Ha! (27 page)

P
EER
P
RESSURE

A priest, a rabbi, and a monk walk into a bar. The bartender says, “What is this? A joke?”

I laughed the first time I heard this joke, not only because it's strange but because it highlights what I call the meta-level aspect of some humor. At first glance it seems to violate all four of Grice's maxims, because there's no communication between the imagined participants. The priest, rabbi, and monk say nothing, so the bartender's comment is surprising. It also seems out of place—unless, that is, you consider that there exists a long history of jokes involving two or more characters entering a bar. This joke relies on that background knowledge, and also on the assumption that the reader expects a joke. In essence, then, the punch line steps out of the context of communication between
three clergy members and a bartender, and becomes a comment on the joke-telling process itself.

We call these jokes meta-humor because they involve meta-awareness of joke-telling in general—that is, they take the idea of humor as social violation to a level beyond just breaking polite rules of conversation. In the movie
Wayne's World,
there's a scene near the end where Wayne opens a door revealing a room full of soldiers training for a ninja-style fight. His friend Garth asks what he's doing, and Wayne looks into the camera (movie no-no number one) and says that they're not relevant at all. He just always wanted to open a door revealing a room full of soldiers training as they would in a James Bond movie (no-no number two: the fighters have nothing to do with the plot). That's about as meta as you get.

The idea of stepping outside the normal rules of humor is important, because it shows how comedians don't always speak at face value. When we hear a joke, we build certain expectations, only to have them violated for the purpose of entertainment. This controlled violation allows comics to speak indirectly, conveying messages that might not be appropriate if the topic were addressed head-on. Consider Daniel Tosh, for example. Tosh hosts a clip-based comedy show on Comedy Central called
Tosh.O.
On that show he frequently shares racist and misogynist comments with the television audience, and taken at surface level the comments seem to imply that Tosh himself hates women and minorities. Not so. A closer analysis reveals that Tosh isn't making fun of these groups, he's making fun of stereotypes themselves. For instance, when Tosh urges his viewers to sneak up on women and inappropriately touch their stomachs (ugh!), he's not advocating sexual harassment. Rather, he's satirizing an unusual and inappropriate social phenomenon involving pregnant women, and then exploiting it for the sake of humor.

Still, comics who use this form of humor ineffectively sometimes get themselves into trouble. When Michael Richards (the comedian best known for playing Kramer in the sitcom
Seinfeld
) took the stage at Los Angeles's Laugh Factory on November 17, 2006, he made two mistakes.
First, he lost his cool when a group of unruly fans disrupted his act. They yelled and told him he wasn't funny, and in return he remarked that fifty years ago such behavior would have gotten the African American hecklers hung upside down. Then, as if that weren't enough, he pulled out a few racial epithets and even made an explicit reference to lynching. But his second mistake was even worse—he simply wasn't funny. Had he convinced the audience that such comments weren't his own opinions but a comment on slavery itself, the incident probably wouldn't have been all that remarkable. He might have been accused of going too far, but at least most people wouldn't have considered him a racist, and an unfunny one at that.

Once again we see that humor is a social act. Skilled joke-tellers realize that what's being communicated isn't just a joke but a message about the relationship between teller and receiver. The receiver contributes to the humor just as much as the teller does, bringing a rich set of expectations and—hopefully—a willingness to look deeper than the surface words of the joke.

I must confess that the first time I saw
The Big Lebowski,
I didn't like it. I'd been told by dozens of friends that I
had
to see it; yet when I rented the DVD and settled down on a lazy Sunday afternoon to watch it, I was sorely disappointed. It seemed slow, a little ridiculous, and the humor was sporadic. I know there are worse things to admit, but for me this was difficult because everybody I knew said the movie was great. But then, one evening when a bunch of friends came over for barbecue and beer, I gave in to their urgings and together we gave it another try. I laughed harder than I had in weeks, and
The Big Lebowski
soon became one of my favorites.

As this anecdote shows, humor is sometimes even communal—as with dancing, comedic beats are easier to follow with others around. To see how incongruities and moments of absurdity are shared between people in an experimental setting, let's look at a study by Willibald Ruch, whom we've met several times already. In the field of psychology, experimenters usually remain neutral and in the background. We don't want to influence our subjects because we aren't part of the phenomenon
being studied. But what if our goal is to see whether an experimenter's mood can influence the humor ratings of the participant? Could a violation of experimental protocol make a subject laugh more at a joke, simply by setting a humorous tone?

To test humor's social nature, Ruch asked each of his sixty subjects to sit down in a room with a television, at which point a female experimenter explained that they'd be watching ten-minute segments from six successful comedies—for example, Monty Python's
The Meaning of Life,
a particularly absurd series of humorous sketches. Cameras had been set up to record the subjects' reactions to the films, and they were told that afterward they'd be asked to rate their funniness. Immediately following this introduction, the experimenter departed the room so the subjects could view the comedies on their own.

The interesting manipulation occurred after the third film, when the experimenter returned to the room. In the control condition, she sat quietly behind the subject, reading a book and not making any commentary about the movie. However, in the experimental condition she wasn't quiet at all. She remarked upon entering that the next three movies were her favorites, and she laughed audibly at various points during the viewings. To avoid alerting the subject to the manipulation, she made sure not to laugh too long or too obviously.

The results were striking. Subjects who experienced the “humorous experimenter” laughed more intensely and more frequently than those visited by the silent experimenter—almost twice as much. They also judged the last three movie segments to be funnier than the control subjects did, indicating that the experimenter's influence affected not just their behavior but their perceptions too. It was as if the presence of the “humorous experimenter” caused the subjects to like the humor more.

The influence others have on our subjective moods, particularly humor, is well known. That's why television shows use laugh tracks:
producers know that when we hear laughter, we want to laugh too. As Ruch's study demonstrated, humor ratings can be influenced simply by exposing subjects to laughter. Other studies have found that subjects laugh more and rate jokes as funnier when a nearby actor shares their laughter, and that laughing confederates don't have to be visible so long as they can be heard. In fact, we don't even need to hear the others laughing—simply being told that a friend is nearby and enjoying an entertaining videotape is enough to increase our humorous response.

Shared laughter is more pronounced among people packed closer together . . . we laugh more when surrounded by friends rather than strangers . . . the bigger the audience, the greater the amount of shared laughter. Each of these findings shows that laughter is about more than punch lines. However, they also give the misleading impression that making others laugh is easy.

When we feel as though our emotions are being manipulated by a comic, all bets are off. For example, when we're told that background laughter is canned, rather than live and in response to the humorous material, the background laughter loses its effect. Being instructed to laugh or not to laugh can also backfire. If we're asked to withhold our laughter until after watching a comedy, we're generally able to comply—yet our perceptions of the humor will remain unchanged, as if we had received no instructions at all. This works in the opposite direction, too. If we're told that a joke is hysterically funny and it is, we'll laugh and rate it appropriately. But watch out if an experimenter says a joke is funny and it isn't. Our laughter will disappear, and so will our positive impressions.

In short, laughter isn't contagious like the flu. If it were, we'd never question why others are laughing; we'd only join in. Instead, humor is social the same way our close friendships are social. When shared similarities are explored together, close bonds form. But when laughter is artificial, the result is as satisfying as taking your sister to the prom. It's just not the same.

T
WO
B
RAINS,
O
NE
M
IND

In my early days as a graduate student I tested a split-brain patient, and I'll never forget the experience. Split-brain patients have literally had their brains cut in half, a procedure called commissurotomy, as a treatment for epilepsy, and the amazing thing is you'd never know their unique medical history from looking at them. The person I tested was named Linda, and the entirety of her corpus callosum had been severed almost forty years before. This is the thick fiber track connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres, and hers had been cut to stop the spread of seizures that ravaged her brain since young adulthood. Although less radical treatments are now performed to achieve the same effect, the surgery for Linda had been a great success. Despite having two unconnected brain hemispheres, she was not only healthy but nearly indistinguishable from anybody else you might meet on the street. She was sassy and quick-witted and fun to be around—except when asked to participate in laboratory experiments.

The test was an EEG assessment of Linda's brain activity while she performed a “lexical decision” task, which was described in
Chapter 5
. As you may recall, this task involves showing someone strings of letters and asking if they constitute real words or not. It was a difficult task for Linda because she didn't like experiments, preferring to flirt with the more attractive graduate students, but also because the letter strings weren't shown in the center of her vision. Instead they were presented to the left or right of where she was looking, what we call the left and right visual fields. A curious aspect of the human visual system is that everything we see to the left of our gaze is sent directly to our right hemisphere—and vice versa. The switch occurs because our optic nerves cross sides soon after leaving our eyes, and for most people this medical curiosity has no implications at all, since the two sides of the brain are so highly connected that everything is shared between them right away. But not for Linda. Using this task, I was able to show Linda's right hemisphere both real words and meaningless strings of letters to
see if it could tell the difference. It could, even though the right side of our brain doesn't usually contribute to language. That's because the left hemisphere is usually too quick to speak up in normal conversation. To hear from her right hemisphere, I had to look directly at her brain.

Split-brain patients like Linda reveal just how separate the two sides of our brains are, and how divided is our actual thinking. I've seen it for myself—Linda repeatedly assured me that she had no idea what she was seeing, even though her brain recognized the words clear as day. She argued and complained that we were wasting her time with these silly psychological tests, all claims made by her language-dominant left hemisphere. Yet, as I observed in the EEG, her right hemisphere did know what it was doing and was speaking as loudly as it could. It just didn't have access to speech, so that voice had to assert itself in other ways.

Most of us take a whole-brain approach to life, because the corpus callosum allows us to. Nevertheless, the hemispheres of our brain
are
specialized. As we'll soon see, one area of specialization is jokes. Linda had a remarkable sense of humor—and in fact still does at the remarkable age of eighty. But the “humorous side” of her brain has been forced to assert itself in unusual ways, including bawdy humor and obstinacy directed toward struggling graduate students. While Linda was supposed to be looking at words, she would often tell me she was bored and recommended that we continue the experiment on the beach instead. She would ask if I had any liquor stashed away in the lab, suggesting that we skip the experiments to enjoy an early happy hour. Once, she stopped in the middle of an experiment to ask if it hurt when I walked in the sun. It took me several seconds to realize that she was referring to my lack of hair—a condition that hadn't changed since the beginning of the experiment, yet suddenly required immediate attention. Sometimes I think she volunteered to participate in my experiments only because it was so much fun seeing me struggle to keep her on task.