"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog," said E.B. White. "Few people are interested and the frog dies." Sure enough, humor, that most ineffable of human art forms, has long eluded the efforts of psychologists to describe it. So we turned to the real experts—comedians, actors, and satirists. Our round table consisted of Todd Hanson, a writer and editor for The Onion; Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker; The Daily Show's Kristen Schaal; MADtv's Arden Myrin; Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land; comedian Eugene Mirman (who, along with Schaal, appears on Flight of the Conchords); and comedian Heather Lawless. Since they're the ones on the front lines making people laugh, we knew they'd be able to shed light on when jokes go too far, whether men like funny women, and that great existential stumper, the knock knock joke.
We want to keep this informal...
Mankoff: Can we keep it totally formal?
Mirman: We should probably use Robert's Rules of Order.
Hanson: I don't believe any scholarly conversation can reasonably be held if it's not in Latin. I mean it's for Psychology Today, let's try to keep it classy.
Mirman: Alright, the psychology of humor! We're about to talk about power, struggle, our childhoods—with comedy, or what I like to call "the power of the tease."
Let's start with something that's not funny at all but quite sad: the death of George Carlin. How did he influence you?
Mirman: Never heard of him. (Laughter.) He influenced the canon of standup and shaped what it became and what was acceptable. He took it from vaudeville, Bob Hopey jokey jokes and made it personal and important and an art.
Mankoff: Like New Yorker cartoons, Carlin's whole point was to use humor to communicate something besides making the person laugh. The things we've laughed at hardest in our lives are not the jokes at all. He was a thinking comedian.
Hanson: Carlin was part of a giant shift in the culture. He was 30 when he started dropping acid and turning into the Hippy Dippy Weatherman. Before that, he was a straight comic. There isn't really a counterculture now. But on the other hand, in the mainstream, there is nothing that's considered out of bounds.
Myrin: We have such a crazy censor on MADtv that it's very arbitrary what you can or can't say. So the writers write entire sketches with made-up names for penis and vagina, like "gooch hole" and "twazzer." But the censors still won't let them use them because of the context, so they get in battles.
What is it about vulgarity that's funny?
Hanson: George Carlin says there's no such thing as shock humor. Shock is just another word for surprise, and all humor is based on surprise, or having the person off-guard.
Schaal: I think it's a matter of taste: Maybe you love Andrew Dice Clay, or maybe you don't.
Hanson: I do love Andrew Dice Clay, but only because I hate women.
Mankoff: I think what you're getting to is what psychologists call script opposition. So if there's a doctor saying, "You'll be awake during the entire operation; the anesthesiologist is on vacation." The script opposition is that we expect the doctor to be solicitous. The weird thing is it's a surprise you expect. When they do experiments, they find the more predictable jokes are the ones that are funny.
Lipsyte: I once heard someone describe it as a rubber band being stretched.
Myrin: I like seeing what you can get away with with a smile. The sweeter, more pleasant you can be—and then say something horrifying.
Hanson: You don't have to be a primatologist to figure out there's a connection between the startle reaction and making people laugh. For me, the funniest things are always the most horrifying, and then figuring out a way to process that in your mind so you can laugh.
Schaal: And also playing it real and sincerely and not at all winking.
Mankoff: It all occurs in the context of play. When we're playing, we enjoy things that are normally offensive and repulsive to us. Say I can have a cartoon where it's a gallows and there's steps—and then there's a ramp for the handicapped. It's play. You can have a guy getting executed with a guillotine and the guy has the two baskets and he's saying, "Paper or plastic?" That actual scene wouldn't be funny.
Mirman: I think it actually would be funny.
Schaal: I want plastic.
We're talking about humor coming from surprise, but isn't it also the recognition of the familiar?
Schaal: But you start with recognition.
Lawless: There's a degree of precariousness.
Mankoff: There's a degree of unexpectedness and conjoining two things that people haven't expected. If I do a cartoon and say to you, "OK, here's heaven. Make something up about it—conjoin it with an airport." You'll start to come up with jokes. What are the parallels? You go into heaven, maybe there's security. Maybe it's a nightclub—there's a guy out front, guarding the ropes. Maybe it's the U.S. and there are illegal angels crawling over. If I say it's like a highway, maybe there's an EasyPass. Conjoining these two things is what you're supposed to do as a comic.
