Some cultures avoid these types of blatant transgressions by restricting the topics that can be fodder for jokes. When they were in Japan, for example, they noticed that the comedy in clubs was as raunchy as it gets, but certain settings were entirely off-limits to joking:.
But in bars and karaoke theaters, anything goes. Likewise, p articipants found a picture of a man with a frozen beard mishap funnier than a man with his finger stuck through his own eye socket tragedy. Eventually, however, distance decreases humor by making the event seem completely benign. Last year, the comedian Stephen Fry publicly discussed his bipolar disorder and suicide attempt. In the s, the psychologist Lewis Terman found that children rated as having a good sense of humor by their parents and teachers died younger as adults.
A longitudinal study of Finnish police officers found that the funniest among them were more likely to be obese and to smoke. And an analysis of New York Times obituaries found that performers died nearly eight years younger than members of the military did. Is there something unusually taxing about the process of dreaming up violations and deploying them to crack people up?
Last month, a group of British scientists found that comedians are more likely than regular people to exhibit psychotic traits, or the characteristics associated with people who have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Writing in the British Journal of Psychiatry , the authors describe how they administered a questionnaire to comedians, actors, and people with non-performance jobs.
Comedians and actors alike scored higher than the non-performers across almost all of the traits. Comedians, more so than the regular folk or even actors, were more likely to have a mild distaste for humanity. In fact, few of the subjects actually experienced psychotic symptoms; they just shared some traits with people who suffer from psychotic ailments. Though our investigation is still in the early phase, our data support a connection between the cognitive processes needed to mentally time-travel and to appreciate humor.
Further research on time perspectives may help explain individual differences in detecting and resolving incongruities that result in funny feelings. Experimental psychologists are rewriting the book on humor as we learn its value in our daily lives and its relationship to other important mental processes and character strengths. As the joke goes, how many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?
Just one, but it has to want to change. Studying humor allows us to investigate theoretical processes involved in memory, reasoning, time perspective, wisdom, intuition, and subjective well-being. This post originally appeared at The Conversation. Follow ConversationUS on Twitter. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy.
Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. Follow Quartz. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects. By Janet M. There's an old saying that "brevity is the soul of wit. However, while they get to the point quickly, exceptionally funny people put the funny part at the end, rather than in the middle. My favorite example of this is from Jack Handey: "The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.
The funniest stories are always about people, and people are funny in the telling only if they have something to say. Exceptionally funny people use different voices to represent the various people, or even the states of mind of the same person, in their story.
For example, if your story has you saying something aloud but thinking something else, you make your "aloud" voice very clear and your "thinking" voice an audible side whisper. These, Forabosco says, include features such as aggression, sexuality, sadism and cynicism. Laughing, Tickling, and the Evolution of Speech and Self. Robert R. Peter McGraw et al. Christian Jarrett in The Psychologist, Vol.
Giovanni Sabato trained as a biologist and is now a freelance science writer based in Rome. Beyond psychology, biology and medicine, he is interested in the links between science and human rights. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American.
Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. Researchers do not fully understand which aspects of a joke or situation make it seem funny. Various theories have posited that people find amusement in the misfortunes of others, in expressions of otherwise forbidden emotions, in juxtaposition of incompatible concepts and in realizing that certain expectations have been violated.
One scheme weaves several hypotheses together: it holds that humor results when a person simultaneously recognizes both that a norm has been breached and that the breach is benign. Laughter may have evolved as a way to enhance connectedness in societies. The greatest of them all: Charlie Chaplin was among the fathers of slapstick comedy, which relies on physical gags. Chaplin refined his comedy by tinging it with melancholy and social commitment.
Credit: Max Munn Autrey Getty Images Superiority and Relief For more than 2, years pundits have assumed that all forms of humor share a common ingredient. Benign Violation These and other explanations all capture something, and yet they are insufficient. Wilson is a major proponent of group selection, an evolutionary theory based on the idea that in social species like ours, natural selection favors characteristics that foster the survival of the group, not just of individuals Wilson and Gervais applied the concept of group selection to two different types of human laughter.
Unanswered Questions Other questions remain. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up.
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