(This post appears on the Humor Code’s Huffington Post and Psychology Today blogs.)

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are garnering lots of attention these days. Some see large-scale, web-based classes as the new frontier for colleges and universities, a great leap forward that could revolutionize higher education. Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics Dan Ariely and his colleagues at the Center for Advanced Hindsight, on the other hand, see MOOCs as the perfect way to test Dan’s academic funny bone. Will the jokes that work in a traditional college classroom work in a class of say, several thousand online students?

We here at the Humor Code were happy to lend a hand. So as part of his recent MOOC, “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior,” Dan told a joke at the beginning of each week’s online lecture video. We asked Dan to predict how funny and how offensive his students would find each of these zingers on a five-point scale, from “not at all” to “extremely.” We also had him rate how funny and how offensive he found each of his own jokes using the same scale.

We threw similar questions at the thousands of students subjected to the jokes each week. Using the five-point scale, we asked them how funny and how offensive they found each of Dan’s wisecracks. We also asked them to predict Dan’s own ratings: how funny did their teacher consider each of his own jokes?

Now that the six-week course has wrapped up, here are the results:

Week 1

Funniness =3.3; Dan’s prediction = 4; Dan’s judgment = 5

Week 2

Week 4

Week 5

Though, to be honest, Dan isn’t as funny as he thinks he is. He was pretty accurate in predicting how offensive his jokes were going to be – the difference between his jokes’ average offensiveness rating and his prediction was just 0.2. But he was far less precise in his funniness estimates. On average, he was nearly a full scale point (0.97) too optimistic about how well his jokes would go over.

Dan might have an inflated opinion of his own sense of humor, but he doesn’t come off that way to his students. On average, they predicted Dan would rate his own jokes more than a full scale point (-1.2) below how he actually rated them. Maybe he was a bit overzealous when he gave all but one of his jokes a five on the funniness scale.

As for other conclusions from the study? The results from week five suggest professors should not make jokes about someone’s parents having to move in with them. For most people, online or off, nothing about that scenario is benign.

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Professor Peter McGraw (@PeterMcGraw) and journalist Joel Warner (@JoelmWarner) have embarked on the Humor Code, an around-the-world exploration of what makes things funny. Follow the Humor Code on Facebook and Twitter. Look for the book in early 2014.

Some pretty bright folks have asked the question, what makes things funny? Despite efforts from the likes of Aristotle, Kant, and Freud, there’s been little agreement on the answer. There are hundreds if not thousands of different humor theories, many of which fall into one of three broad categories: superiority theories, relief theories, and incongruity theories.

Superiority theories suggest that we laugh at the misfortune, ignorance, or inferiorities of others. For example, seeing someone suffer from a swift kick to the groin is funny (according to superiority theory) because he is in a great deal of pain and you are not.

Superiority theory explains why wedgies, insults, and other humiliations can be quite funny provided you’re not the one being laughed at. Jokes often capitalize on the superiority principle. Hearing that some other ethnicity invented a submarine with a screen door or a solar powered flashlight is funny because it allows you to revel in their stupidity. Indeed, it appears that we can learn far more about humor from three stooges (to whom we feel superior) than three wise men (to whom we do not) – gold and frankincense are not nearly as funny as a hearty jab to the eye or a frying pan to the back of the head.

Relief theories suggest that the purpose of laughter is to release excess nervous energy. Relief theory is closely associated Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. According to Freud, the id produces a host of aggressive and sexual impulses that are typically repressed by the superego. Humor occurs when the superego is tricked into expressing the normally forbidden drives. Jokes often rely on clever “jokework” to trick the superego. Consider the following:

One night a policewoman pulls over a drunk driver.

She politely asks him to step out of his car. He willingly does so.

She says, “Anything you say can and will be held against you.”

He replies “BREASTS.”

The cognitive effort required to understand the two possible meanings of “held against you” distracts the superego and allows the reader to bask in the driver’s sexual advance on the unsuspecting policewoman. Relief theories tell us that sometimes a tree is just a tree, but if that tree looks like it has a penis, it can also be quite funny.

Incongruity theories suggest that something is funny when we perceive some kind of incongruity. Incongruity can refer to things that are unexpected or to things that juxtapose two typically incompatible concepts, like toilet paper and a cheese grater.

Some believe that incongruity alone is funny. Others suggest that the incongruity needs to be resolved. Consider the following joke:

A secretary goes into her bosses office and says, “Excuse me, may I use your dictaphone?”

The boss replies, “No, use your finger like everyone else.”

Although the boss’s response seems incongruous, it can be resolved by identifying another possible interpretation of the secretary’s request: instead of asking to use the dictaphone she could have been asking to apply an unconventional body part to different piece of office equipment. Resolution is more apparent in some forms of humor than others. For example, not much is resolved when someone gets kicked in the groin, yet many find the event funny.

Superiority, relief, and incongruity theories provide important insights, but they all fail to provide a complete and convincing answer to what makes things funny. Superiority theory cannot easily explain puns and self-depreciating humor and is inconsistent with the observation that in play fighting victims laugh more than aggressors. Relief theory rests on outdated assumptions about the nervous system and its predictions have received little empirical support. Finally, although most things that are funny seem incongruous, the reverse is not true. Getting a limb caught in a meat grinder would be incongruous, but it would not be funny. (See another post about why humor is not simply incongruity).

(Our lab, HuRL, is investigating an alternative account of humor that suggests humor is elicited by benign violations. Learn about it here.)

Pete saw that Matt Kirshen (@mattkirshen) was performing at Denver’s Comedy Works and cornered him in the alley. Pete asked him:

Is good comedy a conspiracy?

Matt’s observation is reminiscent of the “minimal groups paradigm” in the psychology literature. Basically, you can take a bunch of strangers and arbitrarily create two groups (e.g., by having them count off odd and even numbers), and almost immediately people will like the members of their group and not like the members of the other group. In this way, a comedian who creates a group atmosphere can enhance the audience’s experience.

His answer also highlights the two-way relationship between humor and social bonding. Research shows that humor can improve social bonds, but conversely, building social bonds also improves humor.

Check out Matt on his recent appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson:

Nick Justicz wrote a guest blog post for Pete a few months ago (see Humor and The Pianist). He did such a good job, Pete invited him to do another. Tell us what you think. Should the invitations continue?

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“That’s like, almost not cool” an onlooker exclaims (with nervous laughter). Indeed, a widely-viewed YouTube clip that shows a ferocious lion attempting to eat a zebra-dressed baby is hilarious to some and appalling to others. Some viewers look at this video and laugh it off as a harmless joke, while others believe the child’s parents are terrible people. How could a short video clip elicit two very different reactions?

CHICAGO — The 2012 Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor Conference is probably the only convention where it seems appropriate for a sock puppet to deliver the opening remarks.

And not just any sock puppet — a sock puppet stand-in for Patty Wootan, the organization’s outgoing president, who couldn’t make it to last month’s event here. Her successor, Chip Lutz, took the stage the first morning of the conference with a sock on his hand, mouthing along to Wootan’s prerecorded introductory speech.

Unfortunately for Lutz, Wootan’s remarks were impressively lengthy and rambling, eventually leading the puppeteer to lean over the podium, grimacing in pain as he struggled to keep his hand up. The several hundred attendees ate it up, roaring in laughter.

That laughter is what the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor Conference is all about. Now in its 25th year, the four-day event is a slick, sometimes moving and often goofy testament to the age-old saying, “Laughter is the best medicine.” This year, social workers and nurses, educators and therapists, improv performers and motivational speakers from all over the world gathered together in Chicago from Apr. 19 through 22 to learn how trauma and tragedy could be infused with humor.

“Comedy saved my life,” said Saranne Rothberg, who started therapeutic-humor nonprofit ComedyCures after using humor to help her cope with and recover from stage-four breast cancer. “My love of comedy and laughing kept me positive, so I could fight every battle I had to fight physically and emotionally.”

The positive-humor movement began in 1979 with the publication of Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient, journalist Norman Cousins’ account of laughing away a possibly fatal degenerative disease of the joints with a steady diet of Candid Camera and Marx Brothers films. Since then, a booming industry has sprung up around healthy humor, a movement that’s gotten an added boost from the deluge of “Happiness” books flooding the market.

At the AATH conference store, table after table was covered with books bearing titles like Laughter: The Drug of Choice, This Is Your Brain on Joy and What’s So Funny About … Diabetes? Nearby, other stalls offered light-up detachable ears, water-balloon launchers and bumper stickers that read, “Clowning for Jesus.”

The conference registration packets came equipped with bright-red clown noses. At the evening cocktail reception, a typical ice-breaker was, “Are you a Certified Laughter Leader?” In front of the hotel, a threesome sporting chicken hats and checkered jackets piled out of a shuttle bus and attempted to head into the conference, only to be sidetracked by the revolving front door, spinning around and around with befuddled looks on their faces.

But this isn’t all for fun and games. Therapeutic humor is an increasingly mainstream and commercial endeavor. Cancer Treatment Centers of America sponsored this year’s conference, and at the hotel bar, nurses gossiped excitedly about how insurance companies are starting to cover laughter clubs. Alongside conference sessions titled “How to Establish an Intergenerational Laughter Club” and “Holy Hysterics: Laughter and Joy in your Community of Faith,” there were also seminars with names like “How to Turn Laughter Into Revenue.”

Many of the attendees have already figured out how to do that. At the conference’s ritzy awards dinner, a signed portrait of comedian Red Skelton — which in truth resembled one of those bad clown paintings you might find in a thrift store — was auctioned off for more than $1,600.

But a major question remains: Is humor really the best medicine? Does the science really support all these laughter yogis, giggling nurses and Funny Bone, M.D.s? So far, the research is ambiguous on the matter. The best studies have only been able to conclude that laughter might help people better tolerate pain for short periods of time.

Scientific support might be coming, however. That was the takeaway from a keynote session helmed by Willibald Ruch, a professor at the University of Zurich who’s one of the titans of humor psychology. Ruch is responsible for naming several new humor-related disorders: gelotophobia, the fear of being laughed at; gelotophilia, the joy of being laughed at; and later, katagelasticism, the joy of laughing at others (“We got bored, and so we created a third term,” says Ruch).

Lately, Ruch and his researchers have turned their scientific gaze on humor therapy, and so far, the results have been encouraging. In one study, they tracked multiple groups of people, some who attended laughter clubs and learned humor-therapy skills. Over an extended period of time, those exposed to humor therapy reported markedly increased satisfaction with life compared to those who didn’t.

Steve Wilson, “Cheerman of the Bored” of the World Laughter Tour program and a wise, Yoda-like figure within AATH, welcomes this “quantum leap forward” in humor-therapy science. Now, as he put it at his conference seminar — during which he wore a red clown hat above reading glasses and blew bubbles from a plastic wand — it’s time to shore up the “dissension in the ranks” among practitioners.

Laughter yogis have to stop bickering with laughter therapists.

Laughter yogis have to stop bickering with laughter therapists; folks have to stop arguing over whether it’s humor or laughter or comedy or clowns that is the secret to medicinal merrymaking. After all, he says, all these approaches lead to the same place: Helping people learn how to generate humor and laughter when times are good, so when things go bad, they will have the tools at their disposal to lift themselves to a happier, healthier place.

………………………………Steve Wilson

Wilson knows this from personal experience. Not too long ago, he needed those tools more than ever.

About a year and a half ago, he was rushed to the hospital from one of his humor workshops with terrible back pain. Part of his intestine had exploded, nearly killing him, and in the medical chaos that followed, he was ravaged by pneumonia, kidney failure, a blood clot in his lung and surgical wounds that wouldn’t heal. Wilson was so miserable that he didn’t laugh at the rubber chicken someone had hung from his IV pole. When a hospital clown came by to cheer him up, Wilson sent her away.

“It was like being in a black box,” says Wilson. “How do I get out?”

Several weeks later, he found an exit. Lying on a stretcher after a particularly grueling CAT scan, a nurse leaned over him and asked, “Are you comfortable?”

At that moment, a joke came to Wilson, one he’d heard years earlier. “I make a living,” he cracked, giggling.

“Sir, this is serious!” snapped the nurse.

“No,” he replied, “This is vaudeville!”

And with that, says Wilson, he knew he going to be OK. As he put it to his rapt audience, “George Harrison said, ‘The deeper you go, the higher you fly.’ I am back, and I am flying high.”

A few months ago, Pete received an email from Nick Justicz (a comedy aficionado who has worked alongside comedians at The Comedy Store) commenting on my humor research. One part of his email stood out to me:

I was watching the great film “The Pianist” the other day with some friends (light movie night I know!) and there is a scene in which the SS throw a Jewish man in a wheelchair out a window. Interestingly, I noticed this horrific scene caused a few of my friends to laugh – only to instantly regret laughing later. I looked up the scene on YouTube, only to see that there were lots of people who laughed, only to have others condemn it. I didn’t laugh when I saw the scene, but somehow upon watching it I understood the instinct.

He asked Pete why this was the case, but instead of answering the questions, Pete sent him a couple of papers (this one in particular), and asked Nick if he wanted to write a guest blog based on what he read. Here’s what Nick came up with:

Humor and the Pianist

While watching Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” – his biographical film about a Jewish man and his struggle to survive the Holocaust – chances are we aren’t expecting to find humor, much less to laugh. The movie is filled with countless atrocities and horrific events. Take, for instance, the scene in which the German SS throw a disabled man out a window to his death:

As I watched this movie with some friends a few months ago, I noticed a couple things. Most people showed disgust during this sequence, but some people – a vocal minority – laughed.

While it’s easy to rush to judgement and call those people insensitive or immature, it would be irresponsible to do so without an analysis of the situation. After showing the scene to several friends and reading YouTube comments of the video, I found out that many people found this scene humorous. Laughing was not an exceptional circumstance, but rather a common reaction.

Chances are we have all laughed at something we were not “supposed to” laugh at. Maybe repressing laughter makes us more prone to it. All that being said, doesn’t laughing at the gruesome death of a disabled man still seem odd? What is it about the way this scene is constructed that causes some of us to feel disgusted and some of us to laugh?

To help me answer this question, I turned to noted humor expert Peter McGraw, who researches at the University of Colorado at Boulder and helped develop the Benign Violation Theory (BVT) of humor. Professor McGraw kindly forwarded me a couple research papers and asked that I try to answer the question myself in the spirit of thoughtful discussion. Not only is the professor saving time, but I get to learn more in the process. Touché, professor, touché!

So without further ado, here is my analysis of this scene of “The Pianist”, and how one might find it humorous according to BVT.

Benign Violation Theory is simple in its hypothesis, and it will help us explain how one could interpret this scene from “The Pianist” as humorous:

The benign-violation hypothesis suggests that three conditions are jointly necessary and sufficient for eliciting humor: A situation must be appraised as a violation, a situation must be appraised as benign, and these two appraisals must occur simultaneously. (McGraw, Warren 1142)

Simple but effective! Credit: petermcgraw.org

Applying the theory to the above scene, the question now becomes: how is this situation a violation? How is it benign? And how does it occur simultaneously?

The first part of this question – analyzing the violation – is much easier to answer. During the scene in question, our protagonist looks on as the German SS kill a man in cold blood right across the street. Firstly this is a physical violation. A man is being killed physically close to our hero, and for all he knows he could be next. Secondly, senseless killing of any kind is a moral violation that is widely held belief, including (presumably) the protagonist and those watching the film.

The second part of the question – analyzing how this scene is benign, is much more difficult to answer. Turning back to the work of McGraw and Warren:

A violation can seem benign if (a) a salient norm suggests that something is wrong but another salient norm suggests that it is acceptable, (b) one is only weakly committed to the violated norm, or (c) the violation is psychologically distant. (McGraw, Warren 1142)

Intuitively, it is safe to saw that those who laughed felt “psychologically distant” from the violation. While it is possible that for some reason those who laughed thought the violation was “acceptable” (a), I doubt that such a large number of people would think that murder is inherently ok. Furthermore, I doubt this group of people is only “weakly committed” to the taboo of murder (b), so it’s probable that those who found the scene humorous did not feel psychologically involved in the film.

“The Pianist”: not a comedy

What would cause some viewers to feel psychologically distant and others not to? A couple ideas come to mind. Most obviously, those watching the film are a safe distance from the tragedy, very likely at home on a comfortable sofa. Even the protagonist in the film is physically separated from the events that are going on. It’s the viewer’s choice to be involved with the film or not.

Furthermore, the director made several choices that could potentially make the situation seem benign. The victim in the scene made no physical or audible sign of panic. In fact, he seems very calm. The aggressors (the SS) did not use threatening weapons like guns or batons. The victim’s death did not include any physical altercation between people, or for that matter any sign of blood. Perhaps the situation seemed so extreme to viewers – putting Nazis against a man in a wheelchair is almost Tarantino-esque – that many did not feel it was real. All of these elements could make a viewer feel physiologically distant from the tragic situation.

“Pulp Fiction” contains murder scenes constructed to be funny

It bears repeating that not all people found this scene humorous; in fact, most did not. It is my hypothesis that those who did laugh felt psychologically distant from the tragic situation because they interpreted it as benign. This interpretation is most likely due to the scene not containing traditional signs of physical violation like panic, weapons, and spacial proximity.

Viewers who interpreted this aberration as benign felt distanced and were likely to laugh. Conversely, viewers who did not see this aberration as distancing also did not see the situation as benign, and therefore did not laugh.

A friend of mine told me that he thinks Polanski made mistakes in directing this scene. He said that if the director made more careful decisions in the editing room, viewers would not have felt as distanced from this scene and therefore would not have found it as humorous.

I don’t disagree with this argument, but I also believe that audience members have a responsibility as well. I believe that it is an audience’s responsibility not to distance themselves from a film as they watch it. Distancing oneself from a movie makes it less risky (detachment is trendy these days) because we are less prone to negative emotions like horror and disgust. However, it is also much less rewarding. Choosing to distance oneself from a film is tantamount to not listening to someone in a conversation. It’s one’s prerogative to do so, sure, but it undermines the whole mode of communication.

While there is no “wrong” way to watch a movie, viewers have an important choice in how they interpret them. I would humbly advise those who watch “The Pianist” – or any movie for that matter – to invest themselves fully into the situation. It might be harder to watch, and you might not laugh as much, but actually listening to what the director is trying to say will inevitably be a much more rewarding experience.

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The paper:

McGraw, A.P., Warren, C., Williams, L., & Leonard, B., (2012). Too close for comfort, or too far to care? Finding humor in distant tragedies and close mishaps. Psychological Science.25. 1-9. LINK

Humor is ubiquitous and often beneficial, but the conditions that elicit it have been debated for millennia. We examine two factors that jointly influence perceptions of humor: the degree to which a stimulus is a violation (tragedy vs. mishap) and one’s perceived distance from the stimulus (far vs. close). Five studies show that tragedies (which feature severe violations) are more humorous when temporally, socially, hypothetically, or spatially distant, but that mishaps (which feature mild violations) are more humorous when psychologically close. Although prevailing theories of humor have difficulty explaining the interaction between severity and distance revealed in these studies, our results are consistent with the proposal that humor occurs when a violation simultaneously seems benign. This benign-violation account suggests that distance facilitates humor in the case of tragedies by reducing threat, but that closeness facilitates humor in the case of mishaps by maintaining some sense of threat. We discuss implications of our results for theories of humor and psychological distance.

With the holidays upon us, we’re taking a break from deconstructing what makes things funny and instead pondering the tradition that is Thanksgiving. We’re not talking about gathering with friends and family to express gratitude for what we have been provided. We’re referring to the national customs of eating to the point of pain on Turkey Day, then turning shopping into a blood sport on Black Friday.

Neither makes much sense on the surface. While it’s one thing to overeat on special occasions, it’s quite another to gorge oneself, as many of us do on Thanksgiving. The average American consumes 3,000 calories and 229 grams of fat at the Thanksgiving table. To put that in perspective, a fit individual would have to run for four hours to burn off those extra calories.

Somehow, despite the daylong orgy of fatty food, many Americans nevertheless manage to wake up before dawn the following day prepared to battle over discounts on laptops and talking dolls. The insanity and violence of Black Friday sales have long been the stuff of news headlines. Yet, despite the attention, millions of people amazingly continue to participate in the shopping frenzy each year, to the point of injury or worse.

What exactly is going on here? Is all that tryptophan going to our heads, turning us into gluttonous, blood-thirsty zombies?

The explanation is likely more simple. One of the hallmarks of psychological science is that we are influenced by the actions of others — often more so than we’d like to admit. Sometimes we’re impelled to take positive actions, such as switching to reusable bags or cutting down on littering. Other times, social influence can be quite negative. When it comes to Thanksgiving and Black Friday, unfortunately, the influences skew more toward bad than good.

Thanksgiving Feasting

When those around us succumb to indulgences, we’re more likely to succumb as well. It’s why obesity was recently found to spread from one friend to another, like a disease. The phenomenon is so formidable that a person packing on pounds in one city can influence a friend’s waistline hundreds of miles away. Likewise, the person across from you at the Thanksgiving table can unduly influence your decision to put in for a third serving of stuffing.

But that’s not all. The chitchat around the table is also a culprit. While conversation and storytelling can result in a wonderful experience, they impair self-control.

Research has shown that others tend to distract us from paying attention to what we are eating. Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating, found that distractions lead people to ignore the most important eating cue-hunger. In our favorite study, for instance, people eating soup from bottomless bowls failed to realize they never finished, no matter how much they ate. As a result, they consumed 73 percent more than those who ate soup from a normal bowl.

Black Friday Door Busters

Social triggers may also play a role in the mob mentality that pervades Black Friday. That includes the concept of scarcity-the frenzy-inducing promise of “while supplies last.” It turns Black Friday shopping into a physical and mental achievement, one that requires us to outwait, outwit, and outrun our fellow shoppers in order to “win” (i.e., buy something).

As Texas A&M marketing professor Suresh Ramanathan notes, “I have always thought of it as a competitive sport-the scarcity primes a competitive motivation so that people will go to absurd lengths to get the best deal or snap up something before others can get to it.” Consider how the hot toy each holiday season becomes hotter and hotter as stores begin to run out.

Even worse, the Black Friday routine most retailers have adopted-locking entrances until the exact minute of opening time, inadequate staffing, no crowd management-means consumers are primed to act in the worst ways, recklessly charging into stores as soon as they are allowed.

Once one person begins running, everyone follows course. It’s the concept of social proof (“If somebody else is in a hurry, there must be some urgency, so I should hurry, too”). And once everyone is running toward the same destination, the situation turns bad quickly. Contrary to media interpretations, research has found that most crowd disasters aren’t “panics,” such as when everyone tries to flee a building. Instead, the majority of crowd calamities are associated with “crazes,” the phenomenon of everyone rushing toward the same thing they all want.

Beating the Crowd (Mentality)

Does this mean we are helpless to the whims of the crowd on Thanksgiving and Black Friday? Not necessarily, since we can always exert self-control. On Thanksgiving, think smaller plates of food, as advocated by Wansink’s small plate movement: You’ll clean your plate faster and then stop and think about how hungry you are before going for seconds or thirds. If you’re just digging into one gigantic mound of chow, you may never take a break to check in with your body’s hunger queues.

As for Black Friday, shop online. After all, more online retailers are now matching or beating the best Black Friday deals of the big-box stores. And even if some in-store prices are better than those on the web, ask yourself this: How much is your time worth? Are cold, early-morning hours spent waiting in line with potentially violent shopaholics really worth saving $50 on that flat-screen TV?

Sure, lots of other folks seem to think so. But just because other people believe something doesn’t make it true.

Why does absurdity lead to humor?

Basically, somethings are so wrong that they spontaneously don’t seem real. BTW, here is the hilarious flowchart:

….

Learn more about the benign violation theory.

Check out Pete’s paper on psychological distance, which features work on hypotheticality:

Humor is ubiquitous and often beneficial, but the conditions that elicit it have been debated for millennia. We examine two factors that jointly influence perceptions of humor: the degree to which a stimulus is a violation (tragedy vs. mishap) and one’s perceived distance from the stimulus (far vs. close). Five studies show that tragedies (which feature severe violations) are more humorous when temporally, socially, hypothetically, or spatially distant, but that mishaps (which feature mild violations) are more humorous when psychologically close. Although prevailing theories of humor have difficulty explaining
the interaction between severity and distance revealed in these studies, our results are consistent with the proposal that humor occurs when a violation simultaneously seems benign. This benign-violation account suggests that distance facilitates humor in the case of tragedies by reducing threat, but that closeness facilitates humor in the case of mishaps by maintaining some sense of threat.

McGraw, A.P., Warren, C., Williams, L., & Leonard, B., (2012). Too close for comfort, or too far to care? Finding humor in distant tragedies and close mishaps. Psychological Science. 25, 1-9.

The studies run in the Humor Research Lab often require subjects to create something funny, like a write a joke or come up with an amusing caption. But when other folks are asked to rate what they’ve come up with, we run smack into an unfortunate truth: Most things are just not that funny.

Take a recent marketing study Pete  ran with Caleb Warren. In it, research assistants asked undergraduates to create funny advertising headlines for a made-up company, “Thriftonline.” There even was a funny-looking image of a couple to facilitate the process.

Then another group of undergrads judged the headlines on a five-point humor scale from “not funny” to “very funny.” Only 10 percent were judged to be very funny. Among the top scorers? “Because looking this bad never had to be expensive.” The vast majority, however, were mediocre. The average rating fell below the scale’s halfway point, and the distribution is skewed toward the non-funny side of the scale. In other words results skewed towards stinkers such as, “Come get your nerd.”

These results aren’t unique. Caleb and Jonah Berger, a Wharton professor, recently ran a study in which research assistants rated YouTube comedy clips on a seven-point rating scale from “not funny” to “very funny.” The results were similar.

These findings might not be all that surprising to anyone who’s tried to use wit to score a phone number at a party. It is downright difficult to be hilarious, especially on command. And when I recently asked one of the longest-running writers for Groupon what was the hardest part of his job, he responded, “Making something that is actually funny.”

Unfortunately, people also don’t spend very much time finding things funny. In a 1999 study, Rod Martin and Nicholas Kupier asked adults to keep a laughter diary. The researchers found that the average person reported only 18 episodes of laughter per day.

Why aren’t things funnier?

To understand the “not funny” effect, it helps to understand what makes things funny begin with. Building on work by Tom Veatch, Pete and Caleb have proposed the benign violation theory, which suggests that humor arises from perceiving something to be wrong, unsettling, or threatening (i.e., a violation) while also realizing that it is in some way okay, acceptable, or safe (i.e., benign). Tickling (at least when it is done by someone you trust) is a benign violation – a physical attack that does no harm.

The idea of a benign violation suggests that there is a sweet spot to comedy, that humorists fuse together just the right amount of pleasure and pain. In that way, a humor attempt has only one shot at succeeding, but two shots at failing. To fail, it can be too benign, and hence boring, or it can be too much of a violation, and offend in some way. What makes the task even tougher is that timing matters – the benign and violation appraisals need to occur in close proximity to each other. In short, it’s far easier being not funny than funny.

Making things funnier

Does that mean everyone should throw in the comedic towel? Not at all, since the world would be a far less interesting and entertaining place if folks stopped telling jokes, stinkers included.
Instead, take a few strategies to heart as you try to tickle your next funny bone:

1. Try a lot. Since most things aren’t funny, the best solution is to simply try to be funny more often. A theme from my Humor Code travels is that the world’s funniest people generate many, many ideas during the humor creation process – whether they are writing headlines for the Onion, drawing cartoons for the New Yorker, or dreaming up ads for the Super Bowl. Take a close look at how stand-up comedians do their job, and you’ll find that they spend their days writing many jokes and their nights testing them. As a result, the process of creating a solid hour of stand-up can take up to a year (as an example, watch the movie Comedian, which details how a stand-up legend like Jerry Seinfeld even struggles to create new material.

For the non-professional, just make a concerted effort to inject humor into casual interactions – with the barista at the coffee shop or the customer service agent at the airport. Sure, most of these attempts won’t kill, but eventual a few of them will truly shine.

2. Start with the bad. Mark Twain wrote, “The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.” Because there is nothing wrong in heaven (i.e., no violations), there is nothing to laugh about. Jerry Seinfeld’s approach to comedy illustrates this principle. By humorously highlighting the things that are wrong with everyday life, he conjures humor out of everyday situations

For everyday folks, the “Seinfeld strategy” can be as simple as noticing that the things that seem awry are actually the best material for a joke, quip or witticism.

3. Be playful. Life can be stressful. Yet, a consistent theme in humor literature is that humor is often associated with safe, playful (i.e., benign) situations. Sarah Silverman’s approach to comedy exemplifies this. The popular female comedians takes extreme violations about age race, creed, or color and makes them benign by, say, weaving them into a cutesy song.

The “Silverman strategy” can be tricky to implement. The last thing you want to do is offend a friend or colleague by stepping too far over the line. So first, make sure everyone is in the right mood. At work or at home, try to create a culture that encourages a playful and fun (yet also respectful) atmosphere.

Move the needle

These strategies might not turn you into the next Chris Rock or even the life of the party. But considering how humor has been shown to improve people’s happiness and helps build social relationships, making life funnier, even just a little bit, is surely worthwhile. Sure, most things aren’t funny. But if you can a few more things humorous, you’ll reap the benefits.

Apes, babies, and people everywhere (with the possible exception of Switzerland) enjoy humor. But why is humor so prevalent? And why is it so pleasurable? Why do we seek spouses, friends, books, movies, television programs, websites, and LOL cat photographs that make us laugh?

Most likely, humor is ubiquitous and enjoyable because it somehow enhances our evolutionary fitness. Humor is a psychological state characterized by (1) the positive emotion of amusement and (2) the tendency to laugh. Both positive emotion and laughter offer adaptive benefits. I address each in turn.

Unlike negative emotions, which are typically triggered by immediate threats, positive emotions tend to occur in benign situations. The absence of an immediate danger allows people to focus on broader problems and stimulates creative thinking and rehearsal (typically experienced as daydreaming, planning, or play). Thus, positive emotions allow people to concentrate on important, but less pressing concerns, like how to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes at once.

Unlike other positive emotions, humor is associated with a specific behavioral response: laughter. Laughter is one of the few forms of communication that developed before speech (more on this in a forthcoming post by Pete). Babies laugh. So do chimpanzees and possibly even rats. Pre-language communication is severely limited. Each of the dozen or so unique messages conveyed through grunts and other monosyllabic vocalizations, like laughter, had to be as important and informative as possible. Given this, it makes sense that not all benign situations (and their accompanying positive emotions) trigger laughter. There is rarely value in telling others everything is okay. This information is only useful when there is some ambiguity of threat.

Indeed, the situations in which our evolutionary ancestors laugh, like chasing, play fighting, and tickling, all involve feigned aggression. The development of culture and language likely expanded the threats potentially triggering laughter. Instead of merely laughing at tickle attacks we could enjoy more sophisticated forms of humor, like flatulence, dead baby jokes, and the scene below.

Humor is prevalent and enjoyable because it evolved to help people mentally and behaviorally adjust when an apparent threat (i.e., a violation) ends up being benign. Humor provides a way to cope with the hypothetical threats, remote concerns, minor set backs, social faux pas, cultural misunderstandings and other benign violations people regularly experience. Of course, Pete and I are not the first to suggest this. What balding white guy sparking up a nostalgia joint could forget J.W. Buffett’s renowned hypothesis, “If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane”?

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