Peter McGraw, Humor Speaker, The Science of Humor

So I spent the last six years studying comedy and the first thing I learned is that it's important to make people laugh right away, so I apologize. Actually, let's start with a quiz. This is probably not something you anticipated but I'm a nerd I'm an academic but this is the best kind of quiz this is the kind of quiz that doesn't have right or wrong answers I just want to know if you think the following things are funny so The first one I'm going to read along with is actually a letter from Brooke, a six year old girl, to her mother and she says thank you very much for being my mother.

If he had a different mother, she would punch him in the face and go find you, love. Brooke, okay, people like that one, so this one is more visual and I just want you to use your imagination since you think it might be difficult for the people in the back, but this gentleman jumped off a balcony into a group. of air mattresses, so it might be too early for that one, this one, that this will be on Friday night, right, that's the one on Friday night and then finally, the best pick up line of all time , okay, so Brooke wins, Brooke wins, okay, let's go.

Let's come back to this after we've talked about what makes things fun and we'll deconstruct why they were fun why they weren't fun for each of you just a quick note I probably don't have to point this out to this group, but understanding what makes things funny is actually a really important question and the reason is that

humor

has been implicated in a wide variety of things, so it helps people cope with pain, stress and adversity. a fun mood enhances our creativity, broadens our perspective, helps us solve problems and then it's very important in terms of social interactions, so people who are fun or liked a lot, brands who are fun or liked a lot, they can help us navigate the normal. stresses and tensions that arise from being human when interacting with people who are different from us, who have different opinions, etc., when I came across this question of what makes things, what makes them fun.

In fact, I was giving a talk at Tulane. University I was giving a talk about what makes things wrong. I had been studying moral violations and I gave an example of a moral violation and the audience laughed. Someone raised their hand in the back and said, Pete, you say that moral violations cause anger and disgust. and still we laughed, expressed positive emotions, why and I stayed there. I was totally flabbergasted by this and said, I don't know, and at that point I had been studying emotions and decision making for over 10 years. I never considered the question.

I had never written an article about it. I didn't know anything about this very important topic, so I went back to Colorado and did something I'm not very proud of. I did something that my students do when I give them. I searched for an assignment on Google and this is what appears if you search on Google for what makes things fun and what I realized since then is that I'm actually studying the wrong thing. I should be studying what makes things spooky because people seem to care more about that and I'll let the real scientist figure out what makes things glow in the dark because that seems like a harder question.

The first thing I realized was that people much smarter than me have been trying to crack the code of

humor

, which is why Plato and Aristotle wrote about this 2,500 years ago Immanuel Kant Sigmund Freud Thomas Hobbes have all reflected on this topic, which the only thing they didn't have going for them. It was

science

, they didn't have the ability to do experiments and look at this from a scientific point of view and that led me to launch the Humor Research Laboratory which we affectionately refer to as hurl to do this and then what started What happened was that I started looking very broadly in philosophy, ethology, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, etc., looking for clues about what makes things fun and one of the best clues is to find a parallel case of this experience in animals , in the same way. that nonhuman primates, rats, and humans can all experience fear or anger.

I wanted to try to find out if there's something that runs through all of those species that is similar to humor and I'll show you a video in this video when I saw I was just surprised that there's evidence that rats laugh and I'll argue that they laugh at the same things we do. we laugh at least in the same kind of conditions, so here we go, these animals would start enjoying our company. and they would start playing with our hands and wherever we put our hands they would follow and when we tested these animals to ask them if they enjoyed this type of activity, the unequivocal answer was yes.