Anatomy of a Joke: Or How to Change Misery to Mirth (article)

Jokes and humor are valued because they somehow convert human misery into laughter. In fact, Freud felt that humor was the highest of our defenses. Up until relatively recently, humor was not considered worthy of serious research attention. Why bother studying humor? It seems so light, airy, and frivolous. But upon closer inspection, one can find many examples of just how important hu-

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mor is to world politics and personal health.

If we turn our attention to presidential elections, we observe that President Kennedy, one of our most beloved presidents, had both charm and wit, while his opponent Richard Nixon was overly serious, awkward, and even dour. Kennedy won, and when Nixon finally did become president, the nation was more than happy to eventually throw him out. To be able to disarm, charm, and make others like you is a powerful political and social tool. Maybe the best at this was Ronald Reagan, who may not have had all the facts during his presidential debates, but he won both elections with landslide victories as he sidestepped criticisms with comments like “there you go again.” He was able to diffuse hostile attacks during the Iran-Contra investigations with his wit, charm, and boyish smile.

More proof of the immense power of humor came in 2005, when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a cartoon depicting Mohammed standing on a cloud holding back a long line of smoldering suicide bombers in front of heaven’s gate by shouting “Stop! Stop! We ran out of virgins!” This led to death threats to the cartoonist, the burning of a Danish embassy in Damascus in 2006, and worldwide outrage by the Muslim community.

Comedians have enormous power in Hollywood as well, and people who are funny are paid very well. Two of the highest paid actors are comedians: Ben Stiller makes about $34 million per film, and Adam Sandler earns $40 million per role—Brad Pitt only makes about half that amount. Funny is more profitable than pretty.

I obtained my doctorate at SUNY Stony Brook, where I met and got to know Leonard Krasner, one of the founders of behavior modification. He told me that humor ought to be one of the subtests on all IQ assessments and encouraged me to research this area. My dissertation was eventually titled “The Role of Empathic Arousal in Children’s Cartoon Appreciation” (1981). So when Paul Elovitz invited me to write a piece on the psychology of humor, I accepted with delight. I have been publishing a cartoon called Yin & Yang: Tales of Neurotic Golfers in Asian and American magazines for the last 15 years. I have also recently published my first

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book with the same name in Korea. I suppose I may be one of the nation’s only psychoanalysts who is also an established cartoonist. Now, if you have ever met me you will know that I am not even remotely funny. In fact, one of my more slow-witted cousins calls me “Dr. Deep in Thought.” I can take some comfort by recalling Abraham Maslow’s remark that fully actualized people are rather sober and on the serious side.

Freud was one of the first to research humor with his book Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). He suggested that humor allowed for the expression of thoughts that were socially unacceptable. His formulation of tendentious (containing sexual or aggressive elements) versus non-tendentious humor (more like word play) laid the foundation for much future humor research.

Much has been written about humor since Freud’s days. Even medicine has turned its attention to its effects. The findings suggest that watching a humorous film does relieve pain and that laughing or feeling amused does help the immune system, at least temporarily. The famous study by Norman Cousins (Anatomy of an Illness, 1979) helped to develop the idea that there are some health effects of humor. However, the inverse is also true. Findings suggest that especially funny kids have a greater chance of becoming obese, alcoholics, or smokers (Rod Martin, The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach, 2006). Witness the early death of John Belushi and Chris Farley. As research continues, we will learn more about the positive and negative components of humor and laughter as time goes on.

This paper focuses on the anatomy of a joke—on how the comic produces humor in the first place. I once did laughter research on the Mel Brooks’ film Young Frankenstein. To get an idea about the relationship of pain to humor, the funniest part in the film that regularly got the audience to laugh for over 30 seconds was the scene where the monster raped Madeline Kahn. You may remember it. She first twisted and turned in fear, but then broke into song at the end.

I recall in one of the post-grad classes I taught to social workers that one of my students had met Woody Allen, and I asked her to describe to the class what he was like. “Kind of depressed as

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I recall,” was all she said. I remember lunches with my friend, the writer and actor Spalding Gray, and his relating to me perhaps the funniest story I had ever heard. In fact, it was so funny that I had to stop drinking my soup because I had the real fear that I was about to drown if I kept drinking it as he told the story. It was the story of a film he was in where his character committed suicide. He was in makeup, and his wrists looked like they had just been slit and dripping blood. He thought it would be a funny idea to leave the set and go to a local drugstore. He did just that, and as he approached the druggist (who was an elderly woman), he raised his hands and asked, “Got any Band-Aids?” The poor woman almost passed out. About five years later, Spalding was found dead from suicide. He drowned himself, which takes us to the matter at hand. It is clear that underneath most joking is a very dark side.

How does a comic produce his jokes? Here is a joke for you right off the bat. “What’s funnier: getting poked in the eye with a pencil or submitting a paper to peer review?” You don’t even need a punch line for that one. The reason I came up with that so easily is because I have a growing fear that this essay on humor will be rejected by three vicious reviewers who will call this stuff rambling, preposterous, unsubstantial, or something worse. I take solace in Howard Stein’s comment that writing for Clio’s Psyche reviewers is tougher than writing for the Times. My dissertation adviser Herb Kaye had a saying on his office wall. It read: “Peer review transcends the entire intellectual world.” I didn’t understand what that meant until I submitted my dissertation to publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. I have learned to take solace in the words of Michael Ledeen, who wrote Tocqueville on American Character (2001). He remarked that American academics are so incredibly hostile because the American public shows them so little respect.

In my humor research, I produced empathy for the protagonist of my cartoons by putting my subjects through a mildly embarrassing scene and observed whether they would understand and appreciate the protagonist having a similar experience in my cartoons. Low and behold, they did! They loved the cartoons they identified with.

So now to the point of the article: how does a comic make a

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joke that people laugh at? It is actually extremely simple. Step one: feel misery, shame, rage, or despair in your life. Step two: be brave enough or foolish enough to write about it. Step three: find a publisher willing to print your cartoons. In fact, it’s kind of like submitting papers to peer reviewed journals, but without the laughs.

Let me give you an example of one of my typical cartoons. You may not find it funny unless you like golf. There are four panels to this one entitled “Depression on the links.” Poor Yin, my main character, is swinging and missing shot after shot and getting increasingly upset. His caddie Lucky (named after the character in Waiting for Godot) asks him in the last panel what club he wants next. He replies, “Forget the clubs and get me a razor blade.”

So there you have it. To be a comic, you need to feel shame and despair and be willing to admit to this fact. I will finish with another little anecdote about comics and their funny sense of humor. A few years ago, I was invited onto a television panel in New York City. The host was the stand-up comic and actress Susie Essman. As is usually the case, we sat around in the green room before the show and got to know each other. As I remember, Ellis Henican of Newsday was there along with two other guests. It was a show about sports, and as a sport psychologist, I was brought in to shed light on the professional athlete’s pathology. I was talking about Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco’s writing (1999) about how sport is used as a compensation against homosexual tendencies (A Psychoanalytic Study of Argentine Soccer in Psychoanalysis and Culture at the Millennium, edited by Nancy Ginsburg and Roy Ginsburg). I went on to mention how effeminate Mike Tyson’s voice was. The conversation drifted on to other matters, and finally, we were all brought into the studio for the show. This was a live national TV show, and after Susie introduced the panel, she turned to me first and asked, “Well Dr. Ferraro, I was fascinated by what you were saying about homosexuality in the NFL. Do you care to expand upon that?”

I sat there stunned with a frozen smile and clenched teeth. As my mind raced along about lawsuits and civil actions I might have to face if I answered this question, I thought back to how Ronald Reagan won the elections by always ignoring press questions and giving his own scripted questions and answers. So I said,

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“Well Susie, that is a good question, and also, how about the aggression in the NFL for an even better question?” Not brilliant but I got out of it pretty well.

On the way home from the city that night, I noticed severe pain in my back tooth. It seems that I was so anxious that I had actually broken my tooth during the show. So much for the light, airy, and frivolous subject of comedy and comics. Freud was right. Humor expresses our dark side. So next time you hear something light and funny, rest assured, there is darkness and despair right underneath that has created all that mirth.

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