Ha! Read online

  HA!

  Copyright © 2014 by Scott Weems

  Published by Basic Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107-1307.

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  Designed by Linda Mark

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weems, Scott.

  Ha! : the science of when we laugh and why / Scott Weems.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-465-08080-9 (e-book) 1. Wit and humor—Therapeutic use. 2. Wit and humor in medicine. 3. Laughter. I. Title.

  R705.W43 2014

  152.4'3—dc23

  2013046270

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Katherine Russell Rich, who laughed

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART I:“What Is?” The Elusive Concept of Mirth

  CHAPTER ONE – Cocaine, Chocolate, and Mr. Bean

  CHAPTER TWO – The Kick of the Discovery

  CHAPTER THREE – Stopover at the Empire State Building

  PART II:“What For?” Humor and Who We Are

  CHAPTER FOUR – Specialization Is for Insects

  CHAPTER FIVE – Our Computer Overlords

  PART III:“So What?” Becoming a More Jovial Person

  CHAPTER SIX – The Bill Cosby Effect

  CHAPTER SEVEN – Humor Dances

  CHAPTER EIGHT – Oh, the Places You’ll Go

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  THE JOKE IS DEAD. IT EVEN HAD AN OBITUARY, WRITTEN BY Warren St. John and published in the New York Times on May 22, 2005. “The joke died a lonely death,” wrote St. John. “There was no next of kin.”

  The setting was, as armchair poets call it, a dark and stormy night. New York City was being hit by almost twenty inches of snow, with wind gusts exceeding eighty miles an hour and temperatures dropping well below zero. The city was still recovering from an even bigger blizzard just two weeks before, and Mayor Robert Wagner had been forced to declare a state of emergency. Until the weather cleared and bulldozers could push the mess into the East River, New York was closed for business. At the same time, a young comic named Lenny Bruce waited in a hotel on West 47th Street, wondering if anybody would endure the terrible conditions to see his show. Cars weren’t even allowed on the roads, so what were the odds they would venture out into the city to see comedy?

  It was midnight, February 4, 1961, the beginning of a prolonged death for the traditional joke. By the end of the night, Bruce’s career, and indeed comedy itself, would never again be the same.

  Bruce had already made a name for himself by performing edgy stand-up routines based on race, religion, and sexual hypocrisy. He didn’t tell jokes, and many people didn’t find his stories especially funny. Instead, they were shocking, less like comedy and more like social commentary. Bruce wasn’t a comedian like Bob Hope or Sid Caesar; his act had little structure and sounded distinctly unrehearsed. Just as jazz musicians hone their craft not by focusing on individual songs but by perfecting use of their instrument, Bruce was becoming master of the riff, the story, and the offhand remark. Carnegie Hall would be his master performance.

  The show began with Bruce remarking on the size of the crowd, wondering what would happen if, instead of comedy, he simply performed an extended violin solo. Then his art began, and he ripped into a string of random observations and anecdotes that, if committed to print, would be incomprehensible. He pondered what would happen if Jesus and Moses visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral and saw the size of the cardinal’s ring. He wondered how, since the earth is constantly rotating, people who die at noon can go to heaven while those passing away in late evening don’t go to hell. When feedback erupted over the microphone, he searched the stage looking for the source of the noise, musing how funny it would be if the speakers were simply picking up sound from a kid practicing piano behind the curtain. Like Charlie Parker with a saxophone, or Miles Davis a trumpet, he worked the microphone and improvised about anything that came to mind, drawing huge laughs despite telling almost no traditional “jokes.” “There’s no right and wrong,” he claimed early in the act. “Just my right, and your wrong.”

  For the next two hours Bruce shared observations about religion, prejudice, and even women with hairy armpits, and though his approach wasn’t groundbreaking, it was the first time anybody had performed with such fluidity. Like other comedians of his generation, he rejected the idea of setups and punch lines in favor of a more personal approach, trading one-liners for an angst-filled slurry of words that at times bordered on gibberish. He wasn’t the funniest comic of his time. Far from it—much of his humor was lost on the audience for the simple reason that he didn’t bother finishing most of his sentences. He wasn’t the smartest, either. Rather, he was simply the most creatively idiosyncratic, like the kid in school who could have been voted most likely to succeed if only he cared about the title. He was both a genius and a complete mess.

  “All laughter is involuntary,” he said during the performance. “Try to fake four laughs in an hour, it’ll take you away, man. You can’t. They laugh because it’s funny. [Switch to stiff, formal voice] They have had the exposure in the area that he is satirizing.” In other words, humor happens when we connect with other people and share their struggles and confusions. Indeed, on February 4, 1961, all laughter was involuntary.

  Still, the exact moment of death, the joke’s final death knell, didn’t come until the conclusion of his act. Bruce announced that he wanted to end the performance with a traditional story, one with a regular setup and punch line. People would laugh and jump from the rafters, choral music would celebrate his joy, and his job would be so complete that there would be no need for a curtain call. The joke would be enough.

  Nineteen minutes later he still hadn’t gotten around to the punch line.

  Though the joke eventually elicited huge laughs and applause, the reaction didn’t come from the joke itself. That was relatively tame, involving a man sleeping on a plane with his fly open and his privates exposed. No, the audience erupted in huge applause because they recognized that something unusual had just happened. They had witnessed a new form of comedy.

  A short while later, Bruce would be arrested for obscenity, and comics like George Carlin and Richard Pryor would take his place as humor pioneers, working up audiences in ways unknown to previous generations. Comedy would remain healthy as ever, though nobody would look at it the same way again.

  “I’m not a comedian,” Bruce said later. “The world is sick and I’m the doctor. I’m a surgeon with a scalpel for false values. I don’t have an act. I just talk. I’m just Lenny Bruce.”

  I’m too young to have ever seen Lenny Bruce perform live, but I love his work and it has often made me wonder: Why do we find things funny? It’s a philosophical as well as scientific question: Why do some comments, including jokes, quips, or extended stories, provoke joy and laughter, while others do not? Or, to be more concrete, why do we have the same reaction to a quip made by Lenny Bruce as to one made by Henny Youngman? Youngman was the comic who spoke the i
mmortal line “Take my wife . . . please,” the kind of one-liner that’s now rare but in its day caused audiences to howl. Humor may have adapted to modern tastes, like other forms of entertainment, but this doesn’t explain why something funny to one person isn’t to another, or why something that’s hilarious in one decade is trite and stale in another.

  I believe the answer to these questions lies in the fact that humor is ultimately not about puns or one-liners. Although traditional jokes are now rare thanks to artists like Bruce, humor remains alive and well because it’s a process, one that reflects the times and needs of its audiences. It’s the social or psychological working through of ideas that are not easily handled by our conscious minds.

  As a cognitive neuroscientist with more than a dozen years’ experience studying how the brain operates, I have learned that understanding humor requires recognizing the massive complexity of the human brain. If the brain were a government, it wouldn’t be a dictatorship, a monarchy, or even a democracy. It would be an anarchy. It’s been said that the brain is a lot like the Reagan presidency—characterized by countless interacting modules, all acting independently with only the semblance of a central executive. Political views aside, most scientists would agree with this assessment. The brain is indeed massively complex: parts are connected to other parts, which are then connected to others, but nowhere in the system is there some “final part” deciding what we say or do. Instead, our brains act by letting ideas compete and argue for attention. This approach has its benefits, such as allowing us to reason, solve problems, and even read books. However, it sometimes leads to conflict, for example when we try to hold two or more inconsistent ideas at once. When that happens, our brains know of only one thing to do—laugh.

  We often think of the human mind as a computer, one that takes input from its surroundings and acts based on our immediate goals. But this view is flawed. Rather than working in a logical, controlled manner, the brain multitasks. It doesn’t break down in the face of ambiguity but, instead, uses confusion to achieve complex thought. When the brain is given conflicting goals or information, it uses that conflict to generate novel solutions, sometimes producing ideas that have never been thought of before. Humor succeeds because we take joy in this process, which is why a bored mind is a humorless mind. We take pleasure in working through the confusion, and we laugh when we’ve come up with a solution.

  One challenge arising from viewing humor as a social and psychological phenomenon is that it’s not easily measured. Most scientists prefer to focus on laughter, which is a concrete behavior. As a result, laughter has been relatively well studied; surveys show that we’re more likely to be seen sharing laughter than any other emotional response. This means that, on average, we laugh between fifteen and twenty times a day. There’s lots of variation, though. Women tend to laugh less as they get older, but not men. And we all tend to laugh more in the afternoon and evening, though this tendency is strongest for the young.

  It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that our first attempts at understanding humor involved the study of laughter. Aristotle said that humans are the only species who laugh, and that babies don’t have souls until they utter their first giggle. As if that wasn’t enough, he further claimed that every baby first laughs on his or her fortieth day. Fried-rich Nietzsche described laughter as a reaction to existential loneliness. Freud had a more positive view (an unusual role for him), claiming that laughter is a release of tension and psychic energy. The problem with each of these definitions, of course, is that they’re useless. There’s no way to measure psychic energy or existential loneliness, and there never will be. Perhaps this is why Thomas Hobbes felt comfortable confusing things entirely by calling laughter the “glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves.”

  Laughter, which we can actually observe and measure, is indeed endlessly interesting, but humor reveals more about our humanity, about how we think and feel, and about how we relate to others. Humor is a state of mind. And that’s what this book is about.

  Ha! is about an idea. The idea is that humor and its most common symptom—laughter—are by-products of possessing brains which rely on conflict. Because they constantly deal with confusion or ambiguity, our minds jump the gun, make mistakes, and generally get muddled in their own complexity. But this isn’t bad. On the contrary, it provides us adaptability and a constant reason to laugh.

  The reason Lenny Bruce was so funny that night, just like Pryor was a decade later and Louis C.K. is today, is that each found a way to address the prevailing concerns of his time. For Bruce, this involved telling stories about the hypocrisy of sex, prejudice, and drugs, allowing humor to shed light on topics that, in the late 1950s at least, weren’t openly discussed. Being funny was how he helped his audience work through living in such volatile times. Indeed, though the traditional joke may be dead (or, more likely, gravely injured), humor remains as healthy as ever because that need for relating with others is timeless.

  Over the next two hundred pages I will show that humor is closely associated with nearly every aspect of human cognition. For example, the same processes that give us humor also contribute to insight, creativity, and even psychological health. Studies indicate that the use of humor in everyday settings—for example, when we’re responding to e-mails or using descriptive imagery—is strongly related to intelligence. In short, the smarter we are, the more likely we are to share a good joke. We don’t even need to be outgoing to appreciate humor. The important thing is being able to enjoy a good laugh.

  For years, scientists have known that humor improves our health, and now by viewing it as rigorous exercise of the mind, we understand why. Humor is like exercise for the brain, and just as physical exercise strengthens the body, keeping a funny outlook is the healthiest way to stay cognitively sharp. This also explains why watching Robin Williams’s stand-up routines improves our ability to solve word-association puzzles; minds are meant to be constantly worked, stretched, and surprised. Such comedy pushes our brains to make new associations and tackle confusion head-on.

  Though in this book we will explore how to incorporate humor more in your life, it’s important to note early on that the goal isn’t to learn how to make people laugh or tell the perfect joke. This isn’t to say that by the end of the book you won’t be equipped to be a funnier person. I will show that the key to being funny isn’t to learn tricks or memorize jokes but, rather, to gain a firmer grasp of how humor is our natural response to living in a world filled with conflict. Then you will see why comedy follows no simple checklists or rules, and why no single joke pleases everyone. Humor is idiosyncratic because it depends on the one thing that makes each of us unique—how we deal with disagreement in our complex brains.

  Some people have argued that there’s little point in studying humor because it’s too mysterious to understand. The American writer E. B. White even wrote that analyzing humor is like dissecting frogs: few people are interested and the subject always dies in the end. In some ways this is true, since humor is constantly changing and, like a frog on a table, without restraint the subject tends to move on without us. But now scientists are discovering that humor is our natural response to conflict and confusion—a topic absolutely worthy of our attention. What better way to understand what makes us tick than finding out how we cope with uncertainty?

  Another common argument against studying humor is that it’s as much art as science. Joel Goodman, director of an organization called The Humor Project, once claimed that people learn to become funny the same way a musician gets to Carnegie Hall. That is, they follow the Rule of the Five Ps: they practice—and practice—and practice—and practice—and practice. It’s true that humor is so complex, and the causes of laughter so diverse, that no rules apply from one situation to the next. Yet humor has some very clear ingredients, ones that science is just now beginning to reveal. These ingredients explain puns, riddles, and even lawyer jokes. And they all depend on conflict and ambiguity re
solution within our highly modular brains.

  I will start by introducing you to the latest humor research, showing that it’s only through owning indecisive brains that we take pleasure in a cognitively and emotionally demanding world. This raises the What is? question of humor: What is it, and why is it so enjoyable? As we will see, humor relies on stages, starting with making premature predictions about the world and ending with resolving the misinterpretations that inevitably result. Without this beginning and end, we don’t laugh. Too much in between just muddles the punch line.

  The next question is What for? What purpose does humor serve, and why do we need such complicated brains? Wouldn’t life be easier if our minds were like computers and more predictable? Not at all. First, computers fail all the time, especially when confronted with ambiguity. If a computer gets confused, it must be shut down and rebooted. The brain, by contrast, must keep working even in the face of the unexpected. Second, when was the last time a computer wrote a decent sonnet or composed a catchy song? With simplicity comes a cost.

  The last question is So what? In other words, how can we use inner conflict to better our lives, and how do we become funnier people? Though this isn’t a self-help book, I will show how improving your humor affects your health, helps you get along with strangers, and even makes you smarter. Nearly every aspect of our lives is improved by focusing on humor. This book explains why.

  Although my background as a cognitive neuroscientist certainly helped me write this book, I’ve tried to keep the science accessible to the general reader. One of the most exciting aspects about any emerging science is that at the beginning, everybody is both an expert and an outsider. While many scientists take the subject down some unusual roads—a recent study by researchers at the University of Louisville on the humor of French author Albert Camus comes to mind—the research is still so new it’s easy to follow. It also helps that humor has only recently become a legitimate topic of study for academic fields like linguistics, psychology, and sociology. My goal in this book is to act as translator, and perhaps mediator too, pulling out interesting findings from each of these fields. And, by combining their insights, to form a new field altogether—Humorology.