Can you learn to be funny? Can you study humour and unlock its scientific formula? Alex Horne swaps the comedy circuit for the lecture hall in search of the science of laughter. Plus, Greg Davies, Tim Minchin and Shazia Mirza tell us what really tickles them
In the middle of last year's football World Cup, 200 men and women from Asia, America, Australia and Europe sat in silence in the main hall of the City University of Hong Kong. I was in the middle of this disparate group, next to my reluctant assistant, Tim.
At the podium the university's president clicked his PowerPoint remote control and revealed a photo of a young lady pretending to perform oral sex on a statue of Ronald McDonald. Tim and I exchanged glances then copied the rest of the delegates by bowing our heads and scribbling in our branded pads while Professor Way Kuo announced: "There is no area of life that can't be improved by an injection of humour." This was the opening ceremony of the 22nd International Society for Humour Studies conference.
I had taken the first step on my journey to Hong Kong 10 years earlier while supposedly studying in my own university's library. Easily distracted, I'd picked up a bright pink hardback entitled It's a Funny Thing, Humour, which contained the minutes of the first International Conference on Humour and Laughter, held in Cardiff in 1976. This was the start of my obsession with the laughter-watchers.
It was an extraordinary book, fascinating and intensely boring at the same time. It claimed to hold the secrets of laughter ? why people laughed, what made them laugh and how that laughter could be increased ? but it was full of graphs and bar charts and the driest of observations. I was both intrigued and amused by the combination of light-hearted subject matter and serious scholarship and spent the rest of the week poring over every page, giggling at the ludicrous research, but absorbed by the results.
Compared to my own studies, experiments like those designed to discern the effects of age and alcohol on laughter were captivating (both concluded that the more you drink/age, the less you understand, but the more you laugh). I made lengthy notes on every chapter, from "The Uses and Abuses of Canned Laughter" to "Female Responses to Chauvinist Humour" and "Humour Among the Au Pairs". This was my sort of academic research.
A few years after leaving university I had somehow become a comedian, a profession traditionally suspicious of this sort of thing. Eric Morecambe warned, "If you try to find out what makes us tick, the watch stops." Ken Dodd, the guest speaker at that first conference, implored the scientists and psychologists not to discover or disclose the "key" to humour. Most memorably, the American humorist EB White once remarked: "Analysing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." But I was interested; I wanted to gawp at the insides of this funny frog, and I wasn't alone.
Since the International Society for Humour Studies (ISHS) took charge of the original laughter conferences in 1989, humour experts have met every year in locations as exotic as Israel, Osaka, New York, Sydney and Sheffield. Its membership has mushroomed as psychologists, health professionals, writers and more scientists from across the world have been drawn to the cult of laughter studies and as I worked my way around the UK's comedy clubs I continued to read the papers they produced, itching to get involved.
Then, a year and a half ago, my wife and I had a baby; a son but also my very own guinea pig. This, I thought, was my chance to get in on the laughter action. In the foreword to those 1976 conference notes, the author mentioned CW Valentine's Psychology of Early Childhood, in which the psychologist explored the behaviour of his own five children. This was the passage that had first tickled my fancy.
In a brief digression on laughter, Valentine explained how he'd identified 12 stimuli that made his kids chuckle, ranging from tickling, mild shock and mere repetition, to teasing, incongruity and the sight of a bright or pleasing object. The idea of researching the most fundamental jokes appealed to me and I decided to see if these triggers worked for my progeny, too. I wanted to discover if a sense of humour, in babies at least, is universal and timeless.
Apart from Valentine's work I could find almost no other research on laughter in babies. Plenty of parenting books advise you when you can expect your baby to start laughing, but not why they do it. In Robert Provine's authoritative Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, he does point out that "pre-school babies provide an opportunity to study laughter independent of speech, the criteria of most adult laughter", but for some reason he didn't seize that opportunity. This was my gap in the laughter market.
So, while struggling with nappies, babygros and the fundamental principles of fatherhood, I carried out countless potentially amusing experiments on our tiny son. I held bright and pleasing objects in front of his face, mildly surprised him with games of peep-bo and tickled him incessantly, all the while ensuring that I could justify my behaviour should social services come calling. I filmed his reactions, made copious notes and at last, on his 102nd day alive, he cracked (up). I was whistling to him, he looked at me. I continued to whistle, he smiled, then gurgled. I whistled some more. He carried on making that noise and eventually I realised it wasn't gurgling, he was chuckling. That was his laugh. Looking into his eyes I saw delight, but more than that, I saw amusement. He found whistling funny.
After that there was no stopping him. On Day 114 he had his first proper laughing fit when his uncle pretended to be a duck. A week later I heard him sniggering to himself when alone in his cot. Other observations in my notebook included: "Day 130, T found tickling funny"; "Day 142, T laughed when I babbled"; "Day 150, I asked T the question, 'Do you?' 10 times in a row, he found it increasingly funny"; "Day 169, T laughed when I mildly frightened him just before bath."
When he reached six months, I stopped our experiments. By then my son was aware enough to know when I was acting differently, particularly if I had a video camera in my hands, and would adjust his own behaviour accordingly. But I had enough evidence. It may have taken my son three months to learn to laugh, but when he did so the prompts were almost identical to those of Valentine's offspring. My conclusion was simple: we are all born with a similar sense of humour.
I wrote up my findings and sent them to the organisers of the next two major laughter events with a note asking if I could present a paper myself. To my surprise and delight, they agreed. They were keen to have a comedian on board, I was desperate to join their ranks, so in the spring of 2010 I packed a bag, kissed my wife and son goodbye and headed for Lodz University in Poland and LAFAL ? the first ever International Symposium on Linguistic Approaches to Funniness, Amusement and Laughter.
Before this trip I had never attended any sort of academic event so spent most of the preceding weeks and all of the two-hour journey southwest from Warsaw frantically trying to polish my material (no pun intended). I wanted to be both funny and interesting. That, surely, was what any decent laughter student was aiming for. But as my taxi pulled up at the university, the reality of the situation hit me for the first time. This was not necessarily going to be a fun-filled few days. The compact building where I would be both staying and working was clean but drab. The people bustling in and out of the door were decidedly studious. This was miles from any comedy club, both literally and metaphorically, and I couldn't hear anyone laughing.
I felt like a fresher all over again. The only flights I'd been able to find meant I'd arrived half a day late, so everyone else had already made friends and I shuffled about on the fringes of conversations. Thankfully a Scottish lecturer named Graeme Ritchie rescued me. He'd happened to see me perform in Aberdeen the month before, and after he'd introduced himself I clung to him for the rest of the weekend.
The seminars themselves didn't start promisingly. Most of the speakers projected huge swathes of data on to tiny whiteboards behind them and I struggled to keep up. Being a proud PowerPoint connoisseur I was particularly distressed by the presentations. The clip art was nearly all clich�d, the text far too small and, worst of all, the fonts weren't even uniform.
An even bigger problem was that I found much of the technical jargon bandied about was impenetrable. I was surprised and dismayed to find almost all the evidence used to demonstrate humour and laughter had been culled from the internet, a notoriously unamusing hunting ground in my experience. Here's a typical example:
Why was Cinderella chucked off the baseball team? Because she always ran away from the ball.
After 20 minutes of rigorous analysis, this apparently "standard joke" was declared an example of "lexical humour". No one mentioned that it wasn't actually funny. Categorising jokes was all-important. Certain people, scientists in particular, seem anxious to classify everything they find, but jokes can't always be pinned down with a single label. You might be able to put a joke in a particular linguistic box but unless you take into account the personality of the joke teller, their delivery and the context, that box is a useless box.
When it came to my own talk, I was apprehensive. These people, most of whom spoke English only as a second language, spent their lives dissecting jokes. Would mine be rendered impotent by the filters of translation and analysis?
In short: no. After two days of unwavering sobriety, a lecture filled with jokes they hadn't heard before was just what people wanted. Unfortunately, while they laughed at my material, they didn't take my research seriously. They saw me as nothing more than a comedian and I still felt like an outsider.
THE CONFERENCE IN Hong Kong, a few months later, was a far grander event. Tim and I were welcomed with hearty information packs and our very own conference T-shirts. But during a couple of the driest sessions I sat, open-mouthed, amazed at how uninspiring my fascinating subject could sound. Do we really need an "ironyness scale"? Are pie charts always the best way to represent amusement? And is any line from You Rang M'Lord? ever worth analysing for more than half an hour?
Tim and I were very well looked after and, outside the classrooms, we were royally entertained. I met great and diverse people and a few of the talks were genuinely fascinating. But after struggling to stay awake for a dozen sessions Tim and I both agreed to sneak off and explore the island instead. After a 10-year build-up, I did feel guilty missing talks such as "Did Hitler Have a Sense of Humour?" but I'd had my fill.
My own presentation had the opposite problem; the delegates laughed as much at my theories as my jokes. When I asked for feedback I was told I needed to do far more research and provide far more data if I really wanted to make a point. Pre-empting this criticism I revealed the news I was expecting another baby at Christmas, a playmate for my son and a control to confirm my previous hypothesis. Again, they chuckled and told me I'd need to examine at least 50 babies before my theories would be properly considered.
So the main thing I learnt in Hong Kong and Poland was that I am no academic. Despite the universal subject matter, they were specialist events, and despite my personal interest, I'm no expert. But I still have the itch. The laughter conferences and I have unfinished business; we are yet to do each other justice.
The next big international gathering takes place in Boston this July and I'm hoping to go again, as a bona fide practitioner this time, rather than a curious performer. So right now I'm knuckling down. I have work to do. And if anyone has a baby between six weeks and six months old, please get in touch. I'm serious this time. It's the only way.
"If I saw a mouse as big as a horse I'd die", says Greg Davies
"Sadly there isn't a formula for making an audience laugh, but if a comedian really believes what they are saying is funny and sells it accordingly, there is a pretty good chance an audience will agree. My family and friends make me laugh, as do animals that are traditionally small made huge. If I saw a mouse as big as a horse I'd die." Greg Davies is currently on a nationwide UK stand-up tour Firing Cheeseballs at a Dog (gregdavies.co.uk)
"Couples arguing in public is hilarious," says Shazia Mirza
"The truth makes an audience laugh. If you tell the truth about life in a funny way everyone will be able to relate to it. Even if you tell the truth simply about your own life, people will still laugh out of being able to relate to what you are saying and from shared experience. Audiences also laugh at silly things, and absurd things that are so ridiculous they must be made up. I once went through a woman's handbag on stage and found a bra with a computer mouse hanging from it. The audience laughed hysterically. It was absurd.
I laugh at people's stories about their life. Their sex life, their marriage, their divorce, their husband/boyfriend. I also laugh at other people's misfortune ? a woman running for a bus and missing it would make me laugh out loud, I'm afraid. Couples arguing in public I find hilarious. Things I'm not supposed to laugh at like war, death, famine, I find funny." shazia-mirza.com
"I like black comedy and anti stand-ups," says Tim Minchin
"Audiences laugh when someone delivers their own experiences back to them in a package that is familiar, but odd or shocking. The type of experiences you address changes what audience you get coming to your gigs. Someone like Michael McIntyre is brilliant at comically mirroring experiences that the majority of people can relate to, so his audience is massive. Someone like Stewart Lee (a very different genius) talks about ideas that many people might not have considered.
I'm somewhere in between, and I have a piano and rhymes on my side. I also like black comedy. I like anti stand-ups. I like the elegant, uncompromising expression of ideas that are not commonly seen as comic. I also like complete stupidity."timminchin.com
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/apr/24/laughter-humour-science
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