slimvictor
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Depends on if you're drunk.
A few years ago, two researchers invited a dozen folks from an ad firm out for drinks at the Hurricane Club in New York. But this wasn’t a social call. It was an experiment in the relationship between drinking and humor.
The researchers were Joel Warner and Peter McGraw, a journalist and an academic, respectively, and the co-authors of The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny (in bookstores April 1, naturally). The test subjects were members of the award-winning creative team from Grey New York, the firm behind E*Trade’s talking-baby ads. McGraw, an associate professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado, explained to me the thinking behind the experiment: “We thought we’d take some people who were funny and see if we could make them funnier.”
The instructions to the subjects were straightforward: Come up with a gag. Have a drink. Repeat. After each round, the subjects were asked to rate their drunkenness on a seven-point scale ranging from “sober” to “shit-faced.” (McGraw admits that his study “will never make its way into a peer-reviewed journal.”) They were also asked to rate their own jokes, on a scale of “slightly amusing” to “hilarious.” The jokes were later judged independently by a sober online panel.
The experiment was designed in part to test McGraw’s “benign violation” theory of humor, one in a long line of attempts to offer a universal explanation of what circumstances make us laugh. McGraw theorizes that humor arises when something “wrong, unsettling, or threatening” overlaps with a safe, nonthreatening context. So somebody falling down the stairs (violation) is funny, but only if the person lands unhurt (benign). Slapping is funny; stabbing is not. A faux-clueless Sarah Silverman saying racist things is funny; a drunk and hostile Mel Gibson is not. Each gag the Grey New York folks created was to take the form of a Venn diagram illustrating benign violation. Among the early contributions were two circles labeled “Grandpa” and “Erection,” the overlap of which was deemed “funny.”
McGraw is not the first academic to look into the relationship between humor and inebriation. In a study published in 1985, a group of researchers at Indiana University assembled three dozen male students and gave each a strong, weak, or nonalcoholic drink. (While waiting for the alcohol to kick in, the subjects were, inexplicably, shown videos of “light popular music performed by groups such as Tony Orlando and Dawn.”) All then watched comedy clips that involved both blunt humor—a Harvey Korman and Tim Conway skit involving an elderly pediatrician, a monkey mask, and confusion over oral and rectal temperature-taking—and more-nuanced material, such as George Carlin reading fake news headlines: “Football Player Dies in Sudden-Death Overtime,” and “Boomerangs Are Coming Back.”
Respondents rated the humor of what they were watching, and were also videotaped so their reactions could be analyzed. The study concluded that “subjects in high-intoxication condition judged the blunt humor to be substantially funnier than did the subjects in the other conditions.”
McGraw’s work has put a new twist on this. He posits that drinking skews our interpretation of violation, so humor has to become more threatening in order to register as funny. “You have to be broader,” Warner explains.
cont at
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...-into-a-bar/358629/?google_editors_picks=true
A few years ago, two researchers invited a dozen folks from an ad firm out for drinks at the Hurricane Club in New York. But this wasn’t a social call. It was an experiment in the relationship between drinking and humor.
The researchers were Joel Warner and Peter McGraw, a journalist and an academic, respectively, and the co-authors of The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny (in bookstores April 1, naturally). The test subjects were members of the award-winning creative team from Grey New York, the firm behind E*Trade’s talking-baby ads. McGraw, an associate professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado, explained to me the thinking behind the experiment: “We thought we’d take some people who were funny and see if we could make them funnier.”
The instructions to the subjects were straightforward: Come up with a gag. Have a drink. Repeat. After each round, the subjects were asked to rate their drunkenness on a seven-point scale ranging from “sober” to “shit-faced.” (McGraw admits that his study “will never make its way into a peer-reviewed journal.”) They were also asked to rate their own jokes, on a scale of “slightly amusing” to “hilarious.” The jokes were later judged independently by a sober online panel.
The experiment was designed in part to test McGraw’s “benign violation” theory of humor, one in a long line of attempts to offer a universal explanation of what circumstances make us laugh. McGraw theorizes that humor arises when something “wrong, unsettling, or threatening” overlaps with a safe, nonthreatening context. So somebody falling down the stairs (violation) is funny, but only if the person lands unhurt (benign). Slapping is funny; stabbing is not. A faux-clueless Sarah Silverman saying racist things is funny; a drunk and hostile Mel Gibson is not. Each gag the Grey New York folks created was to take the form of a Venn diagram illustrating benign violation. Among the early contributions were two circles labeled “Grandpa” and “Erection,” the overlap of which was deemed “funny.”
McGraw is not the first academic to look into the relationship between humor and inebriation. In a study published in 1985, a group of researchers at Indiana University assembled three dozen male students and gave each a strong, weak, or nonalcoholic drink. (While waiting for the alcohol to kick in, the subjects were, inexplicably, shown videos of “light popular music performed by groups such as Tony Orlando and Dawn.”) All then watched comedy clips that involved both blunt humor—a Harvey Korman and Tim Conway skit involving an elderly pediatrician, a monkey mask, and confusion over oral and rectal temperature-taking—and more-nuanced material, such as George Carlin reading fake news headlines: “Football Player Dies in Sudden-Death Overtime,” and “Boomerangs Are Coming Back.”
Respondents rated the humor of what they were watching, and were also videotaped so their reactions could be analyzed. The study concluded that “subjects in high-intoxication condition judged the blunt humor to be substantially funnier than did the subjects in the other conditions.”
McGraw’s work has put a new twist on this. He posits that drinking skews our interpretation of violation, so humor has to become more threatening in order to register as funny. “You have to be broader,” Warner explains.
cont at
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...-into-a-bar/358629/?google_editors_picks=true
