Some weeks back, an invitation arrived to address a group of journalism students at a prestigious Midwestern university whose name will not be mentioned, but its initials are SIU-C. The assignment was to talk about opinion writing in its many forms and, oh yeah, their teacher said, “Some of the kids want to know how to write funny.”
Hoo-boy, that was a tough one. The truest thing ever written about writing funny was said by the great E.B. White of The New Yorker: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”
In the course of researching this topic, I discovered something startling: There is now, and apparently has been for several decades, a serious academic discipline devoted to studying humor. Almost nothing about it is funny.
At newyorker.com was a review by technology journalist Shane Snow of the book “The Humor Code,” by Peter McGraw and Joel Warner. It was released on April Fools’ Day.
McGraw is an associate professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado and director of the Humor Research Lab (HuRL), “dedicated to the scientific study of humor, its antecedents, and its consequences.” Warner is a freelance journalist who thought there might be a book in traveling around the world with a guy who’s trying to understand humor.
There are some laughs in the book, which begins with McGraw bombing at a Denver comedy club when he goes on stage to try his hand. When he comes off the stage, the emcee says, “I thought you were going to talk about your humor theory. He has this theory, see … well, who cares. Obviously it’s WRONG.”
McGraw’s “benign violation theory” of humor is adapted from a 1998 article in “Humor: the International Journal of Humor Research” by Thomas Veatch, who was then teaching at Stanford University. Veatch’s idea was that when something seems wrong or unsettling, but it is actually benign, humor is the result.
McGraw refined this into the “benign violation theory.” This explains the Three Stooges: Moe pokes Curly and Larry in the eyes. That seems wrong, but it doesn’t hurt them, so it’s benign.
It might explain Jerry Seinfeld’s act, pointing out absurd violations in the benignity of everyday life. For instance, talking socks acting like inmates making a break for it from the laundromat.
McGraw saw his theory as advancing humor studies from the “Superiority Theory,” which suggests that humor comes from others’ misfortunes, or “Relief Theory,” Freud’s idea that humor gives release from our suppressed inner desires, or the always popular “Incongruity Theory,” which holds that humor happens when our expectations are surprised.
There are several competing academic organizations for humor studies. In a publish-or-perish environment, scholars go at these ideas in a deadly serious way. Which is, if you think about it, pretty funny.
There is the “General Theory of Verbal Humor,” developed in 1991 by Victor Raskin of Purdue University and his student, Salvatore Attardo (more about him shortly). Raskin explained it to Snow like this: “The idea is that every joke is based on a juxtaposition of two scripts. The punch line triggers the switch from one script to the other. It is a universal theory.”
And then there is Veatch’s own refinement of violation theory which he calls “affective absurdity.” It can be expressed in a Venn diagram (intersecting circles). In the “V” circle, a guy sees something as a Violation of the way he thinks it should be. In the “N” circle, a guy sees the same something as Normal. Where N and V intersect is humor. Eureka.
Consider the famous talking dog joke. A guy is passing a farm house and sees a sign reading “Talking Dog for Sale.” He gets out of the car and talks to the dog, which tells him about his great adventures as a spy for the CIA. The guy finds the dog’s owner and asks him why he’s selling a dog that tells such great stories. “Because he’s a damn liar,” the farmer says. “He never did any of that stuff.”
See, the first guy’s V is overlapping the farmer’s N, which is why you are laughing uproariously.
I didn’t tell all of this to the students at SIU-C because I was already boring enough. I didn’t even give them E.B. White’s line about dissecting a frog because White died in 1985, well before they were born, and I would have been surprised if any of them had ever heard of him, much less read him, not even “Charlotte’s Web.” If you want to write well and funny, you could do worse than to look up his stuff and try to absorb it.
I did tell them that the aforementioned Salvatore Attardo, now at Texas AM-Commerce, had recently published a two-volume “Encyclopedia of Humor Studies.” It is 984 pages long and sells for $350. That I find hilarious.