The Joe Rogan Experience - #578 - Peter McGraw

Episode Date: November 21, 2014

Peter McGraw is an associate professor of Marketing and Psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Along with journalist Joel Warner, they are responsible for "The Humor Code" - a bestselling book, blog & international research project. His research spans the fields of judgment and decision making, emotion, affect, and mood.

We used to do commercials, but now we just add them in later. So we'll just go live. Just start talking. Are we live? Yeah. Jeez. What is that? It's just fucking chaos. Is that some music playing in the background?

Peter McGraw. Sir. How are you? Scholar. Author. Comedy expert. The Humor Code. Two out of three. Two out of three. Two out of three. I'll just let you folks out there figure out which one of the two.

So your book, Humor Code, it's all about analyzing comedy and the art of comedy, where comedy comes from, where humor comes from. Yes. No, so it's, yeah. I mean. Good pause. Okay, all right, we're done. you guys got timing we're done that's it uh you can get it on amazon.com is there an audible book available there is uh did you read it uh no another one god damn it there's a there's a fucking there's some sort of a trend out there where these publishers won't let authors read their own book i think that's a huge disservice to the authors.

Except for Stephen King. So I co-wrote this book, and the joke was that we were going to read every other word in order to make it even. Right. So actually, the book's about what makes things funny, and it's a global expedition. So I teamed up with the writer Joel Warner, and the book's actually told in his voice. so I teamed up with the writer Joel Warner and and the books actually told in his voice so it's a co-written book but it's Joel sort of narrating what it is that we're going through like through his eyes right and then it allows him to make fun of me for like doing dumb things and stuff like right but you know um you know who narrated the book seems Peter name's Peter Berkoff.

He was on Animal House. Really? There's a scene with Bill Murray where he like accosts one of the caddies and he's like holding a pitchfork up next to his throat and he's telling some story and the guy's like looking really scared and awkward. Bill Murray? No, Bill Murray was in the scene with the guy who narrated the book. I wish. But Bill Murray wasn't in Animal House. Oh, what did I say? I mean, Caddyshack.

Right. Caddyshack. Okay. You did say Animal House, right? Didn't you? Did I? Yeah. Can we strike that?

This is a confused fucking room. We beep. No, is that out? No, Mr. Cosby, we cannot redirect anything from this. We study too soon. We definitely, that's a big part of the book. I think you got off light. It's good.

Leave this fucking disaster alone. Oh my God. It's terrible. It's terrible. People are looking at it from a lot of ways, but the real way to look at it is that how did this happen? How did this guy trick everybody into thinking he was America's wholesome father, and all the while he was a drugging rapist. It's unbelievable. It's terrifying.

It's terrifying that a guy like that can make it to like 70, whatever the hell he was, by doing it. 77? Doing it since the 60s, apparently. Well, I can get in trouble very easily. I have tenure, so I'll tread lightly. I hear you. I've got tenure, so I can go down some of these paths. Right.

But here's the thing that is striking to me is like, why does he need to do something like... It's not like the man probably didn't have admirers. There's something that's scary. You're very right. You're very right. yes scary it's very you're very right you're very right and that's that sort of supports a lot of the arguments that women always want to uh bring up when they talk about rape that rape is not about sex it's about violence it's about control that's right and when you have a guy like this i mean what clear first of all he is so wealthy if he wanted to just order prostitutes and have them

wait in the hall like by the hundreds he could do that i meanitutes and have them wait in the hall, like, by the hundreds, he could do that. I mean, he doesn't have to drug people. Like, why? And I'm sure a lot of people would enjoy having sex with Bill Cosby. They'd be like, oh, boy, I got to have sex with Bill Cosby. Maybe it's just that he has such disdain for people that he just doesn't mind treating them like objects. Who the fuck knows? We're just speculating.

It's awful. I think what it does, though, it highlights. I mean, it's just a terrible, terrible thing. But what it highlights, I think, is that the person on stage and the person in the green room can often be different people. And sometimes the person on stage

is a lot nicer and friendlier and warmer. And sometimes the person in the green room is a lot nicer a lot nicer warmer you know i mean like it's like so the idea essentially is that that um when you see someone you see their public persona stand-up comedian and actor and so on that's that's a character who may or may not be sort of closely related to the person who they are. So I like to say Gallagher's not at the local neighborhood block party smashing watermelons and running around. He's like a really nutty conservative. You ever heard him talk about that?

No, never. He's been on radio shows. He's very fiscally conservative and angry. Huh. See? I mean, there you go, right? And so you see you know you see this happen you know people sort of talk about comedians having a dark side

and some of it is is that the act of being a funny person you often go down dark dark places and talk about the things that are wrong in the world but it's hard to know how dark that person is in the same way that that it seems like cosby flipped it right he seemed like the nice guy he would chastise chris rock and richard prior for using curse words and yet you know that's so famous that eddie murphy bit is one of the greatest of all time did the people laugh did you get paid tell bill to have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up that's right i can just imagine that conversation taking place between Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor over Bill Cosby. Wouldn't it be great to be a fly on the wall for those two hanging out?

Amazing. I got to open, or not open, I actually got to go on after Richard Pryor for the last shows of his life. Really? Yeah. I mean, he might have done a couple more after that that i didn't know about but as far as i know i i work with him the last shows of his life at the uh at the comedy store that's crazy yeah when i was and how is it that you had to go after him because the comedy store um was run by mitzi shore and mitzi shore had a really a do or die philosophy. She had like a gladiator

philosophy when it came to comedy. She would take comics and if she thought they had any potential whatsoever she would shove them against the most damning odds. Like I used to have to go on after Martin Lawrence when Martin Lawrence was on Martin and he would do like 45 minutes in the main room and destroy.

People have like slept on Martinin lawrence and i don't know how it happened but martin lawrence for one at one point in time he had some issues he got a little crazy and you know remember he was like wearing a rubber suit and he got pulled over by the cops and he had a gun or something remember that like no i need to hang out with you guys more often and find out all these stories we'll give you the real insight on stand-up comedy. But yeah, he had some sort of a breakdown. But before that,

I mean, I think a lot of that is probably stress-related just from being such a fucking megastar. But before that, he would come to the comedy store and fucking destroy.

And I used to go on after him and eat just giant platters of shit. I would bomb every time. I'd go on after Dice Clay. I'd go on after him and eat just giant platters of shit i would bomb every time i'd go on after dice clay i'd go on after anybody who was like if there was a big name mitzi would shove me on right after and that means she she likes you i mean she believes in you yeah it's like sink or swim bitch this is it you know you can't get those eight o'clock cushy spots after argus hamilton when everybody's nice and warmed up and friendly and no one's drunk yet

no no you're gonna go on at 10 45 after you know a guy like damon wayans does 45 minutes and destroys um anyway is that why you started weight training yeah i got scared fight off the audience um i so i uh would go on after prior and they would and they would bring Pryor to the stage, and it would take, like, I'm not exaggerating, at least four or five minutes to get him to the stage. Okay. Because the OR is a small room, the original room, but you have to start in the back, and two guys would have to carry him. So they'd have to walk with him.

They'd clear the path and make the path towards the stage larger so they could get him through, and then they would slowly walk him down the aisle. They had literally, like, picking him up, stepping, picking him up, stepping him, and his body was just gone. He was severely deteriorated. Then they would put him on this chair, and he would drink, and he was on medication. He was still drinking.

Okay. And they would crank the mic up, like, because he couldn't talk. Uh-huh. So, you had to make it really loud so he could talk and and then you know people get really bummed out and then i'd have to go on after him it depended on how much time you would do sometimes you do like half an hour sometimes you'd only do like 20 minutes but you know you're watching arguably the most influential greatest stand-up comedian of all time and this is his his last days and it was just it was hard yeah i went

back and watched some of his stuff it's it's really interesting to go back and watch classic yeah stand up and the thing about richard's stuff is as opposed to eddie murphy's stuff it holds up yeah really strongly yeah in a way that like topically even it would. You wonder what would happen with a guy like that today and the machinery. Where would he have gone in terms of television, film? It's a good question. And so on, because he's just so funny. Yeah.

And he's so likable in ways that... He was the best. I think Kenneson was probably the best for like a year but overall prior is the best because like i think lenny bruce is the most important bill bill already just took himself out of consideration who did bill yeah he's out so it's funny just not even like a few months ago bill burr and i were planning on taking a trip to vegas just to see bill cosby we were we were plotting it out and we're like let's just take a weekend off because everybody always raves about how good he is like i've heard a bunch of comics like like

chris rock was raving about it chris rock was saying that he felt like an amateur after he saw oh well bill cosby and i watched his special and i was like, man, I don't know. This seems like fucking some really conversational, middle-of-the-road stuff. Not by any means offensive. It wasn't that good to me. I know he was brilliant back in the day. You'd go listen to that Noah's Ark bit and all that stuff from way back when. But the stuff that I was watching that he was doing recently, I was like, all right, we should just go. Just because it's a historical thing.

And then all this shit comes out. I want to know what Hannibal thinks about all this. Like if he's sitting there going. He's probably just fucking hiding. If I was Hannibal, I'd fucking hide. Because that guy might get you killed. I mean, think about it. Like how much money does Bill Cosby have?

And how much time does he have left on this planet? Yeah. And he's got to connect the fact that this one really respected stand-up comic started calling him a racist. Or a rapist, rather. No, I said racist. A rapist on stage. And then it hit. I forget where.

I mean, the next day it showed up online. Yeah. But it's taken a little while to pick up. Well, everybody knew about it before then. This is what's really weird. It's almost like a volcano that gave you a bunch of warning eruptions and then spewed because there was stories from way back in like the early 2000s of you know improprieties as it were and it was mildly in the news when hannibal started talking about it that's how he started talking about it in his act he had done it for a few

weeks a couple times here and there but yeah he just said like go google it it's all over the news just no one's paying attention until this happened yeah so maybe you could explain this to weeks, a couple times here and there. But yeah, he just said, like, go Google it. It's all over the news. Just no one's paying attention until this happened. Yeah, so maybe you can explain this to me as someone who, I visit LA, you know, I sort of pay attention a little bit to what's going on here. Obviously, I've gotten connected into the comedy scene. How is it that there are these, what is it, like, dark stories that everybody sort of knows in Hollywood, but no one ever talks about outside of that? I don't think there's that many anymore.

Okay. You know, I think things like this, like this is as dark as it gets. Okay. This is an evil crime of epic proportion. And one that there's going to be no justice, right? That's the thing that makes it very difficult. How can there be? I mean, even if you put him in jail, how much time does he have left in his life and he lived this like fantastic existence

for 70 plus years i'm sure right now none of that matters to him i'm sure right now he is in hell you know that's one of the weird things about the concept of karma you know like when you you do evil shit to people and even if you got away with it for a long time, it's probably still creeping away at his insides constantly. And then when it finally does overtake him, like right now, and he's just swarmed by allegations, it must just feel like hell. Yeah, it must be. It's got to feel like hell. Speaking of hell, if someone told me when we set this up that we were going to spend the first half of this this podcast talking about bill cosby and the rape allegations i never would have believed it i never would have believed it either i never would have someone on twitter wrote that like for the first time in 40 years

charles manson is having a better week than bill cosby because manson got married yeah it's it's fucked man the the dark side thing yeah i want to hear what you have to say about my take on that um a lot of comedy comes from people being scared or bullied or making light of situations and that's where they sort of develop their sense of humor including mine mine was like sort of a it came about through a different angle but it's all sort of the same thing and i think a lot of comics were ignored and were not loved and they developed this exorbitant need for attention it's so powerful it makes them want to stand on a stage like they're trying to get it all back it's almost like they're trying to seek balance from what they didn't get in their childhood that's almost everyone i know yeah okay so i so i buy that like

that makes a lot of intuitive sense the challenge with that is that that's the same story that people put forth for other artists for musicians and for you know painters and like that they that their art arose from this dark sort of place and it's a way to kind of try to fix things try to cope or you know trying to be um to feel positive again um and then the other thing is though there's lots of people been bullied and scared and had terrible childhoods who don't become funny right so so i mean i think that there is something to this notion, but I wonder how specific it is to comedy and what is it that differentiates someone like you versus someone who never became funny? So where's that mechanism? Because that I don't have a good answer to.

I have an answer to why people seem messed up who do comedy because most people don't get on stage right and tell the world about their problems um but there's plenty of people in the audience who were abused as kids and they're alcoholics and are divorced and all these kinds of things so it so it's a it's a really interesting puzzle and it's certainly one that that there's a lot of evidence for because you really notice when a seemingly happy comic commits suicide like robin williams or you know someone ods etc and so so what is it though that you can point to that that made you go down the path of comedy versus some other path well i can i can comment on this in a unique way

because there was a lot of other points of focus that I used to try to distract myself from my unhappy childhood that weren't funny at all. Okay. I was an artist, and I was really heavily into drawing comic books. And then I became a martial artist. Okay.

And I started fighting. From the time I was like 15 until I was like 21. That was my entire focus of my life. So during that time, it wasn't funny at at all and the only people that i would make laugh was like guys in the locker room and it came out of a a fear like we would spar and sparring scary because you know you're practicing fighting and a lot of times you're like the way to get good is you got to hit each other really hard you got to do it like it's a real fight you kind of pull back a little bit sometimes but it's just scary as shit and oftentimes you're sparring with people

you don't know and that turns into like an actual fight so every sparring session we would do especially on saturdays with this big thing called team training that we do on saturday morning and i would make everybody laugh i would be the guy who would be like cracking jokes you're doing impressions of people but i was only doing it because i was scared and i was doing it for them because i wanted them to pay attention to me i think that all the other energy that i put forth into art and into um into um martial arts was just trying to calm down whatever fucking ridiculous storm was inside my head because i didn't get enough attention or my life was fucked up or you know fill in the blank for whatever it is sure and I think the path of comedy is just a unique path in and of itself

because there's so much criticism and analysis and self-analysis and judgment by the audience and then this pressure to produce comedy. There's so much going on on top of the initial motivation that got you into it. But I think that path can go to guitar playing. That path can go to, it's just trying to find something that makes you feel special. And if you, I mean, there's a bunch of people that have that issue in their head and they've never figured it out. And they've, you know, bounced around in normal jobs and never can keep it together and become drug addicts or alcoholics or fill in the blank. But I think it all comes from a very similar place.

And it's really weird that our society, that human beings rather, are like that. But if you don't get enough attention at certain ports in your developmental process, you develop this exorbitant need for an unbalanced need for attention. And you either learn how to deal with that and learn how to channel it or you don't but if you do learn how to channel it it's like a massive advantage it's like being a crazy attention whore if you can keep a handle on it's like what an like an engine for motivation you have yeah well i think in some ways you you really need that to to make it in this business right It's such, you know, stand-up comedy. So I gave it a shot. Actually, that's what started the Humor Code Project was this journalist said to me,

you know, I want you to come to this open mic night and critique the comedians. Tell me why they're funny or not using your theory. And in a moment of hubris, I oh i don't get on stage and tell some jokes and uh you can imagine how that went uh it did not go well how long did you prepare uh this is embarrassing it's embarrassing to say now because i know about the business i prepared like 24 hours that's better than not at all yeah yeah it's i mean i understand i get it now but you know when you're when you're outside the business you don't really understand what goes what goes into it and then at the end of the book at the end of our travels i got on stage again this time

at just for laughs and at a real comedy club in montreal in montreal oh okay at the comedy nest oh okay yeah and then to sort of prove right that i've learned something along the way did you get laughs i did oh that's awesome i did yeah it was good fun yeah it was fun but uh but uh where was it going oh the idea is that that to want the attention to want to succeed so badly it is necessary it's sufficient, but it's necessary because you face challenges. Yeah, you face failure, the risk of failure all the time, failure regularly. And then you just have to do it constantly to be able to get those sort of shining moments that I think help propel you even further along. Well, it's also in order to to get good you have to accept that

failure and you have to absorb the pain it's a very weird thing but i find that the more satisfied i am with what i do the shittier my product is and the more i'm disgusted by everything i do the better everything is and this i like i could have a murderous set where i'm killing for an hour and i'll fuck one setup of one thing and that's all i think about for like days yeah so like there's like this intense never satisfied sort of narrative that keeps going on when i'm really working on something and i really get into it i I'm never satisfied. Well, there's a, so there's this, if I could be a professor for a moment. So there's what's called, we call the negativity bias or negativity dominance. And it's essentially the idea that, that the negative things in the world hold much more sway over our decisions, our

emotions, our reasoning than positive things. And it's, it's part of the reason that that one little element can outshine, outweigh, you know, 59 minutes of other good stuff. And, um, I mean, that makes, it makes sense from sort of an evolutionary standpoint. But then when you think about the stakes associated with wanting to become a stand-up comic it it actually becomes really rational to pay attention to the to those failures right because you have to eliminate them or fix them if you want to get that hour special that just shines yeah you also you don't do yourself any good by being happy with your work it's fucked up but it's true it's like you you i mean i'm happy with the results like i know

like objectively all right that was really good but actually there could i could go look at my last special which i think the one that's coming out it's coming out tonight oh my uh on comedy central midnight tonight's the first night but i think it's my best one but i always think that but this one i really do like objectively think it's my best one i put way more work into it than my last one but i way more work into it than my last one but i could go back and watch a bit like five times and get crazy and go what the fuck did i do it like that for like oh if i just did this or like you can't you can never find like a peaceful moment and it's because the stakes are so high first of all and the the impact of it like when it's when you when you get it good when you really

get it and nail it and and the audience is dying laughing and then people go that's my all-time favorite bit like that that is so fun like that is such an important thing to be able to accomplish it's so and there's only one way to do it you gotta fucking crawl through glass if you don't crawl through glass if you don't crawl through glass if you don't really look at it for what it is it'll never get to that point and the only way to look at it like that is you got to be like super hypercritical and if you're hypercritical you're gonna fucking hate everything you're gonna hate everything you do you know i um i i so i did my postdoc with danny kahneman so he won won the Nobel Prize in Economics for psychological insights into decision making.

And I worked with him before I did the postdoc when I was a graduate student. He was in his late 60s at the time. I was in my late 20s. And I helped him edit a couple chapters. And that guy, what you just described is him. He would write a paragraph. And I would be like, oh, it's great. And he goes, no, no, no. And then he would rewrite it in front of me and it would take him like 45 minutes.

And then I'd be like, oh yeah, that's better. And he goes, no. And then he would just write it over again. And we would, so we'd work on a paragraph for like three hours that I already thought was good. And at the end of it it was great and then we just move on to the next paragraph and it it's just like i think that that idea of being so obsessed obsessed with getting it perfect is what you need to get something near perfect yes the only way you really achieve what we want to call greatness yes uh

ernest hemingway has this great quote that my friend ari shafir has taped on the front of his laptop okay the first draft of everything is shit yeah yeah shitty first draft and he just puts it he puts it right on his laptop like right where the uh the thing above the keyboard so he looks at that every time he writes yeah and it's just that that's what you got to do you got to write and you're going to rewrite and you got to analyze and you got to listen like brian and i were actually just talking about this last night it's fucking hard to listen to yourself he's like i hate my voice i fucking hate what i sound like i figured it out if you uh put it on double speed it sounds a little different like it doesn't sound like your voice you're trying to hack it you're not trying to hack and you don't

have to listen as long yeah and it's faster And you know what you're talking about already, so if you listen to double speed, it's the way to go. Because that's the problem I had, was my voice is so gross when you hear your own voice. No, you should listen to your voice and fix that shit. That's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to do something that doesn't seem gross to you. But you're like, oh, fuck you, reality.

Changing your voice is messed up, though. No, you don't have to change your voice. You just have to calm down. Just calm down, down you silly goose so what's the name of your special uh rocky mountain high okay it's a denver song yes fucking john denver had to had to use it plus i i did it in denver uh it was right after the comedy works in denver i decided yeah it's the best i decided to do it at a comedy club, first of all, because I wanted to. Because I think that I've been doing it in these theaters. So I had a lot of decision making after my last special, the live at the Tabernacle one.

I wasn't that happy with it. I was happy with some bits, but then I was like, man, if I had more time to work on that, I could have made that whole thing better. And then I thought about it. And I'm like, you know, another thing is is i don't think that that's the right environment for doing a special like on a giant stage i'm like when you watch someone in a comedy club and you're in your living room like you're right there you know like you feel like you know these big wide shots and so on exactly yeah so i didn't want any of that very little shots of the audience i just wanted to

just focus on the thing like you're someone in the audience you're just watching of the audience. I just wanted to just focus on the thing. Like, you're someone in the audience. You're just watching in the audience. And Denver is just, you know, right now is just changing so radically because of the marijuana being legal. It's just bizarre. The culture is expanding in this really strange way that everybody idealized, like, this would be the ideal scenario. You get $100 million a year in taxes. You know, the violent crime drops drunk driving drops murder rate drops but that's actually what's happening yeah and you know um sort of like tons of young people are moving there the tech scene is booming yeah um yeah it's the city's doing very well it's blowing up and it's going to continue it's an amazing amazing place colorado's my favorite spot

i'm stuck here for a little bit i'll fucking get back there those mountains you just can't beat that view that view is insane yeah it's a nice place to live god damn i don't want to bring everybody to move into your neighborhood well i i own so that's okay i'm help uh you know what is so here the thing that i like about colorado is the thing that i also don't like about colorado is that i live in boulder so you know i'm 30 miles north of of denver is it's just such an easy place to live like it's just things function very easily and everybody's very nice and they're fit and you know things run well and so on so you could be productive you can be creative there you can get stuff done and you can be healthy doing it but i like coming to la um although la is a lot harder as you as you know but it's also there's like this is also

a hub in ways that a place like boulder or denver can't be right you know there's just it's just so the scale is so much bigger and the the people that you meet are just doing big things like adderall yeah this is a crazy place you're not supposed to have this many people you know what i went to recently what really cemented it i went to mexico city oh yeah i was in mexico city for the ufc first of all it's like a robot farting in your face 24 hours a day. That's what Mexico City smells like. It is so polluted. I put a photo on my Instagram, and people were like, holy shit.

When you're flying into Mexico City, you're like, whoa, that's dark. And it's perpetual gridlock. So you know how sometimes in LA, you get to a green light and some assholes they drove into the intersection the light changes and they're stuck there and then everybody honks and you know

everybody tries to be more courteous and they go around the guy and then you behind them so you make sure that you don't do that you give yourself a little gap room you know so like

this is why it's about to change let me hover back here so I don't fucking block the intersection. Because I'm a good person. Exactly. They don't ever do that in Mexico. That shit doesn't happen. So when you're driving at five o'clock there's just jammed up

this way and jammed up that way there's red green it doesn't matter the light turns green you move forward little light turns red where are they going they're fucking they're right there and you're parked in the middle of the intersection it's perpetual gridlock with the nicest people that's the other thing that was strange. Honking? Is there honking in Mexico City? Very little. Very little. That's nice.

Very friendly. Very nice people. Yeah. Like, there is way more people than there are in LA. But everybody's really chill. Like, they're super friendly. Like, Mexican people in Mexico City are some of the nicest people I've ever met in any foreign city, like, when I first went to.

It's, like, consistently nice. That's great. Yeah. You know, and they didn't know me there's just they were just normal nice folks but that that monster of traffic and gridlock and people is what we're going to expect in la it's just going to happen if it if it doesn't happen in 20 it'll happen in 50 or 100 years whatever it is like that's inevitable and that's chaos unbelievable chaos there's too many people i read this thing that la county has more people than all like i think 13 it's like if it

was a state it'd be like the 13th largest state or something like that just la county just la county yeah that makes something like that that's that's really obscene it's enormous it's an enormous enormous amount of people and it's very strange it's like um you gotta wonder like what is everybody here for like how many how many of these people are here because of show business like what is the actual number because there's a lot of people that go well you know i'm gonna give it a shot go to california and they have like sort of this like very non-committed idea of trying to make it a show business hoping they make some connections and along the way they quit like i've met a lot of people like that right

there's a lot of people like that you meet yeah i think a lot of them are in in in the show business but there's so many different kinds of like i think porn extras i mean there's so many just people there's very few people in porn extras that is just the worst example ever porn extras hey we're looking for porn extras Yoshi keeps on contacting me to be a porn extra

that's Yoshi bro Yoshi's fucking crazy why are you pretending like Yoshi's normal like oh it's normal here I have an example for you he's like

he thinks I want to do he's like it's a hundred dollars you get to watch porn and you just have to stand in the background while other people fuck yeah

do you know what? I'm glad I'll re-listen to this at double speed. Yeah. This is the time to fast forward. Porn extras. What a fucking terrible example. There is so. There's a bit in there though, right?

Probably. Yeah. Porn extra bit. Yeah. There's probably a bit in there. Yeah. My friend was a porn extra. He had to be behind a blowjob scene where spider-man was hanging upside down

and she was giving him a blowjob upside down he just was like inches away having to just sit there go ah he was water man against the wall or webbed against the wall yeah okay that doesn't that doesn't get the central casting doesn't send people out for that stuff uh no they probably have like a craigslist thing it's probably all non-union you know the whole deal okay but um anyway back to uh motivations and stand-up comedy and this and that did you how did you um like come to conclusions or you know extract data when it comes to like yeah so i have a i have a lab at the university of colorado called the humor research lab an actual lab do you wear coats we don't you know like

people always want us to you should you know the media is like where do you have any lab coats any rubber chickens like whenever rappers refer to like their where they write as the lab like kid cuddy i want them to wear a lab coat you're in the lab fucking take this shit to the next level we've thought about it for like when we bring in um participants for subjects we thought about wearing lab coats just to make it like um for the for the subjects to take it more seriously because like lab coats say science we should get some beakers you know things like that but no we don't do any of that stuff okay but. So, by the way, the acronym is HURL. So, we refer to the Humor Research Lab as HURL.

Oh, okay. HURL with laughter. Yes. And so, what we did was sometimes we would run experiments out in the field. Sometimes we'd run experiments back in the laboratory. So, we'd have an idea. We'd go out and investigate it. And then, oftentimes, we'd supplement that work in the laboratory. So we'd have an idea, we'd go out and investigate it, and then oftentimes would supplement that work in the laboratory or elsewhere. So you mentioned comedy works as

being such a great room. One of the things that we do in the humor code is investigate what makes a great comedy room. And we actually tried to construct a comedy club at this art museum that was doing a special event. So we showed comedy clips and we changed aspects of the room to see if it would actually have an effect in the way that you would expect based on your experience as a comedian. And sometimes the studies work, sometimes they don't work, but it served as a nice scene by which to talk about, why is it that comedians are especially

funny in a comedy club like why what helps make a joke land what what did you come what were your conclusions so um so one of the things that people always talk about is like having a low ceiling and how beneficial a low ceiling is and so you're like okay well why is that the case you know so that what they'll say is that that the laughter will kind of bounce back down onto the audience and and if you think about it what what laughter really is is a communication tool right it's a primitive communication tool so babies laugh you don't need language to laugh right babies laugh monkeys chimps bonobos there's even evidence that rats engage in something akin to laughter and uh and what it does is it it communicates that this situation um and this is getting into the theory that we test um the situation that seems wrong is actually okay

or what we say is it says oh this is a benign violation and when other people are laughing at something that you just said that might be a little bit off color, what they're essentially saying is, oh, this is okay to me. This is positive to me. And you get these contagious effects. Right. It's like when some people will laugh after a statement that's not funny.

I guess I left the keys at home. You know, they're trying to let you know, like, oh, no, yeah, sorry. And everyone's like, it's okay, it's okay. That's what they're trying to let you know like oh no yeah sorry and everyone's like it's okay it's okay yeah that's what they're doing right yeah so there's some lol what's interesting about about laughter is that it doesn't necessarily communicate that that something's funny that it's been co-opted by language in a way that like so when people punctuate a sentence with laughter it's something they often don't even know they're doing right and it's just a way to kind of smooth the interaction yeah um versus the kind of what so that's what's called non-duchene laughter non-duchy duchene

duchene unfortunate word to use couldn't you come up with another type of word is that how it's pronounced yeah he has no idea how it's pronounced. You are asking the wrong guy. Do not ask him questions. Trust me. Keep your eyes up there. Right here. All right.

All right. All right. So. You got sucked in. I did. Good luck. You're infected now. I've said that word like 150 times.

You just got red band. I had. You got red banned. I had to. You got red banned. So the idea is that you have, for instance, smiles. A smile can be an indication of positive emotion, or it could be like a sorority girl smile that's like a fake smile. The same can happen with laughter, right? So I could politely laugh at a joke that you've said just because I don't. Exactly.

Just trying to be nice. So that doesn't indicate amusement. Right. But when it does, like, you know, so it can, obviously. Like, most of the laughter that we have is that we're actually enjoying something about a moment in time. But when other people are laughing, it has that contagious effect. So if you think about laughter as a signaling tool, it you want if you want to spread that signal out and so a low ceiling helps it helps get someone laughing who might not necessarily be laughing

because they're just surrounded in laughter right that makes sense um so one of the things is having a dark room is really important it's why the comedy store i think people really like the dark you know it's such a dark room. It disinhibits the audience. So when you're in darkness, you feel anonymous. And again, because I believe that comedy plays on violations, on talking about things that are wrong, that are threatening, that are amiss in some way.

Well, most of the time, those things aren't funny. They make us laugh. They make us laugh. They make us cry. They anger us. They confuse us. They disgust us. And they embarrass us. But when you're in darkness, you can let loose.

You won't hold back laughter because you're like, oh, I don't want to be the person who laughs at that kind of a joke and so it has this disinhibiting effect uh some of the other things are like you know chairs having a chair that's that's kind of uncomfortable you know that and you're cramming people in it helps increase arousal so um because comedy plays on arousal taking things that are kind of negatively arousing and making them positive. And the more arousing the situation is, the bigger the emotional experience. That's interesting.

So jamming people up together makes them slightly uncomfortable because they're invading each other's spaces? Is that what it is? Yeah, and you're just like more awake and more like uncomfortable. Right, right, right. And then another thing about jamming

all these people together is you almost create this bonding among them. So I've had comics talk about this idea of comedy as a conspiracy. It's like us versus them. Like everybody in the room here, we all get it. And those fools out there, they don't get it and when you're jammed in there with all these people you feel connected to them in a way that that i think often helps when you think what you know what a lot of comics are doing just pointing out what's wrong with the world um and and so now we have this bond we feel um we're highly aroused there's no one falling asleep during a comedy show you've got the

laughter bouncing back down on people you've got the darkness and then the last thing show you've got the laughter bouncing back down on people you've got the darkness and then the last thing is you've got the red brick wall behind the comic and this i'm not sure how much of an effect this has but certain colors have that kind of more arousing like a red brick because like the behind me yeah like that that's a good arousal so the so red is a more arousing color than like blue for instance what about like flat red why the brick no let's just make it like homey is that what the idea is i don't know i think it's just there's just no it's not brick per se i don't know if there's anything about the brick there's so many comedy clubs i know every improv has bricks yeah they all have bricks even

if they don't have bricks they bring bricks in i think it's the red more than the brick although that's an interesting i I could run that study. Yeah. I could run that study. I'm thinking about it. Actually, I paid to have these bricks put in. These aren't even real bricks. Is that right?

Yeah. They're like this. They're like that thick. It's a veneer. There's like wire they put down. Then they do it, but it makes me feel better. It is. Well, you're doing something real.

I mean, it's real bricks, but it's not all brick construction. It's not going to stop the Hulk from running through the wall. I don't know why I said the Hulk. He's not real. My point. I don't think real bricks stop the Hulk. No. My point being, I was wondering why, I think everything you said makes a lot of sense.

And one thing that I didn't even consider was the uncomfortable factor. Because there's a place called the Ha Ha Cafe that I love. It's in North Hollywood. Great spot. But they have couches in the front. Oh, yeah. And people just like, just lounge. Great spot. But they have couches in the front. Oh, yeah. And people just lounge. They should get rid of the couches.

Yes. Now I'm thinking about it. I need them to listen to this podcast. Ditch the couches. Give them some shitty fucking folding chairs. Slide them in there. So the other one is that, and this, I haven't done the research on it, but I believe it's the case.

It doesn't happen in comedy clubs that much, but it happens like late night television. You get those like freezing cold rooms. Yeah. Like Letterman is famous for like a 54 degree room or something like that. And what you hear is people say, oh, it's because of the lights and the people are, you know, they're in these suits and they want to just keep it cold. But I think it's also, again, it keeps the audience awake because you're not gonna you're not gonna nap right it's like 54 degrees you're you know you're uncomfortable and you're you're awake yeah i think he's dead right about that that totally makes sense as well i think another thing to take

into consideration i don't know if you did um is that part of comedy part of what's going on is it's like some sort of a mass hypnosis sort of a thing when a guy's on stage and you're really in the zone like you just you got your material like laid out and it's just you're just riding this fucking thing and the crowd is roaring and laughing along with you there's they're letting you think for them almost it's like they're allowing you to have access to the wheel of their mind and you take them on this crazy comedic journey and in that sense it's kind of like a mass hypnosis in a way and the smaller the area that you're doing this the more comfortable people are going to feel

allowing themselves to be taken away like this like when you have low ceilings the parameters are like very clearly defined like there's the ceiling. There's the floor. Here's the wall. This is a small place. But when you get a big place, like when you're doing a Madison Square Garden or an arena or someplace with a giant ceiling, people always say, well, that's not a good place for comedy. The laughs die away. There's a little bit of that, but it's also like there's a lot above us. There's a lot of space here.

It's less comforting. above us there's a lot there's a lot of space here it's less comforting it's like it's less uh less contained than like say a place like the helium in philadelphia where joey diaz is this weekend uh helium is one of the great comedy clubs in this country so really low ceiling tight it's in you know this great neighborhood and it's just perfect like you couldn't get any better it's like you're right on top of those people yeah Like everything's, the entire dimension, the dimensions of the room are clearly defined. Yeah, I think I've called Madison Square Garden to have them let me run a study there

and I haven't heard back from them yet. So we'll see about that. They'll get right back to you, I'm sure. They're not busy at all. They're like one free night this fall, I think. it's very rare to see a comedian perform there though oh i think it's yeah i mean these are ease is doing it there aziz has a gig there and i think um i'm actually you might already had it dane's done it dice has done it i think there's only a bit like a small handful yeah it helps to have a lot of fans right i think that those arena kinds of

things these are people who already love that comedian and they're going to see them a little bit it's also an event yeah you know like a like if kevin hart is showing up somewhere he's hot right now so it's an event we're gonna go see kevin hart people at work even if they're not fans you guys got tickets for kevin hart he's hilarious you know i mean it's like such a big name that becomes an event yeah that's interesting i think well so the takeaway of all this is i think you made a great choice for for rocky mountain high oh denver comedy works yeah it's i mean every comedian i speak to talks about how that's in the top five yeah well wendy who the woman who owns and runs it is like one of my favorite people ever. And she's responsible, essentially, for the entire comedy scene in Denver.

She fosters it. She developed this open mic program, which brings people into the club, gives them time, then makes them their middles, and then they could eventually... She develops local headliners. It's one of the few places left that has local headliners. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, I know the... Do you know the growlix guys there

they've uh there's like a three-man crew they do uh they do their own show but they always are showing up at comedy no i don't know them ben roy adam kate and holland andrew orvid all no no but those you know like that those are people you know those are folks who are sort of yeah yeah now they're you know they're on the cusp this is a real scene there you know denver is one of the few places that has a real scene. That's what it takes. It takes a club. We've often talked about Houston, because Houston is where Bill Hicks started, where

Sam Kinison started. Houston in the early 80s was a motherfucker. It was a hotbed of talent, but it was because of one club. It's because of the Laugh Stop. Laugh Stop in River Oaks. That's where I recorded my first ever CD in 1999. It was the first place I ever did well. Not did well, it got laughs, but it would sell out every show.

And it was because they were looking for that kind of comedy. They had had, you know, Kinison started there, and Carl LeBeau, the Outlaws of Comedy, all those guys came out of Houston. But when that club went away, the scene went away. Yeah, I know you need yeah you do need those things so we for the humor code we we came to LA to look at stand-up and improv and we actually went to we went to New York and looked at the New Yorker cartoons um so we and we and um and also like humor and Madison Avenue and all that kind of stuff

and then um we actually went to tanzania we went to japan we went to the west bank went to palestine scandinavia the amazon and what's interesting is i don't want to say stand-up is uniquely american because like in japan they have like a vibrant comedy scene but it's it's different right so in japan for instance they have two-man comedy it's called manzai and it's like dean and martin style stuff like an abedin costello kind of a thing and they don't really have the comedy club like the independent comedy club scene it's all corporate in japan for instance and uh you know i can in a lot of places like obviously in the amazon they're not comedy clubs you know it's like it in a lot of places, like obviously in the Amazon, there's like comedy clubs.

You know, it's like, it's such an interesting. I mean, it really does have, has had its start in the United States. You know, Wendy had this great conversation with a large chain that was trying to set up in Denver. And they wanted to talk to her about getting involved. And she said, what's your strategy as far as open micers and open mic nights she goes we're not going to have open mic nights she's like okay let me get this straight you want to sell widgets but you don't want to make your own widgets but you're selling widgets but you don't develop widgets at all you don't have any any resources in developing widgets so other people have to bring you the widgets and they're like oh we didn't see it that way. Right.

These places like the improv, I do a lot of the improvs, but they don't do open mic nights. And I think that's a huge disservice to the art form and to them. It's just they don't, they see it short-sightedly. They see that as being a detriment to their business because they're going to have to pay the wait staff. And they might even lose money on that night. But I think that's how you develop talent. And if you don't do that, you don't develop talent in a scene. And you get more people invested in the idea of stand-up comedy, especially if you have, like, a local headliner guy that's really good.

People, like, really get involved in, like, someone who's, like, a local person who's, like, really good, who they think has, like, potential to, you know, to break free or break it when we're home break in break out yeah yeah so you know what i i i say how every every city has a rap star right so should you go off to la or new york and try to create your fame and fortune or do you become the best person in that city and so and i think of like i think of rap in that way like you know so if you think about every major city not every but a lot of

major cities you can identify who is the best and then they use that city as a leaping off point for a more national scene an international scene and so on i think rap is very different than comedy though no no but i it's but just as an, the idea that you, where is it that you should develop your craft? When is it that you're ready to go to one of the coasts? Like, it sounds to me that if you have a good club, a reasonable goal would be to become the headliner, the local headliner at that club. And then try to break into the business more broadly like you know whatever it be television or film or or go out on the road yeah no you just you you seem you need to be around other comics that kick ass it's super important it's important every step

of the way you need to be around them hanging out you need to be around them going on stage we feed off of each other yeah we feed off of each other in a way that i don't think rappers i mean i might be wrong but i don't think they have to as much because they can kind of judge themselves on the long history of rap nationwide and all over these places well yeah i mean i'm sure the development of the craft but the idea i guess the question is this is if you were a good comic and you wanted to get great and you were going to prescribe a route for for one would you say look you know stay in denver and and be the best that denver can offer and then do it or when you think you're ready head off to new york this is my advice and this is very general okay it could vary depending upon

circumstances but i think you should get a general proficiency in a place where you can get some stage time okay like a denver or portland or a place that's a smaller place yeah get a general proficiency where you you know you're a general you're essentially a professional you could do half an hour okay then get the fuck out of there okay you gotta go to la or new york because you got to be around beasts you gotta you gotta see bill bird drop into the comedy store on a tuesday night and do 15 minutes you got to see joey diaz go up in the original room at 11 o'clock and murder the place you got to see those guys you got to be around them you gotta you gotta there's a there's a certain inspirational heat that you get from being around a crew of comedians that takes your act to the next level.

Okay. Almost universally. So I can, I can see that it's hard to argue against that, but if you're, but you need to get the stage time, right? So it's this balance. And if you're in Austin or Portland or Denver, you do have great comics coming through all the time. So you can get that.

Sort of, you know, you can get that sort of you know you can watch them do weekend sets that definitely and they do drop it yeah but you won't see them working on material yeah i see the seeing them working on material and when you know something's absolutely new there's like this spark of excitement that everybody has in the room like say if an event goes on like something happens in the news and then you know someone like chris rock will show up and start talking about that event right there's like a certain crackle to that it's not the only thing that's necessary for success as a comedian i mean you could absolutely be a guy who lives in boise and goes on the road and does great but there's something about being around a lot of really funny

comedians that has uh this undeniably inspirational effect yeah i understand i mean i'm i'm interested we were sort of we're talking a little bit about this idea like achievement right so what is it that predicts success in this very difficult business yeah i'm certainly not i don't there's no hard fast answer there's no black or white you know i'm just saying from my point of view what i would advise and it's maybe my style and strategy is incorrect for some people i mean it would depend i would have to really know the person some guys are fine like living in austin they develop a good little following and now because of the internet you can get a following just from a youtube video and then start touring nationally

i think that's that's essential as well i think touring is uh another essential um developmental developmental tool for a comic because i think one of the things about being a comic is you want to get the most varied input possible if you're doing the same club all the time the same kind of audience you're preaching to the choir and you know the people that happened a lot in boston in boston a lot of the local guys they became really proficient and really good and making boston people laugh yes yeah that's yes it was a huge trap and then they would go to other places and it would be like they were hamstrung like someone just like hit him in the kneecaps of the baseball bat like they couldn't run anymore it was crazy to watch

i see and that's exactly what it is it's not doing the road enough you have to develop an act that that is yours and then it's uniquely your you know your take on things but it also has your take on things is like a conglomeration of all the experiences that you've had in your life and the more experiences that you have especially as a comic on stage in different places the more it flavors your performance and how you do it yeah i think that's you know so people talk about this sort of 10-year rule you know that it takes 10 years to get your voice and um there you know obviously there's exceptions but you know i think some of it is just like you need the practice but some of that 10 years is you just come to

better understand the world yeah right and so so when you're 22 years old you can be a funny person but it's but you haven't you know you haven't learned all the mechanics and all that kind of stuff you don't have enough material but some of it is you just don't really understand the world in the way that you do when you're 32 or you're 42. And what you're suggesting, though, is the more experience you have out on the road, understanding what people in Oklahoma find funny, what people in Minnesota find funny, what their lives are like in Texas and Alabama and Atlanta ends up being very useful. I mean, I've been to the clubs in New York and L.A. with the kind of, like, hipster, you know, audiences. The alt crowds.

Yeah, and it's, you know, it's fun comedy, but it's not going to go very far if you're interested in going far. Well, it's a very specialized form of comedy. Like, you're the cool guy in the room, you know, and the cool guy in the back of the room recognizes the cool guy in the room you know and the cool guy in the back of the room recognizes the cool guy in the room and you know you're pushing a lot of progressive issues that you know are very debate debatable in other parts of the country but you know you're just getting like a raucous round of applause and appreciation for what you're saying and then you feed off of that and then you become like super captain lefty and you're going on stage with a fedora on right you're talking about being a feminist and you know it's a lot of what they're doing is just you know that's their spot they're doing boston comedy they're

just doing it in brooklyn in some hipster spot yeah you know what i mean like by saying boston comedy i mean they're doing like a specific style of comedy that maybe they like or maybe works well in their area and then there's nothing wrong with doing that i mean you can do that that could be your thing you could do whatever the fuck you want but i think that one of the great things about being a comic is going to all these weird places and you know doing stand-up in alaska doing stand-up in florida doing stand-up all over the place and experiencing all these weird things and weird crowds and weird situations. If you just did comedy only in Brooklyn,

I think you're going to get a very limited perspective. You're going to get a very, your art's not going to reach its full potential, if that makes any sense. Yeah. It's very pretentious calling it art. No, no, no. I actually, well, I think it can be art. Yeah.

You know, I mean, you know, fart jokes aren't artistic. They might get laughs. Right. But if you can make laughs and change the way people see the world. Or if the fart jokes is so fucking good that it literally transcends the fart joke genre and it becomes art. That's possible. Yeah.

I'm doing that with poop right now. No, you're not. No, you're not. Send me an email when that happens. Yeah. I'd like to to i'll start paying attention but um so you know actually but for the humor code that's exactly the perspective that we took so one of the things that we did was say and this is no offense to you we said well um humor is not just stand-up stand-up is a is a bizarre art form you know that, that it seems like the quintessential thing that you should look at. But most of our laughs don't come from a guy on a

stage with a mic and a fedora. It's from, you know, our own interactions with our friends and our family and strangers and watching television, watching film, and seeing the world more broadly. And then also, it's such a complex topic. We were like, oh, we can't just look at it in the United States. We can't be so focused on the U.S. And that's what pushed us to go out and look at this. So we went to the West bank and hung out with this comedy satire troupe whoa who has a television show that it's it's once a week but during ramadan

it's every single night for 30 nights and so whoa um yeah and so like we hung out with these folks like so these are people who are they're in the West Bank, and they're criticizing everyone. So they're criticizing the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Americans, Barack. Wow. You know, like, Osama and Obama in the same sketch, right? Like, you know, these guys are doing really cutting-edge stuff in this place that there, there aren't comedy clubs. Like you're the way that you get professional comedy. There's like two shows on Palestinian national television,

or you need to find it broadcast from Egypt or from Jordan, or I'm not sure Jordan, because evidently the Jordans aren't terribly funny. Jordanians aren't very funny, but the Egyptians are like hilarious. Jordanians aren't funny. So the Egyptians are like hilarious Jordanians aren't funny so that guy right now listening it's fucking pissed there's a no we talked to these guys and they're like oh yeah there's a um there's like a hierarchy of comedy in the Middle East and according to them the Palestinians are about the middle the Egyptians are hilarious really and the jordanians evidently are like the most serious

the egyptians are hilarious they're very funny yes what do you attribute that to i can't remember i don't know uh i wish joel was here he remembers everything here because he writes it all down but uh yeah there's like a long history of uh of egyptian comedy huh very funny people what about uh the israelis do they factor in there yeah so so what was really fascinating was that um so we you know you have kind of the stereotype of the of the the funny jewish person, very self-deprecating. But you don't find that style of comedy in Israel as much. The Israeli comedy is a lot more aggressive. Like it's the comedy of the victor, not of the victim. Oh, how strange.

And so we found this weird reversal where the Palestinians were much more sort of self-deprecating, and their comedy was much more Jewish in the American sense than you would have necessarily expected. How bizarre. It was really fascinating. That's so strange. It is weird when you think about it. I've met a bunch of Israelis, and they're very different from a lot of the American Jews, and I think that that's a big generalization, American Jews. Sorry, folks. But the idea being that they're at war all the time, and they're constantly surrounded by people who hate them.

They all have mandatory military service. How did – did you study how, like, the American Jew came to be, like the separate subspecies of the Jew? You know, like sort of like the Sitka black tail deer. It's a smaller deal lives in Alaska. One thing that we looked at was how overrepresented Jewish Americans are in comedy. And so like back in the day, it was like 70 percent. Like it was it was an incredible number. It was less so now.

But those folks have been replaced by other minorities. So African Americans, even like the rise of the Muslim American comedian post 9-11, you're seeing this. And what I think it is, is that to be a minority is advantageous when it comes to creating jokes. Because what you're doing, as I like to like to say you're trying to create benign violations you're trying to make things that are wrong okay well being a minority helps identify what's wrong in the world because when you have one foot in the majority culture and one foot outside of it you can see the things that seem off right strange like it's sort of like why chris rock i think one of the brilliant things about chris rock is his crossover appeal you can see the things that seem off, strange. It's sort of like why Chris Rock, I think,

one of the brilliant things about Chris Rock is his crossover appeal. And some of it was he went to a white high school, so he was sort of too black for a white high school. But then back in his neighborhood, he was sort of too much of a nerd. He never fit in either of those places and so he could see what was wrong at home and he could see what was wrong with white culture in a way that when you just buy in totally you don't see those things that are wrong and it's the things that are wrong is what's a ripe source of comedy right and so so if you think about jewish americans

well they fit that model very nicely in a number of different dimensions. Right. So like culturally, religiously and, you know, and so on, um, ethnically and so on. And so, and then, and now you also have mentors, right? So, um, so if you, if you're like looking for someone to look up to, you can find someone who's like you, right? You've got Mel Brooks making, you know, uh, making his way in, um, in comedy in a way that, uh, uh, is inspirational and you see it as like, oh, I can do this cause Mel's done it or, and so on. So, but we haven't gone, that's about as deep as we went with it but it's a really fascinating idea this this notion of um wb dubois called it two-ness right so you have like kind of two identities that's that's a useful thing it's why like it's like you're

talking like you're talking about mexico city in mexico city that's just the way the traffic is right but you come there as an outsider, and it just seems so bizarre. Mm-hmm. Mexican person comes to L.A., and they make jokes about L.A. traffic, about how well-behaved people seem to be, at least relative to home. You know, you can see how that stuff can work. Yeah, I talked to my friend who's from Mexico, and she was laughing, and she was like, they always say, if you could drive in Mexico City,

you could drive anywhere. You know, she was like, I was saying, I can't believe what the traffic is like down there. She's like, I know. I came to America. I could drive easy. Yeah, exactly. It's like, no problem. You should go.

So we went to Denmark, and it's the easiest driving in the world. Like, we rented a car, drove all over the place in Denmark. It's just so polite. It's polite, rule-abiding, abiding everything and also there's like nobody there like you know like we're in copenhagen and you're just like where is everybody well and that says that's how boulder is boulder is very polite like the driving there is very calm and i know and i want to start honking it's like don't do it people people here's the problem is people are too polite at times and as a result people misbehave because they're they they don't

they feel like they're operating and like with um anonymity because they've come from probably a place where people like are a little bit more aggressive and yeah and so i'm like i need to start using that i'm from new jersey originally don't do it don't bring jersey to fucking boulder don't do it dude god damn you damn you peter mccraw um what you're saying about the outsider makes a ton of sense especially being an outsider on both sides you know being an outsider inside the black community and of course being black being outsider in the white community for chris rock yeah that totally makes sense being in an outsider having some you know having a lack of comfort yeah you know i mean it's almost like what we're talking about about being smushed in together and being cold and like there's something about a lack of comfort that can create comedy the the jew thing is fascinating to

me because european please don't say it like that it's complimentary european jews are so um intelligent like they have a completely disproportionate number of nobel prize winners that are european jews um they they're responsible for a great deal of like inventions and and innovation it's incredible like just as far as like european jews you look at the the intellectual talent pool it's come out of europe jewish folks from europe it's amazing and a lot of those who immigrated to america became fantastic stand-up comedians and were known like pretty much across the board as being like really intelligent like you think about like i mean woody allen

before all of his troubles was known as a very intelligent guy you know very introspective and fascinating guy right jerry seinfeld is of course known as being very intelligent there's a slew of them you could just start there and larry david you can go on to the end of time yeah so so the best predictor of a good sense of humor is intelligence and so um so some like in the professional ranks that that clearly make sense because you have to be writing you know what i mean like so you're so you have to um to be good at at writing and putting these things together but even outside of the professional ranks just to be quick-witted it helps to be smart because really what you're doing is creating a situation where you take this thing that seems wrong and find a way to make it okay right and and

smart people tend to be more creative and smart people tend to be better at that kind of thing it's like it really is the best i mean you don't have to be because you know you can still make fart jokes and so on but you got a problem with fart jokes dude i see what you're doing you get caught in a trap you can get caught in a trap here's that trap the trap is you eliminate a subject matter because you believe it's low brow okay but the reality is there are certain times that is the correct thing to discuss sure and you know ari shafir has this joke about having diarrhea and he had to go across this bridge in uh sydney we were in australia i'm already laughing i don't even know it's a true story and uh his manager actually told him look

ari it's a shit joke and it's a fucking hilarious bit and his manager's like look man you gotta drop that it's a shit joke so he dropped his manager it's like fuck off dummy like you don't know what you're talking about like there are certain times where that is the right thing to talk about i i agree i mean you know if you give a comic a choice between saying something smart and saying something that gets laughs they go with the laughs they and they ought to that's the currency they trade in but now see i discussed this on reddit yesterday now that comics have podcasts if they have like something that they really want to discuss it's not funny at all they can do it on a podcast but there was like a real trap that some comics would get into like when they started getting a little bit

of relevance especially where they would start preaching on stage and it's gross like they would say things on stage that aren't funny at all yeah to get applause breaks to get people to agree with like a ted talk almost yeah or like you know you're essentially preaching to the choir i mean that's what you're doing you're you're doing it on purpose to like to set yourself up on a moral high ground or to establish a premise you know and then you're going to expand from there but it's the preaching thing gets really fucking gross when you're an audience member especially if it's like duh like a really obvious stuff that you know someone's doing just to get, like, of course we all think that women shouldn't be slaves. You know what I mean?

Women shouldn't be slaves. You know, everybody starts clapping like, what are you doing? If you don't have a punchline, don't say that. Of course women shouldn't be slaves. Nobody should be a fucking slave. You know, it's like that kind of thing is avoided by podcasts because in podcasts you can explore an idea and not have to worry about like the very rigid parameters of like getting a joke or getting a laugh every x amount of seconds

right i see and then you can have people like me on yeah we can have people that are way less funny than you you actually got laughs on stage at a comedy club you know i've had like theoretical physicists on where you have to ask them to repeat themselves because you don't know what the fuck they just said. Or, you know, really intellectual people with very varied interests. That's where it's not funny at all. And you don't have to be. Yeah, that's because you're providing other value. It's not even that you're providing.

It's a conversation. That's all it is. Like, when you have a conversation, if you're the type of guy that is trying to get laughs all the time when you're having a conversation, you're going to have fucking really boring conversations because you're going to limit your interaction

to only that little narrow gap of humor. Yeah, I see. You can't go deep on stuff. Right, you can't go deep on stuff. You can't. I mean, look, even when you go deep, that's the other thing. Sometimes you're going deep, but there's still some ridiculously funny shit in the deepness.

We're human. We're pliable. We can go back and forth between all all of them the idea that you can only be one or the other is like a marketing issue or something yeah i see all right all right i'll embrace the fart joke that's what don't well you're right though for the most part most of the time when someone tells a fart joke they're only telling a fart joke because they they're just scared and they're trying to get a laugh and it's almost insulting as an audience member it's a cheap laugh yeah although it's still a laugh right so if you have the choice between no laugh and a cheap laugh i don't know i saw joey diaz fart into a microphone once at the comedy store it was one of the funniest things

i've ever saw in my life because he was he was totally non-related he's like i'm sorry i got a fart and he just farted right into the microphone. I would love to see his face during a Tiffany Haddish queef. Yeah, you don't want to see that. Does he always do this? Him? Yeah. Yeah. It's annoying, right?

There's this girl who does stand up, and one of her big bits is she makes air come out of her vaginal cavity and makes noises with it and puts the microphone up to her crotch. A unique skill? It's so funny. I don't know if it's unique, but it's unique that she's willing to do it on stage with a microphone. And it's great because she does it at the end

of her set, so she's all sweaty, and so it's more of a wet one. Oh my goodness. He's 40. He's grown now. Yeah, it's... Do you follow her on Twitter? Oh yeah, I take her on the road.

Oh, you're friends. I have to follow her and use the microphone right after. And do you tell a joke about that? No. Oh yeah, that's how... That's you open? It still smells, yeah.

A little one quickie. That's not funny... That's you open? It still smells. Yeah. A little one quickie. That's not funny. You should come up with a better joke. I know. Yeah. That is a showstopper. Yeah, that's him. That's what he does.

Sometimes it's not good, like right there. But the point being, it's like funny is funny. And sometimes someone will say something that you would say, oh, you shouldn't do jokes on that. Like Ari's joke about shitting his pants while he's going over the bridge. But yeah, he should. I mean, it was a clever bit. It's a funny, honest bit. It is what it is.

And I think that there's been a lot of like bad comedy on almost every subject. You know, there's been a lot of bad comedy on fart jokes or jokes or a lot of bad comedy on you know fill in the blank yes like airplane jokes like if you have an airplane joke oh yeah that's right i always hear comics talk about that like yeah enough with the travel jokes yeah you know because it's just every comic has a travel joke but if someone comes along with a travel joke that just knocks your socks off that is what it is and it's like someone can have a point or a point of view or a take on some aspect that we haven't considered some unique aspect yes you know uh yes but i mean well so it's like it's isn't it? I mean, it really is the thing where you are trying to be unique.

Right. Right. The ideal situation is you say stuff that no one's saying, that they're not thinking about the way you're thinking about it, that you're giving people a perspective that doesn't quite seem familiar. Right, right, right. That's the holy grail, I think. Mm-hmm. And especially in a world where it's so hard to stand out. I mean, I constantly have people say, oh, do you know this particular comic?

And I'm like, no, I don't. And that person's very good. It's just there's so many of them. And so how is it that you can get people's attention and, I mean mean i hate to use the marketing term but like cut through the clutter but isn't that the sort of the the case with any art form like with music i mean there's so many small bands i know yeah bands that are trying to make it and yeah in the end i mean any of the entertainment and world of entertainment i think that's that's probably the case but don't i i think that today least, it's the best time to be one of those people.

They'll be – like, especially, like, bands. Because of YouTube. Because now – Yeah. Yeah, now you don't have to rely on the machinery. I mean, that's the thing that I think is really exciting about comedy specifically and entertainment in general is that now you have the long tail, right? Like, it's a big world. There's 300 million people in the United States.

And now there's, like, some kid in Kansas City who never would have found you, you know, and then he stumbles upon you and he hears about it. And then you can actually create a following through technology because you're just cutting out the middleman you don't need you know you you just don't you don't need the um the channels and you don't need the clubs and you don't need all these things as much because you can reach people yeah directly and so then you can be you can you can be really narrow um because there's enough people out there who might be able to support that yeah sure that's really exciting yeah well there's especially like when you talk about like specific genres like alt

comedy there's alt comedy scenes all over the country now yeah where you could you know you could fit in these areas because there's a lot of people that like like a different style of comedy just like there's a lot of people that like a different style of music yeah that's the weird thing about comedy is that the genre itself is not really defining of what it is it's like you don't go to see live music you go to see live rock and roll you go to see live blues live country even if you don't know the artists you essentially go to a club where you know what they're what they're selling yeah that's a good point but comedy man you could get guns and roses or you get barry manilow and back to back yep backback. Yep, back-to-back.

Well, at the Comedy Store, you'll deal with like 10 comics in a night. And they're all totally different. I mean, there's all sorts of different takes. You know what I'm really impressed by is these sort of blue-collar comedy guys. Because what they've done is found a space that there's a huge demand for and there's not enough people filling it. Right. Right? So if you think about it, you've got all these alt comics and they all look like they came from Mumford and Sons.

They're all sort of the same dude. Yeah. And now they're just competing so much. And then these blue collar guys just must be killing it. Because there's a whole world out there that's not producing enough comics for the demand. Well, I have a friend who's really into country music. And I was over his house and they were watching the country music channel. It's fucking ridiculous. It was all country music videos.

And it's like, it was some of the worst music you'll ever hear in your life. But it's like this culture that they're ingrained in, and there's not a lot of comedians that connect to that culture. I know. But it's like, have you ever seen the compilation? Brian, pull up this compilation, Why Country Music Sucked in 2013. It's fucking hilarious, because it's about what we're talking about. it's fucking hilarious because it's it's it's about what we're talking about and we're talking about like hack premises and obvious scenarios and there's formula to success that's insulting to people that like uh if you enjoy like merle haggard you enjoy like some really good country music williams yeah hank williams you know uh waylon jennings you know that the real shit man

and that johnny cash and you listen to some of this, like, really obvious formulaic sort of created shit. And it's annoying. Like, it drives you crazy. So somebody concocted this video of all the premises in country music and how much they're repeated and how often they're repeated. Did you find it? Yeah, I think so. It's a YouTube video. video okay do you think it's gonna get us pulled uh yeah play it on that thing and then just we'll we'll watch it you could do that right what's the worry we get pulled from youtube all the time youtube uh someone would make a claim against you say like if we if we just

do the show we're fine but if we do the show and we show a video right and the video is like like a snake eating a crocodile or something like that somebody owns that video and then we get pulled from youtube and then it becomes if you get a certain amount of strikes if you get pulled for copyright violation a certain amount of times we always take down the video and then edit it out and then put it back up but if that happens a certain time you can get in trouble like this Why country music was awful in 2013. And this is particularly awesome for me because... So this is going to be cliches. It's just cliche after cliche.

It's glorious. It's a glorious series of cliches. But it just shows you how hard people are not trying. Or how hard they're trying to do the same shit. Or you don't have to try as hard. That ends up being an open question though no okay here's how country music worked in 2013 a bunch of dudes sang about trucks This is good comedy.

They drove down old dirt roads. Here's the quote and they beg girls to get in their trucks too your little hot stuff over here Over here The only one of girls wearing tight jeans. That's so crazy. And they drove the girls to the nearest riverbank. River hookers. The sunset moonlight made it all so romantic. And there was always alcohol, a.k.a. good good stuff to loosen things up it's coke yeah good stuff it is moonshine

but if every bro tactic failed they would just call their girl girl okay so pretty much why why listen to country music? Well, not that. It's not the whole genre. It's most of it, though, right? But there's an appetite. Well, it's just like saying music is like that. I mean, there's a lot of goddamn pop music. Is most music pop music?

You know, Honey Honey's obviously not pop music. There's a lot of music that's not pop music. It's just... Aziz does a joke about this right like about these sort of club like these sort of club songs about partying and yeah he has a i haven't seen it about this stuff but it's i mean he's just doing it now with like club music new stuff yeah no it's not it's a few years old oh is it but you know the idea is that you're finding these things right resonate people like it and so people keep doing it yeah

it's just different versions of it all well there's a market you know especially when you're talking about like going out to like clubs and drinking like drinking in clubs and playing music while people are drinking like shot shot shot shot people love that kind of stuff they love to to be included but you know this is just like you could clear that off man clear all that and go back to the blank screen it's all uh hack premises you know it this is just like, you could clear that off, man. Clear all that and go back to the blank screen. It's all hack premises, you know. It's like, that's one of the things, like, you know, don't do fart jokes. Don't do anything lowbrow.

Don't do anything so obvious. Unless you want to get paid, right? I mean, that's like, there's a bit of that, no? A little bit of that, especially in the beginning. I think with comedy, one of the things in the beginning is just becoming at least reasonably proficient. And I always describe it that there's like three steps. The first, and sometimes they're not all necessary. The second step's fine.

But the first step is you just figure out what works. It's like you have a toolbox. It's like you're just hammering nails and sawing wood. You're just trying to figure out what works. So your jokes, you might not even think they're funny at all, but they get a laugh. So you stick with them. And then once you get good enough, you start doing stuff that you actually think is funny. And then the third step is you start trying to make your ideas funny, like make points. Some people don't ever get there. And some of the best ones don't ever get, like Mitch Hedberg is my perfect example of a guy who's

like one of my all-time favorite comedians. but he never had like there was no philosophy behind his comedy it was just uh it was just really hilarious one-liners yeah non-related one-liners too and hours of them you know he was a really unique and unusual comic in that sense and did he did he recreate himself at one point in his career? Like the Mitch Hedberg that everybody knows about is not, he didn't start doing that style. Like even like the kind of cadence and the way he, I think he changed his voice. Am I? No. Is that not true? No, he pretty much did start.

Yeah, I've known, I knew him for a long time. Okay, maybe I misread something. Well, one thing that did happen is he got development deals, and they started doing the whole sitcom shuffle thing with him, trying to develop a sitcom for him. And then once they stopped developing the sitcom, then it didn't work out. The acting thing didn't work out. And he really started just touring more and getting more into his stand-up. And his stand-up just kept getting stronger and stronger and stronger.

And it led to the Mitch Hedberg that everybody knows now. Yeah, okay, I see. All right. But there's also substance abuse involved in there, like a lot of it. And there's some of his style that you could probably attribute to drugs. You know, because he had this, I mean, he had a heroin issue. You know, and he had this sort of almost layback heroin style. I took a piece of carefree gum.

An hour later, I was still worried. It never kicked in. He had this weird, slick, bizarre style of comedy. That's a huge loss. You have to wonder where could he have gone. He would have been doing the same thing. He would have been doing the same thing. He had no like dull spots.

Like if you go and look at through his body of work, there's no like bad stuff. It started off great. It stayed great to the very end. He would create new great stuff. And in my opinion, the hardest way to do it, like the one-liners, like unrelated one-liners over and over again. And especially like bizarre, absurdist sort of one-liners. Yeah. Well, you know, more people would have known about him for sure.

I mean, he died, I think, in 2000. I want to say three, somewhere around then. Yeah, before the, I mean, because his stuff is perfect YouTube material. Yes. Yeah. It's like so shareable. Yeah. You know what i mean like and you can you know because it's one-liners you can break it down and have like 15 seconds or 15 minutes yeah people eat it up he's an interesting guy too because there's a lot of um

stories about him in the early days where club owners didn't quite get it like when you go on the road a lot of times the club owner just cares about putting an act on stage that's going to get laughs. And sometimes the act that they'll book for the headliner is not compatible. Okay. Like he worked with some guy, and the guy was like singing

and doing impressions of musicians, doing fucking flips and cartwheels and shit. And he had this crazy big closer that he would do. Thank you, good night. And everybody would go crazy. And then Mitch Hedberg would go on stage with his sunglasses on and people would get angry. And it didn't just happen in one club. It happened in a bunch of clubs.

And obviously you're talking about a guy who I think is one of the best ever. But he would eat shit because he would go on after these guys and no one knew who he was. So they didn't know that they were going to expect the mitch headberg style so they saw this guy go on after this guy who was flipping around and sweating and putting out all this effort and they just never look like he's mailing it in maybe they just couldn't switch gears you know you know this is this is a really interesting idea. So this is the kind of stuff that I test for a living, right? So what we've been sort of talking about is, like, whether someone's funny or not

or how they develop, you know, a sense of humor, the ability to produce laughs in others. But from the comedy club conversation that we had earlier and then this conversation, you realize that there's a lot of moving parts. Yeah. There's a lot of things that are outside of your control as someone trying to be funny. And so the idea that you could have someone who was very – I mean, ideally, you do have someone who is funny before you because it warms the crowd up and they're already in a good mood and they're just more likely to laugh now than they were before because their mood state has changed. It's positive and so on. But the fact is that that can have such a profound effect

shows that there's a lot of contextual factors that are at play that you can't necessarily control. Right. You know, and so that's, I've never, yeah. So what I, I'm trying to put my finger on what would be the contrast there. Like, why is it that the audience would sort of rebel against him, given how good, I mean, you know he's good, so it's not a matter of that. Well, just make an analogy to music.

I mean, if, if Metallica went on stage and did you know a concert in front of a bunch of metal fans and went fucking crazy did enter sandman and then brought up christina aguilera yeah how well do you think that would go i am beautiful no matter what they say bitch let me see your tits no no but it would cause beer. You know, if you would... If you would go to any sort of a music show, it's very rare that you have, like, completely contrasting styles like that that share the same stage. The difference, though, is that this is presumably,

like, just a regular audience. Like, it wasn't an audience that came there for this jumping around guy. Right, right, right. No, it was just a comedy club yeah that's right that's the thing like and that's the difficult part of uh developing as a comedian i think for a lot of comics it's like you have to find your audience and if you compromise yourself you don't ever find your audience you become this sort of middle of the road guy with a blazer on like when i first tried to go on stage the first thing i did is try to dress like a comedian road guy with a blazer on like when i first tried to go on stage the first thing i did is try to dress like a comedian so i wore a blazer and i rolled my

sleeves up and i wore like a wacky t-shirt and i had like a pin on my jacket like i was trying to like fit into the mold of what i thought of a comedian and i think that if you're a comic it's very hard to become a mitch hedberg because of that it's very hard to like do something that no one's they haven't seen why is he wearing sunglasses like why is he he would turn his back to the crowd do like his his act to the wall okay like sometimes he would hide behind curtains he would do his whole act behind the curtain i'm just gonna hang out back here for a little bit and he would do his act right like that creates arousal though yes right that makes that makes it it's unusual that's an interesting way to look at it too you're creating arousal you're creating arousal

right and the key is just to make sure that the the arrow is pointed to the positive side right like because because that makes it would make it even worse like if he was bombing yeah that would make it even worse because now it's he's creating negative arousal exactly exactly yeah i mean he was doing well and doing that but like i i've told this story before but it's he's creating negative arousal exactly exactly yeah i mean he was doing well and doing that but like i i've told this story before but it's it bears repeating hicks i saw hicks in boston okay and i saw him bomb and uh he went on after a guy who was a like a really hacky like the guy was doing like cartoon characters smoking weed like doing impressions of like things that we all knew you know like just standard really like down the middle hacky shit and he did well okay hicks went off from no one knew who the fuck hicks was and hicks just ate shit for like 45 minutes except for like 50

people in the room so it was like a 300 seat room 250 people leave the 50 people that are remaining are howling laughing it's like the comics in the back of the room and like a 300 seat room 250 people leave the 50 people that are remaining are howling laughing It's like the comics in the back of the room and like a few people in the audience, but Hicks Never like left that style like he keys and he knew this wasn't his crowd He just plowed through it anyway and found his crowd in the people that stayed Because he never stopped like delivering the material the way he wanted to do it yeah it was very unusual because i've never seen a guy be so confident bombing yeah so so this idea so um so the theory that we use is benign violation theory one of the nice things about

the theory is it explains the two ways that a humor attempt can fail so you're trying to find that sweet spot the situation being wrong yet okay. Sometimes you create a situation that's just wrong and people are outraged. And sometimes you create a situation that's just okay and people are bored. And so when I bombed, when I tried stand up, I bombed on the benign side. My jokes, they didn't go far enough. I had an audience of like dirtbag hipsters and wannabe comedians. And so the jokes I was telling were, they didn't go far enough. You know, I had an audience of like dirtbag hipsters and wannabe comedians. And so the jokes I was telling were, they were just too boring and benign. Because that night people were talking about smoking crack and about abortions and all these kinds of things that were like, you know, just much more.

Unsavory. Unsavory. Thank you. Risqué. But what you can find is that three people can have three different reactions to the same joke so one person is howling with laughter one person is totally outraged and the other person's like come on tell me something funny and and so what that shows you is that in any one audience and the more heterogeneous the audience is, the more diverse the audience is, the more likely you're going to get all three of those reactions.

And ideally what you do, what Hicks did was find the people who he hits the sweet spot with. And then, you know, nowadays, imagine what, you what what happens is that like now you can identify who your audience is they can find out where you are that you don't just stumble into a club anymore they people go to see joe rogan because they know that that he's going to be funny to them right even though you know you're not no offense but you're not for everyone nobody is that's the key if you you know if you try to be for everybody, you're never going to figure out what the fuck is unique about what you do. Your sense of humor, your style of looking at the world. And I think that's a big part of what comedy is.

A big part of what comedy is, is here's the world through my eyes. But if it's not really here's the world through my eyes, here's the world through the vision that i think you would laugh at that's not that's not like really your take on things and what hicks had figured out i guess long before a lot of people was just to stick to your guns and they'll find you you know the the fucking field of dreams build it and they'll come if you're funny though like that's the thing right because there are plenty of people who stick to their guns. Right. And they just don't have an audience. Yeah, that's the true statement, right? There's so many variables involved.

And some people would listen to that country music thing, and they would love each one of those songs individually and can't wait until they come on the radio again. And they're not wrong. No, no. They're not wrong. It's a taste issue. It's like what you were saying about the blue collar guys it's like they figured out how to tap into that that sort of unrepresented aspect of america which is monstrously huge huge i mean it's like you find out how many albums are being sold country music

albums how many people know that music and it's it's incredible it's like you're dealing with a whole different world that you didn't know existed yes Yes. And Larry the Cable Guy owns that world. That guy does football arenas. Yeah. You know, I got serious in my car, and there's like six stations you can choose from. Comedy stations. Comedy stations. Thank you.

Yeah. And I regularly try to listen to the Blue Collar station because, well, it's different, and it's good comedy. Larry the Cable Guy's a funny comic. He's a very smart guy. Yeah. He's a very good comic. That's why I was shocked when a lot of people were super jealous, I guess, or they felt

like he represented racism or homophobia or whatever it was his character did and so like a lot of people like were really derogatory about him like have you ever like read his jokes or listen to his jokes they're well-written jokes it's a character his name's dan whitney yeah okay i mean he's doing an act i mean i think about that like with dice clay you know like you know you just you you have character, and you create a character that can work. It would be really funny, though, if he got to a certain point and was like, Okay, I got enough money. It's time to start turning on these motherfuckers.

And he's using his character to expose the worst aspects of Southern life and religious ignorance. And, you know, it could be fascinating. You know who the other person who i think of is uh russell peters in what way that he um that he's found a niche oh yeah i mean and like a space like there you know it's like indian people want to laugh and so like uh and he's very good i mean you know all this stuff is all contingent on being very good yes but very much so but the opportunities there are just huge well russell transcends i mean he doesn't um a lot of people know him from youtube his youtube clips are giant like he has youtube clips with millions of hits and that's really what made him big and he like if you go

to one of his shows it's not just indian folks you're like you'll find people of all ethnicities because he does so much on race yeah and he's so likable you know he's so likable and he has good points and you know he's just a friendly smiley guy up there you like you want to you want to enjoy him yes that's true you know he's the fucking nicest guy ever too like in real life he's a sweetheart like you'll never hear i've never heard anybody say anything bad about russell you know but so when russell tells you someone's a douchebag you go hmm i bet that person's really a douchebag oh wow you know but i mean he sold out the o2 arena in london twice yeah yeah he's giant but a lot of that i'm

sure a lot of his asian folks you know folks from india and all sorts of people all sorts of different ethnicities but he definitely found a market the in the humor code one of the things that that stands out is that no matter where you go people value laughs like they you know they value it in their in their personal lives they value it in their leisure time um they're they're you, it's an escape. It's a way to help cope with a difficult life. Um, and that's like, that's fundamental. I mean, you know, it's so fundamental as you find it in, in animals. So I have this clip, uh, I have this clip that I show when I give public talks about these researchers tickling rats. They actually like put their hand into the cage

and kind of roughhouse these rats. And the rats emit this sort of chirping sound that signals that they're enjoying this activity. So these, and then what happens is, and this blows my mind, is that after they've done this for a little while, then the researcher will move their hands away, and the rats will chase the hand.

So he'll move his hand around the cage, and the rats will chase after the hand, seeking out that experience. So they want to get that stimulation again. They want to get that stimulation again. And that chasing is no different than the people who are going to go to see your show tonight or watch your special.

You're just a rat-tickling hand as a comic. You know, like, it's so fundamental to us as organisms to find this kind of, this sort of, like, ambivalent, arousing experience where you're, like, right on the edge. You know, you're right on the edge of going too far and um and you're bonding with other people over it it's it's really fast i buy all that about comedy but i don't know how exactly it relates to rats how do they know that the rats are laughing like when you're tickling a rat how do we really understand what they're feeling yeah what that means to them um so so what they do they have these bat detectors

so these are ultrasonic so we can't hear them with the human ear and what they find they do they do they do a number of things in these with these experiments so one of the things that you can do is you can take that tickling too far you make it too aggressive and those chirps the laughter is replaced by a different vocalization that that rats make when they fight oh so like all right all right enough enough it's like when it's like if you have kids and they're play fighting right and then it turns oh or when you're like you're when you were talking about sparring right sparring is is it's scary but it's also fun but then when it turns into a real fight it just gets scary right right right and so and then they also measure measure these sort of physiological changes in

the rats right so their brain chemistry and and so on so there's these these guys at northwestern they're trying to create essentially happy pills so they're they have to understand how do you create positive emotion in rats because they want to create chemicals that can create positive emotion in rats. So the goal of understanding this is because most drugs are designed to stop negative emotion. But the new frontier is to create drugs that create positive emotions safely. And so they've been for years been studying rats and they've been creating – and they basically – I don't know exactly how they do all these studies, but they essentially find that this physical experience in rats creates a positive emotional state akin to other –

you can feed rats and you can do other things to create positive emotional states. And they basically find that the brain chemistry following this experience is the same as the brain chemistry following other positive experiences and is unlike the brain chemistry following negative experiences. Oh, okay. So they're completely monitoring this animal's state. Exactly. While this is all going on. So they're pretty aware of exactly what's going on. on yeah these guys have been doing this stuff for 20 years but is it possible that it's just looking for affection and like a I mean how complex is the recognition of this

this state this rat is oh it's very simple like it's just it's just I like this right but couldn't it be like my cat like when I pet my cat she you know she rubs up against me and she gets excited it's not tickling her at all well but when you pet the rats you don't get the you don't get the laughter it's really the rough housing that's that's present by the way i think like cats like how you do it's play yeah it's total play but if it's play how do you consider i mean i wouldn't consider that like um tickling yeah so um so the way i think about this is that so so you have, so if you think about humor from an evolutionary standpoint, is that, you know, if you look at non-human primates, the things that monkeys and apes and bonobos laugh at, it's actually called play panting. So it's physical forms, physical acts, so rough and tumble play and tickling and so on. The situations that induce laughter have this sort of harmless nature to them.

So not all tickling, for instance, induces laughter. You can't tickle yourself. There's no threat there. There's no violation. And if on your way home tonight some creepy guy in a trench coat tried to tickle you, that wouldn't be funny either. Why are you looking at me, Jim? I'm not. So the idea is this, is that you have this sort of sweet spot with tickling.

You have this sweet spot with play fighting. And then as humans evolved and started to acquire language, systems of logic, cultural norms, social norms, and so on, now the world of things that could go wrong started to expand beyond the physical. Now it could be a misuse of language. It could be an absurdity. It could be farting, right? Because whether farting is okay or not okay is just a social norm. And so the things that could go wrong and the way those things that could be wrong could also be okay also expanded. And it's why I think humor is such a complex thing to study because there's so many ways to create this positive emotional experience. There's only one way or in rats or a

few you know tiny a few different ways in rats but in humans it could be you know slapstick it could be knock knock jokes that have a taboo thing to them it could be you know i mean there's any number and so it could be a parody it could be satire and but all of them across all these different forms of comedy have the same element this sort of thing that's wrong yet okay right that's a fascinating way of looking at that i don't think most comedians ever sort of conceptualize i think we just try to figure out what's funny about something and we don't look at it what's wrong but okay and then how everybody sort of agrees that it's okay yes and that's sort of what like this sort of group recognition laughter is yes and i i think that there's i think comedians have been doing this successfully for

you know for a long time i what i believe science can provide comedy is it can cut the learning curve. So imagine you don't need a theory, but imagine you had a theory. So imagine you said, oh, Pete, I believe you. I'm going to use the benign violation theory. Well, it has certain insights. So, for instance, one strategy we call the Seinfeld strategy. So if you think about what Jerry Seinfeld does, is he takes situations that seem okay, and he

points out what's wrong with them. And when Jerry fails at that, he rarely offends anyone. The other strategy is the Silverman strategy. She takes a situation, Sarah Silverman takes a situation

that's wrong and finds a clever way to make it okay. You know, sometimes she puts it to a song and so on. She's really very non-threatening in the way that she does this stuff. So you say, okay, so just that insight alone could be useful to a comic, right? Like, okay, well, where am I starting? Am I starting with something that's very clearly wrong to everybody in the room? Let me figure out the way I can make it okay. A double entendre or misuse of language or find the right victim, et cetera.

Or am I taking a situation that everybody sees as okay and I have to find a way to show them how it's also wrong? And so that's not a bad strategy to start from a writing standpoint versus just like oh that right like you know earlier i said oh that could be a bit well you know it's like okay you're just taking this situation you see that there's something amiss there and that it could serve as like a foundation for a funny joke it's i don't think very many comedians look at it that systematically oh yeah i don't think they do but my point is i think that they could right and i think it could help yeah i bet you're right makes sense i mean being aware of the mechanisms behind any sort of decision making i mean a lot of times that's one of the things that like counseling and therapy

helps the people is to be aware of the mechanisms that lead you to go off the rails and go on a gambling binge or a drinking binge like recognize the steps that are taking place instead of just being caught up in the wave of momentum yes and on a constructive side like understanding what is or isn't funny about something it's like almost all writers understand um story structure but very few people that enjoy a good book do. Yes. You know, they just sort of like enjoy it and go on with it.

But most writers, especially when you're writing like something like a novel, it sort of makes you do that. You kind of have to. It's like the heroes, if you understand the hero's journey, then you can write a screenplay.

Yeah. But people have seen hundreds of heroes journeys but they don't they don't recognize plot point one they don't recognize plot point two even though it happens over and over again what what was shocking if anything about like the process of creating humor when you're writing your book um surprising maybe a better word yeah so so one was this idea of of how the palestinians were sort of more jewish in their in their comedy that that was very clearly one of them so one of the things that stood out to us was um so we went to the amazon with patch adams and 100 hospital clowns so patch adams the clown from

the movie yes the real patch the real patch adams i didn't even know he existed i thought that was just a construct no no he's a real man really yeah and he's like a big man he's like six six he's he's an enormous man and so he's not he's not robin what you think of him looking like robin williams but he doesn't look at all anything like robin williams but we wanted to to look at whether laughter is the best medicine and you know the answer to that obviously is no you know there's other better medicines antibiotics way better than jokes yes but but there's good reason to believe that it is useful right so so um experiencing positive emotion is um experience positive emotion is is beneficial in terms of coping. That's Patch Adams. That's Patch Adams.

Yeah. The actual Patch Adams. Yeah. I've seen him wear that chicken on his head. Anyway, go ahead. Oh, so yeah, don't pull up the pictures of me dressed as a clown, please. Should have never asked. It's really bad. Should have made no request in that arena.

Whatever you do, don't. It sounds like somebody wants pictures of him dressed like a clown i mean i'm i was a terrible clown uh don't pull them up but but anyway joel was a my co-author was a much better clown than i was than he than i am and i mean that in a positive way right actually i'll never say anything bad about a clown ever again after spending a hunt uh like a couple weeks with 100 hospital clowns in this destitute area of the Amazon. Okay, so positive emotions help. Having a good sense of humor is beneficial for coping because we like people who are funny,

and we like people who can make jokes in the face of tragedy, and so it helps muster social support. So when the chips are down more than ever you need your friends and family and if you're if you're able to be a little bit light about it all it helps those people kind of stick with you versus you just turning into this horrible angry sad person right who no one wants to be around right and then the last one and i think this is the most important one and certainly the one that's most uh is most understudied Right. You can reappraise it in a way that can be beneficial. So the example I like is when we were in New York, we met with Todd Hanson, who was the head writer at The Onion, when they published their most famous issue two weeks after the 9-11 attacks.

And what The Onion did, which was so brilliant, was instead of doing this sort of too-soon comedy fail and making fun of the victims and making fun of the tragedy they turned it on to the terrorist they made fun of the terrorists they had like headlines like terrorists surprised to find selves in hell and if you think about it like what if you're laughing at these terrorists, you've undermined the terror that they're trying to create. Cause you, you know, it's impossible to be scared and amused at the same time. Right. So,

so what the onion did was like a great, it was great for the American people. Cause it reintroduced comedy into the, into the culture again. It brought them some joy and it also made the terrorists a lot less scary and so in that way like laughter is good medicine because it can serve all these kinds of purposes isn't that why when people are mocked they get furious because you're sort of you're diffusing the what's what's significant about them you're mocking it yeah you're yes you're making you're diffusing the what's what's significant about them you're mocking it yeah you're yes

you're making you're making them seem less serious yeah i mean that's the classic scene from goodfellas what am i a fucking clown i'm a clown for you like it's like people get angry if you think something they do is funny it becomes a diminishing aspect like you and they almost want to fight you to get their energy back yeah i mean well so there's a so humor so we think of comedy as like a very positive thing in the present world but it doesn't have its roots actually are rather negative so plato and aristotle wrote about about humor but they saw it as a subversive thing so they saw it as a negative kind of thing. Really? And how so? Well, so if you think about it, it's sort of like the sneering, the laughing at versus the laughing with.

So there's a long history of ridicule, for instance. Is that because of just... Where you're putting down people. And so in that way, you're... And if you think about satire, uh if you you know and and if you think about satire and um is that and this was a time where government was seen as a more positive thing than it is nowadays and so when you when you take when you when you're using comedy to critique people it can be seen as a negative thing right and so i'm sorry go ahead oh no so so yeah so like over and over

again you sort of find this uh you find this idea like so um thomas hobbes in leviathan talked about laughter arising from sudden glory from from the sudden defeat of your enemies and you are you're laughing as in this sort of superior position. And, and I mean, you can see these things kind of today, right? So people telling racist jokes, people telling sexist jokes, people going too far with their Bill Cosby jokes and making people upset.

They, um, that it's not always used for good. Even if some people are laughing, other people are not. So it can be a really divisive, exclusive thing, or it could be the

kinds of things that we were talking about earlier where you're bringing everyone together and celebrating some idea to get you know together that's that's fascinating that it used to be thought of as a negative thing it used to be thought of like humor was only for mocking purposes it wasn't like a community gathering like one of the things about a stand-up comic you you sort of think of someone standing in front of a group of friends and you know making a speech and everyone laughing and i've always imagined that that was sort of the the origin of it like someone being forced to make a speech somewhere and it's often been attributed to mark twain that mark twain did book readings, and he did speeches, and he was notoriously funny in these.

Yes. And that he was kind of the original stand-up comedian, social commentator slash political satirist. I think he's one of the funniest people ever born. To this day, he has got lines that could be written by a modern comedian, like his line about religion. Like a religion was created the first time a con man met a sucker, or something along those lines. I'm paraphrasing it. Oh, religion was created the first time a con man met the first fool. So if you doubt the benign violation theory, fool so if you if you doubt the benign violation theory one of the best pieces of evidence for it is a quote uh that mark twain wrote he said that the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow there is no laughter in heaven and like that to me that line is really profound because because

what he's essentially saying is you need something wrong. I'm sorry to repeat myself a lot. I apologize. But because heaven's perfect, because it's blissful, it's a wonderful place to be, but there's not jokes. Right. You know, because with perfection, you do not get comedy. You need imperfection. Well, we're always struggling to try to achieve this ultimate state of bliss.

We're always struggling to try to achieve this state of enlightenment and just emptiness and being free of all of our negativity. Our worries, yeah. But what we appreciate in life is the triumphs over the hardships. What we appreciate is the beer after the long, hard day. You don't want to just wake up and drink a beer. You're missing the whole fucking point, you know? It's like the lottery winner is a classic example. Someone's just handed some money.

They always wind up losing it, and they don't appreciate it. It just all falls apart, slips through their fingers, partially because they didn't earn it. They didn't experience all the difficulty involved in getting to this incredible state. We have all these zeros in your bank account i think we need adversity it's important for us i mean well and you're going to have it as humans right because you know sort of like the the anthropologists of the world talk about how um social like social interactions are about conflict, fundamentally about conflict.

And you take away the conflict, and then you take away the source of jokes. And Twain identified that in a way that has really had a big effect on me because it is counterintuitive. You're sort of furrowing your brow over this idea that, that humor is this negative thing, like from a historical perspective. But even, you know,

even today, even the conversations we have highlight how it's just a tool and you could use it for good or you could use it for evil. You know, some people could be laughing and others not, but I think we all agree that the best comedy does one of two things it either unites people it's very inclusive or it speaks truth to power you know so you're not putting down you're not putting down the low status person but if you

are going to put someone down you put down the high status person here's the problem with that sam kinnison's bit about feeding starving people in africa it's one of the best bits ever and it's basically mocking starving people for being stupid enough to live in the desert it's one of the greatest bits of all time it's like you're sitting at home trying to enjoy some food you made from scratch and this guy on tv won't you help won't you it's like why don't you help you're right there he goes what you know what you need to do stop sending him money. Send him people like me.

Send him people that are going to go all the way over there and go, hey, we just drove five hours with your food and it occurred to us there wouldn't be world hunger if you people would live where the food is. And he goes through this whole crazy bit, which is so wrong and so fucked up, where he's taking starving people. Come here. Come here, motherfucker. You know what that is?

That's sand. And it's going to be 100 years from now. now fucking sand we got deserts in america too we just don't live in them asshole and it's so wrong but so fucking hilarious it's one of the best bits ever and it's not punching up it's not punching up by any stretch of the imagination so i don't buy that i'm i think that that's that's that is the problem with that it's like a social justice standpoint and that it's not always applicable there's a there's a sort of a contract that the audience has the comedian that we know you're fucking around all right we know sam kinnison was in africa and so kids were starving he wouldn't

be grabbing them and making them eat dirt yes okay this is a joke and it's wrong and it's awful but it's amazing it's amazing because it's wrong and awful and the the african kids don't need to see it nobody needs to get hurt we're just all together in this room and we're gonna laugh at it so so um i agree with you that funny is funny and and that's you and you know my comedian buddies basically say it's not too soon if it's funny right you know like that's the standard so that joke so here's the challenge i think of of that joke today is because of social media that a joke that wasn't intended to be broadly consumed but of course it was it was on hbo oh all right but well okay so so it was just one of his best bits that he did on a young comedian special. I mean, it was a... I see.

All right. Oh, okay. I mean, but in... So we went to... We actually went to Scandinavia to look at the Mohammed cartoon controversy. Ooh. And that's an example, though, of now that the world is flat, that it causes problems. Because this group of fairly unfunny political cartoons that were designed to punch down,

were designed to make Muslims in Denmark feel not welcome, and created peaceful demonstrations there and so on, and created peaceful demonstrations there and so on, somehow made their way to the Middle East and became part of a political, basically became a political tool and then literally set the Middle East on fire, like riots, hundreds of people dead and all that kind of stuff. From cartoons.

From cartoons. Well, these were cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad drawn by you know danish people your perspective is the first time i've ever heard it put that way that part of the issue was the fact that the cartoons weren't good and that they were punching down yes i've never heard that before i don't i'm not familiar with the actual cartoons but what i've heard was just that they were cartoons and that religious fundamentalists went fucking crazy and killed

people over them well yeah that's true but um but that's not what you think that's not the full story that's not the full so what happened was this sort of right-wing newspaper invited cartoonists political cartoonists to submit cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. So there's nothing in the Quran that says you can't draw the Prophet Muhammad, but part of Islamic culture, it's sort of a no-no. There are some famous depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. There's one in the Supreme Court, for instance. Supreme Court of? The United States., you know. Supreme Court of?

The United States. Really? Yes. Do you think that's by design? I don't know why it's there. Seems like an anti-Islam sentiment. Like, maybe if they knew that that was a no-no, and they just said, you know,

just put it up there to fuck with them. Yeah, I have no idea. I should know that. Do not pull that up. No, I just want to look. Okay. Okay. So what they did was they invited these cartoonists to draw these cartoons and the

idea was it was it was sort of a kind of like freedom of speech uh-huh editorial was it like draw muhammad day or something like that they got like a dozen people who actually you know drew these things and some of them were were jokes on the newspaper so this guy guy, Lars Reffen that we met, he drew a picture of, of this kid named Muhammad and he wrote on a chalkboard in Danish, you know, this newspaper is a bunch of like, you know, right wing fascists,

right? So he, because he, they said they would publish anything that they received. Another guy, um, who, who drew actually a picture of the prophet with a turban turned bomb so it had like

the old cannonball bomb coming out of the turbine kind of thing that's that's the really the one that that is like the most upsetting of all of these kinds of things well in initially in denmark uh there were protests so about five percent of the population is Muslim in Denmark. It's a very small part of the population. And those folks have their struggles there. It's otherwise a really homogenous place. They engaged in demonstration, peaceful demonstration over all of this. They weren't happy about it. Kind of liberal folks in Denmark weren't happy about it. But, you know, it's freedom of speech, and you've got to kind of deal with this kind of stuff on occasion. And then it sort of went away. And it wasn't until later someone essentially brought the drawings to the middle.

Well, actually, that's not true. There was some conversation between countries in the Middle East and the government. And the government stonewalled. Because we know that this didn't have to happen, because Sweden... What did happen? When you say didn't have to happen? Oh, was that... So then what ended up happening basically was

that folks took these cartoons to Syria and so on, and the Syrian government used this as a way to get people really fired up and then to turn this into kind of an international um conflict and but we know that this was largely political um because like a year later the same kind of thing could have happened in Sweden. So this artist drew even more inciting cartoons. Well, they were actually drawings of Muhammad's head on the body of a dog. He drew like three panels of this stuff and it showed up in an art gallery. And that's even more insulting culturally.

But what happened very, very quickly was the Swedish government apologized. They just basically said, we don't think this is right. We're very sorry that this happened. They didn't get to a place where they were just like, oh, well, this is freedom of speech. He can do whatever he wants. And that's sort of what happened with the, with the Danish government at that time. And so it ended up becoming this like really crazy, like political tool. Um, you know, and it ends up getting spread because of the internet.

And a lot of people saw this stuff who would never normally have seen it and, and so on. And so in that way, I mean, I mean i you know like whether the cartoonists were being insensitive or not it depends on your but what is insensitive i mean you're mocking an ideology that's based on animal skins or based on some shit that was passed down for generation and generation if you're talking about christianity you're talking about scientology what i mean when you're mocking things if you find something to mock about something and it rings true enough that people laugh at it, what is insulting? Is it insulting that they found something ridiculous about your ideology?

Or is it insulting that they're bothering to critique your ideology at all or mock your ideology at all? And aren't ideologies open targets? Well, so I think – so according to a political cartoonist, absolutely. Right. I mean, I think that's the, that's what the job of. Who's it not? According to who? Well, so I think the idea is this, is that what you can have is some people laughing and some people horrified.

Right. You know, and so this is the idea. I mean, I mean, it really just depends on what is your goal. Like, what is your level of depends on what is your goal like what is your level of sensitivity what is your goal if your goal is to point out what's wrong with the world and to critique the world then you then you're just like well you know if you want to make an omelet you got to break some eggs yeah you know and so that's fine um but if you do if you don't want to put if you don't want to punch down is that punching punching down, though? I mean, is it punching down when you're mocking a controlling ideology that's responsible for some really regressive ideas?

I mean, like the way they treat women, the women's rights to vote and drive, the stoning for adultery, all the across-the-board things that are a part of Islam. That seems to me, at least, to be a divisive and damaging sort of ideology. I don't think it's punching down to mock something. Well, I think in the case of the Muhammad cartoons, it was in part because what this newspaper essentially was doing was saying, if you want to be part of our culture, you need to be able to laugh about these kinds of things. And so it was being used to sort of set these folks apart.

I mean, you know, and so regardless of what you might think of Islam in general, I think the intentions of the newspaper in that case, it's hard to see how that it was terribly like righteous, I would say. So I'm confused it was that was the most offensive one was muhammad with his turban was a bomb yes that was the most offensive it was and in relation to a an ideology that is you know obviously the most radical aspects of it and not supported by a vast majority of the muslim population but there's been a large amount of suicide bombings.

Not in Denmark. Not in Denmark, but across the world that are associated with Islam, radical Islam, jihadists. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, I mean, you know, take any major religion and you can find a great deal of violence perpetrated in the name of that right religion right like it just it just happens to be to nowadays you're finding it in in islam but it was you've seen it in catholicism and seen it elsewhere right i mean you know so uh look i'm all for the idea of um of critiquing whether it be religion whether it be in government i mean now we're just getting into my personal opinions about these things but certainly we're getting into thoughts about what is punching up and what is punching down.

Like, Islamophobia is a very strange thing that has, like, recently joined our vernacular. And when you, you can mock God, like the angry man in the clouds, all you want. You can mock Jesus. I mean, Sam Kinison had hilarious jokes about Jesus. Right. Like, people, you jesus is coming back and you go i think the last thing that jesus ever said was oh oh not my left hand oh oh like you would go i think this is the last thing we ever heard from him and he he did this whole thing about jesus and jesus being married and all this crazy shit and nobody you

know i mean he was a christian or at least started out as a Christian. Nobody accused him of Christianophobia, or it wasn't thought of as an affront to a minority group. But that doesn't mean that Sam's stuff wasn't terribly offensive to some Christians. Some Christians, sure. Right. So that's essentially what we're talking about. we're what we're talking about is like so is it you know it's one thing to make fun of the pope and versus like you know taking something that people hold dear but why do they hold a deer the whole thing that that that comedy attacks is what is causing you to believe in this what is caught like if i can mock it and i can find holes in it and you say that that's offensive well then

you're saying that comedy is offensive no no, no, no, no, no. To be very clear, the idea of what I, the point that I wanted to make is that in a world, modern day, is that a joke that was very funny and intended for

this audience that never would have reached them 20 years ago, would never reach another audience that never would have reached them 20 years ago now would never reach another audience that finds that joke terribly offensive and and you know some of it is just like okay well that just happens you know what joke you referring to whatever joke it may be like whatever happens in in comedy club x shows up on youtube and people are like i can't believe that person was making a rape joke or these kinds of things. The Mohammed cartoon controversy is an extreme version of that.

That these cartoons should have had their, you know, 15 minutes of fame in Denmark. They created a bit of conflict, peaceful, you know, protests and so on, made people feel a little bit, you know, set aside. And that could have passed that that now is a much more dangerous thing nowadays because information can you know you can go on google and pull them up and see these things you know in that way and that to me that was like a surprising fascinating thing about the world of comedy now i know that that it's impossible to make something universally funny because people are too different um and uh whether and how you want to go about making your comedy i'm not going to tell someone how to go about making their comedy or not who they want

to make the victim and who they want to make fun of and all that kind of stuff i mean that's that's up to the to the artist right but i get confused i mean if you're doing stand-up comedy or you're doing satire and political satire and cartoons if that's the most offensive thing i i don't think the issue at all is this cartoon i think the issue is the reaction to satire the reaction to comedy i mean yeah people are really burning things in the street and over a guy with a bomb in his turban i think that the true issue is who are these people and why are they freaking the fuck out over a cartoon yeah well that's a complete total overreaction i don't think that's punching down yeah i agree with you about this overreaction the the fault lies though in the syrian government

in this in this particular situation because they're shit stirrers they got a hold of they let it happen i mean this is this is a place at the time that that you know everybody was under their thumb so they let these riots happen right they wanted the riots to happen i see you know what i mean so that it so that chapter in the book reads a little bit like a mystery novel, right? Because we're sort of uncovering these clues along the way, trying to figure out like, how did this bizarre situation actually occur? Being at a university and being an academic and being around really progressive people all the time, do you think it necessarily flavors your idea of what is and isn't acceptable

in terms of comedy because that that term punching up you've used it several times yes and that's a term that you see all the time when people are criticizing comedians for you know really extreme acts or offensive what they would consider be offensive jokes even if it's tongue-in-cheek or what have you like this concept of punching up is like it's fairly fairly uh current yeah i'd say um i picked that up from the world of comedy not from right from the scholars uh but i do i do yeah i certainly you know i certainly hang like spend time in faculty meetings with uh my fair share of like super progressives indeed yeah i mean i'm in a business school so they're not like totally outrageous progressives but but i can see you

like hedge your words and you like tread lightly on so you mean you you dance the the dance of a man with tenure well i've got tenure so i could go even further than i probably get a couple of drinks in you you know that's really what we need uh yeah i mean i understand i get it intention to me should be everything and if it's your your intention to get violent and upset because someone mocks what you think is divine right that's you're a crazy person and if they don't make fun of crazy people that are willing to riot and light things on fire regardless of the motivation behind it like who started it and who instigated them yeah at the end of the day a guy drew a cartoon you want to kill him like that's the humor it's and there's no punching down there that that's

like if that created that that's good that's like mocking the ridiculousness of this civilization mocking the ridiculousness of ideology and how attached people become to them with all that's all it is a bomb and a hat yeah so yeah i would so i'll tell i agree with you in this i agree with you in this way the i met the cartoonist he now lives under armed guard god and so i like i like peed in his panic room like his bathroom has been converted into a panic room on all of his walls throughout his house are pictures of um of him doing this to any religion more or less right so so for him he's he's just punching like to him it doesn't matter he's just like i'm there to satirize right and so for him he's not like people might see him as an islamophobe whatever it may be, but he does this with Christians.

He does this with Jews. He does this with everywhere. He's a hole fighter. That's what he does for a living. Right. Right. You know, in that way. And so he doesn't think what he did is wrong and he would, I suspect.

Probably not do it again. I don't know. It's a good question if he would do it again. He'd be crazy if he did it again. I mean, he had some guy break into his house with an axe, and he had to hide in his panic room until the equivalent of the FBI came and shot the guy. Yeah, it's crazy. Well, there was the guy that got stabbed. There was a guy in Holland, wasn't it? The guy who got murdered for some depiction of Muhammad.

There's been more than one attack and that's look whenever a religion says that if you draw our guy will kill you like that is crossing a line you know and i i think there's this there's this trend in this society especially um towards non-violence and towards recognizing also that the amount of aggression that's directed towards Muslims is possibly racist and most certainly due to the fact that we have been involved in a prolonged war with the Middle East. And I think people are recognizing that there's a lot of aspects of this war were unjust, and they segment those people off as being marginalized and to be protected with extreme prejudice as opposed to maybe some christians who live in iowa which were to be openly mocked you know like no one gets in trouble

for mocking christianity but if you mock now islam yeah i mean how many times has people islamophobic is a strange thing to say because first of all you you you think of it as a racism thing but it's not a race it's's a religion. It's an ideology. And there's a lot of atheists that live in Pakistan. There's atheists that live in Syria. There's atheists that live in Muslim strongholds. It's an ideology. It has nothing to do with a race. It's just attached to a race because a large majority of the people in that race have this ideology that they subscribe to. But it's just an operating system and this guy's only mocking an operating system he's not necessarily mocking everyone that has been unfortunate enough to be indoctrinated into some incredibly controlling and archaic ideology

okay i'm not you know what i'm saying i understand your point i really do yeah i do it's just i the punching down thing i was confused i was waiting to find yeah maybe i missed that i uh yeah so i i mean i i do have a i tend to think about these things in terms of like what are their kind of behavioral and social um effects right and i um and again i'm not i i don't think about comedy i'm i'm thinking about like humor like you know imagine humor in the workplace right and in couples and among friends and and all these kinds of things and i generally do believe uh that this idea of the best comedy, whether it be professional or otherwise, unites people. And when it doesn't,

when it divides people, it's trying to keep an eye out for the weak. It's trying to keep an eye out for the oppressed. That's my own personal opinion. That's my own personal opinion. Like if it's just a matter of getting laughs, that's something else. But if you want to try to take that laughs to the next level um that's how that's the framework that

i i use in terms of trying to measure goodness so to speak but that you know i that idea could evolve as i think more about this kind of stuff because some of it is by virtue of um i i don't even want to use this or punching up you're like so if you are a liberal making fun of uh the new republican senate you're going to upset conservatives right and so i think what you're trying to say is what appears to be punching up or punching down isn't necessarily the case because there's so many different constituents out there not only that there's a lot of people that fancy themselves as being very sensitive and very kind very open but they are absolutely vicious in their attacks on people who don't support their ideologies okay and they they will call it

punching up you will call it punching oh i see but what you're doing is you know you have a different point of view on fill in the blank gun control whatever the fuck it is right and because they are deemed to be the enemy you have a green light to attack them yes and in my opinion a lot of it is a lack of a psychedelic perspective and that a lot of these people that form groups they form tribes okay and they stick within the confines of that tribe. I mean, this is, the enemy of religion is psychedelics. And when you look at ideologies, especially really super rigid ideologies, they have to be enforced.

Then the Islamophobe idea, like the criticizing of Islam, being like a mocking of a religion, I see what you're saying now. You've seen the reaction to that? Do you? a religion. I see what you're saying now. And seeing the reaction to that. Do you? I do. I get it. I get it.

What you're, so, I understand what you're saying. You're basically saying is like, if you, that it's not, to say that you can't critique this religion comedically or otherwise because it hurts some people within it ends up being too narrow-minded because you should be able to of course to critique right so if you just say oh well you can't do that because you're hurting this group of people well now there there is some great benefit of critiquing whatever system of oppression system of power that exists if you can make someone laugh like if you have an opinion i have an opinion you go on stage and you state your opinion i go well i disagree i have a different opinion but if you make me laugh with your opinion i'm almost i'm

failing i'm almost forced but this is not what we're doing right right but look there's a lot of people that have valid opinions that you might not agree with but if you're a progressive or you're liberal it seems that there's an open target to mock them like here's a perfect example is people who don't believe in abortion and i'm i should preface this i'm pro-choice 100 always have been i think a woman's right to choose is a very important part of our culture the morning after pill you know but the reality is what is going on there's a something in your body that could become a life and you choose to stop that from taking place okay some people have a

fundamental problem with that because they think that it's killing a life right and to pretend that this isn't a debatable issue i think is completely dis disingenuous. It does become a person eventually. I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to do it. I'm saying you absolutely should, and it's not my fucking business at all. Okay. But people who don't believe in abortion will be mocked as being stupid, as being ignorant, as being anti-woman. They'll fucking say the most venomousous vile shit about because it doesn't

conform with their very rigid tribal ideology the tribe of progressives yeah i agree when the tribe of christians yes pro pro-life they would never consider the possibility that it's just a few cells yes like if i if i just give you a pill and those three it's three cells no it's still life it's fucking three cells it's three cells we stop three cells what if it gets to six can we stop it at six it's a real debate it's a real debate yeah i agree with you it's a real debate actually it's you know you if you can take a relative relativist perspective you can see how very clearly it's a real debate like you can understand why someone would be yes anti-abortion yes you can i how very clearly it's a real debate like you can understand why someone would be yes anti-abortion yes you can i mean i'm not but i can understand it i see it too but to pretend

that it that it's that it's ignorant and to to go after it with vile i mean vile and and and obviously the opposite happens too right it's on both sides it's like you're on the yeah and now where so but so my question for you is where does this stop so let's say so um i i wrote a tweet today that said uh there's a street in la called climate change right like i just you know because i saw i passed this ozone street and i thought that would be a funny tweet it clearly didn't work not great but perspective context but like you're like all right well how much should we be debating climate change at this point right you know because like in my opinion that's oh it's like the it's not overwhelming but it's pretty damn close you know um and so

at some point like so in this abortion one i think you and i can agree whatever our own personal opinion is i can see how another person would have exactly the opposite and have very good reasons to believe that yes at what point does it become a situation where you go no you're wrong well when it comes to the climate change the real issue is what information do you have at your disposal like are you a geologist are you uh do you have a degree in understanding the cycles of weather? Or are you just parroting some shit you read on some wacky right-wing website? I mean, I don't know.

If you want to talk to someone about climate change, there's so many variables when it comes to climate change that are absolutely incredibly fascinating. Like the fact that North America at one point in time was under a mile-high sheet of ice. that North America at one point in time was under a mile-high sheet of ice and that global cooling which has been a part of reality throughout time is much more terrifying than global warming there's all sorts of things everyone's the sky is falling the sky is falling and I think that human beings are disgusting dirty creatures that pollute everywhere we go I've seen eight Prius's I've keeping track of it eight Prius's in my life throw cigarettes out the window we're fucking gross.

We're gross in a lot of ways. A lot of us are gross. So there's no debate that we fucked up the atmosphere. My debate is how much does everybody say that global warming is here and climate change is caused by people. How much information do they individually have before

they start espousing these ideas? And I say very little. Oh, I agree with that. Chuck Woolery. Have you ever read Chuck Woolery's tweet? You remember him from Love, Change, and... Yeah, of course. We'll be right back in two and two. He's a whack job.

He's a crazy... Really? Super right-wing, Obama hater, non-climate change believer. I listen to... I read his tweets all the time. He was going crazy because of the snow in Buffalo. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right.

The lake effect stuff. Evidence that there's no global warming. I'm i'm like oh it doesn't work that way no actually it's global warming that's contributing to that because there's like climate change yeah yeah so yeah i mean you know i'll tell you this one of the things that's been really fun as a scientist is getting to do what we're doing because scientists are really terrible about getting their ideas out into the public discourse because they're not rewarded for it right so so i get rewarded to to write peer-reviewed publications that very few people read even fewer people cite and use for for future research um but because i you know i wrote this book and i blog and i do all this kind of stuff now i can enter into a conversation with more than just other scientists if scientists were

were much better about getting their ideas out there they could actually um so because you know politicians are very good about getting their ideas out no matter how good or bad the ideas are scientists are really terrible about it but they work very good about getting their ideas out, no matter how good or bad the ideas are. Scientists are really terrible about it, but they work very hard to get their ideas right. You know, that's their advantage. And so you see this in the sort of climate change. You're like, now they have to rely on journalists to be the sort of conduit. They don't do the kind of thing that I'm doing, which I really enjoy doing. I think humor is such an important thing to understand that you need to do the peer-reviewed publication stuff, but you also need to enter into a conversation with professionals in the public to talk about this kind of stuff.

Yeah. To figure it out. Yeah. Well, I think humor is a weird thing because you could say something, and it be really funny and then I could say the exact same thing and no one would laugh. Or probably the opposite. Yeah, but it'd be whatever. You know what I'm saying? It's like everyone has their whatever it is about them that makes them funny.

And that's very intangible. There's some weird shit. Like there's some things that would work with some comedians and if you would write them down on paper you would say like mitch headbury again i hate to go back to him but a lot of this stuff if you wrote it down on paper and then read it you'd be like that's not funny at all don't use that on stage but when he does it it's genius there's something about personality charisma all these weird intangible things that are very difficult to measure. And as a scientist, how do you account for that when you try to quantify what is funny or analyze the components of funny? So it depends on the question.

So in some cases, that's error, right? So in some cases, we're not interested in the role that the person plays. And so what we do is we just randomly assign people to one of two tasks. And so hopefully you get the same number of Mitches on the right as on the left, right? On one group as in the other group. And that evens itself out. When it comes to understanding these sort of individual differences, these sort of personality differences and so on,

that's a lot harder because you can't randomly assign someone to be like Mitch or like Joe. Now you have to measure it. And any time you have to measure something, that introduces another level of error, right? Because how is it that you can measure it accurately like reliably yeah and so a lack of reliability influences your um the validity of your conclusions that you can um that you can draw from so i have a particular in my own research i

try to avoid individual differences as much as possible because you're now you're not manipulating them you're measuring them and anytime you measure versus manipulate it it just makes life a whole lot harder where i'm headed though i have to pay attention to individual differences because what we're doing in hurl so for six years we've studied what makes things funny the next six years we're going to try to make people funnier that's what we're going to be doing funny moving forward yes can you help me sure i'm writing a new act i just released my old act i have to write a new act how do i get funnier we can we can that'd be great i would love to do that i've been using mushrooms with limited success uh no but that's i mean i don't you know what I can't answer that question for sure because no one's ever done that research before.

Right. That's where we're going though. But to be able to do that, we're going to have to measure individual differences because you're going to have to figure out how funny someone is at point A and then measure them again at point B. And if you're going to have to understand like what they're good at, what are they not good at and so on. And so, so the answer, my, my quick answer is you got to measure, and it's very hard to do, but that's where we're headed.

Measuring it. The ability to make someone funnier, though. Like, what would you do? Would you, like, analyze their act and say, like, if you did it this way, or maybe you should approach it that way? Like, would you do it on, like a delivery basis a routine basis bit by bit right so um so you have to have the proper control right so so to me i think that the best control um i have this idea for this project i want to do it i want to do a tv special on this thing you do you take one group of people and you you commit them to the kind of typical

um comedy enhancing tools that exist in the world right so they they do an improv group they do a stand-up thing they read some books about how to do this stuff like you expose them to funny people you know who do it for a living and get some coaching. Right. That's probably the only things that exist if someone really wanted to become funnier. The only things that exist but unlike, say, carpentry, there are certain people that just won't be funny. I struggle to say that because I've seen guys get much better. Yes. But there's a certain level of cluelessness that some folks possess that's inescapable so now if the goal is to create funny stand-up comedians i agree with you

if the goal is to create someone who is more funny now than they were before then i say well maybe you're right because some people are just they're just terrible in public and they don't think but could i get someone to send funnier emails or be funnier with his kids you know or to be a better manager to you know so so some of it is a matter of identifying where is a person's strengths what is the medium right and so so when i say improve someone's sense of humor it can be along many different dimensions right i see i don't think the goal is to make funnier stand-up comics i think like we have plenty of funny stand-up comics and the system works pretty well but we have like a lot of like really crappy unfunny customer

service agents i don't think it's gonna i I think they would have to be super focused on it. But I think there is a potential in improving comedy. Look, even professional chess players, and I mean, think about all the incredible disciplines that are involved that need coaching. Even gymnasts, when they're at a gold medal level, they still need constant coaching. Boxers, world championship boxers still have coaches bernard hopkins is 49 years old he still has professional coaches that work with him that are constantly analyzing technique and comics are on their own i think what you're doing if a comic

would uh be open-minded like a lot of comics are very protective of the creative process and they're renegades and like what the fuck do you know when we see your five minutes yeah go ahead do five minutes and then tell me if you could, what the fuck do you know? When we see your five minutes, go ahead, do five minutes and then tell me if you could tell jokes for me or, you know, correct my jokes. Joe, let's make a show.

A show? What kind of a show? Take comics and get them better? Use science to make them funnier. Yeah, I don't know. It would work with some folks. I think it would. Some open-minded folks.

So I'll tell you one of the, I have an intervention idea, not for comics, but for regular everyday people that I believe will help. And it's facilitating what we call a growth mindset. So you can roughly take a person's belief system about their skills and put them in one of two categories, either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. So this is work by Carol Dweck, a social psychologist. A fixed mindset believes that you're just sort of born that way. And so if you have a fixed mindset about intelligence, for instance, then an intelligence test is just a race to see how smart you are.

It's just a ranking system. And if I rank higher than you, then I think I'm smarter than you. And I think that that will always be the case. system right and and if i rank higher than you then i think i'm smarter than you and i think that that will always be the case but a growth mindset a test an intelligence test is just a benchmark it just tells me how smart i am relative to you right now but it shows me where i can go in terms of getting getting smarter right you can imagine having a fixed or growth mindset about shyness, for instance. Some people believe you're just shy.

And other people are like, well, I'm shy now, but I can overcome the shyness, etc. Humor, I think, fits. I think most people have a fixed mindset about their sense of humor. I think that they're just like, well, this is how funny I am,

and that's the way it'll be. But if you can convince them that they can become funnier, if you can transform them from having a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, all of a sudden that opens up the possibilities that they'll try to do the things to actually become funnier. What variables do you think you have to address to make someone funnier? I have my ideas on this, but I'm curious as to what your thoughts are. What variables would you have to address to try to make someone funnier what variables do you think you have to address to make someone funnier i have my ideas on this but i'm curious as to like what your thoughts are like what variables would you have to address to try to make someone funnier farting to get more fun you have to leave soon i do okay don't worry about it okay five more minutes is that cool we're almost done anyway all right yeah i'm sorry we run out of time at three o'clock oh you do yeah okay this has been three hours not crazy yeah flies by i did not i did not expect that um what okay what needs to be Oh, you do? Yeah. Okay. This has been three hours. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Flies by, right?

I did not expect that. What needs to be addressed? I want to hear what you have to say. Self-awareness. Yes. One of the big things, especially with men. We call that self-monitoring in the literature. Yes.

Men are very clueless about how other people see them. Ah. Because a lot of men go by, they're like on an ego momentum. You know? And especially if they're accomplished in any way, like if they're a manager, if they have people that have to listen to them. It's one of the things that you see happen to people that become famous as well. It's like when they go, like it might have been what happened to Cosby. I'm going to actually write this down.

Yeah. I'm serious. Please do. Okay. Self-awareness, especially with men, is a real issue. One of the most annoying things is someone who's a guy who thinks he's funny who's not funny at all and tries to like you know crack jokes and they're just like super obnoxious and you don't see like have you ever seen a real boorish guy who's not funny at

all but who is like maybe a manager or somewhere and he tries cracking jokes around a female employee right who might be smarter than him, but has to listen to this fucking idiot because she works for him. And she's like, oh God. Like that is the complete total opposite of funny. The only way to get that guy to understand how other people would see him is like, you would have to point out, like you'd have to like, so you got to look at yourself the way someone else would see you.

Do you try to actively work on your flaws? Do you try to actively assess how your flaws do you try to actively assess how you're being perceived by others right i agree with that that's very nice because what it does is it turns someone's attention to their audience yeah um and and if you want to be funny you can't just think about what you find funny right you know i mean especially like in a you know mixed setting well you can but you have to figure out a way to get other people to see your point of view. Yes, that's nice. Like doing stand-up comedy, like one of the tricky aspects of it is like how do you get someone confident enough to let you take them on a ride?

So, yeah, we do this. We've been experimenting with this. We just started running the study where we're looking at these, we use these reflection tasks. There's like a diary study, basically. So you have someone for like two weeks, every day at the end of the day, do one of two things. They either talk about what I laughed at and why, or another one. So we call that YLA for short. And then we have WOLA, what others laughed at and why.

other one so we call that wyla for short and then we have wola what others laughed at and why and what we're doing with this study is to see is one better than the other at getting people to better appreciate humor and better produce humor and so what you're suggesting is that wola what others laughed at and why would be a more effective intervention than WILA, what I laughed at why. Because what a WOLA diary study does is it gets you to think about what other people are finding funny, not just what you think is funny. And so it makes you more aware, in a sense. Sort of, yeah.

But not even what others laugh at, but how others perceive you. Because, again, it's like who's the messenger sort of yeah um but not even what others laugh at but how others perceive you because it's the it's a again it's like who's the messenger sort of a thing because there are some ideas that if you gave them to the hands of a skilled comedian they could portray those ideas and have it be really hilarious yes whereas there's other people who would bring up the same joke and they would be thought of as a real asshole or short-sighted or insensitive. And it's a matter of how much do I trust this person's intelligence and how they're going to tackle a concept. You know, if you're talking, if someone's on stage, it's like Patton Oswalt, a very measured, intelligent guy who's curious and he's going to look at something and go,

why is it that, and you're going to go, I want to know what he thinks about this subject. I'm going gonna allow him to think for me but if it's someone who's like a really crude open mic or talk tackling the same subject they might have a good point but they enter into it ham-handedly they don't understand how the audience sees them they are too maybe uh they're too over enthusiastic they look nervous on the mic you know all there's all these variables yes or boorish like being an account manager and these people have to listen to you and you know that's it yeah so one of the things that i talk about like a good starting point is just um make fun of yourself just something like a very simple this is you know um the self-deprecation right

because it almost fits the the definition of a benign violation. Like you're pointing out something that's wrong with yourself, but because it's you, you can do it, right? It makes it okay. And that can lead to, you know, it gets a laugh a lot. It leads to liking, you know, you're not worried about offending people, at least typically in this way. And so you can imagine sort of three types of interventions so some of them are tactics like that you know try it develops a little bit of self-deprecation another one is um is these sort of like changing one the way if someone thinks about the world and about themselves that may lead them to um to pursue um to pursue improvement.

And then this other one, which I think is just like, in general, is like you give them an understanding of the world of humor that they don't get it. Like most people haven't thought hard about humor the way comics have.

They don't really think about these individual differences. They don't think about this punching up, punching down have they don't really think about these individual differences they don't think about this punching up punching down they don't think about um how it might have its roots in negative emotion i mean excuse me negative experiences they they don't right they don't think about the two ways that it can fail etc and so some of it is like you give them a crash course to understand this topic you get them to believe that they can get better at it. And then you give them a variety of different strategies and tactics by which to improve it. And then you force them to practice.

Because it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take a long time. Like in the same way that things like meditation and gratitude and so on could be. So you can make people more compassionate. You can make people more compassionate. You can make them more gracious, have more gratitude. You can do all these kinds of things, but none of these interventions happen quickly.

They take weeks and months to do. It's a practice. Yeah, and I think that the growth of any art form, dependent upon what your starting point is, is about analyzing the effectiveness of the previous strategies and finding out what where the holes in the game are yes the beautiful thing about comedy is you could watch other people do it well and you go oh he's nicer than me you know right oh he smiles on stage she smiles and oh she uh she starts off making fun of herself and then makes fun of other people that are similar to herself i I see what she's doing.

You know, when that's, um, that's something that it requires you again, it requires you to analyze yourself. And if you, if you're not analyzing yourself, if you're, if you're going through life with like,

especially like Eagle blinders, if you put up Eagle, the worst thing is when a comic bombs and you go, how'd your set go? Good. I did really good. The fuck you did. I was there. Stupid. I saw that. You can't, thing is when a comic bombs and you go how'd your set go good i did really good the really the fuck you did i was there stupid i saw that you can't you're not going to get good if you believe that

you did good when you ate shit yeah no you'll never oh yeah there's research on this yeah they call it unskilled and unaware the idea is this is that that that incompetent people are doubly cursed so they're cursed with their incompetence but they're they're also cursed with the inability to recognize their incompetence and so uh so you never get better yeah as a result of it all and so those people make lousy comics i used to do a bit about dumb people out fucking smart people and that explains the pyramids while they're around there's nobody in them but one of the part parts of it was about one of the things about being dumb is you don't realize you're dumb like that's part of being dumb like there's a lot of like i would say there's a lot of dumb people right now that are laughing at this

joke because they think i'm talking about somebody else because you don't realize you're dumb because it's a part of being stupid yeah unaware so i'll send you the paper there's research that they do this they do what is the term again would you say unskilled and unaware unskilled and unaware that's it's like a double curse it is yeah yeah that's it's true like objectivity and introspection yeah they're important for anything it's sports for writing like your friend was talking about like your your friend who uh wrote the the chapter then rewrote it not good enough rewrote it and rewrote it that's the ability to analyze your work that's super critical for creating something yeah i agree but there's also you can overanalyze and you can get to the point where it's just like you fucking hack this diamond down to like a grain of sand you're like it's not ready yeah the question

is when do you get to the flat part of the curve? Most people, they're not patient enough to get to the flat part of the curve. That's the big issue. There's also an issue with when do you release a piece of material and put it on an album or in a CD or whatever. Because when you get to a certain point, it's perfect. But sometimes you're on the way there and you record it then and then you do it afterwards. You're like, fuck, I have all these taglines and now it's better like there's a growth process to performing stand-up and one of the aspects of

stand-up that a lot of people find is that there's only one way to get the jokes better you have to do them in front of an audience and they sort of like find their own life in front of a crowd like when i'm creating new shit i will do a bunch of different versions of it. And sometimes I just say, let me try it backwards. Let me flip it up this way. Let me add something ridiculous to it. Let me dig a hole in the beginning and see if I can pull myself out of it. Let me take them down a trick road where I fake them out and then sneak in the back door with all this stuff. It's like it only works on stage because you can only do so much of it in front of a notepad or a

computer yeah i agree it's a weird art form and that it requires other people's points of view like you could make an awesome song on your own and then go on stage i just wrote this last night and just play it gonna give you some of that good good feel good stuff get in the back of my truck you know you could you what I'm saying? I recognize that as a callback. Yes. Yes, it is. Isn't it weird having a scientist analyze comedy?

You know, I think this is a fascinating subject, man. I know you're out of time, but thank you very much. And it's cool just that someone looks at comedy like that, because I think there hasn't really been anybody before you that's done it like that. Thanks. Yeah, it's been great. Really appreciate it. The Humor Code, people can buy it like that. Thanks. Yeah, it's been great. Really appreciate it. The Humor Code, people can buy it on Amazon.com.

They can buy it. Do you have a website? HumorCode.com. HumorCode.com. PeterMcGraw.org, as we discussed. PeterMcGraw.org. And this Hurl thing, what are you going to do with this? And when can people expect to participate?

Or can they? Geez. You know, I get emails sometimes. People are like, oh, do you need subjects? I'll be a subject. I don't know. That's a tougher one. This stuff takes forever. It takes years. Okay, well, get it to me. We'll put it up online. We'll tweet it

and let everybody know. That'd be great. And go buy his book, folks. He knows some shit. Maybe he can help you, young comedians. Thank you, brother. Appreciate it, man. Cheers. Peter McGraw, ladies and gentlemen. Alright. Cheers. Peter McGraw, ladies and gentlemen. All right. Goodbye.