Ha! (12 page)

Such jokes reveal something new and remarkable about the human mind—namely, that being told we can't laugh makes us
want to laugh.
It makes us want to Photoshop a picture of a huge gorilla grabbing planes from the sky near the Twin Towers with a caption reading “Where was King Kong when we needed him?”

The human brain is an obstinate beast. It doesn't like being told what to do.

S
CARY
M
OVIES AND
R
ELIEF

When you think of emotional complexity, you probably don't think of movies like
The Exorcist
or
Salem's Lot.
These are horror flicks, and they're intended to convey a specific feeling—fear. They're quite good at it too, which raises the question: Why do people watch them? If horror movies elicit feelings that most of us try to avoid, why would we pay to see them in theaters?

My wife enjoys horror movies, but I don't. It's not that I'm a fearful person, or at least I hope I'm not. Mostly, it's because I don't see the fun in them. But my wife, like so many others, disagrees. She says there's great fun in being terrified. She loves roller coasters too, which makes no sense to me at all.

I had always assumed that horror movies are popular because people like the relief that follows the scary scenes. This belief stems in part from the relief theory of humor, which states that we laugh when we are suddenly released from threat or discomfort. The idea is rooted in Freud's psychoanalytic theory, which holds that everything we do (including laughter) is affected by stress imposed by our superego on the hedonistic drives of our id. But this theory is unsatisfying for several reasons, one being that it's about as scientific as palm reading and astrology. It also fails to explain why we don't spend our days hitting ourselves over the head with hammers just to enjoy the satisfying feeling of stopping.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who questions the sanity of horror movies. Eduardo Andrade, professor of marketing at the Hass
School of Business at the University of California–Berkeley, is also uneasy with this popular genre—or, rather, with the explanations that people give for why horror movies are so popular. For instance, why do we need to watch scary or disgusting scenes to feel good about ourselves? If viewers supposedly enjoy these movies because of the relief that comes when they're over, why do the bad guys almost always win in the end and return in the sequel? And if it's true that people who like horror movies are less sensitive than everybody else, and aren't bothered by gruesome scenes, why aren't these differences revealed on personality tests?

To seek an explanation, Andrade performed a series of experiments that only horror-movie fans could love. He showed his subjects ten-minute clips from two popular horror movies:
The Exorcist
and
Salem's Lot.
In one version of the experiment, he asked subjects to rate their joy and discomfort, otherwise known as positive and negative affect, both before and after each film was viewed. In another, he asked for these assessments during the scariest scenes. Reported feelings were assessed for those who considered themselves horror-movie fans, compared to those who generally avoid this type of film.

Contrary to popular expectations, both fans and nonfans reported increases in discomfort after viewing these films. In short,
all
of the subjects found them disturbing, regardless of whether they liked them or not. The experimental differences showed up when Andrade looked at the subjects' feelings of joy. Fans reported increased joy, along with discomfort, during the scariest scenes. That happiness continued up to the end of the movie clips, whereas nonfans showed no such enjoyment. As soon as things got scary, they were ready to close their eyes until the experiment was over.

Andrade's data revealed that horror-movie fans actually experience two emotions at once—joy and fear.

When I first read about these findings, I went with my wife to a horror movie to conduct a test of my own. I didn't know what I expected to see, but as we walked into the early showing of
The Innkeepers,
I promised to keep my eyes open. For the first time in my life, I hoped
that the people in the theater would be loud and disruptive so that I could see their reactions.

During the first scary scene, many people in the audience screamed. Quiet lulls were punctuated by anticipatory gasps, and then the screams came again. At first it seemed as though this would be the extent of the audience's reaction, but then something strange happened. During the next scary scene, one in which the main character enters a possessed cellar, rather than screaming several people laughed. There had been no joke, only a bunch of very startled birds, but these people laughed anyway. This happened several more times, particularly during scenes for which there was an especially long build-up of suspense.

What made the audience members laugh? And why did the subjects in Andrade's study report joy during scenes of terror? One of Andrade's last experimental manipulations provides the answer to both of these questions. Before the horror movies were shown, he presented brief biographies of the principal actors to the subjects to remind them they were observing people “playing a role.” He also placed pictures of the actors next to the screen during the movies. This time, even the nonfans reported feelings of happiness during the scary scenes, to almost the same degree as the fans. Evidently the pictures and biographies provided the subjects with what Andrade called a “protective frame” from which to view the events playing out on the screen. Being reminded that they were merely watching a movie allowed them to override their fear so that enjoyment could emerge. It's as if the subjects wanted to enjoy the movies but their fear wouldn't let them. The experiment allowed these latent feelings to finally be free.

Harald Høffding was a Danish philosopher, well known in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but relatively unfamiliar to most people today. He made one immense, though often overlooked, contribution to the study of humor that is worth mentioning now—what he called “Great Humor.” Emotions, claimed Høffding, reveal themselves in many forms, typically in the form of “simple” feelings, like happiness or sadness. But sometimes our emotions fuse and form
organized complexes reflecting entirely new perspectives. This happens at what he called “the heights of life,” moments when we become so in tune with our emotions that we act based on the totality of our experiences rather than in response to the immediate emotional or cognitive demands placed on us by our surroundings.

Høffding's thoughts on Great Humor serve as a useful introduction to the idea of emotional complexity. Indeed, Great Humor reflects an appreciation of life not just from the perspectives of happiness or sadness but more totally, through a complex synthesis of these emotions. The best humor doesn't make us feel merely one way or another. It's more than that. It makes us laugh at the handicap joke at the same time that we feel sympathy for its target.

“It's pointless thinking of humor in terms of catharsis. We're not talking about washing away anything,” says Davies, and I agree. Sick humor doesn't simply purge emotional stress from our system—it “cultivates” the stress so that we can achieve some sort of resolution. This gets at the difference between the Greek concepts of catharsis and cathexis. Catharsis is the cleansing of one's feelings. Cathexis is the lesser-known opposite of that. It's the investment of emotional energy, the revving up of the libido. Humor provides us with relief, not by washing away bad feelings but by activating them, along with positive ones so that we can enjoy a complex emotional experience.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in gallows humor, the darkest form of comedy in which one makes light of dire circumstances. When the remaining members of the Monty Python comedy troupe sang “Always Look at the Bright Side of Life” at the funeral of their deceased friend Graham Chapman, they weren't celebrating his death—they were celebrating his life. Indeed, tragic environments, such as funerals and war, are effective breeding grounds for humor because they provide the same release as horror movies, allowing participants to confront their emotions head-on.
“Why hasn't Hitler invaded England yet?” asked one Czech in the fall of 1940. “Because the German officers haven't managed to learn all the irregular English verbs yet.”

Perhaps the most famous example of gallows humor is the story of Gerald Santo Venanzi, an Air Force captain from Trenton, New Jersey. During a bombing raid over North Vietnam in September 1967, Venanzi's RF-4C aircraft was shot down near Hanoi. Almost immediately he was taken prisoner and, along with several other soldiers, was subjected to brutal treatment. Many of his cohorts were in worse shape than him, bound and miserable and desperate for something positive. Seeing the bleakness of the situation, Venanzi did the only thing he could: he created an imaginary motorcycle, as well as a fictitious chimp named Barney.

To amuse his fellow prisoners of war, Venanzi “rode” the bike around the prison complex whenever he could, performing tricks and even taking the occasional spill, as one would expect during such daring maneuvers. Most of the guards thought him mentally unbalanced, but his fellow prisoners loved it. Soon Venanzi began providing sound effects, and eventually the show grew so animated that the guards asked him to stop. It wasn't fair to the other prisoners, they explained, because they didn't have motorcycles too.

Fortunately, after the guards took away his imaginary motorcycle Venanzi still had Barney, who accompanied him to solitary confinement, as well as to numerous interrogations. Barney made insulting remarks about the captors, always directed only to Venanzi but shared with everyone else indirectly. Already convinced that they were dealing with a weak mind, the guards played along, sometimes asking Venanzi to repeat Barney's vile retorts. One guard even offered Barney tea, which Venanzi declined, though he did laugh about this exchange with his fellow prisoners later. Though odd from the perspective of his captors, these antics were the greatest entertainment Venanzi and his fellow prisoners could ever have shared. And the effort eventually earned him the Silver Star, the third-highest decoration a military member can receive during times of war.

Prisoners aren't the only group who routinely use humor to cope with macabre surroundings. Doctors, too, spend much of their days
exposed to blood, gore, and general depression—and again their approach to coping seems to be laughter.

What
Catch-22
did for war,
House of God
did for medicine. Written under the pseudonym Samuel Shem, this novel by Stephen Bergman focuses on a group of medical interns struggling to deal with the pressures and complexity of medicine. They create names for uninteresting but acute patients such as “Gomer” (an acronym for “get out of my emergency room”) and refer to “turfing” difficult patients to other teams. They even commit suicide and secretly euthanize patients, all in reaction to the extreme stress placed on them by their jobs. Though not as extreme as war, the interns' situation is intense, and lives are saved or lost based on the decisions they make.

Medicine is rife with humor, even where you'd never expect to see it. The textbook
Pathologic Basis of Disease
describes interstitial emphysema as a bloating of the subcutaneous tissue to an “alarming, but usually harmless Michelin-tire-like appearance.” The same textbook warns that, since the chance of acquiring hepatitis from eating oysters is 1 in 10,000, doctors should warn oyster lovers never to consume more than 9,999 in one sitting. The
Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy
classifies discharge of flatus, otherwise known as farting, into three categories: the slider, the gun sphincter, and the staccato.

If these instances seem mild, making it difficult for us to decide whether the humor is inappropriate, consider the following true story about a group of medical professionals debating how to treat a baby born with severe neurological defects. The doctors discussed numerous tests, contemplating all the possible information they might gather about the child's condition. It soon became clear that the situation was hopeless, though no one wanted to be the first to give up. Finally, one of the doctors ended the debate: “Look. He's more likely to
be
second base, than play it.”

Wow! Fortunately the parents weren't around to hear this. But that's not the point. The doctor wasn't trying to be cruel. He was doing what the American essayist George Saunders calls “rapid-truthing.” The term was originally coined in reference to Kurt Vonnegut's use of
blunt, unvarnished humor in the book
Slaughterhouse Five
to describe the depravity of war. It means “to express truth without flourish.” As Saunders put it, “Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.” In other words, likening a struggling baby to a piece of sporting equipment is funny for the same reason it's horrifying—it expresses an idea so horrible that we're unaccustomed to addressing it so directly.

In most instances of sick humor, the target isn't obvious. Medical humor, particularly of the macabre sort, doesn't make fun of the patients—it makes fun of death. There's an old story, also true, about a group of doctors working late one night in the ER, and together they decided to order a pizza. It was after three in the morning and their delivery still hadn't come, when suddenly a nurse interrupted their complaints by bringing in a gunshot patient. The doctors quickly recognized the patient as the pizza delivery person, who apparently had been shot delivering their order just outside the building. They worked for hours trying to save him, going so far as to open his rib cage and massage his torn heart. But their efforts were futile and the boy died.