Ha! (5 page)

Though few scientists take Freud seriously now, most recognize that there's at least a kernel of truth in his theory. Jokes that fail to make us at least a little uneasy don't succeed. It's the conflict of wanting to laugh, while not being sure we should, that makes jokes satisfying.

We laugh at what forces us to integrate incompatible goals or ideas that lead to confusion, doubt, and embarrassment, but the form of what brings on these reactions varies widely. For example, there are riddles, puns, satire, wit, irony, slapstick, and dark humor, to name just a few. Asa Berger, prominent humor researcher and author of more than sixty books on such topics as the comic book industry and Bali tourism, identified as many as forty-four separate types of humor. Realizing that this number was getting unmanageable, he went on to group them into four categories: linguistic, logical, active, and identity-based. Slapstick, for example, is an active form of humor. Caricature focuses on identity.

Future chapters will explore some of these humor types in greater detail, but for now, let's focus on slapstick as an example. Slapstick humor involves exaggerated violence, often in the context of crashes and collisions that occur outside the boundaries of common sense. In other circumstances such violence would be frightening, but with slapstick it's humorous. Why? Because when the Three Stooges strike each other with bats, they do so with exaggerated motions and the understanding that the violence isn't intended to injure or maim. It's still violence, but it's harmless, a perplexing paradox leading to laughter. If the violence were realistic, it wouldn't be funny, which is why striking a stranger with your car is a felony. Doing the same thing to Johnny Knoxville wearing a chicken suit will get you on television.

Even with all this variation, humor's effects on the mind are the same for everybody—chemicals flood the brain, resulting in joy, laughter, or both. Though many people think of the brain as an electrical machine, this is a misconception. Individual neurons internally rely
on electric polarization, but the connections between neurons are almost always chemical. This is why certain drugs can have strong effects on our thinking—they're made up of the same substances as those used by the brain to convey messages.

Dopamine, the neurotransmitter most closely linked with humor, is often considered the brain's “reward chemical.” That's why it has also been linked with motivated learning, memory, and even attention. Food and sex stimulate the brain to increase available dopamine too, whereas dopamine deficiencies lead to impaired motivation. Cocaine also increases dopamine availability in the brain, which is why it's so addictive; after the initial high, the user is left desperately wanting more. Chocolate does largely the same thing, just not as strongly.

We know that dopamine is important for humor because we're able to look at people's brains as they view jokes and see what happens. This is what the neuroscientist Dean Mobbs did at the Stanford Psychiatric Neuroimaging Laboratory. Specifically, he showed subjects cartoons while they were being monitored by a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, known popularly as an MRI. Half of the eighty-four cartoons were chosen for being particularly funny, while the other half had the funny parts removed (see
Figure 1.1
). His goal was to see what parts of the brain became active during the funny trials but not the others.

Mobbs saw that subjects' brains became highly activated for all the cartoons, but one subset of structures responded solely for the funny ones—namely, the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, and the amygdala. What do those brain regions have in common? They're key components of what scientists call the dopamine reward circuit, which is responsible for distributing dopamine throughout the brain. In response to unfunny jokes, we not only fail to laugh, we miss out on the joy. That joy comes in the form of dopamine.

The dopamine reward circuit is one of the brain's most misunderstood regions, partly because it does so much. It's important for emotions as well as memory, and has been linked with classical conditioning, aggression, and even social anxiety. It's so important because reward is how the brain keeps itself going. We often think of rewards as things we are given, rather than give ourselves, but the brain doesn't work that way. To keep us making good decisions, it gives rewards to
itself
all the time. That's why emotion is such a key element in successful decision making. Dopamine is the currency that allows the brain's government to operate.

F
IGURE
1.1. One of the cartoons shown to subjects while they were monitored by an MRI. For the “funny” version, the unaltered cartoon was used. For the “unfunny” version, the alien was removed and the man made the remark about hallucinating to himself. Only the funny version led to activation in dopamine centers of the brain. Copyright BIZARRO © 2013 Dan Piraro, Distributed by King Features.

It's worth taking a moment to recognize this important fact—humor taps directly into the brain's pleasure-production system. To explore this concept, let's compare two studies, each examining very different phenomena. The first was conducted at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where ten musicians listened to pieces of music identified as being so emotionally moving as to induce chills—that
shivers-down-the-spine feeling that accompanies intense euphoria. For each musician just such a piece was chosen before the experiment began, and then researchers identified the brain regions responsible for the feeling while the musicians listened to their songs. The culprits? Not surprisingly, these were the amygdala and the ventral striatum of the dopamine reward circuit, as well as the primary region they are connected to: the ventral medial prefrontal cortex.

Subjects' brains were monitored in the second study too, but this time the experimenters showed video clips of the British television show
Mr. Bean,
starring Rowan Atkinson. This series, which focuses on the physical comedy of Atkinson as he solves everyday problems with child-like confusion, is unique in that it features almost no dialogue. This allowed subjects to be shown matched funny and unfunny bits whose only difference was their inherent level of humor. Half of the videos were taken from the show's funniest bits, while the other half included no humorous elements at all, and subjects were instructed to mimic laughter even when they didn't find them funny.

The brain area most active during the funny parts, but not the others, was the ventral medial cortex, the primary target of the dopamine reward circuit. This is the region responsible for differentiating true laughter from pretend, the same one that apparently gives some of us chills when we listen to Samuel Barber's
Adagio for Strings.

From these findings you might suspect that dopamine is one of the most important chemicals in the brain, and you'd be right. Scientists have even proposed something called the Dopamine Mind Hypothesis, which states that increased reliance on dopamine helps explain our evolutionary separation from lower ape ancestors. According to this theory, when
Homo habilis
took up meat eating around 2 million years ago, brain chemistry began to alter. Dopamine production skyrocketed, and so did the incidence of cognitive and social processes depending on this chemical, such as risk taking and goal-driven behavior. In short, dopamine made us who we are—physical and intellectual thrill-seekers, always on the lookout for some new way to improve our lives or make ourselves laugh.

We have proof that dopamine is key for animal humor, too, most notably from Northwestern University's Jeffrey Burgdorf. Not only did he learn how to tickle rats, he was able to set up recording devices to hear their laughter. Apparently, one tickles a rat by scratching its belly, causing it to emit high-pitched screeches at around 50 kHz, well outside human hearing range but easily audible to a rat. Burgdorf showed that rats respond to tickling the same way as humans, running in anticipation to tickling fingers and sometimes laughing even before any contact is made. Stroking (i.e., petting) the rats doesn't elicit the same reactions, and neither does holding them. Burgdorf further demonstrated that older rats respond less to tickling than young ones, as with humans, and that young rats who are lonely as a result of being isolated from peers are the most prolific laughers of all.

But more importantly, Burgdorf showed that tickling wasn't the only thing that brought on laughter in his rats. Inserting electrodes in their dopamine-producing centers achieved the same result. He even trained rats to stimulate their own brains by pressing a bar, delivering a current to their dopamine centers and causing them to laugh even without any tickling. Administering dopamine-promoting chemicals directly into the rats' brains had similar effects.

Apparently rats aren't so different from humans, which suggests that laughter might have been around for a very long time. Perhaps it developed to help women like my wife cope with excessive sentimentality, and girls like Conchesta deal with political and social upheaval. For Gilbert Gottfried, it may even have helped prevent a sensitive audience from booing him offstage. Now that we're no longer able to resolve confusion by picking fleas from each other's fur or beating each other with sticks, our humor has evolved just as we have. And that evolution has taken some very broad turns.

T
HE
F
UNNIEST
J
OKE IN THE
W
ORLD

Legend has it that there are only five jokes in the world. I suspect this myth persists only because nobody has tried to identify what those
jokes are, but the sentiment has some truth. Even as times change, humor stays constant, which is why we can still appreciate many jokes dating back to Roman times: “A garrulous barber once asked his client how he should cut his hair,” goes one gag shared more than two thousand years ago. “‘Quietly,' the client replied.” It may be that traditional jokes are rare, if not dead, and that humor is best understood not through one-liners but in terms of conflicting thoughts and feelings. Yet it's still useful to analyze jokes because there's no better way of understanding how humor affects us all differently. There's something universal about humor, despite its many forms. What better way to recognize different humor types than to see them in action in the form of jokes?

Probably the most successful attempt at categorizing humor types has the least funny name possible: the 3WD Humor Test (WD stands for
Witz Dimensionen,
or “joke dimension”). It was developed by German researcher Willibald Ruch, who asked subjects a series of questions about jokes and cartoons and, based on these judgments, grouped their humor preferences into three types. The first type is called incongruity-resolution, which typically involves violating expectations in novel ways, with punch lines leading to surprise or relief. The second is called nonsense humor, which is funny only because it makes no sense at all. The third is sexual humor, which is frequently offensive or possibly taboo. Though the content of individual jokes varies, Ruch showed that the way they provoke us generally falls into one of these three categories, with the most popular jokes relying a little on each.

Another approach is to rank statements into categories depending on how well they describe our humor tastes. This is the technique used by the Humorous Behavior Q-Sort Deck, which involves one hundred cards containing printed statements ranging from simple (e.g., “Is sarcastic”) to reflective (e.g., “Only with difficulty can laugh at personal feelings”). Participants sort the cards into nine decks, depending on the personal relevancy of the statements, and their sense of humor is assessed in terms of how social, restrained, or cruel it is. Extensive research using this test has revealed that American tastes in humor tend
to be socially warm and reflective whereas British humor leans more toward the spirited and amusingly awkward.

But trying to measure humor without considering the psychological background of subjects is difficult, because we can't see where their conflicts lie. We're forced to make our best guess—and though doing so may prove useful, it can be tricky too. Perhaps this is why one scientist, Richard Wiseman, decided to stop asking subjects to characterize jokes altogether. Instead, he simply asked them a single question: “Is this joke funny?” He didn't ask them why, and he didn't make them visit his lab either. Rather, he enlisted help from the British Association for the Advancement of Science and started a website. One year and 1.5 million responses later, he stumbled upon the funniest joke in the world.

Wiseman is a psychologist from the University of Hertfordshire just north of London. He has written four books and is generally considered one of the most influential scientists in Britain. Though not a humor researcher by training, he's had plenty of experience exploring unusual topics such as deception, the paranormal, and self-help. He also is credited by Guinness as the lead researcher on one of the largest scientific experiments of all time.