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Notes on What’s So Damn Funny Do we need a code for humor? By Joseph Epstein

he motives for humor are as little more than a form of hidden aggression to those manifold as those for murder. that hold humor is a cure for all sorts of illnesses. Giv- Among them are the raucous phys- en the range of motives for humor, its varying kinds ical misfortunes of others (slap- and occasions and forms, can it be usefully studied and stick), grotesque incongruities codified in the way of other phenomena? (between reality and appearance), ethnic abuse (Polish, Irish, anti- #1 Semitic, and other), subtlety elegantly deployed (through T irony and understatement), release of inhibi- hether it can or not, it already is, in univer- tion (blue ), witnessing the mighty fallen (the re- W sities, in scholarly journals, at comedy clubs, vered made to look ridiculous). Laughter itself comes at improv studios, and elsewhere. The University of in multiple forms: smiles, sniggers, grins, giggles, belly Southern California provides students a “concentra- laughs, falling-off-the-couch laughs, and what Mel tion” in humor. The University of Colorado has a Humor Brooks once called heart-attack laughter. The realm Research Laboratory. The International Society for of jokes encompasses the entire world in its subject Humor Studies publishes Humor: The International matter and appears in such varying forms as puns, Journal of Humor. one-liners, epigrams, witty ripostes, practical jokes, comic commercials, and elaborate narratives requir- #1 ing foreign, often Jewish-greenhorn, accents. Various, often contradictory theories about hu- enri Bergson is perhaps the greatest name to mor have been devised—from the notion that humor is Hwrite a full treatise on the subject, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, a work that Joseph Epstein, a longtime contributor to Com- brings to mind the comedian ’s remark mentary, is the author of A Literary Education and after seeing The Temptation of Christ: “Not Other Essays (Axios Press). many laughs.” Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the

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Epstein.indd 57 8/12/14 4:08 PM Unconscious (1905) contains a few decent jokes, but it, of the New Yorker and a founding editor of the Onion too, fails to light up the subject, except perhaps for that and many other experts. They investigated one or an- minuscule portion of the population that continues to other aspect of humor in Sweden, Denmark, Africa, believe in the doctrines of the man Vladimir Nabokov Japan, and the Palestinian territories; and talked with never failed to call “the Viennese Quack.” stand-up comics and humor theorists in New York, , , and elsewhere. Many studies are #1 cited (some are called “compelling”) and the word sci- ence often comes into play when social science, a much hree people, it has been said, are required less stringent activity, is meant. All of which leads into Tfor the successful consummation of a : one a poor joke of my own creation: How many social sci- person to tell it, another to laugh at it, and a third not entists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: Dif- to get it. If you have to explain it, as everyone knows, ficult to say. They’ll first need a grant to do a study of it isn’t funny. the problem. Without spontaneity—even well-rehearsed spon- taneity—humor is sadly crippled. I once told a joke #1 through a translator to the Soviet dissident hero Andrei Sinyavsky. The translator had come up to me at a party cgraw’s studies have led him to endorse to say Mr. Sinyavsky had heard I knew lots of jokes. Msomething called the benign-violation theory, He, Sinyavsky, loved jokes, and would be pleased if I which holds that “humor only occurs when something would tell him one. I proceeded to do so. The translator seems wrong, unsettling, or threatening (i.e., a viola- translated me line for line. At the punchline, Sinyavsky tion), but simultaneously seems okay, acceptable, or smiled faintly, and told the translator, in Russian, “Very safe (i.e., benign.)” The form this takes in most jokes nice.” But it wasn’t, really. All rhythm was lost, literally, and comic situations is to begin with the threat of a in translation, and by the time I came to the joke’s end I violation of some sort and save the uneasiness this myself was slightly bored by it. causes by its turning benign at its end. The theory does work with a great many jokes. In #1 1962 I heard , a man not overly concerned with seeming benign, tell a joke whose premise was nalyzing humor,” E.B. White wrote, “is like that Sophie Tucker, still alive at 75 and then thought ‘ A dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and one of the great ladies of show business, was a nym- the frog dies.” This sentence appears toward the end phomaniac requiring the services of an unending sup- of Peter McGraw and Joel Warner’s The Humor Code: ply of Puerto Rican busboys working in the nightclubs A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny.* Inter- in which she performed. Bruce then staged a dialogue esting they would include it, since their book is about between Mr. Rosenberg, the (naturally) Jewish owner little else than the dissection of humor to learn how it of such a nightclub, attempting to persuade Manuel, works, when it is effective, and what are its uses. The one of his busboys, to attend to Miss Tucker in her authors propose to answer such questions, among room. In a heavy Hispanic accent, Manuel protests vig- others, as: “Do comics need to come from screwed-up orously, citing Miss Tucker’s age, her looks, the outra- childhoods? What’s the secret to winning the New geous impropriety of the whole business. Rosenberg Yorker cartoon caption contest? Why does being funny offers him 50 dollars. Manuel claims it’s impossible, he make you more attractive? Who’s got a bigger funny cannot do it. Rosenberg assures him it will all be over bone—men or women, Democrats or Republicans?” in 10 minutes. This back and forth conversation con- They do answer them, but for the most part in the tinues until, finally,M anuel says, “I don’t care what you largely unsatisfactory manner of social science—with, say, Mr. Rosenberg, I cannot, I cannot, I will not [brief that is, poll results, surveys, and focus-group findings. pause here] schtup her.” McGraw, the director of the Humor Research Lab The joke turns out not to be about Sophie Tuck- at the University of Colorado, supplied the theoretical er’s putative nymphomania but about Manuel’s use of expertise for the book. The notion of a Humor Research the word schtup, which picks up on the point that the Lab is itself amusing. One imagines a large, well-lit minority employees of Jewish bosses often acquire odd room with mice and monkeys falling over with laughter bits of Yiddish. while watching videos of Rodney Dangerfield. Another such joke has a man and woman necking Much legwork went into the making of The Hu- mor Code. The authors interviewed editor * Simon & Schuster, 256 pp.

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Epstein.indd 58 8/12/14 4:08 PM passionately on their banquette in a French restaurant, when suddenly the woman slides under the table. (You #1 should be a bit nervous at this point.) A moment or two later the waiter approaches the table and informs the ithout wishing to put the various humor man that his wife is missing, to which he replies: “No, W labs, institutes, journals, societies, and inde- she’s not. She just walked in the door.” Relief follows; it’s pendent humor gurus out of business, thus increasing not a fellatio joke with a high yuck quotient. unemployment in America, why, one wonders, would In both jokes, benignity wins out over violation. anyone need to have an all-purpose explanation of But not always, however. Not even all that often, actu- how humor works anyhow? The authors of The Humor ally. The benign-violation theory has its limits. Code try to understand a laughing epidemic that took place in a high school in Tanzania, but are unable to #1 discover what, exactly, brought it about. They go to Denmark to learn about the extreme Muslim reaction or example: A woman comes to her physician to to the book of cartoons mocking Mohammed, but F announce that her husband, a Christian Scientist, conclude very little. They fly down to the Amazon in has been behaving strangely of late, but, owing to his clown costumes, joining Patch Adams and his troop of religion, refuses to see a doctor. The physician suggests clowns, in the hope of cheering up the lives of wretch- she give him a list of her husband’s symptoms. After she edly poor South American children, and the main re- does so, he says that there are two distinct possibilities sult appears to have been that it allowed co-author Joel here: Her husband has either AIDS or Alzheimer’s. When Warner to lose many of his inhibitions while playing a the woman asks what is she to do, the physician offers clown. They visit the Palestinian territories and write a simple solution. “Drive your husband 30 miles out of about humor among the Palestinians, but they come town and drop him off. If he returns home, don’t sleep up with scarcely any interesting examples. In this last with him.” (A more forceful word than “sleep,” unfit for venture one is reminded of Albert Brooks, in his movie a family magazine, was used when I first heard it.)N o Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, attempting redemption in the benign here; quite the reverse. his twitchy, neurotic humor before an audience of dour Muslim men, and dying on stage. #1 #1 ometimes a joke will offer no hint of violation S whatsoever, but will instead be a story with an hich brings up the question of how well amusing ending. The conductor of a great symphony W humor translates from one country to another, has a heart attack an hour before performance. The from one culture to another, from one social class to assistant director is on sabbatical. The artistic direc- another, from one generation to another. Imagine tor asks if there is anyone in the orchestra who has Jackie Mason doing stand-up before Boko Haram, any experience conducting. A modest man from the Sarah Silverman before a Tea Party meeting, viola section steps up to say that he had some minor at a Sunday-morning session of Jesse Jackson’s PUSH experience conducting a student orchestra in Vienna. organization. He’ll have to do. That night he conducts and at the end his performance is greeted with a 20-minute standing #1 ovation and raves in the next day’s press. He conducts again the next night and the night after to similar ac- ob mankoff, the cartoon editor of the New claim, and takes over the job. Only at the close of the BYorker, tells McGraw and Warner that to be season does the regular conductor, now recovered merely funny is insufficient for a cartoon to qualify from his heart attack, resume the podium. The violist for publication in the magazine. “A great New Yorker returns to his old seat in the viola section. “Good to see cartoon,” according to Mankoff must also “have a you,” the violist seated next to him says. “Where’ve you point” and provide “an insight”—must have an “ ‘aha!’ been?” Nothing violative here in this joke about over- moment, alongside the ‘ha-ha.’ ” How many such car- rating the importance of symphonic conductors. toons the magazine publishes that meet this criterion No wonder that, when asked about the benign- is difficult to say. Most weeks the majority fail. Am violation theory, the comedian Louis C.K. replied: “I I guilty of insufficient subtlety, or are Mankoff and don’t think it’s that simple. There are thousands of the magazine’s editor, David Remnick (who also has jokes. I just don’t believe there’s one explanation.” a hand in choosing each week’s cartoons), and I on

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Epstein.indd 59 8/12/14 4:08 PM different wavelengths, they on FM, I on cruder AM? borhood 50 years later, the shoe-repair shop is still in Might it be that New Yorker cartoons, like New York business, the same Jewish owner is still running it. The itself, always seems better when one was younger? For veteran inquires about his shoes; the repairman remem- me the golden age of cartoons in the magazine were bers and describes them and then says “Dey’ll be ready those of Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, James Thurber, Vendsday.” Apart from the accent problem, though there Charles Addams, extending up through Edward Ko- are still shoe repairmen—in my neighborhood they are ren, whereas I have long ago ceased bothering to read almost all Russian émigrés—nowadays people more and the small print balloons in the celebrated Roz Chast’s more wear sneakers and fewer and fewer bother to have cartoons, failing to find the pay-off worth the effort. leather shoes repaired; they just toss ’em. Autres temps, autres mœurs, autres plaisanteries. #1 #1 odd hanson, a longtime writer for the Onion, T the satirical weekly newspaper, raises the ques- uman nature may not change, but human tion with McGraw and Werner of historical timing and Hrhythms do. I have tried Laurel and Hardy mov- humor, chiefly connected with the question of when it ies, a great favorite of mine when young and a favorite is permissible to make jokes about national tragedies. still, on a number of kids and they don’t find them The example they discuss is 9/11. Thirteen years later very funny. The action is too slow; that they are filmed the time still hasn’t come to make this subject fit for in black and white doesn’t help. W.C. Fields movies comedy. The Onion never took on the subject directly, produced even sadder results. In the time that it takes but instead made jokes about the terrorists, among Fields to do one of his double pregnant pauses, my them the headline “Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves young interlocutors can send off two, maybe three text in Hell.” I am not a regular reader of the Onion, but messages. two of its headlines stick in my mind: “[Bill] Clinton Vaguely Disappointed by Lack of Assassination At- #1 tempts” and, soon after the 2008 presidential election, “Black Man Gets Worst Job in America.” he Humor Code does not take up the matter T of comedians using language once considered #1 risqué. A small band of comedians always did “work blue”: Buddy Hackett in nightclubs was one of them, umor changes from generation to generation, and Belle Barth another (“From me,” she used to say, Hbut at some times more quickly than at others. I “you won’t hear the Gettysburg Address”). On cable suspect we are currently in one of those times. I have a and YouTube, of course, anything goes. Turn repertoire of jokes that require what used to be called on Comedy Central and there is a good chance you will a greenhorn, or a Jewish immigrant, accent, but a gen- find a woman comedian doing a riff on tampons or the eration has now come of age that may never had heard etiquette of fellatio. The political comedian Bill Maher that accent since Eastern European Jewish emigration will get a laugh calling someone with whose politics he to America essentially ended nearly 70 years ago. But disagrees an asshole. Not funny, though his audience, for many jokes the accent is necessary. A man returns sympathetic with his politics, laughs. Has the removal from his annual checkup, and his wife asks if the doctor of censorship increased the Gross National Humor, or found anything wrong with him. “He says I have somet- only enlarged the Gross part? ing called herpes?” the man says. “Nu,” says his wife, “so what is herpes?” The man says he was embarrassed to #1 ask. tells him she’ll look it up in the dictionary and leaves the room. “Nothing to worry,” she says on her great potential source of humor, or so one return. “The dictionary say herpes is a disease of the A would think, would be the targets open to come- .” Without the accent, the joke disappears. dians by political correctness. Not many, though, seem The great Jewish-waiter jokes clearly will obvi- to have taken advantage of it, which suggests that, de- ously have less force for generations who have never spite all the bravura of using once outlawed words or seen a Jewish waiter. I’m fond of a joke, which I’ve told taking up sexual subjects, not all that many contempo- before in Commentary, about a man who leaves a pair rary comedians are courageous, at least in this line. Fif- of shoes with a cobbler and forgets them when he goes teen or so years ago, I heard a comedian named Bobby off to World War II. When he returns to his old neigh- Slayton, also known as Vicious, complain about the

60 Notes on What’s So Damn Funny : September 2014

Epstein.indd 60 8/12/14 4:08 PM dropping of language requirements in high schools. In an a person enjoy humor that rubs too harshly his day, he noted, one had to take a language. “I took C against the grain of his or her politics? The short Spanish,” he said. “I figure the PuertoR icans can learn answer is probably not. Perhaps the most successful it, how tough can it be?” That joke today just might get political comedian of the past half-century was Mort him a lawsuit. Sahl. I met Sahl one night coming out of the long-de- funct Chicago nightclub called Mr. Kelley’s and could #1 not resist asking him if the then racist governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, took over William Fulbright’s arah Silverman is a comedian who bucks politi- senate seat, as he threatened to do, would this mean S cal correctness, though not quite directly. Through that students would study abroad on a Faubus? “Not the persona of a faux-naive Jewish princess, she gets bad,” he said, and then told me that a recently planned away with jokes that would be disallowed if told meeting between Adlai Stevenson and Dwight David straightforwardly. In one she begins by remarking that Eisenhower had to be cancelled because the translator her biological clock is ticking, but there seems never didn’t show up. to have been a good time for her to have had children. Mort Sahl was a fairly standard liberal, but as She then runs through the inappropriateness of her a comedian he was prepared to abandon his politics having done so at various times in her life: in her early for a laugh. One night on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show he twenties she was still immature, an airhead; in her avowed that he had had a most disturbing letter from late twenties her career was finally getting under-way, the NAACP, informing him that, as a man of the left, he and there was no time; in her early and middle thirties ought to be ashamed not to have a (as the term that same career absorbed all her energy. “I guess,” she then was) in his act. Sahl allowed that the NAACP had concludes, “the best time to have a baby is when you’re a point. “So I’ve hired this brilliant young black come- a black teenager.” dian,” he said. Pausing, he looked down at his watch, More daringly, she jokes about what she calls and added: “He ought to have been here by now.” It “the alleged” Holocaust. One such joke has her “lesbian took the audience fully 15 seconds to get the joke, and niece” report to her that in Hebrew school she learned break out in ripple-effect laughter. that they killed 60 million during the Holocaust.” She corrects the niece by saying that it was “only” 6 #1 million. “What’s the difference?” the niece asks. “The difference” Silverman replies, “is 60 million is unfor- he field for humor has also expanded in my giveable, young lady.” These jokes, please notice, re- T lifetime. Mel Brooks made bad taste not only ac- verse the violation-benign formula. They start out be- ceptable but amusing. The flatulent cowboys sitting nign and end up in full-flame violation. around a fire after a meal of beans in his 1974 movie Blazing Saddles is only one notable example. The play #1 within a play, “Springtime for Hitler,” in his 1968 movie and 2002 Broadway musical The Producers is another. arah Silverman is a liberal—a potty-mouthed On 60 Minutes, Brooks, interviewed by Mike Wallace, S liberal, for she gets most of her laughs using what broke into Wallace’s first question by asking him what one can only call naughty (to the highest power) words. he paid for his wristwatch. He broke into the second But, then, the most commercially successful comedians question by feeling the lapels of Wallace’s sport-jacket of the current day are also liberal: , Stephen and asking what a garment like that cost. He was play- Colbert, John Oliver, Bill Maher. The only authentically ing the pushy, the utterly materialistic, Jew, and, so conservative comic I know of is . Liberal- egregious was he, he got away with it. ism, based on hope, should offer more fodder for humor , in his stand-up days and also in than conservatism, which prides itself on reality, but in his movies, made self-debasement and hypochondria our time it does not—though the authors of The Humor into subjects for humor. The television show Code quote a study done at Duke University showing did something similar with selfishness—the defin- that conservatives responded more generously to a ing quality of nearly every character on the show was wider range of jokes than did liberals. Another of the his disregard for the feelings or interests of others— mysteries of humor, this, that cannot be decoded. thus playing an ostensibly deplorable vice for laughs. , along with Jerry Seinfeld the principal #1 creator of Seinfeld, has done the same thing with in- sensitivity on his HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm.

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Epstein.indd 61 8/12/14 4:08 PM #1 #1 hristie Davies, a man described in The Humor umor ought never to be too general, or at least C Code as “the Indiana Jones of hilarity,” notes that Hthe best jokes never are. Warner and McGraw cite “nearly every country has stupidity jokes.” This means what a humor expert concluded, by way of survey, to be that every country finds someone, usually within its the world’s funniest joke. This is it: Two hunters are out borders, to select for comic abuse. The Polish joke in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t has receded in popularity in America in recent years, seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other replaced by the less ethnically offensive blonde jokes. guy whips out his phone and calls emergency services. In India the Sikhs are the victims of such humor, as He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The op- the Irish have long been for the English. (What do you erator says, “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make call an Irish homosexual? A man who prefers women sure he’s dead.” There is a silence then a gunshot. Back over whiskey.) Uzbeks, Davies claims, “get made fun of on the phone the guy says, “Okay, now what?” in Tajikistan, while in France it’s the French-speaking Not that funny, and, as Warner and McGraw Swiss. . . . Brazilians joke about the Portuguese, Finns suggest, it can only have qualified as the world’s fun- knock the Karelians, Nigerians rib the Hausas.” In the niest joke because it offends no large group (with the realm of international humor, the French used to ask exception, perhaps, of animal-rights activists opposed what was the difference between America and yogurt, to hunting) and is general in its context and frame of the answer to which is yogurt has culture. reference; it could, presumably, have taken place in al- most any country in the world. But more particular hu- #1 mor is better; and private humor, between two or three persons, can sometimes be best of all. f course it has long been understood that mi- Onority members can tell jokes, often brutal ones, #1 against their own people in the same way that they can use otherwise banned words to describe them. Richard allows humor is not taken up in The Humor Pryor and the early Eddie Murphy did humor about GCode, that humor which comes in to play when blacks; Pryor had a bit about being the first black presi- situations are so dour that there is nothing left but to dent that is all too prescient about our current president. laugh. The humor that came out of the Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele, a very funny team, is a notable case in point; the heritage of Soviet Com- do wildly amusing bits about ghetto-named athletes, munism, of 75 years of murder, useless suffering, and a black teacher mispronouncing all the conventional general gloom, produced little of value except perhaps names in a white suburban school, and gay black gangs- a dozen good jokes. A characteristic one is about the tas. I hope they will one day do Jesse Jackson confronting man who goes into a Soviet car dealership to learn Al Sharpton, but that is perhaps too much to ask. that there is only one model of car for sale, that this model has no extra features, comes in only one color, #1 and cannot be delivered for 10 years. The man says that he’ll take it but would prefer to have it delivered in the ews are famous for jokes about Jews, not all afternoon 10 years from today. When the car salesman Jof them likely to pass the anti-Semitism test of the asks why in the afternoon, the man says that he has the Anti-Defamation League. (What happens when a Jew plumber coming in the morning. If there were good with an erection runs into a wall? Answer: He breaks German jokes within the briefer Nazi era, none has his nose. What is the ultimate Jewish dilemma? Answer: come down to us. But, then, in the joke that lists the Ham—on sale.) Only Jews could have devised world’s five shortest books, the first volume is titled jokes, two of which run: A Gentile goes into a men’s shop “Great German Stand-up Comedians.” and inquires about the price of a suede jacket. When told it cost $1,800, he replies: “I’ll take it.” The same Gentile #1 calls his mother on Thanksgiving to say that he’ll be three hours late for dinner. “I understand,” she says. These hat of the healing effects of laughter, a theory jokes are of course not about Gentiles at all, but about W given wide publicity by Norman Cousins, then the supposed Jewish propensity for haggling and about the editor of the Saturday Review, in a series of books neurotically demanding Jewish mothers. published in the 1970s and early ’80s about the relief

62 Notes on What’s So Damn Funny : September 2014

Epstein.indd 62 8/12/14 4:08 PM he gained from laughing while suffering illness. Cous- Parkinson’s is no laughing matter, nor is the death of ins used Marx Brothers movies to relieve pain. “I made a loved one, or a lifetime of suffering anywhere. Even the joyous discovery that 10 minutes of genuine belly laughter has its limits. laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep,” he reported. “When #1 the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion-picture projector again avelock Ellis, the pioneering psychologist and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain- Hand a less than notably funny man, thought that free interval.” McGraw and Warner do not hold with laughter had a religious basis. “Even the momentary ex- Cousins’s ideas on the curative effects of humor. The pansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight an ex- most they concede is that “while science doesn’t yet tent, a religious exercise,” Ellis wrote. There is something support the idea that humor improves people’s physi- appealing about the notion that laughter is an expansion cal health, there is evidence that it improves emotional of the soul, allowing fleeting moments in which all one’s health.” Humor, they hold, “helps people cope with troubles are dismissed and one feels an elevation of their problems, it distracts from dispiriting thoughts, spirit. The notion suggests that laughter is a gift, possibly it creates an escape from what ails you, whether that a divine gift. I say “possibly divine” because, when view- be the loss of a loved one, a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, ing the human comedy, in its full range of preposterous- a lifetime of suffering in a place like Belen, or just a ness, its endless ironies and unexpected pratfalls, one is crummy day.” I’m not sure this isn’t overstatement; forced to conclude that God Himself must love a joke.q

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