Hidden Brain - Humor Us

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

Hahaha! The average four-year-old child laughs 300 times a day. By contrast, it takes more than two months for the average 40-year-old adult to laugh that many times. This week, we talk with behavioral scientist Jennifer Aaker of Stanford University about why so many of us fall off a “humor cliff” as we become adults. Plus, how we can inject more laughter into our lives, even during the most difficult of times.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. For 31 years, Beth Nichols has worked at a homeless shelter in Chicago. This story takes place probably about 25 years ago. In all those years of work, she's witnessed incredible displays of compassion and intense moments of conflict. One day, Beth was in the shelter kitchen making lunch. She could hear people laughing and talking in the dining room. Then, the tone changed.

And two mothers were at two separate tables and they were angry about something that had gone on among their children. They began shouting at each other. Beth rushed into the dining room. The women got closer and closer together and circumstances got more and more loud and verbally things became more and more threatening. Nothing I was doing was working

and I felt that we had reached a point where I was not even present in their minds, like it was just the two of them. And as they were just inches from coming to blows, I had a washcloth in my hand from the kitchen and there was not a moment of premeditating this at all. I threw the washcloth up in the air and yelled, go for it! And they dropped their arms and they turned and stared at me with their mouths open. And everybody in the dining room was like, what? And it worked. By suggesting that she was flagging the start of a race, Beth turned a tense moment into a joke.

Yeah, but it actually was effective strangely enough. Humor can diffuse tension and bring us together like nothing else. It's how we make friends, bond with co-workers, get our entertainment. And yet, humor is often missing in many parts of our lives. We lose our sense of humor. We stop smiling and laughing. This week on Hidden Brain, the global humor cliff and how making a joke is like exercising, meditating,

and having sex all at the same time. Think about the smartest person you know. Maybe it's your mom or a teacher. Now think about the most accomplished person you know. It has to be someone you know personally, not someone you've seen on TV. Maybe a friend who's a scientist. Now think about the funniest person you know. When I do this, I find it takes me a moment. I know a lot of smart people. I've talked to a lot of accomplished people on the show. But funny people? Not so much. At the Stanford Business School, behavioral scientist Jennifer Acker has been asking a serious

question. Why is humor in short supply in many of our lives? Jennifer Acker, welcome to Hidden Brain. It's so nice to be here. Some years ago, Jennifer, you were talking with a group of second graders and you asked them, who is the funniest person you know? Can you describe the scene to me and tell me what they told you? I was in the classroom of my daughter, Tais Lone, at the time she was in second grade. So I was teaching a little module on Power of Story, which I also teach at Stanford Business

School. I had finished the segment early because, you know, these second graders, they're pretty damn smart. And so I decided to take the last five minutes of filler time and say, who thinks they're funny? Everyone's hands shot up. Then I said, who is the funniest person that you know? Everyone's hands shot up again.

I called on all 30, 29 of them, said they're dad or brother. I was horrified. So I went home that night and I talked to my family of three kids, Teah, Cooper, Devon, my husband, Andy. And I said, can you believe that 29 of these 30 kids all said their dad or brother, everyone looked down quietly, not saying a word. And I said, excuse me. And so Teah chirped up, you know,

quietly, yes, dad is the funniest, then comes us, then our dog, and then you. You were behind the dog. I was decidedly behind the dog. decidedly behind the dog. Jennifer can laugh about it now, but she also felt sad that she was seen as unfunny. Was that how people thought of her? She noticed of course the gender differences. The men were seen as funny, the women less so. Why was that? As she started to think about humor as a topic of research,

she also stumbled on something else. The polling company Gallup found that when it came to humor and laughed her, something was happening to both men and women around the world, starting around age 23. We lose our sense of humor. We stop smiling and laughing. So Gallup asked people in 166 countries, the simple question, did you smile or laugh yesterday? So for those who are 16, 18, 20, the answer

largely is yes. And then around 23, the answer becomes no. And we don't start laughing again until 70 or 80. Put another way, the average four year old lasts 300 times a day. It takes the average 40 year old to and a half months to laugh that many times. So yes, what we call a global humor cliff. And this was research that was done before the global pandemic. So just as people are entering the workforce, the laughter goes out of their lives. I mean, it's a pretty grim picture of what it's like to be a working age adult Jennifer.

It is. We find that people go into the workforce and they basically stop smiling and laughing or behaving in ways that feel authentic. Part of it is that, you know, they go into work and they think they have to be serious or the risks of humor seem too great. Or by time they've decided they aren't funny nor want to be funny because that's inefficient and it belies their goals at work.

I'm wondering if this research speaks to your own experience, Jennifer. If I had met you at age 4 or age 8, how much did you laugh? When I was a four-year-old, I was about to hit the stand-up circuit. You know, that would have been some good times. You know, by 16 and 18, I still had a very silly sense of humor. I remember, you know, times with my high school friends where we would, you know, dress up for birthday parties and it was a very easy time to laugh and be silly. And then I moved into college where I had this sense of humor kind of dry and dark and

I basically had a humor fail. One of my friends said that, you know, my humor hurt her feelings and I stopped making jokes around 23. And would you say that you have experienced the same humor cliff in the year since 23 that in some ways when you think back on what you did yesterday, can you remember times when you laughed on most days? Well, so getting a PhD doesn't require a sense of humor, nor does publishing academic articles scream, you know, throw in a laugh line. So yes, I would say by the time I started my PhD, I had solidly lost a sense of humor

and definitely the propensity to laugh easily with colleagues. Now, they're very smart people. We're just not talking humor being a priority. You know, it's interesting at some point in my own life, I feel I went from a world where people laughed at jokes to a world where people would just say that's funny when someone said a joke instead of laughing at the joke. That's right. Or on text, just LOL, that's it, done.

Exactly, yeah. So, you know, we won't hurt the phrase act professional. When you join a new company or you enter a workplace, you're supposed to behave in a certain way, no fooling around, no lounging about, and of course, no joking around. We've actually written the humor cliff into employee manuals. Absolutely, you know, it's interesting. This idea of bringing your whole self to work or how you act on weekends could be something that you would bring to work is something that has been underscored for a long time. What's interesting about the days in which we're living now with remote work

is that things are shifting in very significant ways. You know, a lot of what we're talking about is not necessarily about cracking jokes. It's much more about being human. So you point out that even though many people believe that the way to appear serious and professional in the workforce is not to engage in a lot of jokes, a lack of humor often points not to seriousness

as much as a lack of confidence. And we see that many smart and serious people often are able to deploy humor to great effect. I wanna play you a short clip of former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, talking about diplomacy and her fashion choices in the aftermath of the first Persian Gulf War. And so all of a sudden a poem appeared in the papers in Baghdad comparing me to many things,

but among them an unparalleled serpent. And so I happened to have a snake pin. So I wore it when we talked about Iraq. And when I went out to meet the press, they zeroed in and said, why are you wearing that snake pit? I said, because said I'm saying compared me to an unparalleled serpent. And then I thought, well, this is fun. So I went out.

And I bought a lot of pins that would, in fact, reflect what I thought we were going to do on any given day. What was the message she was trying to send, Jennifer? Exactly what we just talked about, that she, A, a you know could read the room and know what was implicitly or explicitly being said about her but also be just showing up as a human when people interact with her as secretary Madeline Albright they act in one way but when she used these pins to break a smile that would actually allow them to interact with her in a very different

way, one where she was much more human. And years later, Shankar, upon discovering that Russians had bugged the State Department, she wore this enormous bug pen to her meeting with Russian foreign minister, and he knew immediately that the jig was up. And it was great, too, because with the press, you know, she would, on good days, she would wear butterflies and balloons. And then on bad days, she would wear, you know, carnivorous animals and spiders. So when people say, how are you doing?

She could just say, read my pants. You tell the story of how Madeleine Albright once charmed a Russian diplomat during some high stakes negotiations. Can you describe what happened? Tell me that story. Absolutely. So, Secretary Albright was preparing for a summit in the Philippines. One of the diplomatic duties she was asked to perform was a skit. And this is apparently a tradition that happens during a formal dinner gala on the final evening of the summit. The United States always does this very badly. There was a counter-part in the Russian government.

And so what she did was she invited him to sing a duet with her. So this night before the dinner, they went, they had all this vodka and they rehearsed this skit that they were gonna do together. Basically, instead of singing West Side Story, they performed together East West Story. And that's how something that was going to be a disaster turned out to be a lot of fun. Besides being a lot of fun, it seems like there was also a certain strategy in her deployment of humor.

That it was more than just simply getting a laugh. It was actually being able to get to some results and diplomacy that she might not have been able to get to otherwise. That's exactly right. And so the ability to shortcut negotiations and be able to not just crack a smile, but be able to expedite the outcomes that she wanted to drive to was significant. And notice what she did there, right? She co-opted someone who did have an antagonistic point of view to be on our team.

And that's what we find happens a lot of times when people use humor strategically and thoughtfully. It's basically creating a more inclusive environment where you feel like you're on the same team. Right. And in some ways, it's hard if you co-opt an opponent or an even an enemy to make a joke with you. It's very hard to feel like this person is still your opponent or it's still your enemy. Once you've laughed with someone, it feels like you bonded with them.

That's exactly right. And, you know, think about the long-term impact of this, right? When you interact a second time, it doesn't even matter if it's like years later. You're able to recall that East West song moment. So the opportunity to have a callback, which, you know, is simply referring to a previous time where people laughed together and be able to rekindle that memory has all sorts of positive impacts on the relationship and on outcomes moving forward. So it has a ripple effect. Yeah. People have noted for many years that one of the things that's happened in Washington is

that many members of Congress do not stay in Washington. They don't live in Washington. They live in their home district, which didn't used to be the case. It used to be that many people who came to Washington actually lived in Washington. But living in Washington has gotten such a bad reputation that most members of Congress go home for long weekends and for vacations. And so they don't really, they're not hanging out with one another in the same space. And so they're not going to social locations together. don't really, they're not hanging out with one another in the same space, and so they're not going to social locations together. Presumably, they're also not laughing together

as much as they might have done 20 or 30 years ago, and it makes you wonder how much of the poison that we see in sort of polarized discussions is because people actually haven't spent some time sitting down together and having a good laugh. I completely agree. You think about the increasing element of divisiveness, of social isolation, and you also compare that

with the scientific benefits of laughing together, or showing up in ways like Secretary of Mental and Albright did, they are significant. I will note there are other ways that we can cultivate humor even though we're not physically close. There's nothing I enjoy more than a little country humor. For example, Ronald Reagan was known to have essentially a signature story or jokes that he kept in a just like a little piece of paper. He kept with them all the time.

One of the great things about having you here is that I get to tell a farm joke. And so these are one-liners that he would say in context where he was giving big speeches or even on the phone. And they would inevitably always crush. And then he would just write down what the title of that joke or story was. It was an old Kansas farmer there. He had a piece of creek bottom land

that had never been developed at all. It was all old Kansas farmer there. He had a piece of creek bottom land that had never been developed at all. It was all rocks and brush and he started in on it, clearing it and cultivating the soil there and he planted a garden. It really became a garden spot and he was pretty proud of what he'd done. So one Sunday morning he asked the preacher if he wouldn't stop by to have a look and he took one look and he said, oh, this is wonderful. He said, these are the biggest tomatoes I've ever seen. Praise the Lord.

Those melons, he said, the Lord really has blessed this place. And look at the height of that corn. He said, the God has really been good. And the old boy was listening to all this and he was getting more and more fidgety. And finally, he blurted out reverend. I wish you could have seen it when the Lord was doing it by himself. That that simple classic way of using humor and understanding that humor can disarm and and move goals forward is so important. When we come back we explore the psychological effects of humor and examine techniques used

by professional comedians. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Behavioral scientist Jennifer Aakher has studied the effects of what she calls the Humor Clif. Many of us sharply cut back on laughing as we joined the workforce in our early 20s. In her new book, Humor Seriously, co-authored with Naomi Baghdanas, Jennifer examines the effects of the humor cliff. Losing out on years of laughter means more than missing out on fun. We miss out on all the psychological and professional benefits of humor. Jennifer, life is tough for lots of people.

It's filled with pain, with adversity, sometimes with tragedy. And a lot of these people might say, it's all well and good for a Stanford professor to tell me to laugh more, but I don't find much in my life to laugh about. What would you say to them about the role that humor can play in giving us perspective about our own problems? It's such a good question. The reality though is that we can't afford to be humorless. You know, we're in the midst of a mental health crisis. Rates of depression are unparalleled and social isolation is piling on to increasingly

stressful work conditions. We're working with our families and environments where stress is high and none of this is funny. And yet, your and your company's greatest self just might be humor. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think a lot of us confuse the importance of levity with the idea that it undermines the issue of gravity. That you can't, in some ways, have levity when you're talking about issues that are very serious. But when you think about the best, you know, memorial services, for example, when someone has just died,

many of the best memorial services often have an element of humor. I'm thinking about the incredible eulogy that the basketball star, Shaquilo Neal, offered after the death of Kobe Bryant. I want to play you a short excerpt from his eulogy. The day Kobe gave my respect was the guys were complaining. He said, Shae, Kobe's not passing the ball. I said, I'll talk to him. I said, Kobe, there's no iron team.

And Kobe said, I know, but there's an in me and that f***ing. So I suppose Jennifer that someone could say, Kobe's death in a helicopter crash is no laughing matter. But when you listen to Shack, you don't hear any disrespect in that joke. If anything, you're hearing affection, you're hearing love.

Absolutely. The end of our book is written with Michael Lewis. And he ends the book in the afterwards saying, when humor exists, love is not far behind. when humor exists, love is not far behind. And to your point, you know, it's true when we are consumed by grief, our sense of humor seems almost impossible to access, and yet there's no greater comfort in times of sadness and mourning. In one study, researchers at Dacker Keltner and George Bonona looked at the effects

of laughter actually on the bereavement process. And they recruited people who lost a loved one in the previous six months and they asked them to describe the relationship with their partner. And basically what happened was when the researchers reviewed the taped interviews, they found that when people who displayed, you know, genuine laughter, you know, basically laughed out loud, they reported 80% less anger, 35% less distress than those who, you know, didn't laugh at all. And those genuine laughers also reported feeling significantly more positive about moving forward and also increase satisfaction with their current social relationships. Laughter does decrease stress and can diffuse tension.

And more than that, that was such a great clip too because it illuminates these funny moments, those moments where you make others laugh. They often illuminate who you really are. The authenticity of Kobe in that moment came out in a way that I think would be really hard to explain, but that short story that gave rise to laughter and a common knowledge of, yeah, that makes sense. That's Kobe. I think it really does depict who one really is.

Yeah. You and I are having this conversation in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. And many of us have experienced, I think, over the course of the last several months, how difficult it is to be in quarantine. We know that many people are really hurting, many jobs have been lost, many lives have been lost.

I want you to tell me a little story about something that happened in your own family at the end of a very long day, your husband had come to the end of his rope and said he was gonna go out to the liquor store to get something to drink. Tell me the story of what happened. We have a family text chain, and Andy my husband texted into it. So we have Cooper Deventea on the line, not Mackie or dog, but Andy goes, it seems like a good day to stop by a wine store for some alcohol. Let me know if anyone has requests. He's obviously writing this for me.

And 15-year-old Taya goes, OK, I'll pay for a bottle of the oldest finest red. It just brought all of us to laughter at a moment of like, it was this moment of surprise and misdirection. And the playfulness within our family that comes to life on this text string is pretty amazing. It really helps in the day to day.

You know, and it's interesting, you know, some people might say, well, the responsible thing to have done, Jennifer, was to tell your 15-year-old daughter that teenager's drinking alcohol is bad for their health and instead of the wag your finger at her. And I can sort of see where that impulse comes from. It comes from a good place of being worried about the risks of alcohol addiction and so forth.

But in some ways, we miss the possibilities of humor and the benefits of humor when we sometimes fail to crack a grin. Absolutely. It's so interesting. I'm increasingly convinced that making your children know that they are funny, even when some of their jokes might be out of context or slightly inappropriate,

is one of the best parenting moves you can do. Think about how much confidence this inspires in a child when they know they made their family laugh. When you understand the humorous styles of each of your family members, it's also easier to laugh. Another small anecdote, one of our sons, Devon, he has a very dark sense of humor, meaning like Ted Bundy jokes, serial killer jokes can make their way into the conversation.

And I never really quite got it. It was certainly hard to laugh generously in those moments. But once I understood his humor style, I was different than mine. All of a sudden, things became even funnier at our home. The benefits of humor and relieving stress are not just in the home, but in work settings as well. Many of us think we need to be serious in order to be taken seriously,

but researchers are finding that humor is a powerful way to unlock creativity and productivity. We find that humor is completely underappreciated and under leveraged at work. When people use humor at work and it doesn't even have to be good humor, it just has to be not inappropriate humor. The bar is so low. They're also seen as more competent and confident. In another set of studies, leaders with a sense of humor,

again, they're not funny, they just have a sense of humor, are seen as more motivating and admired. And we're living in a time right now where trust has been on the decline. In one recent study, there was a large-scale study done in the United States, researchers asked people, would you rather trust your boss or a stranger?

58% of the people responded stranger. Really? Yes, the trust gap is significant. And what humor does is it allows you to interact with someone in a way that does cultivate trust. And employees who rate their bosses is having a sense of humor are 15% more satisfied and engaged in their jobs.

One of my favorite studies, this was a study that shows even adding a light-hearted line at the end of a sales pitch, like my final offers X and I'll throw in my pet frog. Increases customers' willingness to pay by 18%. So you get paid more based on a bad dad joke. Again, this is where we are right now. I love that. So I want to talk for a moment about the ability that humor has to bond people together. There was a study conducted some years ago where researchers had groups of strangers watch video clips together and some of them watched neutral clips like a golf instructional video or a nature documentary. And others heard a routine from the comedian Michael McIntyre.

I particularly like Google Earth, I don't know if you've been on Google Earth, it's amazing. They photographed every road in the whole world, and they put them on Google Earth on the computer and you can go there, you just type it in, and you go there, you drag a little man over the map and you drop him into the road, and then you're there. You can see it. It's really amazing technology. And you sit in front of the computer, and you think I can go anywhere, anywhere in the world.

Where should I go? And we all come to the same conclusion, my house. LAUGHTER So the researchers then asked all of the volunteers to write a personal note to one of the strangers in their group. People who watched the comedian were more emotionally vulnerable. They were more likely to share personal information with the stranger.

Why is it that humor makes it easier for us to bond with others, Jennifer? So when we laugh, our brains release a cocktail of healthy hormones. So it releases endorphins, same sort of hormones that are released with exercise. It reduces your cortisol, so it makes you calmer. And it also increases oxytocin, so which is the same hormone release during sex and childbirth.

Both moments when evolutionarily speaking, it benefits us to feel bonded. But the big secret is that laughter also releases all of these chemicals in our brain at the same time. So it's like, you know, exercising and meditating and having sex at the same time and logistically much simpler. And for that reason, people are more likely to open up, shared laughter, or even having a sense of humor shortens the distance between two people, making them, again, as you said, you know, more

open to disclosing personal information. Yeah. Now, I'm afraid I can't get the image of exercising, meditating, and having sex all at the same time out of my head, so I might take a moment to get back. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Couples rated their relationship as happier when they were prompted to remember moments when they shared a laugh. So this is not just true for strangers, even when people who know each other really well, even recall times when they were laughing together,

it seems like it brings them closer. This is one of my favorite studies, by the way. So couples who are asked to tell stories about moments they laugh together, versus couples who tell stories about happy moments. They report to be 23% more satisfied in their relationships. And laughter is free. And the actual mechanism behind humor is simple. Basically, it's sort of drugging you and anyone who laughs along with you. So it's like drugging others, but in a very healthy way. a very healthy way. We talked earlier about Madeline Albright using humor in 10 situations, and we also heard

the story of Beth Nichols, who broke up a fight at the homeless shelter where she worked. I played a bit of Beth's story for Jennifer. As they were just inches from coming to blows, I really felt like we have come to the point of no return. I had a washcloth in my hand from the kitchen and a couple inches in between them, I threw the washcloth up in the air and yelled, go for it! And they dropped their arms and they turned and stared at me with their mouths open. And everybody in the dining room was like, what? And it worked.

I'm not sure that Beth actually intended to be funny in that moment, Jennifer, but her intervention revealed the absurdity of the situation. Can you talk for a moment about the role that humor plays and can play in diffusing conflict? One way to think about this is that humor is the antidote to arrogance. What's a simple thing you can do to subvert a context like Secretary Albright did or that recent example? So at the core of comedy and humor is really this idea of truth and misdirection.

So we laugh because we think, I do that or I've seen people do that or I think I know where she's going. It's recognition of what someone is sharing. But then when you add in misdirection, where you end a story where the listener is believing you're going one way and then it reveals another, that's misdirection. And so in those cases, it can diffuse tension in very significant ways, partly because the misdirection

creates this element of surprise, and that's essentially what you're doing with humor is you're surprising your brain and in that process, you know, tension is diffused. I'm also wondering whether part of what happened in that incident that Bethnickels describes is a process of reframing the conversation or reframing what's going on. So you have this very tense moment, Two people are almost coming to blows. Everyone around them is basically standing around their bystanders trying to figure out what to do

with anything to do. And then you have suddenly this person coming through a washcloth up almost like the start of a race or the launch of a boxing match or something and says, let's go. And suddenly changes the frame of what's happening. And even the audience, you know, the quote unquote, the audience sort of realizes now they're actually watching

a spectacle. And it makes them sort of realize what they're doing. It makes the participants in the fight sort of step back for a second and say, Oh, I realized that there are people watching here. There's a performance that's unfolding. The reframing of what's happening, I think, is part of the reason why Beth managed to break up this fight. of what's happening, I think, is part of the reason why Beth managed to break up this fight. Absolutely. The reframe is so powerful. We have research to show that when people spontaneously reframe their stories, they're

the hardest stories that define their life as comedies, not only does it do things to them that make them feel better, but when they share those reframe stories, it allows the other individuals who are listening to feel closer to the individual. The example you gave me a second ago that humor is sort of this combination of exercising, meditating, and sex at the same time. I mean, it's a funny image. But one of the things that's powerful about that is that the humor allows the message to basically get in in a way that's very sticky. Many comedians use humor as an educational tool and perhaps none more than John Oliver. In last week tonight on one occasion he explained the

complex science of gene editing with the following description. So tonight we thought we'd take some time to talk about gene editing. What it is, what its potential could be, and what the chances are that we're all going to be killed by a 30-foot wolf. And let's start with the fact that Gina editing actually isn't new. There have been technologies like these around four years. What is new and what is driving a lot of recent coverage

is something called CRISPR, which stands for Crunchy Reckoms in Sassy Pink Raybacks. Except it doesn't, it stands for this, but you won't remember that, and you actually don't need to. So let's go back to the Crunchy Reckoms thing. So I might never be able to think about gene editing without thinking about Crunchy Reckoms going forward, but tell me about this research that finds a link

between humor and memory and the value of humor in educational settings. Absolutely. Well, first of all, I really like the fact that this interview has changed in images in your mind, Shankar, that you will not get out ever. So I feel like our work here is done. Okay, a couple of studies that help unpack why this is so.

First, researcher Abner Ziv showed that students who were taught class material with humor retain more of it in their class learnings, scoring 11% higher on their final exams. What they did was they gave subjects humorous or non-humorous news clips. They basically designed it so that some of the news clips ended with jokes and some did not. And so in addition to collecting data on brain activity using FMRI technology, they also

administered a memory test to these participants to determine how much information they retained from watching the clips. And those individuals in the humor condition retained not only significantly more information, but the elicited greater activity in the brain regions associated with thinking and cognition. So, it's one thing to say, we all need more laughter in our lives, that we need to see the humorous side of things. It's another thing, to actually be able to pull off telling a good joke. It turns out you can learn to do just that.

We'll be back in a moment to explain how. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Jennifer R. Kerr is a behavioral scientist at the Stanford Business School. As she was studying the psychology of humor, Jennifer came up with a theory that the writing of a joke is similar to what she does herself as a researcher. We have this theory that experimentation and the process that scientists use is actually strikingly similar to that which is used by comedians, right?

You're having hypotheses, you're observing what goes on in the real world, and then you test those hypotheses, some of us test it in the lab, and others of us test it on a stage, and you get feedback whether it be last through an audience or experimental results from participants, and you confirm

whether your hypothesis was correct. We are not known academics are not known for our sense of humor and yet we learned so much about these secrets from comedians. You either think you're funny or you're not. There really is a elements to it. Truth and misdirection. So people think that humor is about inventing the perfect one-liner from thin air, but it's just about noticing what's true in your life. So if you just at the end of each day, write down five observations from the day, like simple things like how excited your dog is at

dinner time or you know how you take a walk around the block every afternoon to break up the day or how you actually took a work call today in your underwear and then you apply these rules of misdirection which is simply just saying okay you know how do you take someone down that path of truth and then surprise or misdirect? So for example, you might say something like, the most thrilling part of my day is when I get dressed to the nines, leave my house and circle the blog just to feel something.

Or like contrast. So contrast is another tool you can use with misdirection. My dog seems really excited that I'm home all day now, but my cat acts like it's the apocalypse. So basically what you're doing with the misdirection is you're just taking the small little thing that you notice that's kind of, you know, interesting, not even funny. And then you're

exaggerating or contrasting it. exaggerating or contrasting it. So one of the things that you point out in the book and that you just mentioned that I thought was so insightful was that humor is often not about seeing what's funny, but about seeing what's true, about noticing the things that basically happen all around us, but most of us actually ignore. I want to play you a little clip from Comedian Jerry Seinfeld that I think illustrates both the ideas of spotting a truth but also then taking it and exaggerating that truth. Furniture, what else does that, they like car trunks? If you're trying to help people out of the pack of trunks, where does this go? Just set it down right there, it goes in some special way that only I understand.

No one could help him. Aliens could come from other galaxies to help him. He would go, would you all just let me do this place? I know what I'm doing here. And if I'm another galaxy, I think they know how to travel. Not with your mother, they don't. Just get the rest of the stuff and let me handle it here. And I feel like when I heard that, I can almost see the dad character that this person is so vivid to me. And of course, then taking that and exaggerating that with the bit about aliens is sort of spinning out that moment of truth, just sort of feel really, at this point, or galactic.

is sort of spinning out that moment of truth to sort of feel really at this point or galactic. Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's exactly right. Another one that I absolutely love from Jerry Seinfeld is he has this line, Dogs are the leaders of the planet. If you see two life forms, what are they making a poop?

The other one's carrying it for him. Who would you assume is in charge? There's these really simple ways to get from setup to punchline, using this misdirection idea. Yeah. There's also a very important humor principle that we learned from improv. The actotina Faye once sat down with former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, and taught him a comedy technique. They start out here by acting out an improvised scene.

Stop. I've got a gun. The gun? The gun I gave you for our wedding anniversary, Eric. How could you? We're not married. Aha. We're not married as a denial.

We've learned our first improv lesson. Talk about the principle of yes and Jennifer. One of the first rules of improv comedy is the concept of yes and. So that's simply the rule that when you're a scene partner, you know, Eric Schmidt, makes an offer, you know, either explicitly or implicitly, you always agree with a premise

and then you add something new to it. And so when you're trying to actually create a context where humor can thrive, that basic principle of yes and is really important to lay down as sort of one of the norms. So we've talked about a number of different ideas here. We've talked about the idea of the importance of spotting truth, the value of exaggeration. I want to play you a clip from the comedian, Ellen DeGeneres, that really brings together many of these techniques. And I'm going to play the clip and have our listeners try to spot the elements of the different techniques

that Ellen is using here. So it's been 15 years since I've done stand-up and when I decided to do this special, a friend of mine was at my house and I told him, I'm going to do stand-up and when I decided to do this special, a friend of mine was at my house, and I told him I'm going to do stand-up again. And he said, really? And I said, yeah, I was hoping for more of a really, but it was really. And I said, yes, why? And he said, well, do you think you're still relatable? I said, yes, I do think I'm still relatable.

I'm a human being. And anyway, just then Batu, my butler, stepped into the library. And he announced that my breakfast was ready. And I was on my third or fourth bite of cube pineapple that Batu was feeding me. And I said, Batu, I'm not hungry. I've lost my appetite. My friend has really upset me by what he said.

And he said, well, then I shall draw you a bath-mem. And so I'm sitting in the tub, and I'm looking out the window with the rose garden. And anyway, I get out of the tub, and Betu had forgotten to put the towel next to the tub again. So I had to do that bath mat scoot all the way across the bathroom to get to the towel. And it's a big, you can imagine how big the bathroom is. It's like doing the bath mat scoot. And then I I stopped and I was like, oh my God,

this is relatable. So Jennifer, walk me through what Ellen just did there. Okay, so first, what she does really well in general, but definitely in that clip is understanding what people are feeling and naming that thing. So the whole title of the tour, you know, relatable and that entire first sketch is basically enaming what people are feeling and thinking. Second, she uses exaggeration.

So she kind of builds out that world. And what she's doing is she's saying like, if that's true, what else is true? So for example, when she says, you know, if it's true that she has a butler named bat two, what else is true? The salarium, the rose garden, drawing a bath. And so you're painting out this world based on that simple exaggeration.

She's often ending on funny. She's just got a remarkable sense of timing, like when to say basically, again, you know. And then I think the other thing is the self-deprecation and self-awareness. We show that individuals that use self-deprecation, especially in high status, contacts, you know, have an incredible ability to shorten the distance between them and the audience.

It makes people much more approachable. So that level of self-awareness, she let gleam in there was also really powerful because it also, like the physical elements of it, like the bathmat scoot was just fantastic. She also does something here that you alluded to earlier in our conversation, which is the sketch starts with this friend of hers questioning whether she's still relatable. By the time we come back to that, it's actually about 60 seconds into the joke that we come back to that.

At that point, we realized this whole thing actually is part of the same unit. The whole thing is actually one setup for coming back to that original idea. You talked about the idea of callbacks earlier, the idea of sort of circling back and finding connections. Can you talk about that, not just from the point of view, what makes a joke work, but from the point of view

of how callbacks in some ways bond people together and give them a sense of being part of a shared experience. Absolutely. So callbacks are very simple things. They're basically just when, you know, if you're in a meeting or in any context and someone makes a joke, and then later in the meeting you reference, you anchor on that laugh line and you simply call back to it. Her ability in that sketch to call back to her friend and then she had multiple callbacks about the butler is really powerful. What happens when you do it, when all of us do it, is that you make the person who originally

had the laugh line feel good, feel listen to, I see you, I heard you. It really actually helps to create this inclusive environment. So, we've talked a lot about the upside of humor in the workplace, but I wonder what knowledge there are, there are reasons many companies have clamped down on jokes in professional settings. You mentioned that this happened to you yourself in college where you, you know, you had a joke about a friend and the friend thought that you were being hurtful or that you were being mean-spirited. So what's funny to you might not be not only not funny to me, it could actually be offensive to me. Jennifer, how do you draw a line between all the good things that

human does and the problematic things that can do, especially in the workplace? One way to think about how do you avoid the risks associated with humor, or how do you actually recover if there is a humor misstep, belies in this framework of truth, pain, and distance. The idea is that truth is the heart of comedy. So we laugh at, as you said, what we recognize. But at the same time, the truth coupled with pain and not enough distance may come across as insensitive or hurtful or offensive.

If you remove humor from the one line that you created, and the truth of that statement still stands, there is integrity in actually what you're saying. And so when you have to say something like, I'm just joking, you know you've lost it. Another rule that we talk about is like never punch down. And so that idea of using humor on someone within the organization that has lower levels of status, there's no faster way to lose an audience. I understand that your mom used to be a hospice volunteer and she would sometimes tell you stories at the end of the day about the regrets of the dying.

Why don't you tell you Jennifer? Yeah, so she actually still is. She's done more than 40 years of volunteering at hospice. And so we grew up, I'm the oldest of two other sisters, and so we would grow up listening to stories of what people wish for in their last days of life, because we're a fun family. And one of the things that we learned is,

is people wish for simple things. Like, I wish I didn't take myself so seriously. I wish I let myself laugh more, which is remarkable because it's being expressed in one of the most serious meaningful moments of one's life. People wish that they had been more present, that they just savored the here and now. And what we find with humor is that you're forced to be very present. When you prioritize humor, you're listening for those callbacks. You're listening to those moments of truth that are being revealed. And so it allows you to cultivate joy in a very present way. And as we started this interview, Michael Lewis really, I think, captures the gist of what

we're trying to create and communicate when he says, when humor exists, love is not far behind. And there's, you know, few acts as easy and generous as sharing laughter with someone. So I think at the end of the day, the reason this work is so important is because it helps to encapsulate what's truly meaningful in life. Jennifer Acker is a behavioral scientist at the Stanford Business School. Along with Naomi Bagnones, she is co-author of the book, Humor Seriously. Jennifer, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Autumn Barnes, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, Kristen Wong, and Laura Quarell. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero this week is Lawrence Goodworth, who works for just works, the company that handles payroll for Hidden

Brain Media. We recently had some questions about the way we had set up our vacation and sick leave policies. They were complicated, and Lawrence patiently went through them with us, explaining the minutiae of things like carryover and a cruel caps. Thank you for your patience and attention to detail Lawrence. One last thing before we go, we are working on a story about choices. How we make choices and how we think of them looking back. Are there big life-changing choices you've made

that you would make differently today? Why did you make that choice? What did your younger self not understand about who you are today or about the permanence of that decision? If you're willing to share a story like that with a hidden brain audience, find a quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Three to four minutes is plenty. Email it to us at ideasathydnBrain.org and use a subject line,

choices. Make sure to include your full name and a phone number where we can reach you if we decide to feature your story. Again, that email address is ideas at HiddenBrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you next week. I love this interview. I love the fact that you have some images. You can't get rid of. Yeah, I'm now half the combination of crunchy rectums and meditating, exercising, and having sex at the same time. Oh my gosh. Can we just put that in as the blooper reel? Hahaha! you