My name is Peter McGraw and I'm an Associate Professor of Marketing and
Psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
And I've studied judgement, emotion and choice.
And along my travels on this research topic I stumbled onto the question.
What makes things funny? And as a result of that that experience.
I started the humor research lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
And I'm going to be talking about what makes things funny from a psychological
perspective. So the question of what makes things
funny is actually a surprisingly important question.
And that is the consequences of humor have really important implications for
how we live. So people who are funny are well liked.
Humorous things are really attention getting.
It's something that influences the choices that we make in terms of how we
spend our leisure time, our leisure dollars.
It influences who our friends are, who we end up dating, who we end up marrying,
and unfortunately sometimes who we end up divorcing.
Those types of effects are really obvious and very clear.
What's less clear is what it is that actually makes things humourous.
And I'm going to focus today on the antecedents and at the end of the talk
I'll connect these antecedents to some of these important consequences.
So let's do a little bit of housekeeping first.
What is humor? I think of humor as a response, a
response that people experience in one of three ways, or all of three ways.
So humor is a cognitive response, a judgement.
Hey, that's funny. It's an emotional response.
This positive of feeling, this positive feeling of amusement that we have when we
perceive something as humorous. And then finally a behavioral response.
The tendency to laugh. Now, of course, you don't always laugh at
things that you see funny, but it tends to have a theory there.
So, there are many theories of humor. They go back thousands of years.
Freud had a theory of what makes things funny.
In which he described humor as a release of sexual or aggressive tensions.
And many things that people laugh at seem to have that element.
Although Freud's theory has been largely abandoned.
Plato and Socrates talked about humor and described it as something that occurs
when bad things happen to other people, that we laugh at other people's misery.
I think Hobbes put it best in Laviathan he wrote that humor, the laughter occurs
in response to sudden glory over our enemies.
And then the most sort of compelling predominate theory of humor today is one
based on incongruity. That is that there's something surprising
or something that we expect but don't actually get.
There's some mismatch between expectations and reality.
And some pretty fart smart folks like Emmanuel Cont has suggested that, that
humor occurs as a response to incongruity.
So the research that we've been doing in the humor research lab says, shows that
there's some problems with each of these different types of theories.
So putting them all together, accidentally killing a loved one would
would foster a release in aggressive tension, would assert your superiority
and certainly would be an expected turn of events.
But it's hard, hardly laughable. Instead what we argue is that humor comes
from benign violations. So what do I mean by benign violations?
Well it's actually a little bit of a counter intuitive thought, that idea that
humor actually starts with something that is wrong Unsettling, threatening in some
way. It violates the way you see the world.
The way the world ought to be. Some pretty smart people have recognized
this to be the case. Mark Twain said that the secret source of
humor is not joy, it's sorrow. There is no laughter in heaven.
That is there's nothing wrong in heaven, thus there's nothing to laugh about.
So in each of the previous theories I've discussed, you can see those negative
elements. Aggressive things tend to be negative.
as, asserting superiority. Bad things are happening to other people.
And in the sense that things that are unexpected, if they're unexpectedly bad.
They can be violations. Now in the benign violation theory the
range of violations is really quite broad.
It could be physical threats. It could be violations of social norms.
It could be violations of cultural norms. It could be violations of linguistic
norms. So that things that are wrong vary.
really quite broad. But of course, violations don't normally
make us laugh, they cause negative emotions.
And that's where you need the benign condition.
That violation needs to simultaneously be seen as okay, acceptable, safe, or in our
vernacular, benign. So, take tickling for example, or play
fighting, both are benign violations, they're mock attacks.
So, they're threatening events, or physically threatening events that are
not intended to hurt. And, when is it that they cause laughter,
that cause a humorous response? Well it's when they're not done too
aggressively and when they're done by someone Who you trust.
So, for instance, you can't tickle yourself.
There's no violation there, there's nothing threatening about that situation.
Similarly, if a creepy stranger walked up to you on the street and tired to tickle
you, it's hardly going to be a funny situation.
That situation is purely a violation. There is nothing okay about it.
Benign violation approach also explains things like word play and puns to take
for example, this situation. If you find this this situation funny,
it's likely cause you see how the phrasing of pen and is both wrong and not
wrong. At the same time.
So I'm going to present to you four good reasons why benign violations is a good
theory for what makes things funny. So let's start with the idea of distance.
so Mark Twain said, that comedy is tragedy plus time.
And Mel Brooks similarly quipped that, tragedy is when I cut my finger.
Comedy is when you fall down an open sewer and die.
In both cases these humorists recognize that being far away from, being distant
from a tragedy helps enhance humor. And research in in our lab the Humor
Research Lab, AKA HURL, has found that to be the case.
So, what happens is, is that for really severe violations like tragedies,
distance helps lower the threat of of the violation and helps transform this
violation into a benign violation. But what's interesting is that distance
doesn't always help in some situations. As in the case of mild mishaps.
Actually, moving closer may help enhance humor.
So let me give you an example, that, that illustrates this.
Imagine a situation where you've been hit by a car.
Which of the two situations would be funnier whether if it happened five years
ago or if it happened yesterday. But what about a mild violation, like
stubbing your toe, in what situation is more likely to be funny if it happened
five years ago or yesterday? Well, participants in our laboratory
demonstrate how this reversal occurs. How the effect of distance depends on the
severity of the violation. Getting hit by a car five years ago is
now distant and can be transformed into a benign violation but stubbing your toe
five years ago is so far away for this mild violation.
It's not even worth our attention in actually moving closer to it makes it
funnier. None of the previous theories can account
for this reversal of distance due to the severity of the violation.
The next piece of evidence is that many things that we laugh about, we also
experience a little bit of negative emotions along the way.
You can think about nervous laughter, when you're laughing at something that
you know is wrong. Well, that occurs because you need to
have something wrong to find something laughable.
And so, we've been doing some research on moral violations and when moral
violations can become funny. And what we find is that one way that you
can do this, is that you could have some alternative explanation that explains
explains away the thing that is seemingly wrong.
So a, we use a scenario by Jonathan Height.
A social psychologist. And I'll just read this along with you.
Matthew is playing with his new kitten late one night.
He is wearing only his boxer shorts, and sometimes the kitten walks over his
genitals. Eventually, this arouses him and he
begins to rub his bare genitals along the kittens body.
The kitten purrs and seems to enjoy the contact.
So this is very clearly a pretty disgusting scenario, and almost everybody
agrees with that fact. But we find a large proportion of our
participants also find the situation to be funny, so they're both disgusted and
amused. As you can see I've underlined a
particular passage in this scenario, the kitten purrs and seems to enjoy the
contact. That helps make this violation benign,
that is, the kitten seems to be enjoying the experience also.
No kitten is being harmed in the making of this scenario.
In our study, we actually manipulated whether this sentence was present or a
different pres-, sentence was present, where the kitten whines, and does not
seem to enjoy the contact. In that situation, we have very low
levels of amusement. There's nothing okay about this
situation, and people are only disgusted by it.
So, when you have a benign violation, you can end up having mixed emotions.
It's I think very good support fact that something wrong has to be present there.
The third support that I can present for benign violation account is the vast
individual differences in what people find funny.
What one person finds funny, another person might find boring and yet another
person might find offensive. Why is that the case?
Well humor is a uniquely individual thing and it's determined by one's values,
experiences and beliefs. What one person sees as a benign
violation, another sees as totally benign and yet another sees as totally a
violation. Shows that there's sort of this very,
kind of, tough, going when you want to make something funny.
You've got to find the sweet spot of comedy that perfectly matches these two
appraisals. So in one study we presented our
participants with a scenario in which a church is trying to get people to come to
the congregation, and they're raffling off an H2 Hummer SUV.
And we find that people often find this this scenario to be upsetting.
But some group of people also find it to be amusing.
Who is it that finds it amusing? Well those are people who are not regular
church-goers. So they can recognize that this is
potentially threatening to the sanctity of the church.
But because they don't care about it, they're not, they're not particularly
hearing, adhering to any sort of religious doctrine.
They have enough distance from it to see how it can be funny.
People who are regular churchgoers how, however, don't find this scenario to be
amusing. They're only disgusted by it.
The last piece of support is that the theory not only explains what is funny.
But it also explains what is not funny. So in a, a study that we conducted in the
human research lab, we had a research assistant approach approach people on
campus and ask them to read a survey. And while they were reading the survey,
she just looked at their faces. And she just coded how their, how they
reacted facially to the information that we gave them.
And we gave them a story that was similar to Keith Richard's acknowledgement that
he had snorted his dead father's ashes with some cocaine.
So we made up a scenario akin to that. And with Keith, in which Keith's father
tells his son to cremate his body, and that Keith can do whatever he wants to do
with the remains. So his dad gives him a license to do
whatever he wants, and Keith decides to snort his dead father's ashes.
What we've found was, that some people were upset by this, some people didn't
think it was a big deal, and some people laughed.
And we asked them, can you see the situation as wrong, yes or no?
Can you see the situation as not wrong, yes or no?
And what we've found was only the people who saw it as wrong and not wrong were
more likely to laugh and smile. The people who saw it as totally wrong
were not, not likely to laugh and smile and the people who saw it as totally not
wrong were not likely to laugh and smile. In one case they were offended, in the
other case they were bored. So let's get back to the original
question of what makes things funny. I hope I've been able to convince you
that the answer is benign violations. And let me end with one last piece of
evidence that I think is really quite persuasive.
And that is that that a benign violation approach connects both the antecedents
and the consequences of humor. So for instance, humor is this really
positive thing and it's something people hold liking and admiration for the people
who can create it. Well we should like people who can take
the things that are bad in the world and somehow make them positive.
Transform the violations into benign violations.
Humor is attention-getting. Well, things that are wrong in the world
tend to catch our attention. And one of the things that I hadn't
mentioned yet, is that humor seems to be a very good way to help people cope with
pain, stress, and adversity. And I think humor does that through one
of two mechanisms. One is, we feel good, and when we feel
good about things, the bad things in the world are less threatening to us.
But there also can be this reappraisal process, is that if we can make fun of
the bad things in the world, make fun of the violations, reappraise them into
benign violations. Well then it helps us cope with them,
because they just don't seem as bad. thank you very much.
I want to thank my colleagues in the humor research lab.
And my insights from the humor code.