What Makes Us Laugh?

A limited look at comedy as a critique of reason

What makes us laugh? What is it?

Sure, we all know that when something is funny we involuntary make baby noises, liquid spews from our noses, and we slap our dang knees. What the heck is going on there, though? Why are we doing that?

First of all, let me say that I’m just a person who performs and teaches comedy and thinks about this a lot. There’s no psychology or science to back this up; it is just what I’ve come to after years of studying the subject via teaching and performing.

I made this medium account in large part to write about comedy’s relationship with reason, and this is my way of introducing that concept.

Perhaps someone reading this has a point of view that would lend me a broader perspective. But for now, after researching this and lots of thought, this is where I’m at.

If you take issue with what you read here, please feel free to reach out or comment somewhere and say so. I’d love to have someone to talk with about this.

I am not looking into why humans laugh or how that came to be from an evolutionary perspective. Laughter is a communication tool, and it is largely a social phenomenon. I continue with that as truth. If you want more on why we laugh, check out THIS article.

My aim is more to posit a position on what incites laughter here in our modern world. THIS article takes a look at what I’m getting at, and in my opinion, does a pretty good job but doesn’t quite pin the blame where I think it should.

Essentially, forget about the data. This is an exploration.

Alright, y’all, let’s take it back to like 400 BC.

Socrates and Plato do a series of dialogues where they try to get to the bottom of dang near everything. They break down art, thought, morality, consciousness, etc., into hierarchies and systems and try to see how these things work together. They do this for the purpose of arriving at some fundamental truths. This work establishes the basis for modern philosophy: ancient philosophy.

These dialogues lay down the groundwork for Aristotle to organize everything even more. Aristotle says humans are rational animals and reason is what separates us from beasts, then he places reason as the highest order of things, right above truth. This is what I might call “the original goof.”

Aristotle uses reason to create hierarchies to help people understand art, writing, politics, rhetoric, physics, outer space, ethics, and more.

Then, Aristotle sits Alexander the Great down and tells him about how to think about things for seven years. Alexander is born to build empires.

Alexander does just that. He picks up a sword and goes and starts a huge one. Three hundred years later, Rome is built on top of Alexander’s Empire. Aristotle’s theories about reason become the foundation for the society all other western societies will be built on.

Law and democracy are built on Aristotle’s reason. These rules shape society, society shapes culture, and soon, culture shapes human life. How we think, make choices, and survive all get put through the lens of a society built on Aristotle’s reason.

Ok, forget about days of yore, now. Let’s get away from this incredibly reductive recap of western history and get back to talking about funnies.

So what does this have to do with laughter? It is this very establishment we are subconsciously critiquing each time bust a sweet, sweet gut.

Society, as it is, built on reason, works for folks. It helps people learn, collect the species’ knowledge, build upon it, and move forward. It helps create systems for reading and writing or telling time. Without breaking language down into digestible bits, it would be almost impossible to teach a whole generation to read. Unless a game like chess can be broken down into strategies and potential moves, it’s virtually impossible to know what to do next. Reason helps us do things like create supply chains so we can build a whole bunch of dishwashers, then put together manuals on those dishwashers, so people can fix them when they break.

However, there are little examples of our society and its rules being totally broken, and that’s what laugher is critiquing. Every time we laugh, we are saying, “Wait a minute, that (behavior, thing, sentence structure, point of view, etc.) is totally out of whack with the guidelines of behavior agreed upon by society.” It is our way of coming to terms with recognizing the system we are living in is flawed.

Essentially, we sometimes recognize that a social norm or ethical premise has been violated. When we are not offended by the recognition of this violation, laughter is our way of distancing ourselves from the behavior while keeping the norm in tact comfortably.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say a character believes something. You can think of this as your justification, your set-up, a character’s “deal,” whatever. Let’s say a character believes, “Learning happens best when we simulate the real world and don’t soften the experience.” Essentially, “dive into the deep end.”

People think and behave this way; it’s a common perspective in our world, and people aren’t considered unusual for holding this stance. People may disagree with it, but no one is like, “Doug’s views are so out of touch with reason.” People never say that sentence at all.

Now let’s say that after establishing that real-world based point of view, your character says, “That’s why I honk and wave my fist at student drivers. It feels good to help people learn.” You can think of that as your unusual behavior, your punchline, or playing your game.

This character may believe the best way to learn about car maintenance is just to take their car apart and put it back together, or that you could just work at Subway with no days of training at all!

It’s a point of view we think is reasonable and doesn’t seem harmful, but it’s being used to justify a behavior or belief that is basically considered totally not cool.

It’s outside of reason but within logic.

I could use the rest of the article to discuss every kind of joke and give examples of how each is a critique of reason, and maybe I’ll do that sometime, but you don’t want to read that, nor do you need to.

Think of one of the great archetypes of second-rate stand-up. “What’s the deal with airplane food?” People use this phrase to make fun of stand-up comedy, so it must point out something about what stand-up comics do.

Let’s break it down.

Airplane food is the perfect example of lousy comedy because it is so obviously out of touch with what it is supposed to be. No one is learning anything by having this discrepancy pointed out.

Airplane food is expensive, and there is fanfare surrounding its arrival, but it’s gross. It’s always gross. Therefore, it breaks the social construct surrounding it and its purpose.

Sure, it’s all true about how whack airplane food is; it’s a big dumb thing. But, who cares? Well, that’s why this airplane food thing isn’t funny, and people use it to make fun of stand-up. It’s too obvious.

My point is that airplane food is clearly in violation of the social norms that surround it. Because of this incongruence, it has become a landmark of self-evident comedic material.

We laugh when we know something is broken in a subtle way we can’t describe, then what is broken about that thing or system is defined for us with pinpoint accuracy. In improv, we use the term “labeling” to describe this. And we laugh more when the thing matters to us.

Think of a joke as lightning. A joke connects a dormant feeling to the broken piece of society that created said feeling, the way lightning connects negative and positive particles in the air. The particles were there, reaching out to each other, but the lightning connected them.

The laughter, in this case, is the thunder. When the joke bridges that gap in our heads, those two things collide like air particles being reintroduced with a new electric charge. The recognition of this new connection creates laughter.

I don’t actually know shit about how white matter affects pathways in the brain or how new neural pathways are made. I’m just trying to create a visual to describe a feeling.

If you want to extend my bad lightning metaphor further, you can think of comedians as doofy little Ben Franklins with keys of perception attached to kites representing their ego. FUN!

In 1922 Professor Wilson D. Wallis wrote an essay on why we laugh. The essay generally supports my argument. Though Wallis, and perhaps even you, dear reader, may have a rebuttal. My guess is Wallis’s rebuttal would be something like, “Rather than pointing out a flaw in the structure of society, why not say that these things eliciting laughter are a way of reinforcing what behavior should be?”

Wallis would probably point out that laughter, as I describe it, could be used as a gentle nudge to indicate to someone that their behavior is outside the norm or “group standard,” as he puts it.

I offer two opinions on this. The first is that I agree; it does act that way sometimes. Sometimes we laugh, and it’s slightly derisive. It feels like it’s an excellent way to say, “You made a goof, and we all noticed it, but no biggie, we aren’t taking things that seriously, and your sense of self should remain intact.” It’s the kinder version of, “I can’t believe you did that, how stupid!”

But to my point, this laughter comes from a point of view grounded in social norms, and this rebuttal confirms that point.

The second is that this constant deviation of behavior might tell us something about the “group standard,” or generally accepted rules of society. Are these rules as helpful as we think if everyone can empathize with breaking them so easily? Perhaps we should focus more on accepting our fellow humans’ desired behaviors — when they are neither destructive nor harmful — than reinforcing a structure.

I find that Wallis’s point of view is also basically useless to folks looking to make up funnies. It somehow creates this idea that the voice of reason is the protagonist in comedy scenes, that they are the ones who are right.

I don’t know about you, but my favorite comedy scenes are the ones where I’m rooting for the goofball and their way of thinking at least a little.

Great comedy characters often behave in a way that directly defies reason, but with a justification that’s understandable, empathetic, or relatable. The fact that this behavior doesn’t fit into our system of reason, but remains reasonable, makes us laugh; and points out a flaw.

If you’re a StarTrek fan, you can probably think of a couple of dozen times when Spok or Data pointed out something about how humans behave in a way that defies reason to a human crew member. That’s how that show wrote those character’s jokes.

It’s also helpful if the comedic character doesn’t have harmful intentions. People who aim to hurt others purposefully aren’t funny because we already know people like that are living outside our established system of reason.

We looked to reason while building societies because it was a convenient way to create a structure that would minimize pain. No matter what you think about the ruling class, each time democracy has begun anew from the ashes of revolution the intention has been to minimize suffering among those being represented. This supports harmful intentions inherently clashing with the system in a way that is not humorous. We don’t need lightning to connect that feeling with where it came from. We know why people who do bad things on purpose don’t fit into society.

For instance, The Office’s Michael Scott is so funny, despite hurting people’s feelings and being insensitive, because he just wants people to love him. He does things that seem ridiculous and reasonless, but then we recognize that we can understand where he is coming from, and we laugh and think, “Ahh, a fellow goofball who does things wrong sometimes, just like me.”

That “Just like me” is very important. We have to feel like we could make the mistakes we see in comedy, or it’s not funny. We may know we wouldn’t take our gaffe to the extent a comedy character does. But those big goofs, and the logic behind them, represent little goofs we make all the time.

In other words, a character’s foray outside of the structure of reason must remain logical and even seem reasonable. Oh boy!

The largest flaw of reason, and the one that comedians play with most, is the implication that reason, when applied properly, can break anything into an easily digestible hierarchy.

Human perspective, however, is not objective. People misread things. Therefore, the idea of adequately applying reason to anything is a bit of a stretch for most everybody.

Someone with good intentions doing things wrong over and over, despite following the steps they think they are supposed to, points out this significant flaw in reason, which is basically not a flaw in reason, but a flaw in humans. This is, therefore, a flaw in Aristotle’s faith in reason. People don’t have the perspective to follow reason perfectly all the time.

We, humans, are prone to getting tired, drunk, falling in love, wanting something we shouldn’t, and wanting it a lot. These things aren’t reasonable. That is why it’s endlessly funny to watch people succumb to them.

Systems of power supported by reason are also very easy to make comedy from. The simplest example of this is physical comedy. Every time someone falls, it breaks the illusion that standing up is more than just a cheap trick. We take a mighty human standing tall with the wind of reason at their back and watch them fall foolishly into beasthood all in milliseconds. Potty humor is pretty much the same formula.

Ceremony and mechanism lend themselves to parody because we can point out how they are farces. These things are generally nonsense held together by enforced social structure; comedy just highlights the nonsense.

Reflexive and compulsive behavior, repetition, and duplication point out how not in control we really are. These things show that no matter how much we want to control and create systems based on logic and reason, we are still animals controlled by impulse.

A disproportion of reaction is a step out of the accepted range of behaviors, something we all do from time to time. Any improviser will tell you one of the first lessons they learned is that reacting to anything too much or not enough will infuse comedy into the scene.

Excretion, like getting Nickelodeon slime dumped on you from above or ejaculation like the zit scene from Animal House, both point out how easily an outside force or nature can exert control over us.

Lastly, there’s pain. Pain is a domain reason cannot enter. Batman can find reason while in great pain, and that is basically considered a superpower. Most of us wail around and flail our goofy little bodies because we can’t find the reason to help ourselves out of pain. Pain, and our reaction to it, can be endlessly funny for that reason.

Aristotle laid down the foundations for all Western civilization. However, most of his critics agree he did not leave enough room for the human element or the failings of perception in his writings. This has made Aristotle the most laughed at man in history.

Folks absolutely laughed before Aristotle. Any time there has been an agreed-upon normative behavior or “group standard,” there has been laughter. And as I mentioned before, there is a lot of research to suggest that laughter has an essential evolutionary role in social grooming and mating.

I posit that because something being funny requires prior knowledge and the questioning of our understandings, the things we are laughing at result from mistakes made in society’s creation. In my opinion, the largest of those mistakes is the over-importance given to reason and structure.

Therefore, generally, when we laugh, we are critiquing reason.