All jokes come down to one of four themes.
Anywhere in the world, all jokes can be reduced to just one of four themes, according to Dr. Richard Wiseman, a British scientist who’s been conducting mass participation experiments about what we think is funny. (see below)
What’s the funniest animal?
Wiseman also found that if you insert different animal names into the same joke, one animal evokes more laughter than any others. Guess which animal? (see below.)
Well, how hard is it to get others to laugh?
It is mysteriously difficult, according to scientists, and many professional comedians. In fact, it is easier to get others to cry or smile than to laugh. While you need to evoke a response in only one part of the brain for the first two, you must stimulate a more complex “laughter circuit” involving many more parts of the brain for laughter to happen.
Several researchers, including John Allen Paulos, author of Mathematics and Humor discovered that when we attempt to understand puns, we process them in left side of the brain. Yet more complex, non-wordplay jokes are sent to the right side of the brain to comprehend, triggering many more parts of the brain along the way.
Researchers, Wendy Wapner, Suzanne Hamby and Howard Gardner, in a 1981 paper, entitled “Brain and Language”, described the left side of the brain as a “highly efficient, narrowly programmed linguistic computer. In contrast, the right hemisphere of the brain constitutes a suitable audience for a humorous silent film.” Perhaps that’s why comedians often use their body and props to silently act out a part of their story—to activate more parts of your mind.
What Makes You Laugh?
What makes us laugh? Here’s three clues from the researchers: incongruity, superiority and the pattern of three.
Incongruity.
A joke, “I went to my doctor for shingles. He sold me aluminum siding.”
When we see or hear something incongruous, we are surprised into laughter, often as a sort of relief.
This may be a primitive response for alerting your community in ancient times that an apparent danger is, in fact, nothing to fear. V.S. Ramachandran, in Phantoms in the Brain, wrote, “The main purpose of laughter might be to allow the individual to alert others in the social group that the detected anomaly is nothing to worry about.”
Superiority.
Those who tell us funny stories about their own foibles—or those of others—help listeners feel momentarily superior to the jokester or to the people who’ve been made the butt of the joke.
The Pattern of Three Joke: “My favorite books are Moby-Dick, Great Expectations, and Rock Hard Abs in 30 days.”
Comedians have long believed that jokes work best in a pattern of three parts. Offer two straightforward examples, then a third one to shatter the pattern.
Wiseman, that scientist we mentioned at the top of the column, is a professor at the University of Hertfordshire and the director of its Perrott-Warrick Research Unit. He is probably Britain’s most well-known psychologist—at least since last year when he took his humor research to the world via the Internet.
His mass-participation experiments cover emotions, from lying to laughter. For example, he asked participants to detect who was lying after being exposed to accounts offered on television, the radio or in print. (Of those options, people are most likely to detect lying they hear on the radio).
In the Fall of 2002, Wiseman decided to learn about global differences in humor and opened a web site (LaughLab.co.us). The server for the site broke down when Wiseman got three million hits in the first five days after the site opened.Among other studies, he asked visitors to contribute their favorite jokes and rather others’ jokes, on a one to five rating scale. He’s received over 40,000 jokes. About two-thirds of the submissions are so off-color, violent or otherwise offensive that he chooses not to post them for site visitors.
