How Hard is it to Get Others to Laugh?

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.”