Scientists Try to Find Out What's So Funny About Humor



Toonology: Scientists Try to Find Out What's So Funny About Humor
By GLENN COLLINS


o this group of scientists is setting out to study humor, and they wire up their research subjects and - hang on. Is this a New Yorker cartoon?

Absolutely. But now it is The New Yorker cartoon itself that will become the object of scientific study. As in: How do people perceive that specific things are funny? What happens when they laugh? How does humor evolve? And just why are people born with a gift for laughter and a sense that the world is, er, mad?

These and many other not obviously risible mysteries will be addressed by researchers at the University of Michigan as they examine a vast, ready-made database of mirth: virtually every cartoon published by the magazine since it began on Feb. 1, 1925.

The three-year interdisciplinary experimental project is called Humor at Michigan, in which wit will be studied from psychological, medical, anthropological, cultural, historical and other points of view.

"We need to know a whole lot more about humor," said the project's organizer, Charles R. Eisendrath, director of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the university. "We hope to learn why we think things are funny, and whether it matters. And if the joke is on us, that's fine."

Actually, the joke could be on everyone: the cartoon database is available not only to researchers but, for the first time, to the general public. It resides on two compact discs included in "The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker," a 656-page book being published next Tuesday by Black Dog & Leventhal ($60). The book will include 2,500 cartoons, but the discs hold all 68,647 cartoons published up to the magazine's 79th anniversary last February.

"These cartoons nicely match the kinds of empirical methods we can employ," said Dr. Richard L. Lewis, associate professor of psychology and linguistics at the university. He explains that cartoons-as-specimens are relatively uniform; most consist of a single-panel black-and-white illustration with a short-sentence caption.

"The fruit fly is used in decoding the mysteries of the genome," said Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker and editor of the new anthology, "because the chromosomes are not complicated, and because its short life cycle makes it ideal for following hereditary changes. Well, the ideas in cartoons are like that: easily visible. And the ideas that prompted them have an easily observable life cycle."

Dr. Lewis is a cognitive psychologist who studies psycholinguistics, the mental processes involved in language comprehension. In previous studies he has tracked research subjects' eyeball movements as they read texts at a rate of 300 or 400 milliseconds per word.

Now this technique will confront the cartoon. "There is an incredible amount of cognitive machinery involved in understanding a cartoon, and one interesting thing about humor is that you get it or you don't after two or three seconds or so," Dr. Lewis said. During one planned experiment, test viewers will eyeball cartoon images as well as captions, "and every four milliseconds we'll get a readout of where people are looking." Beyond an understanding of comprehension itself, medical studies, planned to begin next year, may explore the relation of laughter to serotonin levels, or test for links to the immune system.

Researchers will also be looking for physiological markers that could be humor signatures. Dr. Lewis said there was some evidence to suggest that eye-pupil dilation "might correlate with the rating of cartoons for wit" (the larger the pupil, the funnier the cartoon). Beyond this, "if we can map certain processes of humor perception onto brain regions," he said, "we could use functional magnetic resonance imaging tests to depict blood flow in the brain on a second-by-second basis, possibly revealing other signature effects."

The investigators' working hypothesis "is that humor is evolutionary, an adaptive response," said Dr. Richard Gonzalez, chairman of the university's psychology department. "But it could have developed as a function of our brain size, or something else; we don't really know."

Although thinkers from Plato to Hobbes and Freud to Wittgenstein have indulged in the grim sport of humor hypothesis, "the kinds of theories we have about humor are so rudimentary as to be pathetic," said Dr. Daniel Herwitz, director of the university's Institute for the Humanities. There is some consensus that humor is a complex phenomenon subsuming external social context, interior emotional response and the human capabilities of perception, memory and judgment. "But these elements are part of most social and linguistic transactions," he said, "and much of that just isn't funny."

To Mr. Mankoff, who qualifies as something of an expert, "the core of all humor, the reason for it all, is unhappiness," he said, though he added that he spent a mostly enjoyable year editing the cartoon database for the new anthology. He describes his role in the research project as "a stimulator and gadfly," explaining that the academic collaboration started after he began lecturing at the university in 2002. He will spend a year as a varsity fellow during the research project.

Mr. Mankoff, 60, is a former Skinnerian Ph.D. candidate in experimental psychology at Queens College in the 1970's. ("I quit when my experimental animal died," he said of a pigeon with a number but not a name. "I took it as an omen and became a cartoonist.") He began selling his work to The New Yorker in 1977, became a contract cartoonist in 1981 and the editor in 1997.

Mr. Mankoff said it would be possible to study the evolution of comic forms through cartoon elements.

For example, Dr. Gonzalez, the Michigan psychologist, said the anthology could provide a window into sexual stereotyping and how it had changed over time. Before sexual harassment was seen as a serious offense, the "geezer chasing maiden" cartoon was a staple. So were women wielding rolling pins like baseball bats.

New Yorker cartoons are organized by decades in the book, and the database can be used to track such comic evolutions as the one that saw Father Time mutate in the late 1960's into the Grim Reaper - who, in turn, evolved from a menacer in a land of pestilence into a scold in a consumerist paradise. ("Relax," says the modern Reaper to a worried woman, "I've come for your toaster.")

But Mr. Mankoff says it is possible to organize cartoons not just chronologically but taxonomically, in relation to four vectors: caption, image and two values he terms "real" and "unreal."

"Most gags consist of an unreal image with a rather ordinary caption," he said, citing a cartoon that shows a party guest speaking to a desperate woman on a window ledge, referring to a man on the same ledge around the corner. The guest says, cheerfully, "There's someone I'd like you to meet." Or, Mr. Mankoff went on, they might couple a commonplace image (married couple) with an outlandish caption ("I'm sorry, dear. I wasn't listening. Could you repeat what you've said since we've been married?").

His two other categories are "surreal" and "slice of life." The first applies when both caption and image are unusual (crocodiles talking about eating their young); slice of life applies when neither caption nor image is unusual, just funny.

The Michigan levity project is to get $100,000 in financing from the university's Institute for the Humanities, the psychology department, the Depression Center of the medical school and the university's Rackham Graduate School. After that money runs out, it may have to turn to outside sources. Dr. Gonzalez was asked if he thought the project would be taken seriously. "I hope that we could do work that would not be easy to mock," he replied.

And Mr. Eisendrath noted that "depression is a major health problem in the United States," adding, "So anyone who questions the value of a study of humor literally needs his head examined."

There is always, of course, the Heisenbergian concern that the more humor is studied, the more elusive it will become, or as Dr. Herwitz put it: "Humor is like Groucho Marx. It refuses to join any club that would have it as a member."

Mr. Mankoff preferred to paraphrase E. B. White, who said dissecting humor was like dissecting a frog: nobody is much interested, and the frog dies.

"I come here not to bury the cartoon," Mr. Mankoff said of the project, "but to praise it."

Seems like a hopeless idea, but how can you not applaud the effort?

From today's New York Times.

Here's a sample.

"The fruit fly is used in decoding the mysteries of the genome," said Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker and editor of the new anthology, "because the chromosomes are not complicated, and because its short life cycle makes it ideal for following hereditary changes. Well, the ideas in cartoons are like that: easily visible. And the ideas that prompted them have an easily observable life cycle."

Read the whole thing

Posted: Wed - September 29, 2004 at 03:28 PM        

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