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NEW YORK
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How do you make funny?
Pete and I are staring at a cartoon from the New Yorker magazine, willing our brains to come up with the perfect caption for a drawing of a wolfman sitting in a barbershop.
The caption has to fit—but it also has to be funny. And how do you do that? In Los Angeles, we poked around in the strange and off-kilter minds of the gatekeepers of comedy and came away with a rough idea of what makes them tick. But how do they create those jokes and routines in the first place? Not to mention, how do people come up with all the other forms of comedy—narrative poems and plays and animated cartoons and novels and sketches and sitcoms and short stories and movies and satire and caricatures and puns?
That’s what Pete and I aim to find out—starting by creating a funny caption for a wolfman getting a haircut. How about, “Be sure to cover up my bald spot”? Or, “Somewhere in here, I lost my keys”? Or maybe something a little more risqué—a request for a Brazilian wax?
What we’re doing isn’t all that unusual. Thousands undertake this task every week. Since 2005, when the New Yorker began devoting the last page of its weekly issue to a cartoon caption contest, the magazine has received more than 1.7 million total caption submissions from people all over the world. And at this point, 1.7 million minus 300 or so have lost. Comic actor Zach Galifianakis might be funny enough to earn $15 million for Hangover 3, but his submission for a 2007 cartoon of a dog throwing a stick (“He’s his own best friend”) didn’t get a finalist nod. Michael Bloomberg turned himself into one of the richest people in the world and a three-term mayor of New York, but he swears he can’t come up with an idea good enough to submit.1
Sure, it’s possible to win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, but keep in mind that your chances are 5,666 to one. It’s about the same chance as getting a hole in one—if you are very good at golf.
Disregarding the odds, Pete and I are taking a shot at it, but this particular contest is special: we’re doing it on the twentieth floor of a gleaming skyscraper in New York City’s Times Square—more specifically, in the offices of The New Yorker. We’re sitting in a swanky conference room with floor-to-ceiling undulating glass walls. All around us are well-dressed doctors, engineers, and other professionals sipping mimosas from champagne flutes and trying to outwit each other captioning drawings of man-sized babies and guys wearing horse costumes. We’re taking part in a live caption contest, part of the annual New Yorker Festival—Lollapalooza for the New York literati.
Attendees have been broken into a dozen or so teams of eight people, and our table is stymied. Floundering, we’ve been experimenting with different strategies. For the first round, we tried brainstorming a single list of captions. But that soon devolved into wild tangents and rambling, and our final list was pitifully short. So for round two, each team member submitted a caption and we consolidated the best options. Output was much improved, but it felt like a homework assignment. And it didn’t get us on the leaderboard. So far, not one of our options has cracked the three finalists.
Maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves, since creating things that are funny is really hard. For starters, how people create anything unique and brilliant is downright mysterious. For centuries, the talents of artists and inventors were thought to be either a gift from the gods, a satanic trick, or some sort of comic book–type genetic mutation. Creating stuff that is supposed to be hilarious is especially strange. Humorists will slave endlessly to find just the right combination of words or images that will get people to laugh, a body spasm that seems to occur subconsciously. It’s as if the point of the Sistine Chapel ceiling were to get the Pope to sneeze.
Add to that, as Pete’s discovered in his research, most things just aren’t funny. In a marketing study with his collaborator Caleb Warren, he had research assistants ask undergraduates to create funny advertising headlines for the made-up company “ThriftOnline.” Of all the headlines generated, only 10 percent were deemed by a second group to be gut-busters. (Best of the best? “Because looking this bad never had to be expensive.”) The vast majority instead skewed toward stinkers such as “Come get your nerd.”
So, then, what’s the secret to making people laugh—especially when your audience numbers in the hundreds of thousands? How does someone come up with material that’s novel enough, inoffensive enough, and hilarious enough to tickle funny bones the world over? Is it better to use a team-based approach, bouncing humorous ideas back and forth? Or is one single funny person all you need? And what about the giant industry that’s sprung up around comedy, from Hollywood films to sitcoms to meme-filled websites? Has the rise of big-budget comedy made things funnier—or dampened the joke?
We hope to find the answers here in New York, a mass production and distribution center of American comedy, a place teeming with the film studios, television sets, publishing operations, ad firms, and theater stages that help generate, shape, and dispense one of the nation’s biggest cultural exports. It’s why we’re at the New Yorker offices, racking our brains about werewolves getting haircuts. Sure, we don’t really fit in with the swanky crowd, but we happen to be pals with New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff.
In a famous episode of Seinfeld, the character Elaine comes up with a New Yorker cartoon and in the process tangles with the magazine’s cartoon editor. Although Bruce Eric Kaplan, a long-time New Yorker cartoonist, wrote the episode, the editor is nothing like Mankoff. The Seinfeld Bob Mankoff is an uppity New Yorker stereotype in a sweater vest and sports coat. The real Bob Mankoff is cool and engaging, if a bit intense, sporting a tailored jacket and wavy locks of shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair. (Regarding his portrayal in this book, Mankoff quipped, “The main thing I will be concerned with is how my hair is represented.”)
The Seinfeld version of Bob Mankoff resists all attempts to explain the New Yorker cartoons, insisting, “Cartoons are like gossamer. And one doesn’t dissect gossamer.” But the real version of Bob Mankoff has never met a thread of gossamer he hasn’t sliced, diced, and stuck under a microscope. A onetime PhD student in experimental psychology—he taught pigeons how to sort addresses by ZIP code—he’s a member of the International Society of Humor Studies. We’d first met Mankoff when he was making the rounds of humor conferences, presenting on the science of why LOLCat images would never be set among the publication’s rarefied Adobe Caslon typeface.
No wonder we get along. And when he offered us a behind-the-scenes look at the New Yorker’s cartoon operation, we didn’t hesitate. After all, the magazine looms large in the world of American humor creation. Before the New Yorker was filled with names like Truman Capote, E. B. White, and Malcolm Gladwell, it started as the 1920s version of The Onion. As Ohio University communications professor Judith Yaros Lee wrote in Defining New Yorker Humor, the humor publication was one of the first to target a specific socioeconomic demographic (college-educated, upwardly mobile urban professionals), and to match this population’s sense of humor, the magazine’s jokes were groundbreakingly intelligent, topical, and a bit dangerous. In the world of published comedy, the New Yorker was a turning point. According to literature professor and author Sanford Pinsker, when the first issue rolled off the press on February 21, 1925, “The ‘character’ of American humor changed.”2
Part of that transformation was due to the magazine’s cartoons. Harold Ross, the New Yorker’s founder, once joked that because of all the visual gags, his magazine had been described to him as “the best magazine in the world for a person who cannot read.”3 But they weren’t just silly drawings. The entire cartoon medium changed thanks to the New Yorker’s one-two punch of a concise, clever image combined with a witty, short caption. As Lee put it to me over the phone, “The central discovery of the New Yorker cartoon was not the one-line caption, but rather the idea that the caption and the drawing worked together to convey a comic idea.” That combination stuck around, revolutionizing the funny-drawing industry, and has come to define what most people now recognize as cartoons. No wonder former New Yorker editor Tina Brown once noted that New Yorker cartoons are “a sort of national treasure.”4
And Mankoff offered us the keys to the vault.
To start, Mankoff suggests we try our hand at this live caption contest. Pete jumps right in, filling his yellow legal pad with captions and bouncing ideas around our table. Meanwhile, I’m staring wide-eyed at the blank page in front of me, feeling like a Pop Warner benchwarmer who’s been dropped in the middle of the Super Bowl. As a writer, the New Yorker is my Valhalla. Being here leaves me feeling awed and unworthy. And that I’m being asked to come up with concise writerly brilliance after two flutes of mimosa? Forget about it.
Thanks to Pete, however, we’ve come armed with a few tricks. Not long ago, Mankoff handed over to HuRL all the submissions for a recent caption contest, one featuring a man and a woman struggling through a desertlike parking lot and coming to section “F,” with no car in sight. With the help of cognitive scientist Phil Fernbach, Pete compared the several thousand losing entries to the 43 captions short-listed by the New Yorker as potential finalists. They found that the short-listed entries tended to have four things in common: They were novel, in that they didn’t rely on words common in other entries such as “park” and “desert.” They were concise—on average, 8.7 words long, a full word shorter than the rest. They didn’t go overboard with punctuation; losing entries were nearly twice as likely to use question marks, and nearly seven times more likely to use exclamation points. And they featured imaginative imagery, playing with abstract concepts that weren’t represented in the drawing.
“I am shocked—shocked—by the results,” responded Mankoff sarcastically. “When I went to cartoon college, I was taught that long, heavily punctuated, commonplace captions were the key to success.” (The final results of the contest that HuRL analyzed suggests a final secret: have lots of experience writing. The winning caption—“I’m not going to say the word I’m thinking of”—was submitted by none other than the late celebrated film critic Roger Ebert, his first win in 108 attempts.)
Considering the four criteria Pete discovered, maybe our caption ideas for the wolfman in the barbershop aren’t so bad after all. Take this caption: “Be sure to cover up my bald spot.” It’s a concise eight words, doesn’t bother with exclamation points or question marks, is pretty abstract, and seems novel. Who knows, maybe we have a winner.
Our colleagues at the table agree, and submit it to the judges. And sure enough, when the results are in, there’s our caption, standing strong at second place!
I’m thrilled, until I realize that at the New Yorker, second place will never cut it.
So where do the mass-market jokes begin that get churned out from New York’s sprawling comedic sausage factory? Where do the raw doodles originate that become polished New Yorker cartoons? According to Bob Mankoff, many of them come from a second-story walk-up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. When we stop by one morning, a 28-year-old named Zachary Kanin meets us at the door. Kanin’s small and compact, built like a high-school wrestler. There’s a somberness to him, a quiet seriousness, which we weren’t expecting. Mankoff, after all, calls Kanin a comic genius.
In Kanin’s apartment, which he shares with his wife, an enormous blackboard scrawled with a lengthy to-do list takes up much of the living-room wall:
Banjo (done)
Start band (done)
Order dresser
Go on Wheel of Fortune
Get sexy (done)
The last item sounds ominous, if not a bit racy: “July 24th: Bananageddon!” Kanin explains it refers to the time when he and his wife bought too many bananas. They figured if they didn’t eat them all by July 24, they’d have a bananageddon on their hands.
Kanin has already accomplished a lot of things that aren’t on the board. Like attending Harvard and serving as president of its illustrious humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon (at five three, Kanin is proud to point out he’s the shortest-ever president). And scoring the job when Mankoff called the Lampoon’s offices his senior year in college, looking for a new assistant. And once at the magazine, becoming one of its youngest-ever staff cartoonists.
According to Mankoff, cartooning is “idea creativity on overdrive.” Scientists, inventors, and artists don’t have to come up with that many good ideas to get by. A good year for a research professor like Pete entails publishing one peer-reviewed journal article. As a journalist, I am in good shape if I come up with a dozen solid magazine articles a year. Cartoonists? We’re talking about a different order of magnitude. If someone like Kanin hopes to cut it at the New Yorker, he or she has to come up with dozens upon dozens of funny ideas each week.
Kanin shows us where he tries to do so: a room at the back of his apartment not much larger than a storage closet. On a small white desk, a MacBook is surrounded by piles of drawings in various stages of germination. There’s a doodle of an overweight man grasping his rumbling stomach. A Chewbacca look-alike is wearing a hobo outfit. An amoeba-like tree sprouts branches with mouths. In the margins of the pages, Kanin has scribbled down random words and phrases, hints of other odd ideas: “tap dance,” “hard work,” “trunk of car.”
Each week, Kanin will spend hours here, doodling away until he has 100 ideas in various stages of completion, the best eight to ten of which he’ll submit to Mankoff. Sometimes he lets his hand draw freely to see what it comes up with. Other times he plays with a vague concept over and over, maybe endless variations of birds, in the hope they turn into something.
If his work is good enough, the resulting cartoon won’t require a caption at all, since the entire joke is contained in the drawing. This week, for example, he plans on submitting a captionless cartoon that features two people walking toward the same street corner from opposite directions. One is walking ten bowling pins on leashes. The other is walking a bowling ball.
“As a cartoonist, these are the most pleasing,” Kanin tells us. “It’s a puzzle you solve with just the drawing.
How, exactly, did Kanin come up with the image of people walking bowling balls and pins? How do we take all the un-funny elements of the world and distill from them humor? Any sizable bookstore has several shelves devoted to answering the question. There are how-to guides and step-by-step workbooks and so-called comedy bibles, designed mostly for wannabe comedy writers for TV and film. A few compile interviews with as many funny creative people as possible. The most interesting of these is one of the oldest: William Fry and Melanie Allen’s 1975 work Life Studies of Comedy Writers, and mostly it’s because in it, Norman Lear, the television titan behind All in the Family, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, and Good Times, compares comedy writing to an orgasm: “Everything is gushing, everything is just gushing.” As Archie Bunker might have said, those were the days.
One of the longest-lasting theories of how we make things funny doesn’t come from a comedian or humor researcher or comedy aficionado at all. It comes from a man named Arthur Koestler. And it’s not all that surprising that Koestler tried to deconstruct humor creation. During his 78 years, there was little he didn’t do. As an Austrian-born journalist and international man-about-town, he hobnobbed with Langston Hughes and W. H. Auden and rode a Zeppelin to the North Pole, all before being imprisoned by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War. Later, while fleeing the Gestapo in France, he swallowed some suicide pills he’d received from famed philosopher Walter Benjamin. The pills killed Benjamin, but not Koestler, allowing him to continue on with his eventful life—taking LSD with Timothy Leary, getting drunk with Dylan Thomas, buddying up with George Orwell, giving political advice to Margaret Thatcher, teaching a young Salman Rushdie, and sleeping with Simone de Beauvoir.
In between all that activity, Koestler managed to tackle the philosophy of making jokes in his 1964 book The Act of Creation. Koestler described humor as “the clash of two mutually incompatible codes”—the fusion of two frames of reference that for the most part have nothing to do with each other.5 For Koestler, the point where the two frames of reference bisect each other equals the punch line. Puns are the simplest case, since they play with two different meanings of the same word. Greg Dean’s joke-creation process that we learned about in Los Angeles fits, too, since it involves combining two opposing scripts with a single connecting concept. But the theory also works with visual humor. Take the captionless cartoon Kanin is submitting this week: it plays with two incompatible frames of reference—the tendency of people to take their dogs for walks, and the sport of bowling. There’s nothing inherently comical about either, but intersect the two concepts—have pet walkers and bowling paraphernalia run into each other all at once—and you’ve found something funny.
Pete’s fond of Koestler’s work as one way to approach humor creation, but he’s not ready to concede it’s the be-all, end-all of humor-creation theories. Not surprisingly, he prefers his own benign violation approach: come up with something that seems wrong to you, then find a way to make it okay (or vice versa). He’s also quick to point out that the process of combining two otherwise disconnected concepts sometimes just results in gobbledygook. Other times it results in smartphones (“cell phone” plus “internet browser”).6
Koestler believed the “clash of two mutually incompatible codes” wasn’t just about making jokes. He saw it as the recipe behind many other forms of human creation, from scientific innovation to artistic genesis. As he wrote, when two planes of reasoning intersect, “the result is either a collision resulting in laughter, or their fusion in a new intellectual synthesis, or their confrontation in an aesthetic experience.”7
However you build jokes, creativity helps. What’s fascinating is that the reverse is true, too: humor helps with creativity. In a 1987 experiment, psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues had subjects try to solve a classic puzzle: attach a candle to a blank wall using only the candle, a box of tacks, and some matches. Folks who first watched a funny blooper reel were more successful at solving the task—tack the box to the wall and then use a match to melt the candle onto the box—than those who exercised or watched a math video.8 And in a more recent MIT study on idea generation, improvisational comedians asked to brainstorm new products generated, on average 20 percent more ideas than professional product designers, and the improv comic’s ideas were rated 25 percent more creative than those of the pros.9
But beyond watching America’s Funniest Home Videos or doing improv all day, how else can budding humorists put their minds in the best possible position to combine all these disparate concepts? Koestler believed cleverness played a factor, as well as being worldly or well-read enough to have many frames of reference.
This recipe for humor production seems so simple (acquire a lot of information, then combine it in unusual ways), it’s a wonder that no one has programmed a computer to do it for them. In fact, folks have been hard at work designing robo-jokesters for decades. There’s JAPE, the Joke Analysis and Production Engine; STANDUP, the System To Augment Non-speakers’ Dialogue Using Puns; LIBJOB, the lightbulb-joke generator; and DEviaNT, the Double Entendre via Noun Transfer program. And for computer programmers looking for just the right witty acronym for the next big comedy computer, there’s the HAHAcronym Generator.10
Unfortunately, all these attempts have proven is that, yes, computers can tell jokes, but only dumb ones. Consider the following computer-generated zingers:
What kind of animal rides a catamaran?
A cat.
What is the difference between leaves and a car?
One you brush and rake, the other you rush and brake.11
If robots ever conquer the world, we’re in for a dystopian future of horrible puns. That’s because jokes, like puns, involve simple, fixed data sets like word lists and definitions, where computers excel. But most comedy trades in concepts that aren’t simple or fixed at all. The best comedy mines a wide world of attitudes, assumptions, morals, and taboos, and getting any computer to get the joke—much less to come up with its own and know when and to whom to tell it—would require uploading into it all of humanity.12
Maybe that’s why Koestler figured creating jokes wasn’t as simple as being intelligent and creatively combining different subjects. Successful humor creators also have to be comfortable with “thinking aside,” he wrote.13 It’s not about following rules. It’s about breaking them—shifting perspectives, exploring the absurd, and probing the outer limits of what’s acceptable.
Kanin is well versed in thinking aside. “My best ideas seem to be combinations of items that come out of nowhere,” he says as we take a walk through Park Slope, meandering past the triumphal arch and martial statuary of Grand Army Plaza. And yes, he admits, he does tend to be a bit adventurous and inquisitive. If he were dropped into an alien metropolis, he says, “I would want to go in every room in every building in the city.” Of course, he admits with a smirk, then he might be going about this cartooning thing all wrong: “Here I am, sitting in a single room, drawing pictures and not getting around.”
We ponder this as Kanin stops by a streetside fruit vendor, buying three bananas. We each eat one, to help prevent Bananageddon.
The mass-market humor churned out by Kanin and all the other humorists, big-time and small, who populate New York not only has to make people laugh; it also has to sell. It has to sell New Yorker issues and Broadway tickets; it has to turn books into bestsellers and websites into viral sensations; it has to fill movie theaters and primetime television blocks. And nowhere is the line between what’s funny and what sells finer than on Madison Avenue, where the country’s ad firms attempt to churn out one humorous marketing message after another to encourage everybody to buy, buy, buy.
But does it work? When it comes to creating humor for advertising, does funny sell?
A few weeks before our trip to New York, Pete received an unexpected call from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the country’s biggest nonprofit focusing on teenage pregnancy. The Washington, DC–based organization had launched a new birth-control campaign that pushed the comedic envelope to get the attention of 18- to 29-year-old men. There were YouTube videos of talking condoms and Saturday Night Live Digital Short–inspired hip-hop songs and cartoons of Coca-Cola douches. But the folks in charge weren’t sure the public service announcements were working. Did adding all those jokes make for more compelling marketing messages?
The advertising industry seems to think so. In 2008, U.S. advertisers spent somewhere between $20 and $60 billion on humorous marketing.14 By that time, more than three-quarters of all Super Bowl ads were designed to be funny.15
There might be a method to this marketing madness. Researchers have nailed down a few ways in which funny ads succeed. Humorous marketing does tend to get people’s attention, and if the source of humor is well connected to the message, folks are more likely to remember the ads and recall the products being advertised.16 As the ad world is quick to point out to their clients, humorous ads are also more enjoyable and more likely to be discussed. But as for all the other things funny marketing is supposed to do—like getting people to actually buy the product—conclusive proof just isn’t there.
The best humorous marketing is all about nuance and positioning, believes Pete. As he’s found with his colleague Caleb Warren, it’s not the comedy that matters; it’s how the comedy is carried out. According to the benign violation theory, humor is caused by something potentially wrong, unsettling, or threatening. That means even if an ad is funny, if marketers aren’t careful, they could end up hurting the brand.17
It’s one of the reasons, although far from the only one, that a 1999 commercial for the shoe chain Just for Feet is considered among the worst of all time. In the spot, a Humvee full of white hunters chases down a Kenyan distance runner, tranquilizes him, and slaps a pair of Nikes on his feet. The fallout was so extensive that Just for Feet sued the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi for malpractice to the tune of $10 million.18
Aside from high-profile flops, though, it’s difficult to figure out whether most funny ads succeed or bomb. That’s why the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy had come to Pete. The organization wanted to know for sure if its new funny ads were working—so it was hoping HuRL would run experiments on condom jokes in PSAs.
Of course, we replied. Anything in the name of science.
Pete decided to focus on one of their latest spots, a web video featuring a spokesman losing it while reading cue cards about birth control statistics among young adults. (“One in five guys believes having sex standing up reduces the chance of pregnancy. . . . What, are you bleeping kidding me?! That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard in my bleeping life!”) Pete thought the video might be turning off its intended audience, since it made the people who don’t use birth control the butt of the joke.
We worked with the production team behind the PSA, producing three new versions of the video. Two employed a gentle, affiliative form of teasing: “One in five guys believes having sex standing up prevents pregnancy. . . . Seriously? You know better! Just take two seconds and go, ‘Yeah, you know what, that’s not how sperms work.’ ” The final video was a control version, a straight reading of the facts in a somber fashion.
With the help of cognitive scientist Phil Fernbach and graduate student Julie Schiro, Pete recruited a group of 18- to 29-year-old males and assigned each to watch one of the four videos. The results were surprising: subjects who watched the dry, boring control version of the PSA were far more likely to seek out more information about sexual health than those who saw any of the funny versions. As Pete figures, while the funny versions might have been attention-grabbing and entertaining, they also signaled that the situation wasn’t serious. Teen pregnancy was something to laugh about, not ponder. Pete has taken to referring to the results as the “Jon Stewart Effect,” after the allegation that while political-satire shows like The Daily Show might get people to pay attention to unpleasant news, the comedy involved could make them less likely to right the wrongs that they’re learning about.19
Does that mean we’d all be better served if commercials and ads were just a solemn laundry list of facts? Probably not. Maybe a better way to create effective funny marketing is to think of it like a good wedding toast, suggests Pete. Start with attention-grabbing jokes, then put all kidding aside and make your point.
Tuesdays have always been cartoonist open-call day at the New Yorker. As far back as the 1930s, artists referred to it as the “Tuesday Inquisition.” It made the magazine’s founder, Harold Ross, so nervous he was constantly rearranging the desks to make the place as presentable as possible.20 For the cartoonists who show up on Tuesdays, it’s the first step in a multistage selection process, the first gauging of whether the cartoon is funny enough to appear in the magazine and earn its creator upward of $1,000.
On a Tuesday, we go with Zach Kanin to cartoonist open call.
I always pictured the New Yorker offices as a big, ornate smoking lounge, with everyone sipping cognac in leather arm chairs and pontificating on the decline of the Euro. In reality, it looks like every other newsroom I’ve ever worked in: a maze of nondescript, slightly messy cubicles, with oddball marketing swag tucked away in random nooks and review copies of books stacked here and there in precarious towers. It’s the inevitable detritus of an unceasing production schedule, of a place where there’s never downtime for deep cleaning.
A dozen or so cartoonists mill about in front of Bob Mankoff’s office, catching up and waiting to be called in. Most are regulars, though it’s not unusual to find a new face or two in the crowd. The weekly event is open to anybody. You don’t have to hoof it all the way here to have your work considered, but getting a chance to meet with the cartoon editor of the New Yorker is an opportunity most aspiring cartoonists aren’t likely to pass up.
Mankoff, looking sharp in a seersucker jacket and collared shirt, calls the cartoonists one by one into his small office, which has a view of Midtown and piles of drawings sprawled across every surface. First up is Sidney Harris, who’s been publishing cartoons in the New Yorker since 1962. Mankoff greets him like an old friend, reminiscing about the weekly pilgrimages Harris and his colleagues, cartoons in hand, used to undertake around New York decades ago, from the New Yorker offices to Look magazine, from Saturday Evening Post to National Lampoon. Mankoff throws in a good-natured barb, razzing the old-timer about how he’s not good at drawing deer. “Leonardo couldn’t draw a cat!” harrumphs Harris before handing over his latest cartoon submissions.
Then there’s Sam Ferri, a younger guy who’s had success in other publications such as Time Out and The New York Press, but is still trying to break into the New Yorker. With him, Mankoff takes more time. He scrutinizes Ferri’s submissions—dense vignettes of New York daily life that are strikingly different from the cartoons that usually make the magazine. Here and there he offers feedback: “Make your stuff less fussy.” “You don’t need these extra lines on this guy’s arms.” But he tells Ferri not to give up, to keep going in this unique direction, even though it may take a while to pay off. “You are doing something different, and you are doing something harder,” Mankoff says with a sigh. “There are no medals for that.”
Mankoff knows what it’s like to be in Ferri’s shoes. On his wall is a framed copy of one of Mankoff’s own cartoons published in the magazine, one of the most popular among those purchasing online reprints. In it, a CEO says into his telephone, “No, Thursday’s out. How about never—is never good for you?” It took Mankoff years to produce stuff like that. When he was still a struggling cartoonist, he submitted more than a thousand cartoons here before he ever got one accepted.
Last one in is Kanin. “Zach, of course, is my protégé,” says Mankoff as he flips through his submissions. “I taught him everything I know. It took me half an hour.” He pauses on Kanin’s cartoon featuring the bowling ball and pins meeting at the street corner. He likes it—a lot. “But here is the problem,” he says, pointing to the leash that’s tied around the bowling ball. “How is it going to roll? The fact checkers might catch that.” He’s not joking. Like everything else in the magazine, New Yorker cartoons must endure the rigors of the publication’s infamous fact-checkers. One time, a cartoon featuring a talking bluebird nearly got nixed—not because birds can’t talk, but because the bluebird involved wasn’t the correct size for the genus Sialia.
Mankoff likes to joke, “Basically what I do is I reject cartoons.” Truthfully, he’s quite good at doing it. When he first became cartoon editor, the famous playwright David Mamet sent him a letter noting, “I’ve taken the liberty of sending you this batch of cartoons.” Mankoff responded, “Thank you very much for your submission. I’ve taken the liberty of sending you a play.” But sitting here in his office, it’s clear he’s doing far more than just rejecting. He’s working with each cartoonist, editing them, helping them understand what separates regular cartoons from New Yorker cartoons.
The criteria for Mankoff aren’t as simple as what’s funny and what’s not. As he’s the first to admit, the funniest cartoons often don’t make it. As in advertising, the comedy here is all about context. “The cartoons in the rejection pile make no point aside from being funny,” Mankoff tells us after the open call over lunch at a fashionable French restaurant, where he orders a veggie burger and herbal tea. The ones that make it in are funny, too, but also have a point. For Mankoff, it’s all about insight—a great New Yorker cartoon has an “aha!” moment, alongside the “ha ha.” That “aha!” it turns out, is crucial; a large body of psychological research suggests that making creative connections, whether it’s understanding a witty punch line or solving a tricky math problem, is an innately pleasurable experience.21
It’s why Mankoff is fond of Kanin’s bowling-ball image: it’s a smile-and-nod joke. It takes two common cartoon tropes—bowling and street-corner mishaps—and combines them in a cunning way. It’s the sort of gag that fits into the witty yet respectable legacy handed down by some of the New Yorker’s comedy giants—the doughy simplicity of James Thurber, the shadowy macabre of Charles Addams, the eccentric doodles of Saul Steinberg. “One of the objectives of the New Yorker is to advance cartooning as an art,” Mankoff says. He hopes to do that by working hand in hand with cartoonists, essentially creating comedy by committee.
That’s the de facto way of doing things in the big business of humor creation—comedy by committee, jokes via brainstorm. Sitcoms are produced by writers’ rooms, funny movies by one or more screenwriters plus a director, editors, producers, and all sorts of hangers-on. Probably only in stand-up is joke creation still mostly a solitary exercise, and even there, many comics work with other comedians and writers to fine-tune their routines.
The communal comedy strategy makes sense. If you’re aiming to come up with something that’s going to make millions of people laugh, a good way to go is the shotgun approach: stick ten funny people in a room and hope for the best. Do you want to risk your multimillion-dollar film, TV or magazine budget on a single schmuck with a good sense of humor?
Still, Mankoff knows that all his communal work here, culling and editing and crafting burgeoning talent like Kanin’s, isn’t going to produce even a single cartoon that everyone everywhere is going to find hilarious. “It turns out it’s funny enough,” he says, and he’s not saying that to be pessimistic. New Yorker cartoons are different from stand-up comedy, he tells us, where each joke has to work with just about everyone in the comedy-club audience. There are just too many New Yorker readers, too large a comedy audience, to have any cartoon appeal to everyone. “These are like heat-seeking missiles,” Mankoff says of the cartoons. “For each one of these, there will be one you don’t like, but like a heat-seeking missile, it will find its home.” Sure, maybe you don’t love the New Yorker cartoon of one amoeba saying to another, “You’re wasting your time. I’m asexual.” But if Mankoff’s done his job right, enough other people will, snipping it out and fastening it to their refrigerator or tacking it to their cubicle wall or even purchasing a copy from the New Yorker’s online “Cartoon Bank” database, which Mankoff helps run.
And Mankoff, for one, believes Kanin’s bowling-ball cartoon is funny enough that it will find a home among the magazine’s readers. So it makes the cut, landing in the pile of submissions that will move up the production chain. Let’s just hope the fact-checkers don’t get too picky about the bowling-ball leash.
Mass-produced comedy also comes with its fair share of risks. While attending an academic conference in Chicago, Pete visited the headquarters of Groupon, the gigantic daily-deal website known for injecting comedy into its online deal descriptions. He visited a cavernous editorial office staffed with hundreds of 20- and 30-year-olds, all of whom seemed to be wearing hoodies, tight sweaters, and ironic glasses. “Groupon is run by hipsters!” he told me when he returned.
Since every day Groupon puts out the equivalent of a 400-page novel in marketing copy, the challenge, according to Groupon editor in chief Aaron With, is getting all those hipsters to write like a single, tight-sweater-wearing Kurt Vonnegut. It’s why With developed an editorial manual that lays down specific rules about how to inject hilarity into Groupon’s materials. The guide reads like a Groupon coupon making fun of editorial manuals: produce 20 percent humorous content to 80 percent informative content. Include a funny moment every two to four sentences. Stay away from the natural hipster tendency to write about unicycles, mimes, mullets, Snuggies, ligers, hipsters, zombies, pirates, and ninjas. And unicorns—definitely don’t write about unicorns.
Later, Pete spoke with one of the longest-running writers for Groupon. When he asked him what the hardest part of the job was, the writer responded, “Making something that is actually funny.”
Still, compared to most mass-market attempts at humor, Groupon is freewheeling. There are just too many people involved, argue critics of Hollywood comedies and sitcoms, too many writers and directors and producers and network executives and studio chiefs and key advertisers. The goal of these gargantuan operations? Maximize the number of people chuckling and minimize those offended. In the television development world, there’s a term for this practice: “Least Objectionable Programming.” The results don’t usually equal hilarity, but then, that’s not the point. It’s to move movie tickets and score high Nielsen ratings.
Jokes can suffer within the factory system of funny. But what about the comedians themselves? What does the production process do to the folks who come up with the jokes to begin with? We figure the best person to ask is Todd Hanson, the guy behind one of the most celebrated examples of modern American comedy. For the last 21 years, Hanson has been a writer for the satirical newspaper The Onion. Many people consider being among the anointed few to come up with fake Onion news articles such as “Drugs Win Drug War” and “Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid” to be a dream job. If that’s the case, Hanson, who’s been an Onion writer longer than anybody, should have the perfect gig—right?
A beleaguered-looking Hanson ushers us into his Brooklyn apartment. “There’s massive trauma going on,” he tells us, rubbing his eyes. He looks like he just got out of bed. Either that, or he’s been up for days. The catastrophe, he tells us, is that the company that now owns The Onion is consolidating its operation. That means the writing staff will be relocating from New York to the corporate headquarters in Chicago. There is much more at stake than just changing ZIP codes, says Hanson, slumping into a ratty couch surrounded by empty whiskey bottles and overflowing ashtrays. He rolls up the left sleeve of his T-shirt, revealing a tattoo that reads “Satire.” “I didn’t want to get this tattoo till I felt like I earned it,” he says. When The Onion relocated in 2001 from its original home in Madison, Wisconsin, to New York, he says, “I felt like I earned it.” But now, with the impending move . . . his head slumps, his voice trails off.
Hanson pulls it together to walk us through The Onion’s production schedule. On Mondays, everyone on the writing staff gets together and offers up 25 potential funny headlines. Of the hundreds submitted, the vast majority are rejected by the group, never to be suggested again. The best fifteen, however, evolve into full stories for the paper. But the person who came up with a winning headline usually isn’t the one to write the story. Another person will edit it, and then nobody in particular will get a byline.
“Everything at The Onion is in a collaborative voice,” explains Hanson. It’s a dignified approach, one that does away with the cutthroat nature of most comedy writing teams. It’s part of the reason that Hanson and his colleagues are responsible for sticking the landing on one of the most difficult comedic feats in recent memory: figuring out how to be funny right after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Hanson watched the Twin Towers disappear from the Manhattan skyline from his Brooklyn window that morning, seemingly taking with them all potential for humor. Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show—all the late-night talk shows halted production. Time magazine declared, “The Age of Irony Comes to an End.” The Onion, as the flagship of everything ironic, seemed to be included in that death knell. The staff had just arrived in New York, and hadn’t yet put out a single issue in their new home. Now, before they had a chance to do so, says Hanson, “We wondered, ‘Is this the end?’ ”
Timing in comedy has always been tricky. When is it too soon to joke about something, and when is it too late? The trauma of the 9/11 attacks brought the conundrum to a different level. Mark Twain is famously credited with saying, “Humor is tragedy plus time.” But would any amount of time be enough to make the tragedy of 9/11 funny?
As Pete points out, however, timing is far from the only variable that can be tweaked to help land a joke in its comedic sweet spot. The secret, he says, is understanding that in comedy, emotional attachment is key. To make a joke more or less funny, you can make the violation involved more or less benign by shifting the psychological distance between the violation and the person perceiving it. Waiting for days, months, or years before tackling a taboo subject is an obvious way to make an event feel distant and thus safer. But there are other, less drastic ways to do so, too.
To prove it, Pete has been running experiments in HuRL. In one study, participants read about a young woman who texted “Haiti” to a mobile charity program more than 200 times without realizing that the nearly $2,000 donation would be added to her cell-phone bill. People found this story more amusing when the woman was described as a stranger rather than a close friend. In other words, an extreme violation like accidentally spending $2,000 was funnier when researchers increased the psychological distance between the person experiencing the tragedy and the person who’s supposed to laugh. But the reverse happened, too. In the same study, other participants read a story about a woman texting “Haiti” five times and accidentally charging $50 to her account. These participants were more likely amused when the woman was described as a friend rather than a stranger. This means less threatening situations such as a $50 mistake can be made funnier by shrinking the distance between the subject of the joke and the person who’s supposed to get it.22
So maybe folks have it all wrong when they ask whether a joke is “too soon.” Maybe a better way to put it is, “When is the subject matter too close for comfort, and when is it too distant to matter?”
Hanson and his colleagues looked at 9/11 this way. “To me, it’s not about timing; it’s about validity,” Hanson tells us. “If what you are saying is honest and legitimate and has a valid point, it’s going to be valid the day after, and it’s going to be valid 500 years later.” That’s why less than two weeks after the towers came down, they tackled the tragedy head-on, creating a whole issue devoted to the terrorist attacks.
Around that same time, comedian Gilbert Gottfried caught flack for making a crack about taking a flight that made a stop at the Empire State Building. In their 9/11 issue, the staff at The Onion didn’t make the same mistake. They didn’t joke about the planes hitting the towers or the civilians who died that day. The subjects were too raw, too close for comfort. Instead, they turned the horrifying terrorists into fools (“Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell” read one article) and cracked wise about the strange aura of confusion and despair that had settled over the country. Hanson wept when he wrote an article titled “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule.”
The day after the issue came out, The Onion’s fax machine went ballistic with grateful comments, and fan mail started to flow in by the thousands. To this day, it remains the most commented-on issue in The Onion’s history.
That was a career highlight for Hanson. Since then, things have gone downhill. The Onion is no longer the plucky upstart it once was. It now boasts a national readership in the hundreds of thousands, a major web presence and a daily web broadcast called The Onion News Network. In 2003, Hanson co-wrote an Onion film. But for years, the movie was stuck in development limbo, then released straight to video. Hanson has since disowned his part in it. Now market forces and consumer segmentation play a part in The Onion’s wit, and it’s no longer so easy for Hanson to be so honest without stepping on corporate toes. “Now they measure comedy in terms of quantity, not quality,” he says.
For Hanson, the move to Chicago might be too much. He admits that he’s not sure how much longer he can be a part of The Onion. But if he leaves, what else could he do? While some Onion writers have gone on to jobs at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Hanson might not be built to handle a move like that. He’s 42 years old and has never done anything in his professional life other than dream up make-believe news stories. In many ways he’s stuck with The Onion, just as he’s stuck with his “Satire” tattoo, which is starting to seem more like a battle wound than a badge of honor.
We’ve been talking for hours when Hanson’s phone rings. “I’m okay,” he says into the receiver when he picks it up. It’s his therapist. Every night he’s supposed to call her at a specific time. When he doesn’t, she calls him—just to make sure he hasn’t done anything drastic.
When Hanson hangs up, he’s on the verge of tears. “The world is a sad place,” he says to us. He’s being honest and legitimate, but nothing about it is funny.
Our time in New York nearly over, we decide to let loose, to get a little debaucherous. Of course, to be productive, we aim to do it the scientific way.
The idea arose from our obsession with the TV show Mad Men. Is the show correct in its portrayal of well-dressed 1960s ad guys whiling away the noon hour with liquid lunches of Old Fashioneds, then popping back into the office and whipping off a whimsical ad campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes? Does this sort of depravity really lead to successful humorous advertising? More specifically, can booze fuel comedy creation?
As anyone who’s ever been to a comedy club can attest, alcohol and laughs go hand in hand. And scientists know booze can boost humor appreciation, since it lowers inhibition, decreases anxiety, and increases positive mood. In a 1997 study, social drinkers watched twenty minutes of the goofball comedy The Naked Gun. Those who were two drinks in found O.J. Simpson’s bumbling Officer Nordberg significantly funnier than those who watched stone-cold sober.23
But little research has been done on the other side: whether Lenny Bruce–style decadence leads to Lenny Bruce–level jokes. We decide to look into the matter—by arranging an evening of drinks with a couple of creative directors at advertising powerhouse Grey New York, the firm responsible for making E-Trade synonymous with talking babies and producing a DirecTV ad featuring a baby in a dog collar that former U.S. president Bill Clinton called the most hilarious commercial he’d ever seen. As enticement, we tell the folks at Grey we’ll foot the bill for our night on the town.
The ad guys are eager to participate, and before we know it, they’ve invited along their entire creative team, all on our dime. They also have a destination in mind: “Let’s go to the Hurricane Club,” they tell us. The name evokes a cozy corner bar, hopefully one that won’t put too much strain on our wallet.
When the evening arrives and we step into the Hurricane Club, we realize we’re in trouble. Waiters in white dinner jackets glide under crystal chandeliers, delivering exotic drinks served in carved-out coconuts, watermelons, and red peppers. Pete glances at the drink menu and laughs nervously. “This is going to cost us.”
Putting our anxiety aside, we launch into the experiment. We show the ad team a Venn diagram we’ve been using to illustrate the benign violation theory:
Next we tell each participant to polish off a cocktail and come up with a funny new Venn diagram that illustrates and promotes the benign violation theory. We want them to deconstruct a joke into its benign and violation parts, with the intersection labeled “funny.” The ad creatives also have to fill out a survey rating how funny they consider their ad idea. After that, they down another cocktail and draw a new diagram. Repeat, and repeat, and repeat.
They’re off, in a flurry of mai tais, bellinis, and mojitos. What we don’t expect is how seriously everybody takes it, especially the Grey creative directors. The bosses heckle their underlings and demand that everybody give 110 percent, dammit. In the stress and depravity that ensues, everyone goes waaay over the line in terms of decency. Here’s one of the completed Venn diagrams:
Compared to other diagrams, that’s sedate. So here we are, in one of the city’s ritziest juice joints with some of New York’s most powerful creative minds, watching comedy—or at least attempts at it—get made. And judging from some of the preliminary results, it’s one more bit of proof that most things in the world aren’t funny. So if you aim to be hilarious like these ad creatives or New Yorker cartoonist Kanin, the best thing to do is to come up with as many jokes as possible, then come up with more. Or as Pete likes to put it, think up as many violations as possible, and then find lots of ways to make those violations okay. Most will end up as duds, but every now and then you’ll come up with your own version of Kanin’s bowling-ball cartoon.
As for that cartoon? It turns out Mankoff might have been right when he called Kanin a comic genius. The bowling-ball gag makes it up the production chain, past the ornery fact-checkers, and gets the green light from New Yorker editor David Remnick, who makes the final decision with Mankoff on the twelve to twenty cartoons in each issue. A few months later, on the bottom right corner of page 85 of the New Yorker, there’s the bowling-ball walker and the bowling-pin walker, strolling toward their inevitable street-corner collision. But by this point, Kanin is probably too busy to notice it. He’s taken a new job, one that might be even more celebrated in the annals of comedy creation: he’s been hired as a writer for Saturday Night Live.
At the Hurricane Club, is all the booze we’re buying turning the ad team into Kanin-level humorists? They believe so. The more drinks they down, the funnier they rate their comedy attempts. But later, when Pete submits the Venns to an online survey panel, he finds the inebriated ad team is off the mark. According to the panel’s respondents, the shenanigans went downhill by the time the ad team reached its fifth drink. Take, for example, one creative director who went by the code name Blaze. After his third drink, Blaze rated himself about halfway up the drunkenness scale and came up with this gem:
Blaze gave this a 4 out of 7 on the funniness scale, and the online-survey respondents rated it 3.5. Pretty similar. However, after his fifth and final drink, Blaze drew a diagram and rated it an utterly hilarious 7. The online panel disagreed, awarding it an average humor rating of 1.95 and an offensiveness rating of 4.2.
What was the Venn behind such wildly diverging opinions?
Don’t say we didn’t warn you:
So there you have it. Proof that alcohol makes things funnier, but only for those making the funny. All it cost us was $1,272.96—the most expensive bar tab either of us has ever paid. It inspired us to create one final Venn, one we’re still waiting on to see if it comes true:
We come away from New York knowing that a killer funny bone isn’t necessarily a gift from the gods. But it does take a whole lot of work—and, paradoxically, a whole lot of fun. If you’re going to combine esoteric topics in clever and funny ways, you need to live large. Read up on odd topics. Explore new places. Head off on wild adventures. If nothing else, have long, rambling conversations over drinks.
Just don’t offer to foot the bill.
