What's so funny?
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I'm so not fun. I'm a Virgo. So please let me destroy everything you love and make it analytical. Ali Volpe is a senior reporter at Vox, and recently she set out to destroy comedy.

I'm taking this thing that is somewhat like sexy and mysterious, you know, like everybody wants to date somebody funny or be around funny people. Allie loves comedy, but she wanted to understand how it works. Can it be analyzed scientifically? Is there anyone who actually studies humor? We've been able to make a career out of it. It probably is the most surprising thing. So Allie found Peter McGraw. He's a behavioral economist at the University of Colorado, where he also runs the Humor Research Lab.

It's where they get serious about being funny. So if this makes the podcast, people are going to be listening and be like, this is not funny at all. The Humor Lab started with a surprising discovery.

Over a decade ago, Peter was studying something called moral violations. Which are like victimless yet offensive actions. An example of such victimless yet offensive action is eating one's dead pet. The pet is already dead and there's, you know, no victims here. That would be considered a moral violation. Like it's sort of, it's weird, but it doesn't hurt anybody.

Moral violations are things that are supposed to provoke anger or disgust, ewes and yucks. But when Peter gave lectures about them, people would keep bursting out laughing, and he didn't know why. He couldn't stop thinking about it. He was just like, this is a great question.

Why are we laughing at this? So Peter teamed up with a grad student named Caleb. I was excited about it right away when we thought it was just a project on moral violations. I mean, the moral violation studies are just winners. I mean... Those are fun. And they started trying to figure out what makes moral violations funny. But in the process, their question got way, way bigger.

I'm Manning Wint, and this week on Unexplainable, can science help us figure out what makes something funny?

When Allie started down this rabbit hole, she came across a few old ideas, more from philosophy than science. There were three main theories of humor about why we find things funny. The superiority theory, the relief theory, and the incongruity theory. Superiority theory goes all the way back to Aristotle and Plato. The idea is that we find something funny when we feel superior to someone else. Like laughing at a person who trips and falls riding an escalator. You think...

I wouldn't have tripped. On the other hand, relief theory was a favorite of Freud's. The idea is that we laugh to release tension or nervous energy, like when you can't help but giggle in an uncomfortable situation. I'm not uncomfortable. I just keep thinking of funny things. The last theory Allie found was incongruity theory.

And here we've got some famous philosophers like Kant and Kierkegaard. So incongruity theory is when something betrays our expectations. Like we think a joke is going one way, but then the punchline sort of changes it. Allie thought that all of these theories were interesting, but none of them were perfect. Each one doesn't explain the whole humor experience. Caleb and Peter, the researchers from the humor lab, they weren't satisfied with these explanations either.

Take incongruity theory. The idea that surprise or subverting expectations alone is enough to make something funny. I remember one of the reasons we started doing this is like, this is such a dumb theory of humor. It's such a lazy theory. If I run you over with my car, you're going to be surprised. You're not going to be laughing.

The 10th time I saw the big Lebowski, I knew exactly what was coming, but I was laughing. So it's, you know, you can be amused without surprise and you can be surprised without being amused. Yet this is what people were saying was the reason people are laughing. Kott and Kierkegaard weren't giving them the answers. So Peter and Caleb thought maybe we could come up with something better. The problem with humor research in general is that it has its roots in philosophy and

And so there's this tendency to make arguments using examples and thought experiments. So they tried to do some real experiments. Caleb created my favorite study that we ever ran. The jelly bean or the Skittles one? The Skittles study, yes. The Skittles study goes like this. Participants go into a room to fill out a survey. There's a table and a bowl of Skittles, and there's an actor posing as a research assistant.

And the goal of the study is to figure out the funniest way the actor can offer the bowl of Skittles. They ran this test in lots of different ways. But in the first condition, the actor will say, I'm sorry to interrupt you. In a couple seconds, I'm supposed to offer you these Skittles. Would you like these Skittles? This isn't that funny.

But then, things get a little weird. In another group, the actor just flings the Skittles at them. Out of nowhere, they launch the bowl of Skittles, and only afterwards say, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I was told to launch the bowl of Skittles. This is surprising, but not that funny. It's a little messed up.

In the last group, though, the actor gives them some warning before it happens. They say, "I'm sorry to interrupt you, but in a few seconds I need to throw this bowl of Skittles at you." Then they launch the bowl of Skittles on the participant.

It's pretty funny. There was more laughter, certainly, in both of the throwing conditions, but there was a lot more laughter when the person was told the Skittles were going to be thrown at them first. Under incongruity theory, people should be more likely to laugh if there's surprise. But that's not the case here. People

People are more likely to laugh when it's not a surprise, when they're warned before it happens. That's because once you hear that and the Skittles get thrown at them, you know it's part of the study. You're prepared. You're prepared. The point of this was to show that it's not about surprise, and surprise in some cases actually hurts. So if it's not surprise that's making people laugh when Skittles are being thrown at them, what is it?

This is where Peter and Caleb's own theory comes in, what they call the benign violation theory. People experience humor, they laugh when something is wrong yet okay, something is threatening yet safe. Even though it's a threat, it's not a real threat, or it's not a problem for me, or it's not a big deal, and so...

Yeah, you need to have both benign and violation at the same time. It's why we laugh when a friend makes fun of us, when it doesn't actually feel mean and we feel secure about the relationship, or why we laugh when someone farts in public.

And with the Skittles study, people laugh the most when they get a heads up that Skittles are going to be thrown at them. It makes it more benign. Whereas when the Skittles are thrown at you out of nowhere, like you're like, what is going on? Why is this person being such a jerk? It's when you're warned that people are laughing more because that makes it seem more benign.

And this theory starts to make more sense when you look at how humor and laughter may have evolved in the first place. There's pretty good evidence that laughter is a form of communication. It happens far more with other species and humans in the presence of others. And it predates language. So then the question becomes, well, what does it communicate? If it's before language...

it must communicate something really important. Some animals make specific sounds when they play, like rats make these ultrasonic squeals when they're being tickled, and even dogs have specific barks when they're play fighting. But other than primates, animals don't really laugh like we do.

Our laughter? It might have evolved from some of these sounds animals make during play, a sign that the situation was safe. Social norms, language, logic, all these things that humans created, identity. Once we have those things as humans, now there are different ways we can be threatened. And if you can be threatened, something can also signal, well, not a big deal. So according to Peter and Caleb's benign violation theory, humor is a tool for us to learn social norms and culture.

It's a way to communicate the difference between a perceived threat and a real one. Laughter tells us, oh, this thing, it's not really going to hurt us. Learning the social world is really difficult. And one of the values of humor is it gives us clues as to what's seen as wrong, what's seen as okay, sometimes both at the same time. And these social norms are subjective.

They change between cultures. Know your audience, know their culture, because you need to know both what's going to threaten them, but also what they're going to be okay with. Humor can like teach you sort of how to be a person and how to move about the world. Unfortunately for Allie, learning about what makes things funny from the scientists, it hasn't made her funnier. Absolutely not. No. When it comes to being funny, science might only take us so far.

Peter and Caleb's theory can tell us what laughter might mean, what it might communicate. It can tell us about what things in the world we think are benign or won't hurt us. But their theory isn't perfect. An abstract theory doesn't give us the complete picture of humor either. The thing that I kept coming back to throughout the whole reporting process is that whole analysis of it sort of takes the magic out of it.

And like a lot of stand-ups, they like workshop their material a lot in front of audiences to see what they laugh at. And I think like that to me is very scientific, but it requires sort of like the magic of it. Whereas just reading a bunch of studies is a little bit less magical. After the break, we try to capture the magic of being funny by going straight to the magicians. Support for Unexplainable comes from Greenlight.

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This is Kara Swisher, host of the podcast On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. It has been a week in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. I've been zipping around the convention hall, including getting my PivotPod co-host, Scott Galloway, out of Secret Service prison. But I also talked to a bunch of very sharp folks. And of course, I wrangled some of the smartest ones for both podcasts while I was at it.

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So if none of the theories we talked about can fully explain what makes us laugh and knowing them doesn't make us any funnier, I started thinking that maybe humor just can't be broken down into a formula. But before I gave up, I wanted to check with a few comedians themselves. Girl, science, where have you been? Like, we've been just flailing around, screaming in the streets. This is Atsuko Akatsuka. She's a stand-up comedian.

I think what makes something funny for me is when something's like rooted in truth and there's a sincerity and something also unexpected to go with it. I like silly things. I like because I like to misdirect in my standup. I have a joke about trying to help the environment. So I stopped wearing panties.

Dulcé Sloan is a correspondent on The Daily Show, and she agrees. Surprise is pretty funny. Knowing what to expect from something gives us a certain amount of security. Josh Johnson, also from The Daily Show. And I think that when you disrupt that security, it's why a lot of times, like, horror and comedy come from the same places. But being funny might not be as simple as just being surprising or absurd or unexpected.

Comedian Chris Fleming basically admits that he has no idea how he writes his jokes. The way that people have described my process is a fugue state. I'll write in like five to ten minute bursts and my eyes will kind of go soft.

And I never remember the things that I write. Ultimately, humor might be less of an abstract formula and more of a dynamic relationship with the audience. When people talk about, like, the anatomy of comedy, we're always asked about writing jokes in our process. The audience is the other 50%.

And there's certain audiences where, you know, I have to go boom, boom. I have to. There's no deviation. I can't play with y'all. The body hasn't loosened. The mind hasn't loosened. They're listening, but they're not. It's like you're talking at them. And then there's other audiences where you can tell that they're fun and you can play with them. You can go somewhere wild and they'll come with you and they'll come right back and they'll go on this journey with you.

More than set up and punchline, being funny might be about creating a space, an environment that allows humor to emerge. I think it's putting people at ease enough to laugh and letting them know that I'm here to have a good time with them. I'm not trying to trap them.

we're all here to have fun is the most difficult thing because that's something that sort of goes beyond words, you know, because you can say that and people still might not feel it. So you have to think about every aspect of your performance, your word choice, all that stuff that creates that environment for you.

And some comedians make that environment by finding common ground. There's something comfortable about being familiar and then bringing a new idea when someone's already comfortable is when they're going to be the most receptive. And so it's the way that, you know, families can make each other laugh within a family, can make each other laugh in a way that other people can't. Because you have so much of a backstory with your family and so much shared history that, you know, there's something that

that happened that would take so much explaining and just so much background that it would kill whatever the joke is. And that's why I'm very physical in my comedy too, you know, because growing up I watched Lucille Ball, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, these people who didn't use words, but they were making me laugh as a Japanese kid, half Japanese, half Taiwanese kid who didn't speak English, but I could understand that.

Maybe the magic of comedy exists in a space between the audience and comedian. Something that's made new every time. It can either make your brain so sharp if the audience is with you or it can make your brain so bad if they're not with you. And you can be like admitting the crimes you haven't committed if they're not with you. Or if they're with you, it's such a free fall.

Just in the history of the world, comedy has always been what has kept people going, brought people back. And yeah, I always tend to find the levity in things because that just adds for more life. And so that's why I keep running back to it. I'm only ever stuck in life and sadness and anxiety when I'm living in those emotions. The thing that gets me out is...

the need to laugh and to make other people laugh. This episode was produced by Meredith Hodnot and me, Manning Nguyen, with reporting from Ali Volpe. There was editing from Brian Resnick and Catherine Wells. We also had mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, fact-checking from Zoe Mullick, and music from Noam Hassenfeld. Bird Pinkerton stood in shock. Welcome to the octopus hospital, said the doctor. Come this way and bring your octopus key.

And special thanks this week to Jesse David Fox for philosophizing about humor with us. If you have any thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please email us. We're at unexplainable at vox.com. We'd also love it if you left us a review or a rating. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're off next week, but we'll be back on April 5th.