Hidden Brain - Episode 12: Humor

Episode Date: December 8, 2015

This week on Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam looks at what we find funny and what, well, crosses the line. Comedian Bill Burr joins us to talk about why race, gender and Caitlin Jenner can be so funny.

Hey podcast listeners, this episode has lots of jokes. Some people might find the jokes offensive. In fact, the thin line between being funny and being offensive is our theme today. If you're listening with the young kids, you might want to save this for later. I say a lot of absurd over-the-top things. Because if people see a train wreck possibly coming, absurd over the top things. Because if people see a train wreck possibly coming, they're gonna listen. Welcome to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

On today's episode, I'm going to give you a special technique to pure into someone else's head. It's using humor, the joke. What we laugh at, and what we don't laugh at, tell us very important things about ourselves and about other people. We got people lab coats examining dick jokes. Comedian Bill Burris here to help us explore why we laugh at jokes that push the boundaries.

NPR's Elizabeth Blair join me for that conversation. It's coming up soon. But first, I want to tell you about some research into what makes people laugh. This is Robert Lynch. He's an evolutionary anthropologist. He studies how traits pass down through evolution affect human behavior. He now works at the University of Missouri. Instead of asking, do you prefer blacks or do you prefer whites? Or do you associate women more with career and men more with family or the reverse? You actually time them on how fast they categorize things on a keyboard. In the test he gave volunteers, he studied their associations on gender attitudes.

What's interesting about these associations is that they're often unconscious or implicit. People aren't aware of them. Lynch also had the volunteers listen to jokes related to gender issues, the comic he chose, Bilba. I got data this girl one time. She was like really into like women's issues. So we always have the dumb ass argument. So one time she came up to me and she goes,

okay, explain this to me, Bill. Why does a guy make more an hour to do the exact same job, huh? Mm-hmm. I'll tell you why, because in the unlikely event that we're both on a Titanic and it starts to sink, for some f***** up reason you get to leave with the kids and I have to stay. And that's why I get the dollar mark out. People laugh but there's a big range. Some people didn't at all. Some people almost falling out of their chairs.

Now, if you asked people why they laughed or didn't, some people will tell you the joke was funny, and others will tell you it wasn't. But Lynch thinks something else is going on. People's unconscious attitudes about gender was strongly correlated with whether they laughed or found the joke offensive. The take-home message is that people who associated female with family and males with career more strongly had stereotypic or traditional gender preferences, it's called, tended to laugh more at that segment. The joke about men and women in other words is actually a test. If you watch the audience, as Bill tells that joke, you can get a pretty good sense of what's going on in the mind of the person who laughs, and the mind of the person who doesn't laugh. Lynch thinks there are strong evolutionary reasons people behave this way. In fact, he thinks humor itself may have evolved because

it allows people to tell who belongs to their in-group and who doesn't. A lot of laughter is about taboo topics and things like that. So it's communicating something that we may not be so readily willing to admit, but we're communicating it to other people to find out if they share our preferences. And then if it doesn't work out, eh, it was just a joke, you know.

And so it's got this, it's kind of a coded message saying, hey, are you part of my group? Are we in the same in-group? And by laughing at that joke, you're maybe possibly signaling that, yeah, I think women are more associated with family. I mean, that's the lame way to say it, but that's, you're implying that you have

these stereotypical gender preferences or traditional, I should say. So in some ways, I think what I'm hearing you say is that for a very long time, we actually have been using jokes as a way to understand what's happening inside other people's heads. The joke has been a brain scan for much of human history. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. So unlike verbal communication, which is very susceptible to deception and lying. And oh yeah, no, I believe what you believe. Yeah, I'm on your team. Yeah yeah I'm in the same group laughter may be a way to honestly signal there's always an evolution kind of a need

to signal things honestly when there's when they're so susceptible to deception. That's evolutionary anthropologist Robert Lynch. When we come back Elizabeth Blair is going to join me. We'll talk about how comedians need to skirt the edge of what's offensive in order to be funny. Sometimes that can mean going over the edge. Stay with us. Welcome back to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

I was talking about this idea, the idea that jokes can act like a brain scanner with Elizabeth Blair. Elizabeth is an arts reporter at NPR and she covers the world of stand-up comedy. Elizabeth, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thanks, Shankar. It's great to be here. I mean, this is a topic that is dear to my heart, because I love stand-up comedy, and I always thought there was a psychology, a science,

behind why we laugh, why we wouldn't laugh, and I'm just very eager to hear more. And I remember we had this fantastic conversation a couple of months ago at Elizabeth. We were sitting on the fourth floor patio at NPR, playing clips from our favorite comedians, and not just listening to the comedians, but listening to ourselves, listening when it is we laugh and when it is we don't. And why we laughed and why we didn't.

And it wasn't always for the same reasons. No, it wasn't for the same reasons. I've actually brought in a couple of clips with me today at Elizabeth. I want you to listen less to the comedian and more to the audience's reactions to the comedian. The comedian is someone you're gonna know, Louis CK, I'm sure you're a fan. He's a master. And what he does in this series of clips

is he brings the audience very close to a place where they're gonna be very uncomfortable. Here's Louis. Everybody has a competition in their brain of good thoughts and bad thoughts. Hopefully the good thoughts win. For me I always have both. I have like the thing I believe, the good thing. That's the thing I believe. And then there's this thing. I don't believe it, but it is there. It's always this thing and then this thing, it's become a category in my brain that I call, of course, but maybe. I'll give you an example.

Okay, like of course, children who have nut allergies need to be protected. Of course, we just segregate their food from nuts, have their medication available at all times, and anybody who manufactures or serves food needs to be aware of deadly nut allergies. Of course, but maybe, maybe if touching a nut kills you, you're supposed to die. So I love this transition between the of course and the maybe because the of course part is

the part that we all agree, appropriate views, civilized views, and the maybe part is this part in our brain that sort of is lurking there hidden below the surface. But we don't speak it, we don't say it, because it's inappropriate, it's not polite. Exactly, and what I love is how Louis sort of pulling us closer and closer and closer to that line. So what he does is he walks us even further to the line in this next clip, here he is. Of course, slavery is the worst thing that ever happened.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Listen, listen, you all clapped for dead kids with a nuts. For kids dying from nuts, you applauded. So you're in this with me now, you understand?

You don't get to cherry-pick. Those kids did nothing to you. And you can hear the audience. The nerves are there. They're not quite bellowing anymore. But there's some laughter, but there's some sort of, I don't know if I can laugh at this. I totally agree.

And it's almost as if he has actually trapped them because he actually brought them in, initially, with something that they basically said, OK, we'll walk with you. But now he's taken them to this really dark place. And what I like about this clip Elizabeth is that it reflects ideas that social scientists have talked about for more than a century.

In 1905, Sigmund Freud wrote a book called Jokes and the Relation to the Unconscious. And one of the points he makes is that jokes are usually violations of deeply held to booze. So part of why a joke is funny is that it allows us to get up against this place in our brain that's really dark and really scary. Yeah, no, and that's one reason I love comedy.

I almost feel like when I walk out of a great show, it forces me to be a little more authentic with my feelings, I might not express them, but let's face it, we all do have some really dark thoughts. That's human. Yeah, and it's interesting you say that Elizabeth do have some really dark thoughts. That's human. Yeah, and it's interesting you say that Elizabeth, because in some ways Freud talks about this idea too, this idea that the joke actually offers us a mechanism for catharsis. It allows us to get out things in our cells that we really want to have come out.

I was in Montreal recently at the Just for Last Festival, and I actually asked Margaret Cho about this very thing. Why do people laugh? Or what is it about comedy that sort of releases something? And this is what she said. It's kind of like they're laughing out of fear because you can't believe that you said it. I can't believe it. It's a kind of a fear, but it's also like that you're laughing because somebody is actually playing with fire and that this may erupt into something incredibly explosive. So here's where I might push back just a bit, Elizabeth. I came by some new research published recently

in one of the social science journals. It was worked by Peter McGraw. He's a behavioral scientist at the University of Colorado. And he makes the argument that really for a joke to work, it has to violate a taboo, it has to question or challenge something that we believe in. But it has to do it in a way that is actually safe. That if it actually questions this taboo in a way that's unsafe, or it gets too close to challenging something that's very close to our own heart,

the joke stops being funny, it starts being offensive. I mean, if you're a parent of a child who has a nut allergy, that Louis CK joke, you probably are not laughing. Right, you probably find it disturbing, and this goes back to the idea that Robert Lynch told us at the start, which is what you find funny and what you don't, says a lot about what's happening inside your own head. Okay, we've talked a lot about the scientific research into humor. Let's bring a real comic on the stage. Hello. Is that Bill Burr? Yes, it's eight. We got in touch with Bill Burr to ask him about the thin line between being funny and being offensive. You've made me nervous for many, many years, so I'm

delighted to be talking to you. Why? Your jokes have made me pure into my own soul, and I don't like what I see there. Well, you and me both. I'm talking about me, not you though. That's great. Elizabeth and I asked Bill about different jokes and the audience's reaction to them. Right, he did a joke on Conan about Bruce, now Caitlin Jenner. I miss that guy. I miss him already. You should have told us. He should have given us a chance to say goodbye. I'm not gonna watch him on the Olympics. I watched him on chips.

I watched him on that horrible show. My wife, where he just walks around in the background. And then he's just like, and nobody listened to him. It was just, it was so sad. And then, I don't know, I don't know where. It's just, he just saw his guy. And he's, Kaylyn, then you couldn't react. You can't, couldn't on any level be like,

oh my go, you know, what the f, you on any level. You couldn't say that, or you automatically homophobic. Yeah. Dude, I didn't hear your inner thoughts i don't know what you were doing all of a sudden you just go did you shame your beard off people like oh my god that's your chin wow this guy walked out of the dude came back a woman he just goes with

oh yes anyway if Kalin has a good that's something i do during my act where i always lead people down a road where they're like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, okay. It's a way, it's something that I kind of do subconsciously now, but it's something that I did when I was on my way up and people didn't know who I was. It was a way to keep the crowd interested because if people see a train wreck possibly coming, they're going to, they're going to listen.

But Bill said he's listening to the audience too. Like the crowd is just this thing. I mean, you can't really see a lot of them, so it just becomes this thing that you're listening to. And just over the years of doing it, I guess you are making adjustments, but after a while it's like subconscious. You don't even know you're doing it. One of the bits from one of your Netflix specials that we were really interested in was your whole riff on domestic abuse. What do you think wife beaters are doing

when they drive home? They're like so focused on hitting their wife and they got blinders on, they're not reading anything. Do you remember the audience's reaction to some of the... Yeah, it killed. Right now it killed. But Shunker, the truth is, not everyone in the audience's reaction to some of the... Yeah, it killed. Right now it killed. But Chunker the Truth is not everyone in the audience thought so because there was also this reaction. Bill Boyd is still gonna do it. Did that get too weird for you guys? Bill said he intentionally takes the audience to an uncomfortable place.

So a lot of the times when I do my jokes, I deliberately have the setup. I leave it vague and almost just have, oh, where's he gonna go with this? Is it gonna, you know, was this going in a clan direction? Or is this going in a green piece direction? Yeah. So you kind of have them on the fence and they wanna see what the result is

and then hopefully they come along for the ride. I told Bill that some researchers think that jokes are a kind of brain scanner. That while he's trying to make an audience laugh, others are studying why the audience laughs. So what people laugh at and what they don't laugh at can actually tell you a lot about what's going on inside their heads. And you know, there was a... There was a there was a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a Yeah, I agree. Now, since Robert Lynch used Bill's humor about gender issues in his experiment, we decided

to go back to that subject. Yeah, we brought back the domestic violence bit, because when Bill performed this joke for one crowd, there was a very interesting response from the audience. So at the end of the hour, they come to the logical conclusion. They're like, there is no reason to hit a woman. There is no reason to hit a woman. And I was just like, really? I could give you like 17 right off the top of my head. You could wake me from a drunken

stupor. I could still give you like 9. Who does plenty of reasons to hit a woman. He just don't do it. But to sit there and suggest that there's no reason. The level of ego behind that statement, what are you levitating above the rest of us? You're never annoying. Women, how many times have you thought about slapping your f***ing guy in the head this week? There you go. I asked Bill why I found it funny when the woman talks about domestic violence in a way

I didn't find it funny when Bill joked about it. Because we're in different weight classes and generally speaking, unless you're fighting Ronda Rousey or one of those amazing athletes in the MMA or Laila Ali, like somebody knows how to fight, generally speaking, you know, guys, you know, can beat up a woman. So what's funny is it's the same thing if you see a little guy knock out a big guy. It's hilarious. If you see the big guy knock out the little guy, it's, it's awful. It doesn't make you feel good. So that's why, you know, it isn't really a double standard because they have to live in the fear of being hit. You know, I hate when guys go, oh, that's a double standard as far,

I'm not saying you're saying this, but when they're like, you know, oh, they can joke about it, but I can't. It's like, yes, yes. That's like those weird white people that go, well, how come they can say it and we can't when they're talking about the end word, it's just like, dude, do you really not understand the whole dynamics of that? Bill's explanation perfectly mirrors what Peter McGraw's research has found. A woman talking about beating up a man feels like a benign violation because we know it doesn't happen that often.

A man talking about beating up a woman feels offensive because we know that kind of thing happens all the time. You know, Shankar, one thing I didn't know about Bill Burr is that he actually likes hecklers. He doesn't like people who just yell, you suck all the time, but he actually likes people who don't agree with him. I say a lot of absurd over the top things. Like I really don't put any boundaries, I try not to anyways, on what I say. And then, you know, when I, when I do that men, women stuff,

I want women to yell stuff out, because I want to, you actually can learn stuff while you do a stand up, like how how they react their points that they make versus yours, you know, I mean, I've always said I don't read and I'm a moron so by all means, you know, I'd love to hear your opinion. All right, so Bill Burr is going to keep saying absurd things and you should all keep yelling things out, but I had one last question for him. Where do things go from here? I mean, so you've built such an impressive career and you've done keep yelling things out. But I had one last question for him. Where do things go from here? I mean, so you've built such an impressive career

and you've done so many different things. What's next on that horizon? I think this is the time where I start my drug habit. And then I screw the whole thing up. I hit rock bottom, I do a reality show, and then later on I write the book. Don't say that, Bill. And then I'll play somebody's grandfather on a sitcom. That's comedian Bill Burr. His new animated series, F Is For Family,

premieres December 18 on Netflix. The Hidden Brain podcast is produced by Karam Agar Kalasin and Maggie Penman. Our new assistant is Max Nestrak, special thanks this week to Elizabeth Blair and Daniel Schuchin. Find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and of course on your local public radio station. If you'd like to sign up for our newsletter, email us at hiddenbrainatnpr.org with the word subscribe in the subject line. I'm Shankar Vedantam and this is NPR.