Ha! (13 page)

Tired and depressed from having lost their patient, one of the doctors finally asked the question that was on all their minds.

“What do you think happened to the pizza?”

Another doctor looked outside and spotted the box, face up, only a few steps from the ER doors. He retrieved the food, then set it on the table in front of his colleagues.

“How much do you think we should tip him?”

What does the question about tipping really convey? I believe it says several things. First, that we're all going to die, and that trivial matters like tipping will remain long after we're gone. Second, that being alive is a pretty special condition, one that shouldn't be wasted, just like pizza. And, third, that death may come and take even the most innocent people, but it can't make us afraid if we don't let it. Death is the enemy, not pizza, and the only way the brain can express all these complex ideas is to laugh.

J
OKES WITH A
T
ARGET

One major benefit of information sources like the Internet is that even nonscientists have access to the latest discoveries in brain science. Consider, for example, mirror neurons—brain cells that fire when we take an action ourselves, but also when we see someone else demonstrate the same behavior. They may fire when someone reaches for food, shakes someone's hand, or picks up a book, but they don't care if we're doing these things ourselves or watching someone else do them at a distance. Mirror neurons were discovered in the 1990s, and they've become familiar to the general public—in part, because they're so amazing. Many scientists now claim that these cells are responsible for recognizing intention in others, and maybe even empathy.

But there's an even more exciting class of neurons, in a neurosci-entific sense at least, that are recently getting public attention, and they're known as spindle cells. These cells (scientifically called Von Economo neurons, after the Romanian neuroscientist Constantin Von Economo) are relatively rare, occurring in just a few regions within the brain. One of these is the anterior cingulate. Their appearance is unusual too, four times larger than most other neurons with extremely long projections. And they're found in only a few species other than humans—namely, in our most intelligent ape neighbors, such as gorillas and orangutans, and in a few other advanced mammals like whales and elephants.

What do they do? Whereas mirror neurons are responsible for empathy, spindle cells are responsible for social awareness and emotional control. Research suggests that they perform fast and intuitive updating of feelings and emotional reactions. Their lengthy projections allow them to communicate efficiently across wide regions of the brain, and their emergence after birth—unlike most other neurons, which develop prenatally—suggests that their development is influenced by environmental factors such as quality of social interaction. And, finally, spindle cells are observed only in animals with brains possessing a balance of cognitive and emotional thinking. There's one region each of
these animals have in common, the same place in which these spindle cells are most commonly found—the anterior cingulate.

In this chapter we've seen that conflict can be emotional as well as cognitive. When we experience conflicted feelings, we need to reconcile such feelings and establish emotional control. Spindle cells, because they're built for quick, long-range communication, are perfectly suited for this goal.

One thing I didn't mention earlier about the anterior cingulate is that it isn't a single entity. It has parts, much like the larger brain, and one of its most important divisions is between its dorsal and ventral sections (from the Latin words
dorsum
and
ventralis,
which mean “top” and “bottom”). These sections divide the anterior cingulate's cognitive and emotional responsibilities, respectively. The top—or dorsal—part of the anterior cingulate deals largely with cognitive conflict. The bottom or ventral part is emotionally focused.

Returning now to the Stroop task from
Chapter 2
—reading words in different-colored fonts is a cognitive task, so it typically activates the dorsal anterior cingulate. But there's an emotional version of the task too, called the Emotional Stroop task. For example, rather than asking subjects to report the color of neutral words like
B-L-U-E,
the Emotional Stroop task uses words like
M-U-R-D-E-R
and
R-A-P-E.
The shocking words are unrelated to the task, but the ventral part of the anterior cingulate notices them anyway. Then it sends a warning to the rest of the brain—do not trust this researcher!

It's likely that spindle cells are key for sharing such warnings. They appear to be concentrated in the ventral part of the anterior cingulate, which is responsible for detecting such emotional messages, and they're also found in a region called the fronto-insula, another key area for processing emotion. This makes them well suited for dealing with conflict in social situations, particularly those involving mixed or contradictory emotions. Both the ventral part of the anterior cingulate and the fronto-insula are also active during times of empathy, guilt, deception—and humor. In short, these two brain regions are especially involved in dealing with messy feelings.

This issue of messy feelings is significant because it brings us to another kind of conflict important for humor—personal conflict. Sometimes the target of our jokes is unnamed, but much of the time our comedy is directed at particular individuals. In these cases the humor is personal, involving feelings about specific people, and maybe even insults. Though we haven't yet identified precisely which neural responses are involved in these kinds of interactions, with the discovery of spindle cells we may not be far off. Their long projections and their connections to our emotional centers allow these cells to access a wide range of feelings, thus helping us to work through our complex emotional reactions. One way to do that is to tell a joke.

        
One day, the secretary to Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy hears on the radio that a lunatic is driving against traffic on the busy Jerusalem/Tel Aviv highway. Knowing that this is her boss's route, she immediately calls his car to warn him. “Just one lunatic?” he screams back at her. “They're all driving against the traffic!”

This joke depends on your knowing who David Levy is, which many readers will not, but I include it here because it highlights two kinds of humor. First, it's clearly an insult. At the end of the joke, we get some clear impressions of Levy—that he's a bad driver, not particularly smart, and maybe hard-headed too. The joke is also political satire, since Levy is a public figure. And it's a polarizing one, which makes the joke even funnier.

During the late twentieth century, David Levy was a prominent and controversial Israeli politician. With only an eighth-grade education, Levy began work in construction before later aligning with his country's moderate right-wing Likud Party. After holding several ministerial positions he attained a well-recognized position in government, but several unfortunate personal characteristics kept holding him back. One was that he frequently appeared stern-faced and pompous. Another is that he never learned English, making international relations difficult. Even in his native language he often made slips of the tongue
that caused him to look dense. Eventually he became a symbol of stupid, selfish politicians who are willing to say whatever the public wants to hear.

Enter the wave of
Bedichot David Levi,
which is Hebrew for “David Levy Jokes.” This phenomenon, as recorded by Hagar Salamon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, took Israel and neighboring countries by storm. They made fun of Levy's intelligence, his arrogance, and—most of all—his inability to recognize his own shortcomings. The jokes became so widespread that a
Los Angeles Times
reporter even wrote an article wondering if he could overcome them. Here's an especially popular one:
A man approaches David Levy and says, “Have you heard the latest David Levy joke?” “Excuse me,” David Levy responds. “I'm David Levy.” “That's okay,” the man replies. “I'll tell it slowly.”

At first glance, this may appear to be just another wave of political humor directed at an easy target. In the early 1990s, nearly everyone was telling Dan Quayle jokes for seemingly the same reasons. The names Quayle, Clinton, and Palin could easily be used in Levy's place for any of the jokes and be just as funny. Or could they?

Though language differences make it hard to answer this question, a closer examination shows that the humor behind these jokes is more complicated. For one thing, Levy wasn't born in Israel but in Morocco—and as a Moroccan Jew, he represented a new faction in Israeli politics. Up to Levy's time, Israel had been dominated by European Zionism; however, as Levy came to power, Jews from eastern, traditionally Muslim countries were beginning to alter the ethnic balance of Israeli society. The fact that Levy frequently emphasized his ethnic origins only heightened the growing tensions associated with this change. Aspects of Levy's personality clearly made him easier to ridicule, but the conflict that people felt about their old and new society played a large part too. Levy frequently complained that jokes about him were motivated by latent racism, and perhaps the accusation worked because the joke cycle eventually ended.

It's easy to find similar jokes targeting popular American figures, though most of these have nothing to do with racism. By the late 1980s and early '90s, when Dan Quayle jokes were at the height of their popularity, America had become obsessed with money and power. The Reagan years had ushered in an era when wealth was the ultimate status symbol, whether earned or inherited, and Quayle was the perfect example of the latter, coming from two generations of wealthy publishers. Though moderately successful on his own, he was seen as out of touch, dense, and disconnected from common America. It certainly didn't help that Quayle didn't know how to spell
potato,
but at a time when America was ready to rebel against the rich and privileged, he had been set up to fail.

Waves of Clinton jokes in the 1990s. Sarah Palin jokes in the 2000s. Each of these targets tapped into an aspect of society characterized by conflict, whether it was Clinton's chronic infidelity during a time of economic prosperity or Palin's intellectual deficits contrasted with her folksy populism. Why did Americans revel in these joke cycles but leave another figure, Jimmy Carter, relatively alone? Carter didn't escape unscathed, of course—several jokes about peanut farmers surfaced in Washington in the late 1970s. But considering his failures, such jokes were relatively few. Rising gas prices, inflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis led critics to assess Carter's presidency as one of the most ineffectual in recent history. Yet jokes at his expense were scarce, primarily because Carter was not a man to elicit conflicting emotions. Likable, ethical, and smart, he came across as a generally good guy, better suited for peace missions than for leading the free world.

Political jokes are popular because they feed on the mixed feelings that people have about public figures, but what if those feelings are about larger groups? When politicians such as Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich run for office, they expect to be subjected to ridicule as part of the process, but what about jokes about Mexicans, or Polish people? What do jokes about larger social and ethnic groups say about society?

When I was growing up, Polish jokes were huge. Though grossly inappropriate, nearly every child or adult knew at least one.
What do
they print on the bottom of Polish Coke bottles? Open the other end. How do you break a Pole's finger? Punch him in the nose.

Every country has one or more popular targets. Russians make fun of Ukrainians. Australians make fun of Tasmanians. Canadians make fun of Newfoundlanders. Most of the time the jokes are about being stupid, but sometimes they're about being dirty or uncivilized too. These targets may seem to be chosen haphazardly, or aimed only at low-status groups that threaten the home country's prosperity. Not so.

The amazing thing about stupidity jokes is that they can be found everywhere, though the targets aren't usually groups most disliked within the culture. Instead they're the ones just barely outside the mainstream, the ones on the periphery. We make fun of these groups because they're only slightly different from ourselves, and such humor helps relieve the stress and anxiety associated with living in a pluralistic society. To what extent, really, were Americans threatened by the Polish when jokes targeting this group were most popular? Those jokes came almost a hundred years too late for that possibility to be taken seriously. Rather, people laughed at Polish jokes because Polish people were different from those around them, but not so different to be an actual danger to existing cultural norms.