Ha! (30 page)

Humor is important in the educational world, too. One of the most studied humorous environments is the classroom, where finding after finding shows that students prefer taking classes with fun teachers. Humor makes classroom environments more enjoyable, increases student motivation to learn, and leads to more positive evaluations of teachers. Take, for example, educational consultant Bill Haggard. When Haggard's students began having trouble turning their homework assignments in on time, rather than increase punishments he developed a three-way excuse chart. The three sides corresponded to the three most
common categories of excuses—
Helpless, Hopeless
, and
Not in Control of Body
—and every time a student had a problem, the class worked together to decide its proper location on the chart. As the year went on, excuses dwindled and students started taking responsibility for missing their deadlines. “Teachers are way ahead of the game if they can change anxious situations into humorous ones that evolve into shared experiences,” Haggard said.

This approach is useful for students of all ages. It has even worked at conservative schools like the United States Military Academy at West Point, where students were asked to judge particularly effective leaders in terms of their humor, as well as other characteristics such as physical ability, intelligence, and consideration. Good leaders were rated significantly more humorous than bad leaders, even when these other variables were controlled for.

These findings suggest that humor makes the classroom more fun, but does it actually help learning? Absolutely so. Consider, for example, a study involving more than five hundred students at San Diego State University. The students were enrolled in what they thought was a normal Introductory Psychology course on Freudian personality theory, but different students attended different kinds of lectures. One lecture incorporated humor relating to the course content. A second lecture included humor that wasn't related to the material but still kept students entertained. And a third lecture used no humor at all, only a serious treatment of the subject material. When the researchers tested students' retention six weeks after the lectures, they found that those who attended the lectures with humor related to course content scored significantly higher than the other students. In short, humor is beneficial to learning—but only when it focuses on what we're trying to learn.

Connecting humor with learned material is key because it keeps the mind focused. Humor forces our minds to work more than if ideas are presented in a straightforward manner. This work is essential for the same reason that lifting heavy weights builds muscles—because the extra effort makes us stronger. The benefits of humor even last for
long periods of time. Take for example the following cartoon, which was used to teach children statistics at Tel Aviv University. It depicts an African explorer remarking to a group of children not to worry about local predators: “There is no need to be afraid of crocodiles,” the explorer says. “Around here their average length is only about 50 centimeters.” In the background is a huge crocodile coming to eat the explorer, and the children mutter that he, too, shouldn't forget about standard deviations.

When teachers were trained to use such jokes in their classrooms—even as few as three per lesson—learning increased by almost 15 percent. These improvements lasted throughout the entire semester.

These findings aren't lost on professionals who frequently speak in public. Congressional debates, Supreme Court hearings, White House briefings—each of these venues is rife with humor, especially when it helps tackle difficult topics. Joe Lockhart, press secretary for President Clinton from 1998 to 2000, was a master of humor. On one occasion he was asked to explain the frequent foreign-relations trips being taken by the First Lady. At the time, such trips were a significant expense and getting more attention than the administration wanted, and Lockhart replied that they were paid for by the State Department. “Joe, is there a difference between ‘the State Department' and ‘the taxpayers'?” asked a member of the press corps. This was a serious question, since government spending was a hot political issue. Lockhart's only solution was to turn the situation into a joke, and it worked. “No,” he replied. “It just sounded better if I said ‘State Department.'”

From these examples it may seem that humor is merely self-serving, hiding organizational flaws and diverting attention away from unwanted topics. In a sense it is, but it can serve broader purposes too. In politics, especially, humor can be an invaluable weapon. Everybody over thirty remembers the debate between Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle during the 1988 presidential elections. Both were running for vice president, and in response to a question about his ability to fill in for the president if needed, Quayle had just compared himself to the late John F. Kennedy. Bentsen would have none of it.

              
Q
UAYLE:
I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy when he sought the presidency.

              
B
ENTSEN:
Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.

The audience members laughed and cheered for so long that the moderator had to interrupt and calm them down. With just a few words Bentsen had crushed his opponent, but he avoided appearing cruel because there was a bit of playfulness in the comment too. Talk about multiple messages—Bentsen simultaneously compared two politicians, affiliated himself with one and not the other, and implied that one of them was a child in need of rebuking.

Yet like any other weapon, humor can backfire too. One study asked more than a hundred potential voters, immediately before the 2004 presidential elections, to imagine a scenario in which two fictitious politicians get into a heated debate. The debate becomes so intense that a moderator is forced to intervene, at which point one of the politicians apologizes for his exuberance. Here are two versions of his apology, and I want you to guess which one subjects considered more effective.

              
“I know I can go a bit overboard when I get going. My daughter even said that maybe the moderator should have music to drown me out when I go on too long, like they do at the Emmy Awards.”

              
“You must excuse me, but when I am right, I get angry. My opponent, on the other hand, gets angry when he is wrong. As a result, we are angry at each other much of the time.”

The first one was rated more effective, by far. It was judged better at improving the debate, overcoming conflict, and finding common ground. The preference for humility was so strong that it even overcame political ties. When the candidates described in the scenario were
given labels such as “Democrat” and “Republican,” the first remark was deemed funnier and more effective even when the person judging belonged to the opposite political party.

In short, political humor doesn't have to be insulting to succeed. It doesn't have to support one's existing values and beliefs, either. It simply needs to reveal what one is thinking, preferably with humility, so that others can join in.

Bringing people together is indeed a prominent theme in this book—humor clearly builds bonds within social groups. One professor of management found that joking personalities among New Zealand information technology employees improve workplace dynamics by safely allowing the employees to question authority. A year-long ethnography study of hotel kitchen workers showed that humor, even when critical, solidifies groups by highlighting shared beliefs and responsibilities. And an in-depth observation of Sardinian fish market workers revealed that humor brought workers closer together by reminding them of their common goals.

Many groups have their own brand of humor, each with its own style. Jewish humor is one of the oldest.
“The Jewish people have observed more than 5,758 years as a people, the Chinese only 4,695. What does this mean to you?” asks the Rabbi. “It means the Jews had to go 1,063 years without Chinese food,” replies the student.
Lesbian humor is popular too, with one journal article—“How Many Lesbians Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?”—eliciting so much controversy that more than forty pages were needed to resolve it. There's even a category of jokes called “white trash humor.” These jokes often start with the phrase “You might be a redneck if . . .” (as popularized by Jeff Foxworthy in the 1990s), and according to the linguist Catherine Evans Davies, they legitimize Southern working-class individuals by separating them from lower social classes. “Redneck” refers to respectable working-class people. “White trash” does not.

In short, humor exercises the mind, which in turn makes us better students and teachers. It also allows us to appear more organized and helps us get our points across, whether in the courtroom or the fish
market. In the next section we'll address an even more important aspect of humor—its relationship to intellect. Intelligence and humor both involve “thinking messy,” and now it's time to see how training the brain to be funny is just another way of training it to think smarter.

G
REATER
I
MPLICATIONS

Humor is complicated because we, ourselves, are complicated. We laugh, and cry, and have malleable personalities because our brains have developed over generations to be adaptable. Without the ability to laugh, we wouldn't have a way to react to much that happens to us. Without having a sense of humor to take pleasure in the incongruous or absurd, we might spend our whole lives in a perpetual state of confusion, rather than occasionally transforming those feelings into amusement.

In this sense, humor is as important an evolutionary trait as intelligence, because without it we wouldn't be able to cope with the complex world we've created. As discussed earlier, humor evolved over successive generations, much like our ability to use tools and language. Humans need a way to deal with conflict and confusion, and what better way to do that than laugh? Like creativity and insight, humor has allowed us to solve our problems without resorting to beating each other over the heads with sticks. And as a fundamental part of who we are, humor has developed a close relationship with each of these other uniquely human abilities.

Amazingly, humor is correlated with IQ even by the age of ten. This finding was observed by the psychologist Ann Masten, who showed a group of ten-year-old children a variety of Ziggy cartoons chosen for their varying complexity and sense of humor targeting this age group. As the children rated the cartoons subjectively and explained why each one was funny, Masten recorded their faces, noting instances of smiles or laughter. She then showed the children a series of captionless cartoons and asked them to come up with humorous titles. The children's
ability to correctly explain the cartoons was used to determine their “humor comprehension” while their ability to come up with funny captions measured their “humor production.”

Masten found that both humor comprehension and production were significantly correlated with the children's intelligence, which she had also measured separately. For comprehension the correlation was 0.55, and for production it was 0.50—very large numbers, considering that the maximum possible correlation is 1.0. Even the extent to which the children laughed at the cartoons was closely linked with their intelligence, with a correlation of 0.38. Given that IQ has about the same correlation with job performance, humor probably predicts intelligence as well as do most practical measures of life success.

As noted earlier, learning to be funny may even make us smarter. Consider the following scenario. You enter a laboratory and are told to complete a problem-solving task. But before you do, you must watch a compilation of funny bloopers from popular television shows. Other subjects aren't so fortunate—they have to watch a five-minute documentary on Nazi concentration camps. Still others see a math film titled “Area Under the Curve.” And a fourth group doesn't watch a film at all but, instead, is asked to eat a candy bar and relax, or to complete two minutes of exercise by stepping on and off a concrete block.

Each of these manipulations is intended to affect mood in a different way. The math film is expected to have minimal impact, and the Nazi concentration camp documentary should be depressing. Both the candy and the funny video are expected to induce a good mood, but only one is meant to elicit laughter. The question is: Can laughter alone influence performance on the task that follows?

To find out, a final task is administered, and it's challenging too. It's called the Drucker candle insight task, and it goes like this: You're given a box of tacks, a candle, and a book of matches. Then you're asked to attach the candle to the wall so that it burns without dripping wax on the floor. The solution (as you might already know from
previous exposure to this puzzle) is to attach the empty box to the wall using one of the tacks and then to use wax or another tack to secure the candle atop the box. What makes this task challenging for many people is “functional fixedness”—the inability to view the box as serving any purpose other than holding tacks. The candle doesn't have to be directly “attached” to the wall. And boxes can do more than just hold small objects.

When this experiment was conducted by Alice Isen and two colleagues at the University of Maryland, only 32 of the 116 subjects came up with a solution. But when the results were analyzed based on what the subjects did before trying, an amazing finding emerged. Only 2 of the subjects in the math-film group solved the puzzle. Only 5 did from the exercise group. In fact, no group of subjects performed better than 30 percent—with one exception. The subjects who were shown the funny bloopers succeeded at a rate of 58 percent (11 out of 19 subjects).