Save paper and follow @newyorker on Twitter

APRIL 1, 2014

A Quest to Understand What Makes Things

Funny
BY SHANE SNOW

What would happen if Communism were

introduced to Saudi Arabia? Nothingat first. But
soon thered be a shortage of sand.
Thisone of many political jokes circulating inside
the Soviet Union during the late Cold Waris Joel
Warners favorite. Warner is the co-author, with
Peter McGraw, of The Humor Code, which was released on April Fools Day. It can
be analyzed all sorts of ways, he told me. Did Soviet citizens tell jokes like this as a
form of coping, of using humor to lessen their psychological distress? Or was it a
reflection of changing attitudes and growing unease among the populace? Or was the
joke actually planted by the K.G.B., allowing folks to make light of their plight instead
of fighting against it?
Warner and McGraw recently travelled the world in an attempt to answer a question
that has eluded us for millennia: What makes things funny? Laughter is thought by
evolutionary biologists to be an indicator, in pre-historic tribes, that all was well.
Comedy has long been a source of relief for sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder
and for the terminally ill. In 2010, Raffi Khatchadourian wrote
(http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_khatchadourian)
about an international laughter-yoga movement. And, recently, a Northwestern
University professor named Jeffrey Burgdorf found that tickling rats to the point of
inducing laughter might help make them resilient to depression and anxiety. But a
scientific explanation for humor has been hard to pin down.
Many academics consider their humor-researching counterparts unserious, McGraw
said. Its just by nature not a serious thing, he told me. So that association carries
over. And yet, in March, Salvatore Attardo, the dean of humanities, social sciences, and
arts at Texas A&M-Commerce, published a two-volume, nine-hundred-and-eightyfour-page sledgehammer called the Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, meant as an
introduction for the growing number of humor-research students in todays universities.
Its become respectable, Attardo said. There is an explosion of research, and in many
disciplines.

As with other psychological experiences, like happiness or regret, scholars have long
hunted for a formula that can explain humor. The oldest known humor theory, known
as Superiority Theory, dates back to Plato and Aristotle. It says that we find humor in
others misfortunes and shortcomings. This may say more about Ancient Greek social
dynamics than it does about modern humorwhen one gets past The Three Stooges
or YouTube, that is. It fails to explain, for example, knock-knock jokes. Freud oneupped Superiority Theory with Relief Theory, which posited that humor is a sort of
release valve for our inner desires. The theory explained dirty jokes, but not others, like
puns. In the seventies, linguists rallied behind a more palatable idea, called Incongruity
Theory: essentially, that we laugh at surprises, violations of our expectations. This
explained verbal punch lines, slapstick, and other humor, like April Fools pranks. But
Incongruity Theory had a hard time explaining why we laugh when tickled. And it
managed to mispredict things that arent funny. The death of a very young person, for
example, is surprising and incongruous, but hardly humorous.
These days, many scholars still champion versions of Incongruity Theory, including
such prominent figures as Victor Raskin, a linguistics professor at Purdue University
and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Humor, who refined Incongruity
Theory into the Script-Based Semantic Theory of Humor, in 1985. Raskin and
Attardo expanded this, in 1991, into the General Theory of Verbal Humor. The idea is
that every joke is based on a juxtaposition of two scripts, Raskin said. The punch line
triggers the switch from one script to the other. It is a universal theory.
McGraw doesnt buy it. He claims that, while linguists rely on thought experiments to
back up Incongruity-based theories, researchers have used the scientific method to
disprove it. In 1974, for example, two University of Tennessee professors asked
undergraduate students to watch Bill Cosby videos. Before each of Cosbys punch lines,
the professors paused the tape and asked the subjects to predict the joke. Then they
monitored other groups whose members watched the same tapes, and recorded which
jokes they laughed at the hardest. It turned out that the jokes that had been rated by the
first group as easier to predict generally drew more laughs than the unexpected punch
lines.
McGraw found his preferred universal theory in a 1998 journal article by a Stanford
University researcher named Thomas Veatch. Veatch proposed that humor emerges
when something seems wrong or unsettling but is actually benign. (His favorite joke
was the following: Why did the monkey fall from the tree? Because it was dead.)
Nobody paid much attention to Veatchs theory, until McGraw, with a graduate student
named Caleb Warren, dug it up a decade later and dubbed it the Benign Violation
Theory.

Benign Violation explained why the unexpected sight of a friend falling down the stairs
(a violation of expectations) was funny only if the friend was not seriously injured (a
benign outcome). It explained Jerry Seinfelds comedic formula of pointing out the
outrageous things (violation) in everyday life (benign), and Sarah Silvermans hilarious
habit of rendering off-color topics (violation) harmless (benign) in her standup
routines. It explained puns (benign violations of linguistic rules) and tickling (a
perceived physical threat with no real danger).
And it explained something that had particularly vexed Incongruity theorists: humors
ability to help people cope with stress. Transforming actual violations into benign
violations also explained the famed hospital clown Patch Adamss ability to cheer up
terminally ill children, Chris Rock-style racial humor that manages not to be racist, and
political satire.
Questions about McGraws theory remain. Its a perfectly decent piece of work,
Raskin says. But, he adds, Its not at all universal. Attardo tells me hes not a fan.
First of all, he believes that a unified theory of humor is impossiblemuch like you
cant have a supertheory of poetry or justice that answers everything. And he finds
Benign Violations simplicity underwhelming. These are basic, not that exciting
things, he said. The question is what kind of violation? How do you know it is
benign?
McGraw admits that Benign Violation Theory has some holes. (I really havent nailed
why things that are absurd are funny, he admitted.) And yet he feels that a unified
theory is within reach, and that skeptics will come around to Benign Violation Theory
in time. I had been asking him to tell me his favorite joke, and, on a recent evening, he
called me on the phone and said, Ask me the secret of good comedy.
I replied, Whats the sec
Timing! he blurted.
Its an old joke. McGraw fell flat when he tried standup himself, as he and Warner
document at the beginning of the book. Armed with a sweater vest and a handful of
well-crafted benign violations, the only guffaws the fumbling professor elicited at
Denvers Squire Lounge occurred when the m.c. took back the mic and said, He has
this theory, see well, who cares. Obviously, its wrong!
Shane Snow (https://twitter.com/shanesnow) is a technology journalist in New York City.
Photograph by Wayne Miller/Magnum.

SHANE SNOW