Nothing ruins a joke quite like explaining it, and yet here I am ready to do just that.
Being funny is not easy. Despite a clear strategy of building up tension, cleverly misleading your audience, and then surprising them with something unexpected; achieving the end result of being “funny” is more easily said than done. Humour arises when we have an expectation of how something should be and that that something does not end up happening. It is one of those ‘aha’ moments that turns into an ‘haha’ moment. We derive pleasure from correcting an assumption, from the moment where it clicks and we understand why it is funny. Your brain is essentially patting itself on the back for figuring out a mistake it made.
Comedy is the business of hacking our brain’s laziness. Take the following for example:
Two goldfish are in a tank. One says to the other, ‘you man the guns, I’ll drive’.
The assumption here is that the tank refers to a fish tank, but zing! we understand that the hilarity of this joke arises from the suggestion that the goldfish are in a real tank. Your brain is a machine that constantly has to be one step ahead of the rest of your body and make assumptions about its environment to plan and execute a response. Your brain takes the average of all that it has seen previously to apply it to the situation in which it finds itself in the present. This is a sort of cognitive shortcut to minimize the interference with day to day menial tasks. Of course, due to such laziness the brain makes mistakes quite often.
Your brain is constantly filling in the gaps with assumptions in everything you do. During a conversation it will make assumptions as to what someone will say. During a journey that you repeatedly make from point A to point B it will assume which direction to turn. Lastly, when observing an object in motion it will assume how far you need to extend your arms to reach for that object. This process is easier to demonstrate with the following video than it is to explain:
Let us be honest now. Everyone knows that you would be lying if you were to say you heard him sing “I love to count”.
Whether it is unintentionally mishearing a word, or having to re-adjust the length of your reach, your brain often makes mistakes due to its assumptions about the external environment, which are based on its previous experiences. In those previous cases, your brain would be expecting that person to say something specific based on similar sentences it previously heard. Similarly, it would believe the object to be a certain distance away due to previous similar visual scenarios stored in your memory. When it is proven wrong, your brain actively corrects itself. Evolutionarily this makes sense as your brain rewards itself every time these situations happen. Such a behaviour encourages flexibility and staying alert to deal with misconceptions.
To get really specific; in your brain humour processing is thought to be handled by the temporo-occipito-parietal (TOP) junction. This particular area of your brain deals with problem resolution. It also contains the mesolimbic dopaminergic system, which deals with reward processing. As terribly boring as this mouthful of neuroanatomy sounds, it is actually very interesting that humour activates the same region of our brain as the one involved with the pleasure we derive from things like drugs or similarly, chocolate. Equally, the TOP junction is involved in bringing information from surrounding regions of the brain to help form and essentially generate an expectation of how the world will play out. While the intricacies of how humour works remains ambiguous to science, these two regions give insight into how humour is produced.
An interesting question to follow this discussion is therefore; what makes something funny?
Not everyone likes to be tickled, and yet most people will laugh. But when does tickling stop being funny? When you tickle yourself, or maybe, when a stranger in a trenchcoat does it? One of the more parsimonious explanations of humour is called the “benign violation theory”, which not only explains why things are funny but also why the scientists that came up with this, probably aren’t.
Historically, philosophers, with their knack for ruining things, have come up with many explanations for what makes something funny. Hobbes, Plato and Aristotle posited the “Superiority Theory of Humour“, which is commonly summarized by the term ‘schadenfreude’. This German piece of vocabulary which does not have its equivalent in the English language explains the malicious self-pleasure you feel when seeing that person who cut you in line drop their coffee all over their shoes. Freud suggested that humour was a method by which we relieve some sort of psychological tension; and as he would believe, such method of release would reveal deeply suppressed thoughts and desires. Keeping in mind that Freud is your go-to for sexual innuendos, the aforementioned description of humour should be taken with a grain of salt. Kant, whose arguments are more anchored in philosophy rather than psychology, presented in turn the “incongruity theory”. It suggests that humour arises when the mind realizes that two things or concepts don’t go together. This explains the pleasure (some of us) get out of those cartoon character crossovers, and Super Mario Smash Brothers.
However unlike its predecessors, the benign violation theory proposed by Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren sets out to encompass all forms of humour by integrating all previous humour theories. McGraw and Warren came up with three rules for what makes something funny, essentially proving these people are zero fun at parties:
(1) a situation is a violation,
(2) the situation is benign, and
(3) occur simultaneously.
This three part based rule explains why we laugh when: we don’t want to be tickled, or why we laugh when we fall down the stairs and quickly realize it didn’t hurt, or how we laugh when we realize that puns are a violation of the English language. All violations of our expectations of how our world should be, while being harmless, generate laughter and amusement within us, ultimately resulting in the notion of humour.
If you learn anything from this however, know that overall - these guys are probably terrible at stand up.
Written by Manon Rouanet.
