预计阅读本页时间：-
5
JAPAN
广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元
When is comedy lost in translation?
What is the Japanese word for “torture”? Whatever it is, Pete and I are experiencing it.
We’d faced the prospect of our fourteen-hour, 6,063-mile flight to Osaka with resolve. We’d pegged Japan as the perfect place to figure out why comedy is so diverse, why what people find funny varies widely depending on their background, gender, and numerous other factors. After all, it was hard for us to imagine a location with a more dissimilar style of hilarity to our own. But we’d heard horror stories about crossing the fifteen time zones between Colorado and Japan, how it can turn an entire trip into one long, unpleasant waking dream. To prepare, we’d watched and re-watched how-to travel videos online and studied journal articles on the roots of jet lag. Pete also studied the film Lost in Translation to take pointers from Bill Murray’s karaoke routine. Then we’d calibrated the perfect sleep and meal schedule to ensure we’d disembark chipper and alert on the other side of the world. That the entertainment system on our trans-Pacific flight was on the fritz, leaving us with no entertainment other than the GPS sky map updating itself every few minutes? That was no match for the neurotic planning of two anal-retentive geeks like us.
But no amount of groundwork, no possible research or regimen, could have prepared us for what awaited us in Osaka.
We’d been excited to discover that Japan had a thriving academic humor scene. Several top members of the Japanese Humor and Laughter Society even offered to help us. Before we knew it, the scholars had arranged for us to attend a performance of rakugo, a traditional form of comic storytelling, on our first evening in Osaka. Never mind that the show was to begin a few hours after we arrived, with little wiggle room if we had a flight delay. We were told via e-mail the experience was “once in a lifetime,” that “you cannot miss it.”
So we dashed off the plane, dropped our bags at our hotel, and raced to the performance. And now here we are, sitting in a grand theater filled with several thousand Japanese people, most of whom appear to be past retirement age. On stage, kimono-clad men take turns kneeling on a pillow and reciting long, rambling soliloquys. In Japanese. With no translation. Or helpful props. Or evocative gestures.
We try our best to seem engaged even though we don’t understand a word of it. On either side of us, our hosts—humor scholars Heiyo Nagashima and Shinya Morishita—smile and nod, but they aren’t much help. “Husband and wife,” whispers Nagashima to me, using his broken English to explain the subject of one segment. I try to look illuminated, as if the words “husband and wife” make the hour of unintelligible Japanese I’ve been listening to clear.
Exhaustion sweeps over us, our bodies giving in to fatigue and monotony. Soon I’m so tired it’s painful, my head bobbing up and down as I struggle to focus. “Now I understand sleep deprivation,” Pete whispers to me, the color drained from his face. We try to elbow each other awake, but it’s no use. I distract myself by writing random thoughts and details into my reporter’s notebook, only to look down and discover that halfway through a sentence, I’d started scribbling incoherently all over the page. Pete tries a different tack, composing a haiku in his journal:
Hear but can’t listen
Watching kneeling men in robes
Laughter surrounds us
Any oomph it provides him doesn’t last long. He’s soon staring off into space with half-closed eyes, as if in a Zen-like trance. Glancing around the auditorium, I find we’re not the only ones nodding off. Next to Pete, Professor Morishita appears to slumber in his seat.
I give in. As my eyelids slip closed, Pete murmurs a final, half-asleep thought in my ear: “We flew all this way to understand Japanese humor, but how are we going to understand it if we can’t speak the language?”
In New York and Los Angeles, we’d hobnobbed with some of the best of the best of the country’s joke creators. But even these guys and gals admit that their brand of comedy doesn’t travel well. Action films are far more likely to be global blockbusters than comedies. That’s because humor appreciation might be even more complex and confounding than humor creation. Sense of humor varies by upbringing and age and gender and political affiliation and other factors. What one person finds hilarious can be boringly dull to a second person, and offensive to a third.
Different cultures even have different forms of “joking relationships,” as anthropologists call them, the societal rules about who can joke with whom. Among Ojibwe Native Americans, if you don’t joke with your cross-cousin, you’re downright rude.1 In East Africa, the Zaramu tribe can joke with the Sukuma tribe and Sukuma members can rib Zigua tribe members, but when someone from Zigua runs into someone from Zaramu, everybody remains serious.2
For many Westerners, there’s one particular foreign flavor of humor creation and appreciation that’s particularly befuddling. Time and again, we’ve been asked the same question: “Can you explain Japanese humor?” There’s something about Japanese culture, with its sadistic game shows, pornographic anime, intergalactic battle robots, and French-maid-themed restaurants, that triggers serious head scratching on the other side of the Pacific. That goes double for Japanese comedy—especially since there is no wholly accurate Japanese translation for words like “comedy” and “humor.”3
So maybe the best way to get to the bottom of humor’s chameleon-like properties, we’d figured, was to immerse ourselves in Japanese funny business. But we had to make sure Christie Davies hadn’t beat us to it.
Christie Davies is the Indiana Jones of hilarity. The British sociologist and past president of the International Society for Humor Studies has spent decades cataloguing and analyzing jokes from every corner of the globe, from Australia and Bulgaria to Tajikistan and Yugoslavia.
That’s why, during a stopover in London, we took a train to Davies’s home in the town of Reading, where he teaches at the local university. Davies, a heavyset man with a scraggly gray beard, watery eyes, and a beak of a nose, met us at the train station wearing the sort of khaki, multipocketed vest folks wear on a safari. I imagined it was stuffed with academic keepsakes: a joke-laden papyrus scroll, a Victorian whoopee cushion, a charcoal rubbing of a dirty ditty from an Incan temple wall.
Davies invited us back to his home, a two-story brick duplex that was clearly the home of a man who’s spent his career focused on things elsewhere. A mountain of empty de-icer cans littered his front stoop, topped by a dead Christmas wreath. In his sitting room, a sagging couch and a couple of mismatched armchairs threatened to be subsumed by piles of miscellanea rising nearly to the ceiling—assorted foreign-language dictionaries, tangles of power cords, random pieces of clothing. Tacked to the paint-chipped walls were grotesque wooden masks and wrinkled photos from Davies’s various adventures: running with the bulls in Pamplona, standing on a frigid ship’s deck off Cape Horn. I’ll refrain from describing the bathroom.
Clearing space among the clutter and slumping onto the couch, Davies explained that his quasi-nomadic joke-chasing existence began while he was lecturing in India in 1974. When he mentioned that the English liked to joke about the Irish being stupid, his Indian students replied they told the same sort of jokes about Sikhs. For Davies, that was the “aha!” moment, a hint that within comedy’s odd connections and quirks lay unmined clues about how different cultures think and operate. As he later put it in one of his many academic humor tomes, for him jokes are “social puzzles, puzzles I have had to try to solve.”
And more often than not, he’s solved those puzzles. He dug into premarital-sex rates and personal hygiene in pre-revolution France to ascertain the origins of randy-Frenchmen bon mots. He traced the spread of dumb-blonde jokes from their origins in the United States to Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Brazil, deducing that the zingers emerged as women, long seen as mindless sex objects, shook up gender roles by entering highly skilled professions all over the world. And when the so-called Great American Lawyer Joke Cycle of the 1980s didn’t spread anywhere beyond the United States, Davies became an expert in U.S. jurisprudence to figure out why. He concluded that lawyer jokes were a uniquely American phenomenon because no other country is so rooted in the sanctity of law—and in no other country are those who practice it so reviled.4
Inspired by Davies’s work, Pete would go on to do some academic sleuthing of his own. “What about the idea that the French love Jerry Lewis?” he asked me later. Is the concept real—and if so, what does it mean about the French, not to mention Jerry Lewis? He wasn’t the first scholar to ponder this conundrum. In 2002, French literature and culture professor Rae Beth Gordon wrote a whole book on the subject. Why the French Love Jerry Lewis, as it was titled, argued that the wild, convulsive physical comedy of cabaret shows and early films in France meshed with Lewis’s hysterical mannerisms in movies like The Bellboy and The Nutty Professor.
Pete wasn’t convinced. He enlisted two French speakers, University of Colorado graduate student Bridget Leonard and professor Elise Chandon Ince at Virginia Tech, to design the ultimate Nutty Professor experiment. Working with the survey software company Qualtrics, they surveyed 200 people, half from France and half from the States, asking them to rate fourteen things stereotypically associated with France: berets, Brie, mimes, red wine—you get the idea. Included on the list was Jerry Lewis, along with another pseudo-French comedian: Pink Panther star Peter Sellers.
As it turned out, Jerry Lewis was a far bigger hit in the States than across the pond, coming in fourth out of the fourteen items among American respondents and eighth among the French. Even when Pete re-ran the study, replacing several items with stuff American respondents might like more—cowboys, apple pie, beer—results didn’t change much, with Jerry Lewis still scoring equally high among both nationalities. Other findings? The French really like French kissing, but not as much as they like baguettes. Americans, on the other hand, apparently have a thing for scarves. As for Peter Sellers? Nobody liked him anywhere.
But these results are nothing compared to Davies’s biggest discovery: inspired by the connection he made between Irish and Sikh put-downs, he started tracking similar examples of humor around the world—and uncovered a universal joke. He’s named this the stupidity joke, the sort of barbed zinger that makes fun of outsiders, simpletons, and others on the fringes of society. In America, the obvious version is the Polish joke, but that’s just the tip of the mean-spirited iceberg. Take the Philogelos, the oldest-known joke book in the world. Of the 265 zingers in the ancient Greek tome, nearly a quarter concern folks from cities renowned for their idiocy, like Cyme in modern-day Turkey and Abdera in Thrace.5 Later, in medieval England, cracks about the dunces who lived in the village of Gotham were all the rage. (New York’s nickname, “Gotham,” doesn’t sound so impressive once you learn that author Washington Irving coined it to suggest the place was a city of fools.6)
Since then, stupidity jokes have spread like a healthy fungus. According to Davies’s research, Uzbeks get made fun of in Tajikistan, while in France, it’s the French-speaking Swiss. The list goes on: Brazilians joke about the Portuguese, Finns knock the Karelians, Nigerians rib the Hausas. The model even extends to the work world: orthopedic surgeons, with their rough-and-tumble musculoskeletal work, are the laughingstock of the medical sphere. (“What’s the difference between an orthopedic surgeon and a carpenter? The carpenter knows more than one antibiotic.”)
The Irish, it turns out, have a particularly bad lot. Dumb-Irish jokes are equally common in England, Wales, Scotland, and Australia. But it could be worse: if you happen to be an Irishman from County Kerry, you also get made fun of by your fellow Irish.7
“Nearly every country has stupidity jokes,” Davies told us, pulling a tissue from a bulky vest pocket and loudly blowing his nose. From another pocket he retrieved an inhaler and took a puff. Europe, India, the Middle East, Latin America, Australia—everywhere he looked, the same pattern emerged.
But does the pattern always work? Are there some places that don’t fit the mold?
Davies nodded. “East Asia.” In Japan, there is no “chucklehead” part of the country. Nor do the Japanese make fun of their neighbors in China or Korea.
“It’s a different world,” said Davies. Japanese humor, in other words, is a puzzle that still needs to be solved.
In Japan, the history of humor is intimately tied to the samurai, the warrior class that ruled the country for centuries. We learn this from Hiroshi Inoue, president of the Japan Society for Laughter and Humor Studies. The problem, says Inoue, is that samurai aren’t funny.
“For samurai, timing was very important,” he tells us. There was no time or patience for shameful comedy. “You are laughing at me, so I kill you,” says Inoue, pantomiming skewering a wiseass with an imaginary sword.
We’re sitting in a conference room overlooking a busy stretch of downtown Osaka, sipping iced green tea and listening to Inoue’s lengthy history lesson. To avoid the sort of translation disaster we’d experienced at the rakugo performance, we’ve brought along someone who speaks the language: Bill Reilly. A cheerful 28-year-old from New Jersey, Reilly is the manager of the Pirates of the Dotombori, one of only two bilingual improv groups in the country (the other is the group’s sister operation in Tokyo, the Pirates of Tokyo Bay). When he heard we were looking for a translator in Osaka, Reilly volunteered. “Sarcasm doesn’t really happen here,” Reilly told us when he arrived at our hotel this morning, armed with an umbrella despite the clear skies. (The government had declared that today was the first day of the rainy season. Apparently in Japan, politicians have been granted the power to establish weather patterns.) Reilly welcomed the opportunity to brush up on his sarcasm with us, a couple of fresh-faced gaijin—the Japanese word for “foreigners.” We are happy to provide him with lots of fodder for sardonic eye-rolling: Pete’s constant risk of smacking his head on every low-lying door frame, my inability to extract yen from Japan’s bewildering ATMs, our plan to interview one somber-faced Japanese humor researcher after another.
Inoue, in a gray suit and spectacles, tells us we made the right choice by flying into Osaka, a port city on Japan’s south-central coast. Osaka is Japan’s comedy capital, he tells us through Reilly. Apparently if you go up to strangers in Osaka and point your finger at them, they’ll pretend to be shot without missing a beat. (Later, we ask Reilly if we should try this. “No,” he says. “You might point your finger at a yakuza”—a member of Japan’s mafia—“and they might freak the fuck out.”) Osaka’s brimming with hilarity, says Inoue, because it’s long been “the belly of Japan,” the country’s trade and commercial hub, so the samurai left the city alone, realizing strict hierarchies and customs weren’t good for business. That left Osaka’s merchants free to haggle and barter and banter as much as they pleased—and a lot of jokes lubricated those transactions.
Osaka isn’t just the hub of Japan’s comedy business. It’s also the focal point for Japanese humor scholarship. The Osaka-based Kansai University even boasts its own humor research department, which we get a tour of one morning with Shinya Morishita, one of our escorts during the disastrous rakugo performance. Morishita guides us through a media lab decked out in state-of-the-art video consoles, a full-sized theater with stadium seating, and research labs stocked with gizmos that track diaphragm movements during laughter. “I need to get funded by a Japanese university,” grumbles Pete as Morishita escorts us to the final stop on the tour. “Humor science library,” he announces, unlocking a door. Inside, we find a spacious room filled with row after row of bookshelves—nearly all of which are empty. In the far corner, a smattering of books fills a single lonely shelf. “Poor library,” admits Morishita.
“These guys are wildly optimistic,” says Pete. “I like it.”
To see if these humor researchers know what they’re talking about, we venture out into Japan’s comedy capital. American bombers leveled much of Osaka in World War II, and the city that replaced it is a sprawling and modern concrete affair. There’s a lively, cosmopolitan feel to the place—elevated trains rumble overhead, illuminated electronic billboards pulse into the night, exotic aromas waft from the food stalls and restaurants that have led the city to be called the food capital of the world. Despite the urban bustle, everyone is incredibly, even disturbingly, well mannered. No one dares disregard “Don’t Walk” signals, even when there’s not a car for miles around. And whenever Pete or I happen to pause somewhere and look bewildered—something that happens often—a stranger sidles up and inquires in semi-passable English how he or she can be of service.
Friendly, yes. But do Osakans find things funny? On the street, we don’t see much evidence of it. Nearly everyone we pass—pedestrians, shopkeepers, businessmen, police officers—remains more or less silent. Riding in packed subway cars, the unnatural hush is so surreal I wonder if something’s wrong with my ears. There’s none of the steady background noise I associate with city life—no hollering, no hawking, no bickering, no cell-phone babbling, no schoolkid chattering—and most of all, no laughing.
But maybe Pete and I are going about this all wrong. Maybe we need to observe these people removed from the pressures of their everyday lives. We need to see them relaxed. We need to see them in their natural environment.
We need to see them naked.
The idea comes from Reilly. If we’re looking for something to do in Osaka, he offers after wrapping up his translation duties, Pete and I could visit some of the area’s exquisite temples and castles. Or, he added with a wink, we could go to Spa World, where the locals strip down to their birthday suits and, segregated by gender, luxuriate in a seven-story wonderland of hot tubs, steam rooms, swimming pools, and water slides.
No contest. We head to Spa World.
At first, once we’ve paid our 1,000 yen, or roughly twelve bucks, for all-day spa access (surely the best deal in all of expensive Japan), I’m a bit uncomfortable wandering around among all these naked strangers. But after a few dips in the heated pool and visits to the sauna on the main men’s floor of the spa, a steamy Roman baths knockoff the size of a shopping mall, I start to relax. When in Rome—or at least a reasonable facsimile of it—do as the naked Japanese do!
So when Pete decides to investigate other parts of Spa World, I do likewise. While he wanders off to learn firsthand what an “exfoliation scrub” entails, I head to Heaven Spa, a swanky massage-therapy room in the heart of the Roman baths, to find out about a back rub. I stroll through the spa door, naked bits a-dangling, round a bend—and run into a gaggle of mortified Japanese women in masseuse uniforms. Shrieking and gesturing wildly, they herd me back around the corner. That’s where I notice the out-of-the-way cubby stocked with cotton shorts.
Ah. In Heaven you wear underpants.
Despite my humiliation, the masseuses don’t collapse into hysterics. They just titter. So once again, we’ve come up empty-handed on Osakan laughter. Why can’t we find any of the hilarity these people are known for?
We’re not looking in the right places, says Heiyo Nagashima, the other Japanese humor scholar who attended the rakugo performance with us. When we meet him at the Osaka headquarters of the Japanese Humor and Laughter Society, he explains that in Japan, comedy is compartmentalized. Nearly every society has developed ways to keep folks’ zaniness within safe bounds. In the United States, folks are free to joke with one another in nearly any circumstance, but certain subjects are off limits—scatology, sexual extremes, racist ideas. In Japan, on the other hand, such limitations are geographical rather than topical. Here, nearly anything goes in the name of hilarity, but it is reserved for certain locales like comedy theaters and television. Don’t try joking in the office, in the classroom, or—as I’d learned—when you’re naked in a classy spa. Take the Laughter Society offices we’re sitting in, says Nagashima, sweeping his hand around the unremarkable one-room affair, where two expressionless workers type away at computers. “This is not a laughing place,” he says. “We are exchanging ideas about culture.”
This idea cracks Pete up. “But this is the Japanese Humor and Laughter Society! If you can’t laugh here, where can you laugh?”
We find that place one evening when Reilly and several of his improv colleagues take us to the Dotombori district, the improv group’s namesake and the beating, throbbing heart of the city’s nightlife scene. Dotombori inspired the setting of the sci-fi classic Blade Runner, and it’s easy to see why. The kaleidoscope of flashing neon signs and freakish crab and dragon sculptures that dangle over the bar-lined streets feel like something out of a futuristic metropolis—a metropolis inhabited by folks having the time of their lives.
Gone are the quiet, impassive Osakans we’ve met. Here is a riotous horde desperate to let loose, screaming for another round of sake over the squeal of Motown hits at a packed bar. Flailing to the unrelenting beat of a video-game dance-off at a busy arcade. Crooning away for hours at one of the area’s numerous karaoke cafes. And laughing. Everyone is laughing.
We join in the fun. Late that night, our voices hoarse from one too many Guns N’ Roses karaoke tunes, Pete and I wander off down a cramped alleyway—to the smallest bar in the world. In a shallow divot in the side of a building, a space no larger than a cramped closet, a bartender stands behind a thin plank, taking orders. Around him, bottles and drink glasses are fastened to the walls, like he’s in a small, one-man space capsule to a thirsty moon. There’s no room for clientele, so his half-dozen patrons stand in the alley, huddled around the opening and tossing back drinks. We squeeze our way in.
We don’t understand a word of what our companions tell us, nor do they grasp our replies. Even if we did speak Japanese, we wouldn’t get the jokes. As Nagashima had explained to us at the offices of the Japanese Humor and Laughter Society, Japan is a high-context society. The country is so homogeneous, so unified in its history and culture, that most zingers don’t need set-ups at all. There’s no need for explanation or detailed backstories. Folks get right to the punch line. One common joke, about an Olympic gymnast whose leotard was too high, has apparently become so familiar that even the punch line isn’t necessary. All you have to do is gesture to your upper thigh.
The United States, on the other hand, is as low context as you can get. All those divergent viewpoints and cultural backgrounds and political opinions make for a lot of great comedy fodder, but it also means that everyone has different kinds of jokes. In 2007, researchers subjected more than 800 people in several parts of the country to a battery of humor questionnaires. They found that Texans were more likely to tell self-defeating jokes than Alaskans, while those from Minnesota go for quips that build bonds with their friends and neighbors. And Texas is so sprawling that it has several different humor regions. Those from the northwest portion of the Lone Star State were the most likely of all to use humor to deal with personal difficulties, while those in the southwest corner were the least likely to do so.8 No wonder the list of top-grossing U.S. comedians is so wildly diverse, ranging from superstar ventriloquist Jeff Dunham to rock-star comic Dane Cook to late-night darling Chelsea Handler to redneck icon Jeff Foxworthy.
Comedy is so context-dependent that translating jokes from one language to another can be daunting—far trickier than, say, translating a business memo or news report. You can’t just translate the words of the jokes. You need to capture and express the totality of shared cultural experiences the original joke builds upon and subverts, an entire universe of beliefs and expectations and taboos at which the zinger itself might only hint.9 In most Japanese jokes, such context doesn’t get mentioned at all. It’s why cross-cultural researchers have long seen jokes as a vital window into a given society. As anthropologist Edward Hall put it, “People laugh and tell jokes, and if you can learn the humor of a people and really control it, you know that you are also in control of nearly everything else.”10
We aren’t in control of the jokes flying about the Dotombori district. But that’s okay. At the smallest bar in the world, Pete and I get along just fine without knowing any context whatsoever. Arms slung around our new companions and howling into the night, we communicate via sloppy gestures, stupid expressions, and rounds of what might or might not be whiskey. Sure, we don’t speak Japanese and they don’t speak English, but we all speak Debauchery just fine.
“Don’t move around the stage so much!”
“Project your voice from your stomach!”
“If you are going to pretend to be a girl, you really have to sell it!”
Tomioki Daiku, a tired-looking teacher with graying hair and spectacles, barks criticisms at his 60 pupils. One after another, his young students clamber to their feet in groups of two from where they’re sitting along the walls and dash to the center of the parquet-floored classroom, where they banter back and forth with one another in Japanese. Then Daiku picks apart their performance—“Work on your pronunciation!” “Don’t make fun of women; most of your live audiences will be ladies!” The pupils listen expressionlessly, bow politely, and hurry back to their seats. There is no laughter here—not from the teacher, not from the performers, not from the other students looking on. Ironic, given that this operation is designed to turn people into comedians.
We’re at the New Star Creation comedy school in the heart of Tokyo. The day before, we traveled from Osaka to the Japanese capital via bullet train. When we disembarked—hardly off the train before an army of pastel-clad workers hurried on to scrub every surface clean—it didn’t take long for us to realize that folks in Tokyo are even more methodical and meticulous than those in Osaka. When we checked into our hotel, the concierge wouldn’t let us be until we’d signed enough forms to adopt an orphan child, had our photos taken (“for security reasons”), and been given exhaustive directions on how to use everything in our room—the light switches, the cabinets, the remote control, the video phone, the three-ring binder of instruction booklets for all the electronics he’d already explained to us. “I think that’s everything,” he sighs at the end of his monologue.
“Are you sure?” cracked Pete. The concierge looked panicked, wondering if he’d forgotten something.
We’ve come to Tokyo for the same reason that 1,500 would-be comedians from all over Japan come. We’ve all been lured here by the biggest name in Japanese comedy: Yoshimoto Kogyo. The century-old operation owns the comedy school, which charges 400,000 yen (roughly $5,000) for a twelve-month crash course in comedy, with supplemental lessons in acting, dance, stage presence, and kung fu—but that’s not all the company controls. Yoshimoto is essentially Japan’s version of Comedy Central . . . if Comedy Central were not only one of the country’s largest TV production companies, but also managed 800 Japanese comedians, with several hundred more being groomed in the wings. And owned the comedy clubs. And put on a film festival. And once had its own comedy theme park.
Yoshimoto isn’t just Japan’s biggest comedy company. It is Japanese comedy.
“It’s like the old studio system,” Aki Yorihiro, CEO of Yoshimoto’s U.S. wing of operations, had told me over the phone from his office in Santa Monica, California. “We take care of people throughout their careers and throughout their lives.” I’d called Yorihiro to learn about Yoshimoto before our trip, but when he’d heard about what Pete and I were up to, he offered one better: behind-the-scenes access to every aspect of the comedy juggernaut.
That’s how we ended up here at Yoshimoto’s New Star Creation class, with our own Yoshimoto-employed translator, Takahiro Araki. Thanks to spending a few formative years in Indiana, Araki boasts impeccable English, as well as more than a few American mannerisms. The bespectacled, messenger bag–wearing 26-year-old appears perennially disheveled, has the very un-Japanese tendency to be ten minutes late for appointments and is more interested in gabbing about NBA stars Kobe Bryant and LeBron James over sushi at Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market than hammering home talking points about Yoshimoto. We couldn’t imagine a better handler.
Watching the New Star Creation students, I notice one routine that’s more polished than the others. I turn to Araki: “Were those guys any good?” He shakes his head. “No one is good.”
After class, we introduce ourselves to the teacher, Daiku. He looks drained. The students were practicing manzai, the two-man comedy style comprised of a straight man, or tsukkomi, trading gags with and smacking around a boke, his goofball partner, which is the backbone of Japanese comedy. But according to Daiku, all of his pupils have a ways to go until any are manzai superstars. If this class is typical, he says, only 3 percent of the students will have a successful job in comedy in five years.
The few who make it through will earn a spot on Yoshimoto’s payroll. They’ll work their way up the company’s hierarchy of theaters and, if all goes well, hit the airwaves on the company’s shows. While most comedians’ salaries remain meager, a few become superstars and score Hollywood-level windfalls. Sure, it’s a long shot, but consider that Downtown, one of the most successful Japanese comedy acts of all time, started as a couple of kids in New Star Creation’s first-ever class in 1982.
In Osaka we’d visited Yoshimoto’s flagship theater, Namba Grand Kagetsu, a multistage behemoth that’s designed to celebrate how far the company has come from its humble beginnings in 1912 as a family-owned Osakan theater company. Yoshimoto cultivates Osaka’s comedy-capital reputation, like Jack Daniel’s has linked whiskey and its Tennessee origins. All around Namba Grand Kagetsu, colorful shops sell Yoshimoto-branded cookies, golf balls, instant ramen meals, and cell-phone cleaners. In a touristy restaurant, workers grill up aromatic batches of takoyaki, the mayonnaise-smothered, ball-shaped nuggets of deep-fried octopus that are the signature snacks of Osaka.
“It’s like a Disneyland devoted to Yoshimoto,” Pete remarked in amazement. That is, if Mickey Mouse were all about octopus balls and branded toilet paper.
To make it to the main stage of Namba Grand Kagetsu, aspiring comedians should hope they’re guys. There are only a couple of women in the entire manzai class.
“It’s like something out of Mad Men,” says Spring Day, a U.S. native who performs with the Tokyo Comedy Store, an English-language, ex-pat stand-up troupe. (The operation has no relation to the original Comedy Store in Los Angeles, other than that one of the Tokyo group’s founders realized they could mooch off the American icon’s name without legal ramifications.) We take Day out for dinner one night, and over barbecued chicken wings and horsemeat sashimi, it becomes clear that nearly everything about Japan disagrees with the blond-haired, feisty comedian (whose real name really is Spring Day—“hippie parents,” she explains with a shrug). Her pet peeves about the country include the xenophobia, the outmoded cultural stereotypes, even the cuisine (she’s allergic to fish). At the same time, she can’t imagine living anywhere else. “It’s a messed-up place,” she says, “but I love it.”
The misogyny is especially frustrating, says Day. Things are especially bad for put-upon housewives. According to Day, if you Google “Japanese husbands,” the top results are how-tos on slowly killing your significant other by limiting nutrient intake and encouraging him to smoke. (When I try it, the first result is a news article titled, “Some wives wish their husbands would hurry up and drop dead.”)
Gender bias in comedy isn’t limited to Japan. Big names ranging from celebrated polemicist Christopher Hitchens to podcast host Adam Carolla have considered the evidence and concluded that women just aren’t as funny as men—and they aren’t the only ones who believe this. A recent experiment involving New Yorker cartoons found that participants of both genders were more likely to attribute funny cartoon captions to men.11
Empirically, are women less funny? In the nascent years of humor research, scientists seemed to think so. Researchers found that men were more likely than women to enjoy jokes and cartoons presented to them, and differences were pronounced for sexual or aggressive material. But later reviews of these experiments found the conditions involved were less than pristine. It turned out many of the jokes used were downright sexist, such as this one: “Why did the woman cross the road? Never mind that—what was she doing out of the kitchen?!” So it wasn’t necessarily that the female participants didn’t enjoy jokes. They just didn’t enjoy jokes at their own expense.12
More recently, the task of analyzing gender and humor was taken up by University of Western Ontario Psychology professor Rod Martin, whose name should strike fear into the hearts of all comedy dogmatists. Martin is the unofficial dean of humor studies, and with good reason: his textbook, The Psychology of Humor, is the bible of the field, 446 lucid pages detailing everything there is to know about academic humor research in eleven tidy chapters. It’s proven invaluable to Pete and me, a trusty guidebook to the wild and woolly extremes of humor science. “People have felt that humor is such a difficult thing to study, that it is nebulous and hard to define,” Martin told me at a psychology of humor conference we attended in San Antonio, his bespectacled eyes welcoming and kind. “People have shied away from it because of that. I would argue that’s all the more reason to put effort into it.” But don’t let his grandfatherly appearance and genial Canadian demeanor fool you. When Martin gets his academic teeth into any of the comedy world’s unsubstantiated ideologies, he doesn’t let go until it’s torn to shreds.
And that’s what he did with the idea that women aren’t funny. He examined all the valid experiments on gender and humor, from comedy-appreciation surveys to joke-telling contests to self-report questionnaires to observational experiments, and came to a succinct conclusion, which he relayed at a recent International Society for Humor Studies Conference: “I think Christopher Hitchens is wrong.” By nearly every scientific measure, men and women are far more alike than different in how they perceive, enjoy, and create humor. The same goes for naughty stuff: when you do away with sexist material, women go for a good dirty joke just as much as men.13
One of the few areas where there are gender distinctions is in dating and mating. These days, that tends to mean Match.com. In 2011 researchers analyzed more than 250 online dating profiles posted by people in London and several Canadian cities. They found that men were nearly two times as likely as women to boast of their humor-production abilities (“I’m an aspiring stand-up comic”), whereas women were nearly two times as likely as men to be looking for a humor producer (“I want someone who can make me giggle”).14
This discrepancy could tie in to what we learned in Tanzania about humor’s evolutionary origins. A sense of humor in men could be seen as a sign of intelligence, social desirability, and overall genetic fitness. In other words, good jokes are a guy’s version of colorful peacock plumes. Since women have an evolutionary incentive to find the best possible mate, it helps to be on the lookout for the funniest possible peacock.
All those eons of comedic courting seem to have left a mark. The few studies that have found differences between male and female humor creation do tend to conclude that men might have a small edge over women. But before anyone crowns Adam Carolla the Einstein of comedic gender studies, consider that men might be slightly better at jokes simply because they’re more likely to be encouraged to joke around. It’s far more acceptable for boys to be class clowns than girls.
This social encouragement gives budding male comics a head start over their female counterparts. But it might come with a disadvantage. For guys, all those overeager humor attempts can have a cost.
Pete asked several of his classes to take part in a joke-writing competition. Working with colleagues Caleb Warren and Kathleen Vohs, as well as HuRL researchers, he found that of the 50 or so zingers submitted, those written by men were rated by a second group of students to be somewhat funnier than those written by women, but the difference was so slight that it wasn’t statistically significant. The guys’ jokes were far more offensive, however. Take two of the top three funniest-rated jokes, both of which were written by men:
What’s the first thing a co-ed does when she wakes up? Walks home.
Penn State football: Go in as a tight end and leave as a wide receiver.
Participants rated both jokes highly distasteful, with the Penn State joke rated the most offensive of all submissions.
The funniest joke of all, on the other hand, was somewhat offensive, but not as much as the two runners-up:
How do you know you’ve been robbed by an Asian? Your homework is all finished, your computer has been upgraded, and he’s still trying to back out of your driveway.
This gem was written by a woman.
In short, men should stop wasting their time calling their better halves the less-funny sex. They’d be far better served working on improving their own jokes. Judging from the guys at the New Star Creation class, they could use the extra effort.
There’s something else missing at the New Star Creation classes: political jokes. We’ve hardly heard any political humor during our time in Japan. “The pillars of American comedy, like politics, are completely off the radar here,” we learn from Patrick Harlan, a Colorado-born Harvard graduate who’s the boke in Pakkun Makkun, one of the few successful manzai acts featuring an international duo. The Japanese government is too stable and the elections here too sedate—and the emperor too sacred—for people to crack wise about political affairs.
These days, it’s hard to imagine any part of U.S. politics being considered too sedate or sacred for comedic skewering. From the pointed satire of The Colbert Report to the snarky rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh to presidential candidates rubbing elbows with their impersonators on Saturday Night Live, making fun of politicians has become America’s pastime.
But who wins the prize for being funnier—Democrats or Republicans? Judging from the makeup of the comedy industry, it’s easy to think the political left has it won hands down. Aside from Dennis Miller, P. J. O’Rourke, and Victoria Jackson, it’s not easy to come up with big-name conservative comedians. So why isn’t there a Republican version of Jon Stewart? Some people think it’s because Republicans tend to have a sunnier disposition on life (“Social inequity? What social inequity?”). Using Pete’s terminology, that means they aren’t as likely to come across violations that are ripe for making benign.
Speculation aside, are Democrats quantifiably better at being funny? In his book Debatable Humor: Laughing Matters on the 2008 Presidential Primary Campaign, University of Arkansas political science professor Patrick Stewart catalogued and analyzed every use of humor in the Republican and Democratic primary debates during the 2008 presidential election. All in all, he says, “I didn’t find anything in the last election on which party is funnier.”
He did find some differences in how the Democratic and Republican candidates tended to joke. Democrats, for example, often relied on the kind of comedy that was inclusive and convivial. “The Democratic party is a highly egalitarian party,” says Stewart. “Anyone can get in or drop out. So you really have to be charismatic like Clinton or Obama to draw people in.” Obama was particularly skilled in this area: Stewart found that in the debates he often flashed smiles of genuine amusement and engaged in loose-jawed laughter, the sort of visual signals that suggest, “Join me, I’m here to play.”
Republicans, on the other hand, tended to rely on what’s called “encrypted humor,” says Stewart, the sort of “wink, wink” in-jokes that separate insiders from outsiders. Take Republican candidate Mike Huckabee’s 2008 quip that “we’ve had a Congress that has spent money like [John] Edwards at a beauty shop.” By using the term “beauty shop,” as opposed to, say “barber shop,” Huckabee’s joke was “not just an attack on Congress, but also an attack on John Edwards’s masculinity,” says Stewart.
So Democratic officials don’t have a leg up on Republicans in the funny business. But what about how average Democrats and Republicans go about their daily lives? In general, do liberals have a better sense of humor than conservatives? In 2008, Pete’s colleague Duke University psychology and behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely and Mount Holyoke College student Elisabeth Malin asked 300 people, half liberal and half conservative, to rate the funniness of 22 jokes on various topics. Not too surprisingly, the conservatives were more apt to enjoy the jokes that reinforced traditional racial and gender stereotypes—including a zinger about a guy choosing a game of golf over his wife’s funeral. But conservatives also gave higher ratings to absurdist quips of Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, right-wingers found all kinds of jokes funnier than their liberal counterparts.15 Maybe, then, the concept of humorless Republicans is just a matter of circumstance. After all, the history of American stand-up is littered with hard-core liberals, from Charlie Chaplin to Lenny Bruce to Bill Hicks. It could be that funny conservatives have never been welcomed into the club.
“When you look at a baby, you laugh and smile,” says company CEO Hiroshi Osaki. “That’s what it’s like with Yoshimoto. All you have to do is drop our name and someone might laugh.”
We’re sitting in a conference room, talking with the Yoshimoto CEO about baby faces, in the company’s humble Tokyo headquarters: a retrofitted elementary school near the busy Shinjuku commercial center. The modest surroundings mesh with Osaki’s demeanor. While the formal conventions of the meeting unfold around us—assistants whisk in multiple servings of iced tea; a team of media personnel stand at attention in the corner until the CEO gestures for them to sit; a company representative presents us with gift bags overflowing with Yoshimoto-branded paraphernalia—Osaki, in a suit and tie, remains chipper as he smokes a Lucky Strike. Later, when we pose for a photo, the CEO pretends to feel us up to ensure we’re all laughing in the shot.
Yoshimoto rose to its place of prominence thanks to savvy decisions the company made decades ago, says Osaki. In the 1920s, executives took note of the slapstick and rapid-fire jokes of American vaudeville and decided it was the perfect way to shake up the stagnant culture of manzai. It had remained more or less unchanged since the Middle Ages. According to the scholarly book Understanding Humor in Japan, Yoshimoto brass told their performers to wear “ ‘glasses like Lloyd’s’ and ‘a mustache like Chaplin’s.’ ” And later, as Japanese broadcasting came into its own in the wake of World War II, Yoshimoto again borrowed from the comedy industry across the Pacific. Taking inspiration from the skits, bits and banter of The Bob Hope Show, the company developed its own, enduringly popular version of the variety show.
What Osaki seems to be telling us is that Japanese comedy is a cultural Galapagos Island. All those bizarre Japanese jokes and gags that leave Americans confused? They’re U.S. comedy’s bastard stepchildren.
Lately, Yoshimoto has been going global with this unique brand of hilarity. The company has started producing television programs and live shows in China, Taiwan, and Korea. And now, Osaki tells us, Yoshimoto is ready to show America that the student has become the master. The company has announced plans to build a Second City training center in Tokyo, the improv group’s first-ever foreign affiliate. And Yoshimoto has inked deals with several U.S. and European TV production companies, among them the operations that created Survivor and The Office.
There may be a problem with Yoshimoto’s plan: could a single kind of comedy ever be popular worldwide? Yes, some examples of comedy have been found to be incredibly, even eerily ubiquitous. The trickster motif, the concept of a wily clown who relies on his wits and ruses to get in and out of trouble, has been found in Native American culture, Ancient Greek myths, Norse legends, African folk tales, Tibetan Buddhist practices, Polynesian religious tales, Islamic fables, and even 17,000-year-old cave paintings in France.16 But still, these trickster tales vary from culture to culture. There’s far from one joke that rules them all.
So is it even possible for a single example of hilarity to achieve global domination? In 2001, a British psychology professor named Richard Wiseman decided to find out. He and his colleagues launched the LaughLab, a website where people uploaded jokes and rated others’ submissions using a scale called the “Giggleometer.” Over twelve months, the website clocked 40,000 joke submissions and nearly 2 million ratings from people in 40 different countries—the largest-ever scientific humor study, earning a Guinness World Record. And on October 3, 2002, Wiseman announced they’d done it: they’d come up with the world’s funniest joke.
During our brief stop in London, we met Wiseman at a busy coffee shop. Since retiring the LaughLab, Wiseman has continued to probe humanity’s psychological skeleton closets, deconstructing bad luck, confidence schemes, and ghost hunting. “We deliver, no matter how mad the scientific proposal,” he said between sips of cappuccino.
But no proposal was as mad—or as attention-grabbing—as the LaughLab. The world was eagerly watching when Wiseman and his team revealed the winning joke:
Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says, “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a gunshot. Back on the phone, the guy says, “Okay, now what?”
So what does Wiseman think of his scientific findings? “I think the world’s funniest joke isn’t very funny,” he told us. “It’s terrible. I think we found the world’s cleanest, blandest, most internationally accepted joke.”
In hindsight, the joke’s blandness makes sense. The world’s funniest-rated joke isn’t going to be the zinger that the most people find hilarious, it’s going to be the zinger that the least number of people find offensive. Any joke that makes fun of a particular people, religion, occupation, or viewpoint isn’t going to fly. It has to be something that’s acceptable to everybody—or incredibly ho-hum. And a quip about a couple of bumbling hunters from Jersey is as ho-hum as you can get. As Wiseman grumbles, “It’s the color beige in joke form.”
Pete, ever the competitor, wanted to know if he could use experiments to seek out a funnier variation of the hunter joke without increasing its offensiveness. To do so, he once again partnered with Upright Citizens Brigade LA’s “science department.” For a control version, one team of UCB participants, using lots of fake blood, made a 30-second web video that stuck as closely as possible to the original hunter joke. Other UCB teams tried to make funnier web versions, and they were given various constraints on how far off script they could go.
A couple of the hunter joke variations—one that turned the scenario into a dubbed kung fu movie, and another that featured a hysterical clown using a squeaking plastic hammer to beat to death a kid choking on a balloon animal—turned out to be no more funny or offensive than the baseline version when Pete submitted them all to a Qualtrics survey panel. But the other two adaptations, one an extreme variation and one a mild variation, were rated significantly funnier while also less offensive. The “less offensive” part is somewhat surprising, considering one of the videos featured an emergency-services operator plagued by all sorts of callers misinterpreting his instructions, leading to a two-minute stretch of death and dismemberment, while the other involved a hunter horribly inept at killing his friend, leading to gunshots, hand-to-hand combat, and a Good Samaritan passerby offering to help by running the guy over with his truck.
But it’s all about how the jokes were crafted, Pete pointed out. In the two funniest videos, all the unpleasantness occurred off camera, the violence only hinted at through sound effects. Yes, the hunter joke can be made funnier without becoming more offensive, but it takes some serious work—relying on a subtle medium like video, enlisting comedy masters like those at UCB. “The study illustrates that in some cases, severe violations can be really funny to lots of people if they are done really well,” he concludes.
But at Yoshimoto, CEO Osaki concedes he isn’t sure severe violations can have international appeal, even when they’re being handled by professionals. “I personally don’t find American stand-up that funny,” he tells us. “Maybe it’s lost in translation.”
Remember when I called watching the rakugo performance akin to torture? Forget I said that. That’s nothing compared to what we witness on “Ogata Impossible.”
We’re on a soundstage in downtown Tokyo, on the set of Power Purin, a Yoshimoto variety show that airs late on Wednesday nights on the Japanese station TBS. Most of Power Purin is devoted to Saturday Night Live–style comedy skits. But every now and then, the comedians engage in a batsu, or “penalty,” game, a one-off game-show stunt. That’s what’s happening now.
“Welcome to ‘Ogata Impossible!’ ” shouts the game-show host, who for some reason is dressed up like a demon. “You gamble with your life here!”
The one doing the gambling is Takohiro Ogata, a young Japanese actor with a mop of shaggy brown hair. He tries to look brave as he’s presented with a tureen full of scalding hot soup. Ogata, says the demon-host, has 60 seconds to transfer the soup’s chunky bits—radish, fish, octopus—onto a plate. Using only his teeth.
At least, that’s what we think is happening. Araki, our translator, is trying to explain what is going on, but he looks like he doesn’t understand it all himself.
Japanese game shows, with their oddball set-ups and sadistic challenges, have become the most iconic example of Japanese entertainment. And they’re intimately tied to Japanese comedy. Yoshimoto produces many of the shows itself. According to Yorihiro, Yoshimoto’s U.S.-based CEO, 80 percent of all Japanese game-show contestants are comedians, since the typical Japanese person is too reserved to demonstrate the fear and anguish necessary to sell a bit about diving face-first into a bowl of soup.
An air horn wails, dramatic lights flash and Ogata dunks his head into the tureen. He jerks back up, soup flying, clutching in pain at his face. His mouth is empty. I try to imagine “Ogata Impossible!” going global, with footage like this being a hit in Seattle and Philadelphia, in London and Rio, in Moscow and Dubai.
The soup can’t really be hot, Araki assures me. Ogata is just acting. But later, after the shoot, Ogata, his face pink, assures me Araki is wrong. The soup is skin-searing hot. Teeth-aching hot. “Hot!” he tells me, the only English word I’ve heard him use all day.
A shrill buzzer marks the end of the challenge—with Ogata several soup ingredients short of his goal. The Power Purin comedians retire in exhaustion to their messy dressing room. Araki’s off somewhere, so we make do without him. The comedians scratch at their dyed, spiky hair and in broken English compare their best comedic horror stories, boasting like they’re battle wounds. For a batsu game, one had to eat a raw lemon, skin and all. Another was once elbowed so hard by his manzai partner that he broke a rib.
One of the comedians nods at Pete and makes a crack about his height. “Big!” he cries, then points at Pete’s pants. “Big?” Pete shrugs, smiling mischievously.
“Me small-small,” grumbles the diminutive comic, gesturing in disappointment at his groin.
“But you’re famous!” I cry.
Sure, he concedes, but he’d rather be “big-big, not famous!”
Soon we’ve devolved into a shouting match of “Big-big!” “Small-big!” and increasingly obscene hand motions. Araki looks in, drawn by the laughter. “You’re missing all the fun!” cries Pete.
Our trip to Japan has proven that humor appreciation is very much culturally mediated. Comedy here is a wholly different entity than it is in the States, with specific social rules about when and where people laugh and what they laugh at. Yoshimoto’s global strategy faces some hurdles, since the hijinks of “Ogata Impossible” and other examples of Japanese comedy are very, well, Japanese.
But what’s going on here in this dressing room isn’t professionally crafted, strategically calibrated, big-business comedy. It’s humor, in the most organic sense of the word. Humor that occurs without planning or preparation, humor that’s all the more hilarious because of it. It’s rude-gesture humor, late-night-drinking humor, your-fly-is-down humor, banging-your-head-on-a-door-frame humor. The same sort of stuff that gets us cackling with friends and loved ones back home.
In other words, while Japanese comedy may be different from what we’re used to in America, the way the Japanese experience humor is mostly the same.
And with a realization such as that, maybe we’ve discovered what makes the Japanese really, truly laugh: the same thing that makes you and me and everyone else bust a gut, too.
What’s the key to universal harmony and hilarity? It’s simple: peace, love, and dick jokes.
