Speaking of Psychology - What Makes Things Funny? With Peter McGraw, PhD

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

What is it about puns that tickles our funny bone? Or dad jokes? How about a person slipping on a banana peel? What could possibly tie all these very different things together under the heading “humor”?  Just in time for April Fool’s Day, we explore that question with Peter McGraw, PhD, a marketing and psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the Humor Research Lab, also known as HuRL. McGraw discusses his “benign violation” theory of humor, when it’s too soon to joke about tragedy, how and why humor varies by culture, and how we can apply lessons from comedy to become more innovative and creative thinkers in all areas of our life and work. Are you enjoying Speaking of Psychology? We’d love to know what you think of the podcast, what you would change about it, and what you’d like to hear more of. Please take our listener survey at www.apa.org/podcastsurvey. Links Peter McGraw, PhD Humor Research Lab Benign Violation Theory TEDxBoulder Video with Peter McGraw, PhD Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A skeleton walks into a bar. The bartender says, what do you have? And the skeleton says, I'll have a beer and a mop. All right, it's an old joke, but maybe you laughed at it. And if you did, why? What makes it funny? And what is it about puns that tickles are funny bone? Or dad jokes?

How about practical jokes? Or even a person slipping on a banana peel? What could possibly tie all of these very different things together under the heading, humor. That's a question that's fascinated people for centuries and not just comedians. The writer E.B. White is supposed to have said that explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. The thing dies in the process. But scientists and philosophers, undaunted, have nonetheless long tried to figure out what makes some things funny and other things not. Today, just in time for April Fool's Day, we'll explore that question and maybe help you figure out whether your practical joke is likely to soar or

make people soar at you. Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Peter McGraw, a marketing and psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, and director of the humor research lab, also known as Hurl. He has spent more than a dozen years studying what makes things funny and has developed what he calls the benign violation theory that explains why people find humor in everything from tickling to puns. He's also explored humor on a more practical level, even trying his hand at stand-up comedy and hosting a podcast where he interviewed comedians about their lives and work.

These days, he's exploring how people can apply lessons from comedy to become more innovative and creative thinkers in all areas of their life and work. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. McGraw. Kim, it's a great pleasure. That what a wonderful introduction. I actually feel good about myself right now. Oh, that's one thing that humor does for us, right? It makes us feel pretty good. Well, let's start by talking about how you got interested in studying the topic. What made you as a psychologist want to understand humor? One thing that's probably obvious, like most people, I greatly appreciate good comedy, whether it be consuming it, you know, going to a comedy club or watching a movie.

And then, you know, I would say by professorial standards, I got a kick out of trying to be funny in my professional life, but especially in my personal life. And yet, 10 years into my career at the time I stumbled on this question of what makes things funny, I had never even considered it as a worthy emotional phenomenon to study, to research. And part of it was no one else was doing that. It was, you know, it was running in the background a little bit of a niche kind of topic, interdisciplinary topic, one that, as you mentioned, goes back centuries, millennia, to some of the great scholars who psychological science, their ideas were built on. And I stumbled on this question in a very peculiar way. I was giving a talk at another university about what makes things wrong.

I was studying moral psychology at the time. and because I want to be a good speaker, I used a kind of provocative, entertaining example of religious marketing that people might find wrong. And I got some laughs. And a hand went up in the back of the room. And I was asked the most important question of my professional life. Actually, maybe the most important question of my life. And this professor, she raised her hand. She just pointed out the incongruity between what I was saying and what was happening, which was I was saying that moral violence.

cause anger and disgust, and then she rightfully pointed out, yet we're laughing. Why? And I stood there dumbfounded, and I went back to my university and I recruited a very bright graduate student, Caleb Warren. I said, we should answer this question. And, you know, as they say, the rest is history, or at least ongoing history. Well, then let's dive into the big question that I post in the introduction, which is, what makes something funny? And what is benign, violation theory, how can it help us answer that question? So, yeah, so this very bright graduate student, Caleb Warren, and I jumped into a more narrow question, which is what makes moral violations funny.

But in order to answer a question like that, you need a good theory. So I think the average person doesn't understand what the value of a theory is. And it's very simple, in my opinion. A good theory helps you answer questions. And so it doesn't have to be totally right. it just has to be good enough. And then a good theory will allow you then to make predictions about questions you, you haven't even considered yet.

And so we got started on this and our look at the literature was disappointing. So I did something I'm not proud of, Kim. I googled what makes things funny. That was my starting point. That's what my undergraduates do when I give it. them an assignment, you know? Like they just Google this. And what I found was, harkening all the way back to these Greek philosophers, Aristotle, Plato, and then other great thinkers, Emmanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbs, Sigmund Freud, frankly, people way, way smarter than me,

had put four theories of humor. And those theories take one of three flavors. They point out what we call superiority theory. We laugh at something that, We sort of laugh at the follies and foibles of others. Relief theory or release theory, which is humor is this kind of release of tension that we carry around all the time. Freud's responsible largely for that. And then the 800-pound gorilla of humor theories, incongruity theory. We laugh at some mismatch there. And what we realized, I think, very quickly, and the benefit of coming to it as I was approaching

mid-career was, it just, first of all, it didn't make sense that we need three theories of humor, that a good theory is what we call parsimonious, right? It's simple. And that you don't, you shouldn't have to select from a menu that, like, well, this theory works for Pratt Falls, but that theory works for puns. And so, uh, we found this sort of little known paper written by a linguist that served as the basis for, as you called it, the benign violation theory. And in short, what we found was, and we find time and time again in Hurl, is that people laugh at, they're amused by, they judge something as funny if it is simultaneously wrong yet okay, threatening yet safe, doesn't make sense yet makes sense.

So you can imagine kind of a then diagram, an overlap between benign and violation. And what happens is the violation gives us arousal, makes us concerned, and then what we call the benign appraisal, seeing how this is okay, flips it and turns it from bad to good. And we laugh to tell the world this thing that seems so threatening is actually harmless. Before I forget, what was that moral juxtaposition that made people laugh? So in this research, I was looking at how some people find religious marketing to be morally reprehensible for churches to use commercial principles to save souls. And they just find it icky. And they're concerned that it may take you away from the righteousness that religion may have. The example was a church in Tampa, Florida that had very good intentions.

And that was to get people to go to its winter retreat. You want to save souls? Let's get people to the winter retreat. And so they decided to have a raffle. So come to the winter retreat, you get enrolled in the raffle. And what people found funny was the choice of grand prize. And that was a yellow H-2 Hummer SUV. Not exactly a gut buster, but good, but good for a chuckle. Take it on the road to paradise. And what we found to be the case was, depending on your perspective about how wrong or right that was, that example was funny or not. And so those academics who aren't very religious don't have a very strong connection to this church and so on, they were able to see how it was both wrong and funny at the same time. So how do you study humor in a lab? What are the experiments that you've done over, I mean, I'm sure you can't tell us all of them,

but maybe a couple that you've done over the years that have helped you formulate the theory and better understand what makes things funny. So I'll give you an example of one of, I think, more, one of the more fun ones. So a lot of them, I admit, is just basically showing people funny images or funny jokes and then just asking them, how amusing is this? Did you laugh? Do you find this offensive? Do you find it boring?

And by the way, this is an important set of questions. because in any study we do that we ask someone a judgment, we ask three styles of questions. One is, how amused are you, right, getting at that experience of humor? We ask, are you offended? And if so, by how much? And are you bored? And if so, by how much? And the reason for that is a joke can fail in two different ways.

You mentioned dad jokes. Dad jokes, when they're not funny, are rarely ever offensive. Right? They fall on the boring side of the continuum. But there's a lot of jokes that are very risque. And when those jokes fail, people are offended. They're outraged. And so a good theory of humor is able to not only predict when something's going to be funny,

but also when it fails to be funny, which side does it fall on? So we always ask those questions. But this one was designed to measure smiling and laughter. And I'll give you an example from it. We've always been very critical of incongruity theory because one is oftentimes incongruity is not well defined, but oftentimes what people will say is, and if you ask the regular everyday person, what makes something funny? They'll say something surprising. We laugh at things that are surprising. And we make the argument that actually that's neither necessary nor sufficient for humor.

For example, we laugh at jokes that we know the punchline to. that is there's nothing surprising about them. I rewatched there's something about Mary, you know, 20, 30 years after it came out. By the way, still very funny, and I know all the jokes. And I found myself laughing. So in this study, we had our subjects engaged in a conversation with what we call a Confederate, basically a research assistant who's posing as a student. This is a very common technique in psychological studies.

And we basically at some point in the interaction, the person grabbed a handful of skittles and threw them at the subject, which might seem to be kind of an insulting thing to do. In one of the conditions, though, we either announced, I'm going to throw these skittles at you or I'm not, you know, or didn't say they were going to throw the skittles at them. And in that condition where they announced it and through the Skittles, there was actually more laughter than when not. And we did this to show that surprise is not necessary for comedy, right? You know what I mean? But the less surprising condition in that experiment was actually got more smiles and laughter than the surprising condition. So there's a saying that humor is tragedy plus time. And you've written about when it's too soon to joke about something tragic.

What is the answer? How long does it take? Can you say before we can find humor in tragedy? I'm glad you asked that question because we ran a huge cross-sectional study to answer that very question. I'm going to give away the punchline before I describe the study. And the answer is the amount of time depends on a lot of things, including how big a violation it is. But we, as a result of that work, we revised the idea that comedy is tragedy plus time. to be comedy is tragedy plus the right amount of time. And I'll lead with an intuition. And that is there's lots of things that are too soon. And then at some point it becomes okay to joke about them.

But at some point, enough time passes that that thing is no longer worthy of being joked about. And so what you get is too soon has the outrage, too late is boring. And there's, again, that sweet spot, that peak in terms of time. Why is it the time helps make something funnier? Well, because the passage of time creates distance from it. And distance, whether it be the passage of time or physical distance or relational distance, helps turn violations into benign violations by removing their threat.

And so in that study, what we did was we measured people's reactions to a parity account of Hurricane Katrina. And what we found was, as Katrina was wreaking havoc on the New York metropolitan area, the jokes coming out of this parody account weren't funny. Then with the passage of time,

they started to become funny and less offensive. And then further, months and months later, those jokes no longer seem relevant. They were boring. And so I can't remember the exact date, but it was like 30,

nine days after Hurricane Katrina, we found that those jokes peaked. Now, of course, in some cases, it peaks an hour later. In some cases, it peaks. And there are some tragedies in the world that may never peak because it never becomes okay to joke. Right. That was my next question, which is, are there some topics that are just never funny? Well, you know, I think it depends on who you talk to. I think a comic says there's no such thing as too soon if a joke is funny. I know I have Israeli friends who make Holocaust jokes. They have some sort of license that that non-Jewish people don't have. And so what that question reveals is the incredible complexity around studying humor.

It's part of the reason that people haven't studied it because at first blush it seems so mysterious. It seems so difficult. But as you know, as someone who values science, science has the ability to take the complex and explain it. If we can map the human genome, we can figure out what makes things funny. We just need to have an experiment. How much does what's considered funny vary by country or culture? Are there universal jokes or universal type humor? So there's very little that's universal when it comes to comedy, to be honest.

But the explanation for this is, as I said, a good theory explains puzzles. And one of the puzzles is, why are there two ways that a joke can fail, which we've already alluded to? It could be too benign or it could be too much of a violation. But also, how can the same joke make one person laugh, another person yawn, and another person stomped their feet? with outrage. And at least from a theoretical standpoint, we can explain this. And that is what is wrong and what is okay, what is benign and what is a violation, depends on the individual, the audience members, values, beliefs, lifestyle, the number of

drinks they've had, the context they're in, right, whether they're in a comedy club or in a church, and of course, their culture. because culture creates norms, culture creates rules, and a lot of comedy breaks rules. And so it depends on what rules you value and don't value in that way. Now, what is likely to be universal? The most universal thing is physical comedy. That is, on the individual level, things like tickling and play fighting. And we know this because non-human primates laugh when play fighting.

Even, and this is mind-blowing Kim, you can type into YouTube, rat laughter, and you will find videos of rats being tickled and them doing the rat equivalent of laughing. Now, when you take this into the world of comedy, the closest we can come to is the classic, as you mentioned on the intro, slipping on a banana peel. Right. And the reason behind that is when someone falls, falls down a flight of stairs or something like that, that is obviously a violation. we're concerned for their safety, but if there's something about that that makes it safe, perhaps they get up and find dust themselves off and look perplexed. Maybe there's someone we want to fall down a flight of stairs, right? You know what I mean?

And so there's these different ways. Now, that's as close as we come because there are no cultural norms. There is no language, and it all is connected to that idea of physical play. But as you know, not everybody finds Pratt Falls to be amusing. And so there are real limits to the universality of comedy. And Pratt Falls also, it's if you know the person who fell or had the Pratt fall is funnier, right, than if it's a total stranger where you don't know whether that person got heard or what might have happened. Yeah, it depends. I mean, look, I love it when my friends fall up a flight of stairs, but I don't like it when my friends fall down a flight of stairs.

So is a sense of humor correlated with higher intelligence? It just seems to me that smart people get jokes and people who are maybe not quite as intelligent. I'm not even sure how I'm defining that. That's wide open. But can you be – and my other question that's related to this is can you be intelligent and have no sense of humor? Yes and yes. So first of all, when people talk about a sense of humor, we should be – when people talk about a sense of humor, we should be clear. There's two sides of a sense of humor.

and they're surprisingly uncorrelated. That is, your ability to produce laughter in others and the likelihood that you laugh in response to someone's attempt to produce laughter in others. And the little work that's been done finds that those things are surprisingly uncorrelated, that someone who might be very good at making people laugh may not be very easy to laugh and vice versa. However, when it comes to the production of common,

comedy, you are correct. Your intuition is absolutely correct. Smart people are better than less smart people. And that makes sense, I think. One is intelligence is correlated with creativity, and creativity really is at the foundation of this process. Smart people are knowledgeable about the world. And so if you want to be able to make comedy, a lot of comedy is about what's happening in the world, you know, in that sense. And then lastly, it really is, and this is not something we've talked about to this point, but there is a third element to the benign violation theory, and that is that judgment of wrong and okay has to occur simultaneously. And so that term being quick-witted really is about how do you bring those appraisals together at the same time. And that's

not easy to do. We know that most humor attempts fail. We know that most professionals really have to write lots and lots of jokes in order to find that one very, very good joke. And so being smart certainly helps. Now, I want to be clear, being smart is not in the traditional sense of getting high GREs or high SATs necessarily. Sure. Because, you know, we often have that class clown who is very, very good at making people laugh, may not actually excel in traditional forms of education, in part because they're counter-normative. They don't behave and so on. So really, it's not about the valedictorians I actually don't think are the funniest people, right? It's the people who are smart, but also can sit in this space where they're willing to break some rules. Valedictorians

are very good at following rules. They're not very good at breaking rules. It's sort of more the entrepreneurial person, I think, who has that edge. You published a paper a little while ago on humorous complaining and found that if you have something you want to gripe about, that there are advantages and disadvantages to complaining in a funny way. Can you talk about that a little bit? What did you find? I'd be happy to. I have to say that might be my favorite paper. And I came to the idea behind that paper through, I caught my claiming that I don't complain about things, which is completely false. It's not even, I complain

all the time. You know why? Because humans complain all the time. People complain all the time. Because complaining in some ways is useful and sometimes falsely useful. That is we have theories about the value of complaining. Not all of them are correct. So for example, complaining actually doesn't help us through catharsis in the way that we think it does. It does help us because suppressing a complaint is really bad. Suppressing an emotion tends to make it worse. But sometimes people complain in order to get something. Sometimes they complain to show the world that they have expertise.

So I complain, oh, this dessert, oh, it's terrible. Because I want the world to know, I know what good food tastes like and so on. But what I found was I am a complainer, but I tend to be a humorous complainer. I make a lot of like sarcastic and weedy quips to make people laugh about the bad weather, the bad traffic, you know, a bad dessert and so on and so forth. And so this makes sense, right? A complaint is an expression of something negative and a joke is a way to take something negative and make it positive. And so this work on humorous complaining, Caleb Warren was a co-author on that paper also. So what we found was people like humorous complainers.

Humorous complaints are attention getting. People will share humorous complaints. So if you want to complain about a company, a humorous complaint is great if you want it to, quote, unquote, go viral. The downside of humorous complaints are they don't spur the kind of reaction we often want them to. If you complain to your roommate about the dishes in the sink, that may get him or her to clean the dishes. But if you make humorous complaints about the dishes in the sink, you're taking this thing that's wrong and making it okay. And so as a result, it may not spur the kind of remedial behavior that you want in that sense. And so what I say is, you know, pick your weapon depending on which are the outcomes that you want for a complaint.

What is the relationship and the difference, say, between laughter and humor? We laugh at funny things, but there's nervous laugh. There's uncomfortable laughter. So how are laughter and humor related? So we find that the emotion, amusement, the judgment, funny. So you have emotion, cognition, and then behavior, laughter, are the three elements that make up a humorous experience. They don't all have to be present, but when they are, it tends to be a more intense experience. Now, laughter is really, I think, the sort of biggest puzzle and the one that I think is most

difficult, in part because people are more likely to laugh when others are present, less likely to laugh when no one else is present, right? Because there's nothing to communicate. Laughter can be faked, right? So anybody who's had a boss knows that you can fake laughter, right? Yep. Yep. And laughter can be suppressed. That is, someone tells an off-collar joke that you think is funny, but you don't want the world to know that you think that's funny. And so you can stifle, stifle laughter. And so, but laughter, again, as I said, serves this communication function. And we know it does because we see it in species that don't have the ability to articulate ideas in the same way that humans can. And so I find that to be a really interesting

element to all of this. But again, the best, most funny things, you bust a gut, you get that positive, delightful feeling, and you go, Kim, that was hilarious. That takes me to the question about animals and a sense of humor, because we think that what some animals are doing sometimes, and you mention rats, that they're laughing, and I think we have recognized it in some, some of our closer relatives. But what other animals have a sense of humor? And how do we know? it? Well, you know, this question is wide open. It's not easy to answer. The most of the work has been done with, you know, chimps, bonobos, monkeys, apes, and so on. The researchers don't call it laughter per se. They call it play panting. And this is connected. Really, the roots of comedy are in

play. And play panting, which is really fascinating, you know, again, is this sort of like kind of sound. And what the research shows is that the primates that are closest to humans genetically

closest to humans have play panting that is most akin to the way we laugh. Right. So we know that they are connected. Now, Mark Bekhov is an expert

in animals and especially an expert in dogs and there is emerging work that suggests that dogs have a sense of humor, the dogs laugh. Now, anybody who's a dog owner will say, absolutely, right? My dog has a sense of humor. My dog, quote, unquote, laughs, you know, especially when playing. Cat owners, not so much. So it's hard to know.

My feeling about this, though, is that any mammal has some, in its repertoire, any mammal, that engages in play with its own species has something akin to humor as an emotional experience. But again, the work hasn't been done. This is a projection based upon what's been done and the theory I rely on. I think cats laugh, but we can't hear it. I mean, they certainly laugh at us. That's true. I think they laugh on how they're getting over on the world. Yes. You teach at a business school, and your most recent book is called Stick to Business, which is about how lessons from comedy can help people in their work lives. Can you talk about that?

And should we or shouldn't we try to be funny at work? I used to think we should, and now I think only some of us should. So, and I'll make the easy case for why we all should not try to be funnier at work. And it's that guy. you know the guy the guy who thinks he's funny you know and so if I tell everybody to go

go forth and be funny at work we got to really worry about that guy you know what I mean he's like oh yeah here's my chance you know and because bad comedy may you know at best case bore people at worst case offend people the workplace is a place that we

should be inclusive you know and it should be one where everybody feel welcome and comfortable And so what I have pivoted my thinking is is something that everybody should do, which is to think funny. And so as you mentioned at the beginning, I've tried my hand at stand up. I've taken improv classes. I even developed a live comedy show. And so I've dipped my toe into the professional world.

And what I've realized is it's incredibly difficult to be successful in that world. Yet those people who are successful in that world, not only, are they incredibly creative sort of innately and intuitively, but there are tips and tricks, there are practices and perspectives that they use to make things funnier. And it's those practices and perspectives that we can use not to make comedy, but to make things that are creative or innovative that can help our lives. So I'll give you a quick example. Comedy 101, the first lesson you learn as a comedian, if you don't already intuitively know it, is what I call reverse it or the reversal. And that's to produce an opposing perspective. I'll demonstrate it with a

joke by Henny Youngman, the king of the one-liners. Henny Youngman said when I read about the dangers of drinking, I gave up. Kim, what do you think that Henny gave up when he read about the danger? He gave up reading. He gave up reading. Exactly. Yes. Right. So he did the opposite of what you might expect there. But it, you know, that makes that violation benign because we know Henny likes to drink. You know, I don't want to give up drinking, so I'll give up reading. Well, those reversals and reversals can be, as I just demonstrated there, the punchline to a joke, but it could also be a premise to a comedy bit. So the movie Train Rec with Amy Schumer is a reverse rom-com.

So the typical rom-com, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. In Train Rec, it's the opposite. Girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy back, right? Well, you can find the reversal. in the real world, and it's often a useful way to break out of very kind of tired status quo style thinking. I'll give you one quick example of this. Imagine your two entrepreneurs based in Brooklyn, and you're looking to take on Apple and Samsung in the smartphone market. How do you outsmart Apple and Samsung? Teams of engineers years and years ahead of you, well, what these guys did was they reversed

it. They didn't create a smartphone. They created the dumb phone. Right? So a phone that is made for people who want to be not more connected, but rather less connected. And so they've been able to stand out in the marketplace by thinking in reverse. And so I invite people to think in reverse, especially when they're stuck on a problem. There's been quite a bit of psychological research into who's funnier, men or women. And of course, as a woman, I have a point of view here, but I'm going to ask you, what's the answer to that? I mean, I know there was a recent pretty big meta-analysis that concluded that it's men, but then there's other research that says no. Is the jury still out? I think from a data standpoint, the jury is still out. There's a lot of work that needs to be done.

I think it's the wrong question, though. I'll be really honest. I think a lot of the work on gender that compares men and women, fails to recognize that men and women are more alike than they are different. And so, knowing whether someone is a man or a woman and predicting whether they're going to be funny or not is less important than knowing a whole bunch of other things about them. I'll give you the little work that I've done is, first of all, all of that work is very limited because there are an infinite number of ways to make comedy. If you choose one way to make comedy, for example, writing funny captions for cartoons,

that may tell you that men are better or women are better at making captions for cartoons funny, but it doesn't explain the vast array that people make things funny, quips, satire, irony, Pratt Falls, etc. Also, all of that work doesn't, do what I think needs to be done is to look at how those jokes fail. And I'll give you an example of a little pilot study I ran. It's not worthy of publication, but I thought it was enlightening. I did this with my class where I had students doing exactly that, basically making jokes.

And then when we measured the funniness of these jokes and we compared men and women, we found that men's jokes tended to be on average slightly funnier than women's. So consistent with the existing research. However, we also measured how offensive the jokes were. And guess what? The men's jokes were also when they failed more likely to be offensive. And so any good study that compares men and women, which I don't think is that interesting a question, frankly, because I think there are funny men and there are funny women and they're not funny men and they're not funny women. but any research has to measure how are you failing because the failure part of it is as important as part of the success part of it. And so what my hunch is, I can't, you know, I haven't written

the papers yet, but my hunch is that depending on how you look at the question, the answer is yes. Okay. You mentioned offensive jokes, and I'm going to venture into the question. a politically incorrect department now and ask, why does it seem that every culture have what we in the U.S. call Polish jokes or dumb blonde jokes? And what I'm talking about, of course, is the jokes that denigrate a particular group of people for their supposed lack of intelligence. Indeed, that seems to be a universal. Christy Davies, who was at the University of Reading, has done a lot of work on this. It's really fascinating work, qualitative research, mostly. And essentially the reason for that is that comedy can be used as a tool.

So it can be used as a tool to entertain. As we've talked about with humorous complaining, it can be used as a tool to get people to like you, to garner attention. But it also can be used as a tool to critique the powerful or to critique the weak to punch up or punch down, so to speak. And that's that idea of punching down in terms of making fun of someone's intelligence due to some stereotype, some existing prejudice, is clearly punching down. And really, it's just designed, I think, twofold. One is to make the joke teller feel superior, hence that form of theory that has existed for such a long time.

And then it's also just used as a tool to keep those differences in play. to continue to marginalize and to discriminate and to prejudice. And so I believe that the best comedy, I'm not speaking as a researcher, I'm speaking as a human, that the best comedy punches up. It takes on the powerful, and it looks to make the world a better place as a result of that. And I think that the best comedy,

when it's looking down, is designed to draw people up. And so I, you know, I think the good communication, Comedians recognize that it is completely inappropriate to make jokes about homosexuals, but it's appropriate to make jokes about homophobes and a way to write a wrong, so to speak. Well, I'm going to put you on the spot, which really probably isn't asking you questions as a researcher, but just as a guy who's interested in humor. What's your favorite joke? Do you have a favorite comedian, your favorite funny movie?

Well, you know, that's a tough question because it's constantly changing. We can try this. This may not work well for a podcast, but you can edit it out if it doesn't work. Why don't we do one of my favorite jokes? All right. Okay. Go for it. So Kim, I want you to ask me, what is the secret to good comedy?

I know this joke. What is the secret to good comedy? Timing. I knew you were going to do that. that. And as you demonstrated, an old joke and I still laugh at it, right? They knew it was coming and it was still funny. That's right.

You know, in terms of favorite comedians, I don't want to pick just one, you know, in part because comedy rewards novelty, you know, so it's easy to fall in love with a new comic. But I'm living in Los Angeles right now. And last night, I had a wonderful, what felt like pre-pandemic experience. I dined outside and had a lovely dinner. And the gentleman at the table to my left, I look up, he signs the check, walks by me, I hear him say something, and I go, I know that voice.

And it was one of my favorite comedians. I had a Chris Rock sighting last night, which was nearly as delightful as my meal. Oh, that's a good story. Well, thank you. And thank you for joining us today, Dr. McGraw, if I dare say it's been a real riot talking to you. It's been my pleasure. Thank you, Kim. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www.combeatingof Psychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. That's speaking of psychology, all one word, at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condihan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.