Ha! (9 page)

I'm guessing that, again, you didn't laugh. If you did, then you should stop reading now because I have nothing more to offer you. Now, how about if I present the joke in a format you're more accustomed to?

F
IGURE
2.3. Graphic representation of the joke starting
“Is the doctor home?”
Get it? Adapted from
Humor, the International Journal of Humor Research.
Band 15, Heft 1, Seiten 3–46, ISSN (Online) 1613–3722, ISSN (Print) 0933–1719, DOI: 10.1515/humr.2002.004, De Gruyter Berlin/Boston, January 2006.

              
“Is the doctor home?” the patient asked in a bronchial whisper.

              
“No,” the doctor's young and pretty wife whispered in reply. “Come right in.”

Though this second presentation looks starkly different from the first, the joke is the same in both cases. The first is just a graphic representation of all the joke's key elements, as identified by Salvatore Attardo. A linguist at Texas A&M University, Attardo is one of the most prolific humor researchers in the world. His primary contribution to the field is what he calls the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), which explains how jokes are actually just different ways of manipulating
scripts.
To understand what that means, we need to take a closer look at
Figure 2.3
and see how it maps onto the joke format we're more familiar with.

Let's start by taking a close look at the words. Each word reflects a different script, which is a chunk of information describing some object, action, or belief. Scripts are different for everybody, and there are no rules for what must be contained in a person's script. For me, the script for
doctor
includes the fact that he or she sees patients, prescribes medicine, and probably plays golf. Depending on your own exposure to specialists such as pediatricians or psychiatrists, your script might include other expectations such as lollipops and offices with couches. Babies are born without scripts. Scripts must be learned.

Scientists use scripts to study humor because they allow for systematic analysis, as we see in
Figure 2.3.
Note that the left side of the figure represents all the scripts that are activated by the initial interpretation of the joke. We initially think the patient is going to the doctor to seek a cure. (The circular “nodes” represent scripts, and the lines represent meaningful connections between them.) Then, when the doctor's wife invites him inside, we see that several scripts have been falsely activated. The patient is not sick. He's not seeking a doctor either, he's soliciting his lover. From the figure, you see that the common element between doctor and patient is
cure.
The corresponding link between lover and partner is quite different.

The idea of scripts is an old one, rooted in almost fifty years of psychological research. “Scripts were really meant to be an umbrella term for all the knowledge humans have to describe their world,” says Attardo. “When Victor [Victor Raskin, original developer of Script Theory] introduced the idea, he intended it to be general. In the 1970s, there was a proliferation of research on things like schema, frames, schemata—all slightly different ways of describing how humans organize information. Some were defined more formally or operationally. But they were all trying to do the same thing. They were trying to say how people manipulate knowledge about their world.”

All of this analysis may seem rather technical for a sub-par joke, but it does illustrate some important requirements for humor. First, in order to succeed, a joke must activate multiple scripts. Second, those scripts must oppose each other—and the greater the opposition, the funnier the joke. The key opposition here is between
cure
and
having sex.
Being treated for asthma or tuberculosis is about as different from having an afternoon tryst as you can get.

Another benefit of thinking about humor in terms of scripts is that it allows for certain incongruities to be highlighted, and others ignored. Consider the following joke to see what I mean:

              
A bear walks into a bar and approaches the bartender. “A martini . . . dry.”

              
The bartender asks: “What's with the pause?”

              
“I don't know,” the bear replies. “I was born with them.”

This joke relies on a
pun,
which is essentially a conflict between scripts based on phonological ambiguity, but that's not the point. The point is—what's a bear walking into a bar for? Why didn't the bartender run for his life? And how could a bear possibly hold a martini glass, anyway? We ignore these incongruities because we quickly recognize they aren't part of the joke. The key script opposition is between the words
pause
and
paws,
which has nothing to do with the bear's sudden ability to talk and consume gin. Some humor actually
exploits these seemingly ignored incongruities, as seen in the long history of elephant jokes:

        
How did the elephant hide in a cherry tree? He painted his toenails red.

I personally love elephant jokes, not because they're clever but because they make fun of the very concept of surprise. The script opposition at the heart of this particular joke is the least salient aspect of a tree-climbing elephant. Never mind that any tree would surely break under elephantine pressure, or that pachyderms don't have opposable thumbs for climbing, much less fingers. What I really want to know is what color were its toes! The whole joke is absurd because its most highly activated script, elephants, conjures up thoughts of size and weight, thereby undermining every other aspect of the joke.

Research has found that such background incongruities aren't just tolerated, they make jokes funnier. I'm referring to a series of experiments by the psychologist Andrea Samson at Stanford, who instructed subjects to view cartoons that either included background incongruities or omitted them entirely. For purposes of experimental control, two versions of each cartoon were used: an “extra-incongruity” one and a realistic one. Subjects saw mixes of each and were tasked with rating how funny they thought each was. For example, one cartoon showed a mother and father penguin standing in the Antarctic wilderness, celebrating with wild gesticulations: “He just spoke his first word,” one says. “Great! What is it? ‘Mama'? ‘Papa'?” says the other. The second panel shows both penguins standing next to their offspring, who is exclaiming: “Damned cold!” In the realistic version, the words remained the same but penguins were replaced with Eskimos.

Samson found that subjects preferred the jokes with background incongruities. Penguins, apparently, made the jokes funnier.

To see what all this has to do with
resolving,
let's take one final look at the brain, this time using an electroencephalogram, commonly known as the EEG. The experiment was conducted by psychologist Peter Derks for a 1991 conference held by the International Humor Society in
Ontario, Canada, and it involved the measurement of subjects' brain activity using electrodes placed strategically along their scalps. The electrodes couldn't tell what the subjects were thinking, but they did show when their brains got particularly busy. While hooked up to these electrodes, twenty subjects read a series of jokes, each ending in a final word providing a surprising punch line. At the same time, Derks and his colleagues monitored the zygomatic muscles controlling the subjects' mouths, a useful method for scientifically determining whether someone has laughed or smiled.

When the EEG data were analyzed, Derks saw that the subjects produced two very different electrophysiological responses to the jokes. The first was a peak in activity called the P300. This occurred about a third of a second after the last punch line word and took the form of a sudden, positive spike in electrical activity. In short, the subjects' brains got very busy pretty soon after the jokes were completed. Then, about a hundred milliseconds after that, the EEG showed an N400—a negative deflection also representing a sudden increase in electrical activity, again due to increased brain processing.

A couple of things about the EEG are important to note here. First, the positive or negative nature of any observed EEG effect is meaningless because it depends on the way neurons are oriented in the brain, which has nothing to do with how we think. Second, and more importantly, the timing and identity of the observed electrical potential mean everything. In fact, the P300 effect has been observed in hundreds of studies, if not thousands. From these studies, scientists have learned that it always reflects an orienting response. When people see something they don't expect, or something that grabs their attention, they invariably show a P300. The N400 is just as well studied, though it reflects a different kind of processing. The N400 occurs when the brain has to fit new information into existing knowledge—a process called semantic integration.

Sadly, the presence or absence of P300 and N400 effects alone tell us nothing about how subjects process jokes, but when they are combined
with muscular-response data collected from subjects' faces, a new picture emerges. Derks found that subjects clearly perceived some jokes as funnier than others, indicated by the subjects' zygomatic muscles. When Derks separated the trials containing jokes that were funny from those that weren't, he saw that all of the subjects showed a P300 effect, regardless of joke funniness. However, the N400 effect emerged only when the subjects' zygomatic muscles were activated. In other words, jokes that weren't funny didn't make people laugh, and didn't elicit semantic integration or an N400.

Derks had found proof that humor involves more than just being shocked or surprised. Jokes that weren't funny still brought on an orienting response—a P300—because they included a surprising punch line. But that's all they did. They didn't lead to a satisfying resolution, and thus never made it to our third stage of humor processing. They didn't activate an opposing script, allowing for the joke to “come together.” And so, after encountering the incongruity, subjects' brains became silent.

Derks's findings clearly differentiate between
reckoning
and
resolving
because they show that it's one thing to hear a joke but quite another for that joke to make us feel satisfied. Putting everything together and “getting” the joke is distinctly separate from being shocked or surprised, and I call this stage
resolving
because humor requires not just dealing with the unexpected but activating a new frame of reference.

Interestingly, the anterior cingulate has been closely linked with the P300 but is unrelated to the N400. In other words, the anterior cingulate helps manage competing responses, but it's not responsible for activating a new script following the punch line. That responsibility is shared across our entire brain, which holds all the knowledge necessary to know what jokes actually mean. So, conflict may be essential for humor, but we won't find a joke funny without some resolution. Indeed, without resolution, we get no pleasure. It's the difference between telling a waitress we're on a diet, and expecting that a knife will miraculously make calories disappear.

B
EYOND THE
S
TAGES

It's important to note that the
constructing, reckoning,
and
resolving
stages aren't just a way of looking at humor. They reflect common beliefs about how we process
all
aspects of our environment. We humans are always guessing and jumping the gun, just as we're always dealing with conflicts and looking for ways to resolve them. Jokes are merely a specialized way of dealing with these stages very rapidly.

This isn't to say that jokes can't involve multiple stages occurring simultaneously. Naturally occurring humor frequently mixes up the three stages, as we sometimes see in humorous newspaper headlines. “Red Tape Holds Up Bridge,” claims one. “Doctor Testifies in Horse Suit,” claims another. These headlines are each worthy of a Jay Leno stand-up routine, but their most impressive aspect is that in just a few words each calls on us to simultaneously construct, reckon, and resolve conflicting interpretations. It's not enough for a headline to be merely ambiguous, because if this were the case, then “Doctor Testifies in Suit” would be just as funny. Rather, it's that the unintended meaning brings us all the way to imagining a lawyer dressed as a horse and wondering how long it will take before the judge declares contempt of court!