The Freud Museum is based in the North London house where the great mind doctor worked during the final part of his life. The building contains a wonderful collection of books and artifacts and, of course, Freud’s famous couch. This five-foot-long chaise longue was apparently given to him by a grateful patient in the 1890s. During a typical therapy session, a patient would recline on the couch, and Freud would sit in a large armchair. He devised various techniques to reach the activities of the unconscious. Sometimes he would ask patients to talk about their dreams; at other times, he would say a certain word and have patients respond with the first word they thought of. Since the couch has come to symbolize Freud’s approach to understanding the human mind, it provided the perfect backdrop for the second LaughLab photograph. The BAAS contacted the museum and were delighted when the director granted us special permission to have a clown recline on this most famous of couches.
On a cold December morning in 2001, the LaughLab team (plus clown) arrived at the museum and were shown into Freud’s office. It is an impressive room. One wall is lined with bookshelves containing Freud’s extensive collection of books and manuscripts. Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities are scattered around the room. The couch sits in one corner of the room next to Freud’s large leather armchair.
The photographers arrived and we took up our positions. Our clown carefully reclined on the couch, and I picked up a clipboard and took my place in the armchair. Sitting in the chair that had once been occupied by the world’s most famous psychiatrist, and being greeted from his couch by a man wearing a huge bright blue wig, a greasepaint grimace, and massive red shoes, proved to be another surreal LaughLab moment. The photographers liked the setup and merrily snapped away. To help induce a sense of realism into the pictures, one of them asked me to conduct an informal therapy session with the clown. Although not a Freudian psychologist, I was happy to try. I asked my “patient” what the problem was, and the quick-thinking clown said that he was upset because no one took him seriously.
Although Freud claimed to be a scientist, many of his ideas are completely untesticle. Even so, many of the jokes submitted into LaughLab certainly supported Freud’s ideas. Time and again, we would get jokes about the stresses and strains of loveless marriage, inadequate sexual performance, and, of course, death:
I’ve been in love with the same woman for forty years. If my wife finds out, she’ll kill me.
A patient says to his psychiatrist: “Last night I made a Freudian slip; I was having dinner with my mother-in-law and wanted to say: ‘Could you please pass the butter.’ But instead I said: ‘You silly cow, you have completely ruined my life.’”
A guy goes to the hospital for a check-up. After weeks of tests, a doctor comes to see him and says that he has some good news and some bad news.
“What’s the bad news?” asks the man.
“I am afraid we think you have a very rare and incurable disease,” says the doctor.
“Oh, my God, that’s terrible,” says the man. “What’s the good news?”
“Well,” replies the doctor, “we are going to name it after you.”
Some of the submissions allowed us to explore Freud’s theories. Given that older people tend to be especially anxious about the effects of aging, would they find gags about memory loss and the like funnier than younger people would? Freud would have argued that this should be the case, but would our data support this? We carefully sifted through the joke archive and selected several jokes that centered on the difficulties associated with getting old, such as the following:
An elderly couple had dinner at another couple’s house, and after eating, the wives left the table and went into the kitchen.
The two elderly gentlemen were talking, and one said: “Last night, we went out to a new restaurant, and it was really great. I would recommend it very highly.”
The other man said: “What was the name of the restaurant?”
The first man thought and thought and finally said: “What is the name of that flower you give to someone you love? You know . . . the one that is red and has thorns.”
“Do you mean a rose?”
“Yes,” the man said. He then turned toward the kitchen and yelled:
“Rose, what’s the name of that restaurant we went to last night?”
A man in his late sixties suspects that his wife is going deaf, so he decides to test her hearing. He stands on the opposite side of the living room from her and asks: “Can you hear me?” No answer. He moves halfway across the room toward her and asks: “Can you hear me now?” No answer. He moves and stands right beside her and says: “Can you hear me now?” She replies: “For the third time, yes!”
The results were as Freud would have predicted. Younger people didn’t like these types of jokes. On average, about 20 percent of people under the age of thirty found each joke funny, versus 50 percent of people in the “sixty or over” age category. The message is clear—we laugh at the aspects of life that cause us the greatest sense of anxiety.
We also inadvertently conducted a second experiment testing this idea. Emma Greening, our joke-vetting expert, had done a grand job keeping the crude material away from the Web site. However, she did allow one joke through by mistake:
A guy goes to his priest and says, “I feel terrible. I am a doctor and I have slept with some of my patients.” The priest looks concerned, and then tries to make the man feel better by saying, “You aren’t the first doctor to sleep with their patients and you won’t be the last. Perhaps you shouldn’t feel so guilty.”
“You don’t understand” says the man, “I’m a vet.”
It is a classic Freudian joke, and it revolves around one of the most basic forms of societal taboos—sex with animals. Interestingly, it obtained a very high score, about 55 percent of people finding it funny. Draw your own conclusions from the fact that men found it funnier than women, and people from Denmark found it funniest of all.
THE HUMOR OF THE HEMISPHERES
Scientists are not known for their sense of humor. However, since we were conducting an experiment, we thought it appropriate to approach some of Britain’s best-known scientists and science writers and ask them to submit their favorite jokes to LaughLab. They all proved obliging, and we ended up receiving material from some of the UK’s top thinkers, including: Baroness Susan Greenfield, the director of the Royal Institution; Colin Pillinger, the planetary scientist and principal investigator of the ill-fated Beagle 2 Mars lander project; Steve Jones, the evolutionary biologist; and Simon Singh, the best-selling science author.
The joke that went on to win the “best joke submitted by a well-known scientist or science writer” category was submitted by Sir Harry Kroto, the Nobel laureate. Kroto, a professor of chemistry, is best known for being part of the team that discovered a new form of carbon known as C60 Buckminsterfullerene, and not quite so well known for describing himself as adhering to four “religions”: humanism, atheism, amnesty-internationalism, and humorism. It may have been this last interest that gave him the edge over his fellow scientists, his winning joke being that old chestnut involving two men and a dog:
A man walking down the street sees another man with a very big dog.
The man says: “Does your dog bite?”
The other man replies: “No, my dog doesn’t bite.”
The first man then pats the dog, has his hand bitten off, and shouts, “I thought you said your dog didn’t bite.”
The other man replies: “That’s not my dog.”
Overall, the jokes submitted by scientists did not fare especially well. In fact, they came in the bottom third of all jokes submitted, and even Sir Harry Kroto’s winning entry beat only 45 percent of other jokes.
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We also examined another source of humor: computers. LaughLab attracted lots of jokes about this topic (“The software said it needed Windows 98 or better, so I bought a Mac”). However, it also contained a few jokes actually written by a computer.
A few years ago, Graham Ritchie and Kim Binsted of the University of Edinburgh created a computer program that could produce jokes.
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We were keen to discover whether computers were funnier than humans, and so we entered several of the computer’s best jokes into LaughLab. The majority of them received some of the lowest ratings in the archive. However, one example of computer comedy was surprisingly successful, and it beat about 250 human jokes: “What kind of murderer has fiber? A cereal killer.”
It’s an example of the most basic form of joke—the simple pun. The most popular theory about why we find these sorts of jokes funny revolves around the concept of “incongruity.” The idea is that we laugh at things that surprise us because they seem out of place. It’s funny when clowns wear outrageously large shoes (especially when they are not performing), when people have especially big noses, or when politicians tell the truth. In the same way, many jokes are funny because they involve ideas that run against our expectations. A bear walks into a bar. Animals and plants talk. But there is more to this theory than simple forms of incongruity. In many jokes, there is an incongruity between the setup and the punch line. For example: +
Two fish in a tank. One turns to the other and says: “Do you know how to drive this?”
The set-up line leads us to think about two fish in a fish tank. But the punch line surprises us—why should the fish be able to drive a fish tank? Then, a split second later, we suddenly realize that the word “tank” has two meanings, and that the fish are actually in an army tank. Scientists refer to this as the “incongruity-resolution” theory. We resolve the incongruity caused by the punch line, and the accompanying feeling of sudden surprise makes us laugh.
The LaughLab team decided to find out what was happening in people’s brains when they laughed at these types of jokes. To help, I contacted Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England. I chose Adrian for two reasons. First, he is one of the leading brain imagers in the world. Second, the two of us studied psychology at college together, devised and performed in the
Captain Fearless
magic show during our summer breaks, and, despite it all, remain good friends. Adrian teamed up with his colleague Steve Williams, a professor from the Institute of Psychiatry, and used a technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (or fMRI) to examine what was happening inside people’s brains when they laughed at some of the best puns from the project.
Brain scanning is used to study all sorts of psychological phenomena. One of my favorite experiments was conducted by Gert Holstege, a professor at the University of Groningen, and examined how women fake orgasms.
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In the study, women’s heads were scanned while their partners stimulated them manually to achieve a real orgasm. The women were also asked to fake an orgasm. Comparing the two scans revealed that faking was associated with certain parts of the brain, providing a very expensive way of knowing whether an orgasm was genuine. Curiously, the researchers also discovered that many couples were put off because their feet were cold. When they gave the couples socks to wear, about 80 percent of the couples were able to achieve orgasm compared with 50 percent in the “no sock” condition.
Our scans were far more straightforward to obtain, but no less surreal. The work involved carefully placing people’s heads inside a million-dollar scanner and asking them to read some of the top-rated puns. The results revealed that the left side of the brain plays a key role in setting up the initial context for the joke (“There are two fish in a tank . . . ”), and that a small area in the right hemisphere provides the creative skills necessary to realize that the situation can be seen in a completely different, and often surreal, way (“One fish turns to the other and says: ‘Do you know how to drive this?’”). One of the resulting brain scans is shown in
figure 9
. This scan shows two areas in the left hemisphere being activated after being shown some of the set-up lines from LaughLab jokes.