The secret to humor is hidden in the chicken joke

Humor isn’t mean. Humor isn’t anything. It’s just a sensation our brains get when we surprise it in a particular way. Let’s break it down by starting with what I think is the fundamental joke of American society:

Q. Why did the chicken cross the road?

A. To get to the other side!

Now, that’s funny.

Odds are, you’re reading this and you don’t think it’s funny. Not true. It’s funny. You aren’t experiencing the mental reflex of humor because you’re so familiar with it, but it is funny. In fact, The Chicken Joke is really the ur-joke. It’s the fundamental joke. It’s just that you were probably so young when you first heard it that you didn’t really get it and by the time you were old enough to get it you’d heard it or its variations so many times that you thought it was stupid [There used to be a link here to a blog post at ‘Hey Guess What,’ but the post is gone, as is the site].

But, I not only think that the Chicken Joke is funny, I think it’s ingenious. Here’s the deal: humor is a pleasurable mental sensation we experience when something leads us to expect one thing (the set-up of a joke) and then gives us something else surprising (the punchline). The more surprising the punchline the funnier it is. The Chicken Joke is ingenious because it leads you to believe that there is a story behind the chicken crossing the road, but it turns out that the answer is the one that should have been the first to come to mind. Because, in fact, you didn’t think of that answer, you find it funny.

Or, you would, if you heard it for the first time today.

Take another classic joke, the Henny Youngman one-liner: “Take my wife, please.”

Youngman makes you think he’s going to use the classic stand up set-up for a whole story: “Take my [whatever],” but instead he gives the sentence a whole new meaning by ending it with just one surprising word: “please.” It’s even funnier because you’re supposed to love your wife, not want to get rid of her. It’s funnier still because so many people know that even though that’s how it’s supposed to be, it often isn’t. It implies a thousand other jokes. In this way, those four words, in that order, with that pause, hit us on a lot of levels.

I was thinking about this today as I thought about different humorous projects that I have been involved with that have offended people in one way or another. There’s no question, my sense of humor can be pretty rough and I can poke fun in ways that people can take pretty personally. What I thought about it though, is this: people are only offended by jokes that reference some personal pain in their life. So, for example, if I made a joke about Fergie pissing her pants onstage, someone who actually has pissed her pants in public would be reminded of that moment and feel hurt. She’d feel like the people laughing at Fergie are also laughing at her for doing it, or that they would have laughed had they been there.

The trouble is that if every humorist shied from making a joke about anything someone else might take personally, we wouldn’t have many jokes at all. I don’t think that would create a happy world, but I think the notion that we should be more sensitive with our humor and be careful about not reminding people of past humiliations stems from a conflation of laughter and humor.

Laughter and humor are not always paired. We laugh for all kinds of reasons. We laugh as a form of welcome. We laugh to ease tension. We laugh to express affection without touching. We laugh to ease or signal nervousness. We laugh out of joy. More often than not, though, laughter is used by one person to tell another person “it’s okay, keep going, I’m with you.” In those cases, the laughter doesn’t stem from any experience of humor, though. It’s a gesture.

I think maybe the confusion about what laughter means also stems from the fact that we experience a mental pleasure when we do laugh out of humor. What I call “true laughter.” I’d argue that any of the social forms of laughter, above, don’t yield pleasure. At least, they don’t for me. Maybe that’s why I hardly ever laugh for any reason other than humor? I only feel pleasure from laughter when it’s the physical expression of humor’s surprises.

That said, even though laughter is pleasurable, I don’t think it means that the person necessarily enjoys whatever embarrassment the humor might cause someone. Look, it’s funny that Fergie pissed her pants. Why? Because we don’t expect big stars to lose control like that. It’s surprising. That said, if I met Fergie tomorrow would I call her a big loser for pissing her pants? If a friend pissed his pants, would I try to point it out to everyone? No. It’s not about that. It’s not about looking down on anyone. Humor is only about itself.

Humor, I’d contend, is value-neutral. It’s a quirk of the human brain. A reflex that happens to feel good when it hits.

When I saw Christian Bale in American Psycho take an axe to Jared Leto while talking through the pro’s and con’s of the musical career of a post-Genesis Phil Collins, I laughed out loud. I laughed because the context for the axe murder was so outrageous and laughed because it came so unexpectedly. I was the only person that laughed, but that doesn’t mean others didn’t experience the twisted humor of the moment deep down.

The truth is, it was a silly moment in a silly movie, and laughing doesn’t mean I condone murder. I laughed because the murder was so absurd and screen writer Mary Harron dramatized its absurdity so well.

It’s not the only time I’ve ever laughed “inappropriately,” and I am writing this just because I want to create a little tension around the whole notion of appropriate laughter. To call it inappropriate suggests that you are saying something with your laughter that I don’t think you are actually saying, and just because I see humor in something and you don’t doesn’t denigrate your emotional response to the same thing anymore than your failure to laugh denigrates my sense of humor.

To me, the more we associate laughter with some sort of moral judgement or valuation, the more we stifle wit. And to what good end? Humor is just a reflex and true laughter is how it manifests physically. More than that, it is the reflexive reaction to the works of a clever mind.

As a listener, the more of the world you know about, the more jokes you are going to be able to get. One could argue, then, that the pleasure of humor is the mind’s reward for learning. So why suppress it?