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INTRODUCTION
People a lot smarter and more important than the two of us have pondered what makes things funny. Plato and Aristotle contemplated the meaning of comedy while laying the foundations of Western philosophy. Thomas Hobbes probed the issue within the pages of his momentous tome Leviathan. Charles Darwin looked for the seeds of laughter in the joyful cries of tickled chimpanzees. Sigmund Freud sought the underlying motivations behind jokes in the nooks and crannies of our unconscious.
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None of them got it right. Yet for some reason, we think we can succeed where they all failed.
Who are we? A dream team of Nobel Prize–winning scientists and Emmy-laden comedy writers? Not exactly.
Let’s start with my co-author: Peter McGraw, the so-called “brains” of the operation. An academic with an adventurous side, he’s the guy who set this outlandish quest in motion. As a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, he’s obsessed with making sense out of insanity, order out of chaos. His university office is impeccably organized, with piles of journal articles and academic surveys—on topics ranging from the economics of gun shows to mega-church marketing strategies—arranged by subject, stacked in perfect columns, and labeled with orderly Post-it notes. To try to understand the odd ways the world works, he’s circumnavigated the globe on a ship. Twice. He’s just as exacting regarding his teaching techniques. Lately, before classes, he’s been telling himself he’s going to a big, exciting party, to ensure his lectures are as energetic and engaging as possible. For a professor who goes by “Pete” instead of “Dr. McGraw,” stuffy and long-winded doesn’t cut it.
So when he started contemplating what makes things funny and found that little about it made sense, that wouldn’t stand. He had to find a nice, tidy explanation.
Then there’s me, Joel Warner, the more cautious half of our duo. As a journalist, I’ve always suspected that there’s something about me that’s not quite right. While my colleagues thirst for tips on dirty cops and City Hall corruption, I prefer stories on real-life superheroes and beer-delivering robots. As an upbeat newshound, I’ve never been fully comfortable in an industry that relishes tragedy over comedy. Maybe, I figure, if I can help Pete solve the riddle behind the lighter side of life, I won’t be so confused.I
Considering our pedestrian backgrounds, it might seem unlikely that we can outperform some of history’s greatest minds in our quest to crack the humor code. But we have a couple advantages. For one thing, we suspect we have the timing right. Although comedy has been around since the dawn of civilization, it has never been so pervasive and accessible. Comedians such as Will Ferrell and Tina Fey are among America’s biggest celebrities. Satirical news shows such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have become news sources for an entire generation. Roughly a quarter of all television commercials attempt to be humorous, and the internet has become a 24-hour one-stop shop for laughs. Everywhere you look, somebody is making a joke—which means those jokes have never been so easy to study.
Plus, we have science and technology on our side. (And we don’t just mean we have Google.) Aided by increasingly advanced technologies, scientists are piecing together the intricacies of the human condition. Psychologists are probing our unconscious motivations, biologists are tracking down our evolutionary origins, and computer scientists are building new forms of artificial intelligence. While these efforts are helping to solve some of the universe’s greatest mysteries, they could also help us figure out why we laugh at farts.
Our plan, simply put, merges the best of both worlds, a mash-up of science and comedy—two topics that don’t always get along. We’ll apply cutting-edge research techniques to the wide world of humor while subjecting the zingers, wisecracks, and punch lines we’ve all taken for granted to hard-and-fast analysis back in the lab.
Along the way, we aim to answer tough questions that are bound to turn heads of scientists and comedians alike: Do comics need to come from screwed-up childhoods? What’s the secret to winning the New Yorker cartoon caption contest? Why does being funny make you more attractive? Who’s got a bigger funny bone—men or women, Democrats or Republicans? What is, quantifiably, the funniest joke in the world? Is laughter really the best medicine? Can a joke ruin your life—or lead to revolution? And, most important of all, do the French love Jerry Lewis?
As with all the best experiments, not everything will go as planned. There will be bickering, bruised egos, and, yes, more than a few bad jokes. Still, we’re confident that the two of us make a good team. Pete’s got a way with data, while I have a way with words. Pete’s willing to pursue his research in the most outrageous circumstances imaginable, while I have the wherewithal to keep us out of trouble. At least, that’s what we’ve told ourselves.
To cap off our expedition, we’ll tackle one final challenge, one that’s either the ultimate high-stakes experiment or a scheme as harebrained as they come. We’ll use our newfound knowledge to try to kill it on the largest comedy stage in the world.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Our journey begins, appropriately enough, with a set-up straight out of a joke:
Did you hear the one about the professor and the journalist who walk into a bar?
I. We thought long and hard on how best to write this book. A third-person account: “We ask Louis C.K. way too much about his physical anatomy”? A God’s-eye-view of our hijinks: “Pete’s busy getting an exfoliation scrub when Joel gets chased naked out of the Japanese spa”? We decided to go with my personal point of view: “Pete naps and I worry about dengue fever as we fly into the Amazon in a Peruvian Air Force cargo plane packed with 100 clowns.”
