George Meyer, the reflexively funny joke appeals to comedy writers for its sheer grace. It’s the opposite of what legendary Saturday Night Live writer Michael O’Donoghue used to call “sweaty” comedy, where the effort and laboriousness of manufacturing every joke is right there on the surface. The better jokes just alight on you effortlessly, like a butterfly. “That was considered, like, the acme of what we could do, if you came up with something like that,” he told me. “If we could discuss, ‘Why is that joke funny?’ ” And now that the audience for comedy is largely seen-it-all connoisseurs as well, the funny-for-no-reason joke is the Holy Grail, the last really impressive thing. You can’t explain it. You can’t teach or learn it as a matter of formula or craft.
Saying Funny Things vs. Saying Things Funny
A favorite in the Simpsons writing room, Meyer remembered, was a line from a 2000 episode structured like a Behind the Music parody. At one point, the melodramatic narrator intoned, “For the Simpsons, everything was coming up roses. But those roses contained ready-to-sting bees.” The joke came from former showrunner David Mirkin. “Such a bizarre line! We were always laughing at that. Why is that funny?”
Most funny-for-no-reason jokes rely on that thrill of exploration. In some cases, newfound comic potential is drawn from something that’s never been joke fodder before, and the audience can sense the exciting novelty. But often the discovery can be as simple as an unexpected turn of phrase. The idea of metaphorical roses containing very concrete bees might be incongruous, like the real toads in Marianne Moore’s imaginary gardens, but it isn’t terribly funny at first blush. It’s the bizarre phrasing—the bees aren’t just ready to sting, they’re adjectivally ready-to-sting bees!—that elevates the joke.
The first time I watched Groundhog Day with my kids, I was pleased to see them laughing at all the right places: “Watch the first step—it’s a doozy!” “Morons, your bus is leaving.” “Don’t drive on the railroad track!” The movie, evidently, had aged well. But I’d seen it at least a dozen times over the years; I’d seen Bill Murray’s alarm clock go off well over a hundred. I wasn’t responding to entry-level stuff like “Needlenose Ned” anymore. In fact, I found myself laughing the hardest at a line I’d never even noticed before. Late in the movie, when Murray is hoping to impress Andie MacDowell’s character over drinks, he muses, “People place too much emphasis on their careers. I wish we could all live in the mountains . . . at high altitudes.” At high altitudes! He later repeats the line. Maybe it’s meant to echo his bored-weatherman shtick from earlier in the movie (“At high altitudes it will crystallize, and give us what we call snow”) but mostly it’s just a weirdly specific mismatch with the dreaminess of his utopian vision. The altitudes . . . they must be high. A mildly eccentric phrasing turned a slight joke into a very good one—if you’ve heard the other jokes so many times that you’re desperate for novelty.
The notion that sometimes the funniest things just sound funny goes back at least to the Engli
sh masters of nonsense poetry: Edward Lear with his Quangle Wangle and Jumblies and Scroobious Pip, Lewis Carroll with his borogoves and Jubjub bird. This is a strain of gleeful infantilism that we see in British language and comedy up through Monty Python’s “Election Night Special” sketch, in which the candidates for the Silly Party have names that begin in Edward Lear territory and only escalate from there: Kevin Phillips-Bong, Mr. Elsie Zzzzzzzzzzz, Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lin-bus-stop-F’tang-F’tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel.X
But the modern phraseology of English-language comedy has more distinct American roots. The most influential British comedy voice, after all, is still the high-minded comedy of manners. It’s the clever verbal jousting and elaborate social customs of a Sheridan play or Austen novel. When we appreciate a witty Dryden couplet or scathing Oscar Wilde comeback, we’re not exactly laughing so much as we’re admiring the intellect that went into its construction. The difference between witty and funny is effort. So even the airiest banter in this vein is going to feel, in Michael O’Donoghue’s parlance, “sweaty.”
