Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny

2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.1.2.0281

2333-9934

Miriam Chirico,

Humor Studies and Applications

The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny is a buddy book. Two friends, a professor and a journalist, travel to various global locales in order to study sources of laughter. The book's scholarly background originates from Peter McGraw's Humor Research Lab (HuRL) at the University of Colorado Boulder, a lab where researchers in behaviorist psychology perform experiments regarding what people find funny. Although the book depicts their mutual journey, Joel Warner narrates their encounters with stand-up comedians, sufferers of laughing diseases, humor therapists, and other figures related to humor. Each chapter finds the two in a geographical location of laughter: Los Angeles for stand-up comedy, Tanzania as the site of the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962, and Japan to see rakugo, a traditional form of comic storytelling, or manzai, a two-man style of comedy (unfortunately for the authors, they didn't speak Japanese).Analyzing humor is complex because the very questions underscoring humor studies are ambiguous: does having a “sense of humor” mean possessing the verbal ability to tell a good joke or the mental alacrity to perceive situations as funny? The duo works with a number of experts to find the answers. They interview people who create humor, such as the artists behind the New Yorker cartoons or the writers behind Groupon advertisements; or people who have an eye and ear for humor, such as the agents and talent scouts for stand-up comedians; people who teach humor at the improvisation troupe the Upright Citizens Brigade. Finally, a wager frames the book: Warner bets that their study of humor will make them funnier, and, by the tale's end, the two have “proven” their hypothesis: McGraw performs a more successful stand-up routine at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal than he did at the book's beginning back in Denver.McGraw's theory of humor is laid out at the book's outset: the “benign violation theory.” Building upon the work of Thomas Veatch, McGraw proposes that laughter occurs when the listener realizes a social norm has been violated, but simultaneously understands that the violation is benign. Thus someone falling down a flight of stairs but remaining unhurt, or a church giving away a Hummer H2 to a lucky congregant are both examples of physical or social violations, but they are innocuous enough that after our initial surprise, we laugh. It seems that most theories of humor involve such bifurcated thinking: Victor Raskin's linguistic theory of humor (Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, 1985) claims that a joke involves two different frames of reference: one in the set-up, the other shown in the punch line. (e.g., My wife is an excellent housekeeper. When we got divorced, she got the house.) Prior to this work, Arthur Koestler in The Art of Creation (1964) indicated that a joke involves the juxtaposition of two mutually independent codes. Thus, such forms of episodic or linguistic humor rely upon dichotomous thinking.However, the investigators rarely find this theory at work in their travels—perhaps due to language barriers. Often, their discovery of humor is in the collective interactions that evolve naturally among the people they meet: the two find themselves making penis jokes complete with gestures in the dressing room of some Japanese comedians after a show, and they express incredulity upon witnessing an Israeli police officer and a Palestinian shopkeeper in a fraught section of Hebron tease each other playfully. The two men join Patch Adams and a group of clowns on one of his Gesundheit Global Outreach trips to the slums of Iquitos in the Peruvian Andes, an area riven with poverty, unemployment, and violence. Especially in this last chapter, the two realize that laughter connects people as they roam about the streets making shadow puppets for children and eliminating stagnant water through playful antics. This kind of humor is communal and unifying and, more to the point, healthy. Even though laughter may not be medicinal, it lowers social barriers so that people can find support in relationships and community, which is a proven key to healthy living.Their travels demonstrate that the study of comedy is an anthropological and psychological one, focused as it is on human quirk and the resourceful ability to think outside the box and challenge the status quo. As Warner admits, we laugh for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with humor. The laughter epidemic in Tanganyika may have been hysteria prompted by the children's stressful or regimented lives. Often people offer laughter as a form of cooperative communication to lower anxiety or appease one another. One such example of comedy as an anthropological artifact arises when Warner interviews the various cartoonists who drew the images of Mohammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands–Posten in 2005. Humor has always been a social barometer for the attitudes of society and reveals what we hold reverent or not. The episode showed how satire may illuminate certain values while also reflecting pent-up aggressions in society: was the cartoon controversy evidence that Muslims do not respect freedom of speech or rather proof that they are still victims of racism in Europe? Similarly, on a trip to Palestine, Warner cites research regarding the correlation between humor and optimism: the periods of time when Palestinians stop making jokes about their Israeli occupiers indicate public disillusionment and hopelessness.The style of book is journalistic; it's a breezy though richly informed survey of humor studies. Warner's wide-ranging references to humor studies is an education in itself, discussing Holocaust humor, the psychology of teasing, and the correlation between gender and humor, for example. At times it seems the travel to other places is a pretext for discussing the theory. For example, he summarizes research on humor as an evolutionary tool while on safari in Africa, or cites a study exploring whether Democrats or Republicans are funnier while in Japan, which is noticeably lacking in political mockery. The book occasionally feels like a “Who's Who” in the International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) as it mentions all the group's heavy-hitters: Don and Alleen Nilsen, Elliot Oring, Victor Raskin, Salvatore Attardo, Christie Davies, Jessica Milner Davis, Rod Martin, John Morreall, and Nancy Bell. Furthermore, because Warner focuses on social situations that prompt laughter, the book explores humor rather than comedy and does not take into account any research done in literary or film studies.The book is unusual in humor studies in that it is laugh-out-loud funny. While most academic reading about humor is paradoxically dull, Warner hits the funny bone quite a few times, such as when he relates mistakenly wandering naked around a Japanese spa. While the Benign Violation Theory is never proven through the events of their jocular journey, another subtle theme emerges: resilience through laughter. At the end, the two discuss the necessity of humor as a coping mechanism, and it comes from a well-earned place. During the course of writing the book together, McGraw's mother dies and he travels to New Jersey to scatter her ashes. When he advises that people need to laugh more and be deliberate about it, his perspective is that of someone who has suffered loss and who has traveled to the Amazonian rain forest with Patch Adams's laughter brigade. Transforming one's perspective and reassessing a situation so that it seems more benign is hard work, but it is necessary.