On Humor
Frameworks for thinking about comedy
One hobby I’d maybe like to pick up over the next few decades is stand-up comedy. Most precisely I’d like to study what makes something funny and then reverse-engineer it. That process—the studying and reverse-engineering—is one of my favorite things to do. It didn’t work as much with basketball, but it has with other things (like community building).
This post isn’t about reverse-engineering, but it is about comedy. Here are four mental models I’ve picked up for how to think about comedy.
1/ Comedy is all about misdirection.
Misdirection is getting someone to think one thing when you really mean something else. In magic, this psychological method is used to trick you — "the hand is quicker than the eye." The magician is getting you to look one place while he does something else in another.
In comedy, for a joke to land, it's quite similar. A successful comedian gives you about 10% of the information you need to know and lets your brain fill in the rest. After all, a punchline is that single piece of information proving your assumptions about a story's facts and logical structure were wrong.
For controversial humor: to be funny, you have to tread a fine line on what may be taboo. You make people think you're saying something controversial, but really the joke's on them — because their head went there in the first place!
As a result, people laugh, often as an adaptive behavior to stay calm in what (to them) is an otherwise uncomfortable position.
In Elephant in the Brain, Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler propose laughter is how we signal 'play' in situations where our words/actions could be dangerous or threatening. It's the shared signal of 'It's ok, nothing serious happening'."
So on one hand, misdirection can be used to make humor effective; on the other hand, it can also be used to misdirect us from pain & discomfort.
2/ Laughing is an adaptive behavior to stay calm under stress.
The neurobiology behind comedy comes from sparring.
When animals wrestle they laugh to indicate to other animals that everything's okay: "We're all good, even though we're fighting."
A similar thing is true with humans, especially in their early ages — kids love play fighting, and the predominant emotion involved is happiness, including laughter for the same signalling effect (until one kid gets kicked in the face and starts crying, that is...).
But to consider more broadly how we use laughter as a coping mechanism, consider this thought experiment:
Imagine a Neanderthal walking up a mountain expecting food. He hasn't eaten in 5 days. When he gets to the top of the mountain, he finds no food.
The brain could have one of two responses:
a) "Holy shit, I'm hungry. Where's the food?" *Proceeds to freak out, make a bad decision, and dies*
b) "LOL. That sucks. Guess I'll keep searching." *Moves on*
If you can remain calm & upbeat, even when you're getting punched in the jaw, you’ll bounce back quicker. Laughing off your losses helps redirect focus and prevents making bad decisions out of anger.
Laughing has always been healing to me. For whatever reason, laughter is how I’ve often processed nervousness or anger. I was the kid who always laughed at the most inappropriate time, got in trouble for laughing and then would start laughing harder and get even more trouble. I’ve had to curb this tendency lest I offend others, but I’ve often wondered why is it considered poor form to laugh at serious moments or topics? Why does laughing imply "take less seriously" instead of "I take this so seriously I'm nervous to talk about it?"
3/ Comedy is a way to introduce new ideas into society.
In addition to redirecting focus, studying comedy also means learning how to consider orthogonal perspectives that surprise others.
Comedy can be a means of understanding those whose opinions you disagree with. The art form gets us to question the validity of proposed claims, thinking across dimensions to grasp the author's true motives.
Further, humor is the mechanism by which we sort out the grey area of what can and can't be said.
If you actually want to know what's "on the edge" of popular society, go hang out at a comedy club.
When a comic finds a funny joke, they're unearthing a truth that people are barely aware of but then grasp when they realize everyone else gets it, resulting in laughter. The laughter can be thought of as the sound of comprehension.
Humor treads at the edge, the fringe of consciousness, and that what happens when a comic finds a truly funny joke, is that they're unearthing a truth that people are only kind of aware of but it's so universal that the whole room suddenly grasps it.
4/ Comedy is about power.
In any society, there’s always a culture & counterculture — one is ascendant and the other is renegade. You can tell who the culture is by who controls the institutions, and you can tell who the counterculture is because they’re generally funnier.
Comedy is about punching up, not punching down; so if it’s ok to laugh, it means there's power somewhere in the equation.
Some people gain their power precisely from seeming powerless, so this assumption of power is existential — they can’t afford to let itself be laughed at, since that exposes its power, so that’s why they censor.
Censorship does not have a particularly good track record. The Soviet Union hated photocopiers, for example, because they could be used to spread arguments against the dominant ethos. Censorship of comedy seems particularly dangerous, since comedy is often the last refuge of critiquing absolute power, by doing so in an indirect way.
So for people like those explained above, comedy seems like a threat.
But if humor helps us sort out what we can and can't say, if we cut it off and say "you can't say that," well, then, how exactly do we figure out where the line is?
Often, one has to step beyond the line to figure out where the line is; and if the room laughs, you know you're onto something.
Comedy is an art form that includes, among other things, offending surgically exactly who needs to be offended with minimal collateral damage. A great comedian is like a sniper: they take out the hostage taker while leaving the hostage intact.
OK. That’s it. I’m curious for any mental models you have around comedy, as well as any favorite comedy snippets. My favorite comedians include Dave Chapelle, Hannibal Buress, and Patrice O’Neal, among many others.
Read of the week: Special, by Max Nussenbaum
Listen of the week: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Watch of the week: Comedians against Comedy. Ryan Long’s whole channel is remarkable.
Another note: A Clubhouse show I co-host, Big Ideas, featured Byrne Hobart, Martin Gurri, and Matt Taibbi last week. This week we’ll have Bruno Macaes on Tuesday, Anduril Co-founders on Wednesday, and Michael Tracey on Thursday, all at 730 PM PST.
Until next week,
Erik
A few different models/hypotheses, which I don't think are incongruent with one another and in some cases are mutually supportive:
1. Incongruity theory of humor. This one is not my own, but rather a pretty widely held theory of humor which I think largely checks out. It basically says humor is the experience of having your mental patterns subverted. This checks out with the classic joke archetype: the comic sets us up to expect one thing, then hits us with another. This has also been recast as the incongruity-resolution theory, involving the introduction of incongruous ideas followed by their resolution. I wonder if this take may be better expressed as uncertainty resolution though. This would play interestingly with the model of the brain as a prediction-making machine and Karl Friston's idea of reducing free energy (uncertainty) as the imperative of self-organizing systems (like us humans).
2. Signal of harmlessness/play. This touches on your second one, as it's an evolutionary biology perspective. There are a couple different variations here. One is as a signal to communicate to others of one's social group that something that seemed harmful is actually harmless. For example, you're terrified as you come across a shadowy tiger-like figure in the dark, only to realize it's a tiger shaped rock (unlikely, I know), so you burst out laughing in relief, signaling to your hunter-gatherer boys that "It's all good." This one also ties in with the uncertainty resolution model from above. On the play side, play is a way of practicing for fighting and hunting. If you're not signaling otherwise, it could look like the real thing and suddenly someone is taking it waaayyyy too seriously. Laughter acts as a signal that play is in fact play. Everyone then knows it's play, no one takes it too far, and others around aren't worried that something bad is going down. Play has been found to be a developmentally critical activity, so it would be no surprise that it has its own signaling mechanism.
3. Laughter as mechanism for neural annealing. Here's a brief overview of the theory of neural annealing if you're interested: https://qualiacomputing.com/2019/11/29/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/. Roughly, the theory involves the proposition that in certain high energy states the brain "heats up" and becomes more malleable and then cools down to its resting temperature in the form it has been reshaped to, like clay. In the case of the brain, more malleable means more capable of learning. Psychedelics are one proposed vehicle to these annealing-enabling high energy states, which is why they're such potent agents of change in the mind. Meditation is another. I wonder if this process might be happening to some extent when we laugh, and in other states where we experience a similar feeling of warmth, openness, and energy. By laughing, we bring the brain into a higher energy state, increasing the entropy of the system and thus increasing its malleability. If laughter does help promote learning (and there are some experimental results pointing to this), it would be useful in the context of the other models I've mentioned here. Play is an important developmental tool, so expediting learning in this process would be of great benefit. Perhaps more significantly, if our mental models are being violated when we laugh, as the incongruity theory suggests, then it's important that we be as capable of learners as possible in that moment so that we can update our models appropriately. If laughter is inducing neural annealing, then it would be aiding in that updating process.
4. Social bonding tool. Laughter is a means of fostering social cohesion.
5. Trait for sexual selection. A good sense of humor is often seen as a critical trait in a partner, especially for men to appeal to women. Perhaps it helps to demonstrate intelligence, perspective taking, desire to please others, and confidence (which is often a proxy for status).
Dear Erik,
One of the reasons I applied for the pending ODCC fellowship is so that I can more easily make courses that use examples from culture to explore topics such as comedy and humor.
Laughter is a clue to comedy and humor. As you note, laughter is a social signal. Among other things, it signals "some mental or social models are being disrupted" or "there's mental or social ambiguity or disruption here."
Humans also laugh:
- out of joy
- out of extreme pleasure
- to mock
- out of schadenfreude
- when someone is being bullied
- when a bully is being bullied
- when someone makes a discovery or happens upon loot
- out of anxiety (as you note)
- out of self-deprecating self-recognition ("haha - I fell for that trick again") - similar to what you note
- when social boundaries are observed to be transgressed (think Borat movies)
- when there is transgression of someone's vulnerabilities / tendernesses / "volatilities" (this is a metaphor I'm applying from software architecture) (think "The Three Stooges" when Moe is poking Curley's eyes)
Please note that courtship makes for rife conditions for many of these events to occur - thus rom coms.
Shakespeare's "comedies" often will depict gender bending and usually end in a marriage.
What might tie all of these together is: "Here is an ambiguous event or an opportunity for loot / plunder / free sh*t."
As social animals, we hoot and holler when there's free sh*t to be scooped up OR the potential for the same.
In sum, humor and laughter either alert us or signal:
- that mental or social models are not quite fitting, and that a possible "hinge event" is in the offing, such as an alliance or a potential blow-up or an outright fight
- in which case, new allegiances may need to be chosen, or a fight will need to be entered,
OR
- that there has been a a discovery ("Eureka!"), or other loot to be scooped up (maybe a buffalo kill), or a victory to be celebrated (also a sign of impending loot), or there might be loot to be scooped up after an potential impending fight or as a result of the new alliance (such as a marriage)
This is a alpha version on humor and laughter. I'm an amateur cultural critic/sociologist/anthropologist.
Best,
Dan