Science of Laughter

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Man goes into a restaurant and he looks at the menu.

He says, I'll tell you what, I'll have.

I'll have the octopus, please.

And the waiter goes, just to warn you, sir, it does take four and a half hours to cook.

He goes, four and a half hours to cook?

Why does it take that long?

He goes, well, we cook them alive and they keep turning the gas off.

So

That's in bad taste, that, isn't it?

And it's inaccurate, actually.

Well, that's the,

it's not a real octopus.

How do you know that an octopus could turn off a cooker?

Because, I mean, it could be one of those touchdowns.

See, one of the problems with telling jokes to scientists is they become peer-reviewed extremely quickly.

Hello, I'm Robin Inse.

And I'm Brian Cox, and I am in the unusual position this week of being, for the first time in 112 episodes, not the expert.

Robin is the expert today because we're investigating the science of left.

We originally were going to be joined by a panel that was an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman.

But they all went to the pub with their long-faced horse.

One thing led to the other, another went to a doctor.

He thinks he's a pair of curtains.

So instead, we've got a neuroscientist, a psychologist, and a comedian, which is a much harder setup for the pub-based joke.

But anyway.

And they are.

Hello, my name is Professor Sophie Scott, and I'm the director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London.

And what makes me laugh is Hancock's half-hour.

Hello, I'm Frank Skinner.

I'm a comedian.

I'm here partly because I think I'm very interested in this subject, and also because I'm plugging a live stand-up show at the Garrick Theatre in the West End

from the 13th of January to the 15th of February.

And what makes me laugh is fireworks.

See, made you laugh too.

I'm Professor Richard Wiseman, psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire.

And what makes me laugh was a gift somebody gave me about a decade ago, which was little stickers, which simply say actual size.

And you go into restaurants, and in the menu, there's a tiny picture of a burger, and you just stick actual size.

And this is our panel.

I I was hoping for an even more crass plug.

I thought, and what makes me laugh is Frank Skinner from the 13th of January to the 15th.

My publicist suggested exactly that.

You know, I'll sink low, but not that low.

So the fireworks thing is absolutely true.

I don't know what it is.

I've been to many fireworks displays.

As soon as they start going off, I crack up completely.

I was once accidentally next to Brian Ferry at a fireworks display, and I laughed so much that he moved away.

Why you guys, my grandfather was arrested bizarrely for stealing fireworks.

Is that your contribution?

I was hoping you'd make a more professional contribution to this discussion.

It worked out well because the police let him off.

Now that has got that, come on, come on.

That was a great pause.

Can I thank you?

That is a professional pause on that.

It's only half the joke.

The memory is the joke is that two guys are arrested.

One's got

a car battery.

The other's got some fireworks.

The police charge one, let the other one off.

Better joke.

But you only gave me half the feeders.

Somebody likes car batteries.

Well, you should have spoken to me earlier.

I would have given you.

Before we move on, Richard, do you have any comments on that idea that people laugh at just strange things that are not funny in themselves?

Well, we have to separate humour and laughter because they're slightly different things.

And so, laughter is very much a social signal.

I mean, it's interesting you're with other people when you laugh at the fireworks.

Presumably, you're not sort of there on your own.

So, you know, where we see something funny, we might find it funny.

You only laugh out loud when we're with others.

And so, it's telling us something already about the difference between laughter and humour.

So, laughter is letting people to know, I find this funny, it's a non-threatening thing to me, and it then becomes contagious, and so on.

So, humour and laughter are slightly different things.

And I laugh on my own quite a lot.

I find it's the nicest time to do it as a solipsist.

Probably two things to say.

You do laugh on your own, it's just you laugh much more when you're with other people.

You're 30 times more likely to laugh if there's somebody else with you than if you're on your own.

And that's science.

Does that provide any insight as to the evolutionary origin of laughter?

The fact there's some kind of crowd-like behaviour to it.

It seems to.

So, the first appearance of laughter is wherever you find it.

So, that's in humans, apes, and rats.

There's almost certainly more out there, but we know about these ones.

It always first appears in interactions with babies, normally something like tickling.

So, tickling works across wherever you find an animal that laughs, it will laugh at being tickled.

Now, that's already a social situation.

You can't just walk the streets tickling babies.

The babies are only going to let certain people tickle them.

Everyone really don't.

But also, you can't tickle yourself.

So, it has to be somebody else involved.

So, it's from the very, very outset, laughter is something that is completely being driven by social factors.

And then it just grows in that.

It just becomes more rich.

But can I ask you about that?

You can't tickle yourself, but often when I'm writing...

I see what you say about this, Robbie.

Often when I'm writing material, I will laugh at the joke I've just written.

Sometimes I'm the only person that ever laughs at it.

But so I am sort of tickling myself in that.

You are tickling yourself to some degree.

but I think also there's I mean there's a whole argument that says when we when we have a when we think in a lot loud in our head the voice in our head it's not a monologue it's a conversation so there's already you know there's a there's some sort you know you are you're telling the joke to yourself you're not just broadcasting it to the wall.

So it's not that it's probably nothing that humans do.

You can ever say, I've absolutely guaranteed that's got no social role whatsoever.

It's just statistically and empirically likely that people who heard that joke would be more likely to laugh if they were surrounded by other people than if they were on their own, given that they would all definitely laugh.

I used to do a show called Man with No Show, which was me just messing about for an hour.

And I'd never laugh so much on stage because I hadn't heard any of it before.

And it's sorts of exciting.

I think people being at the birth of a joke is quite an exciting moment.

When someone does a joke and you know that could have only happened that night, I find that quite an exciting moment to be there when it first emerges.

Well that's spontaneity.

I think I don't know what you think about it, but if you're watching a comedian and some comedians are extremely good at constantly creating the idea that the thought has just come to them, that this is just occurring now.

Sometimes if someone's done the act for too long, there's a point where it dies in them and you know they've said it 15, 16, 500 times before.

And at that point, there's a huge loss in the potential amount of laughter from from an audience if they go hang on a minute this person knows what they even though they realize if they go and see your show at the Garrett between the 13th of January and the 15th of February they they know you know that you're not all making it all up they know so you know even someone as wonderful you know Billy Connolly or whatever but there's still a suspension of disbelief and once that is broken that it's like oh I think that's absolutely right I think it's a form of self-deception in a way but it's also creating this illusion of spontaneity and the moment the audience thinks as you say hold on a second this isn't spontaneous, and of course, if they come back night after night and realize that all the ad-libs are rehearsed as well and so on, that's gone forever.

And I think what's happening with a really good comedian is somehow you're almost forgetting the punchline until you say it.

I think it's a very weird state of consciousness where you know you know it, but still at that moment you have to convince yourself and others that's the first time you thought of it.

It's a very curious thing.

And you had a project, didn't you, a research project called Laugh Lab.

Yes.

Where you were searching for the funniest joke or trying to analyse, I suppose, what it is that makes a joke funny.

Yeah, we did Laugh Lab, which was the, we built it as the scientific search, the world's funniest joke.

And we had people submit their jokes onto a website, and then people came on and rated the jokes.

So we had one and a half million ratings, and then we could look at the jokes and compare the ratings to the structure of the jokes and so on, and look at it in a pseudo-sort of scientific way.

But we wanted to do it in a way that celebrated really the psychology of humour that didn't kill the frog, as it were.

And what did you learn?

Very little.

We learnt that jokes written by computers were terrible.

So we had some jokes that are submitted because they'd been produced by software that had been designed to produce puns.

So one I can remember was

what kind of murderer has fibre?

A serial killer.

That came bottom of the thing.

We found out that some jokes you can say exactly how long it will be before the end of the punchline and the beginning of the laugh.

You can absolutely predict it.

So you can take a three-second joke, for example, that would say this is absolutely exactly three seconds, which I can tell if you like.

I can put it to the test.

So a skeleton walks into a bar, he orders a pint of beer and a mop.

So that's exactly three seconds.

So

what was the, because you have found what was apparently the funniest joke, haven't you?

It was awful.

Yeah, I know.

What was it?

That's the thing that I find fascinating is if you actually try, because jokes seem to require so many different permutations, verbal cues, delivery, that if you actually then just find a way, we found the mean average of the funniest joke, it's something that no one finds funny, you know, and yet somehow it's...

Everyone goes, yeah, that's all right.

Yeah, and that's what we ended up with.

Well, the world's funniest joke.

It was like everyone going, yeah, that's all right.

Well, let's find out if they do that then.

So there's two hunters in the woods.

One falls over as laying motionless on the ground.

The other takes out their mobile phone.

They call emergency services.

They say, oh my goodness, I think my friend's dead.

It's just laying there.

And the woman from emergency services says, look, don't worry.

The first thing we have to do is make certain he's dead.

And then she hears a pause.

and a gunshot and the hunter says okay now what

I did all right I did actually

that's the best display in a decade I'll tell you as we've seen there Frank there's a lot of a joke is in the delivery rather than the structure.

Exactly, what are you saying?

Do you find that when you'll be doing your how many stand-up shows is it at the Garrett from the

30 stand-up shows?

30% of January, February.

Presumably with approximately the same jokes each.

Do you find that there's a kind of an intangible difference to the way you deliver them?

Can you put your finger on it?

Well, I think what you find is the correct way to deliver them.

I mean, this is quite a cynical story, but Milton Burle, the famous American comic, someone told me they were doing a show with him and he said, give me a word, any word.

And they said, sheep.

And he went out and did a joke.

I met these two guys at an airport and one of them said, and in the end, and I said, what is it, a sheep?

And it made no sense.

But he did it on the end of three or four gags and they laughed anyway.

Just the rhythm of it.

They trusted him that that must be funny.

I mean, it's a cynical sort of unveiling of the audience's weaknesses.

But I think it's almost like poetry, just changing one word.

You must have had jokes, Robin, where you think this isn't working, and then one night you do it a slightly different way, and it just falls into the slot.

Well, it's like the horror of last night, I did the last of a tour that I've been doing for ages, and I was having a lovely time doing it and changing lots of bits and pieces.

And then there was one bit, it was one of my favourite bits that I know quite well, and I just had a slight stutter there was just one little word that got slightly broken in the delivery all of the content was exactly the same and yet from that moment i went oh well there we go that's 50 of the laugh's gone because there's something i've broken the joke actually say that uh

afterwards no that's the thing well it's it's like that in the same way that science doesn't necessarily you know brian sometimes would go no explain the joke and show the working out you know it doesn't help that's the interesting thing i think about trying to understand the science of comedy when when this was first mooted by our producers doing this subject i was like like, every other part of science, I think, when you have things like the sun explained to you, or black holes, or the beginning of the universe, whatever it might be, after the explanation, it becomes more magnificent.

And yet, quite often, if you then go, and now the joke has been fully explained, you go, it's still no better.

In fact, if anything, it's worse.

And I think that's an interesting thing about some things by analysis are broken and some things grow.

You know that Ken Dodd thing when he said that he said Sigmund Freud said that the joke is an outward expression of the psyche but then he never did second house on a Saturday night at Glasgow Empire and I think that thing of the practical

joke telling thing versus the theoretical is there is always going to be an abyss between them I think well I did a philosophy I went did a conference about philosophy and comedy and as well as doing the panels I went and watched it all and it was fascinating to watch again everything theoretical it all worked on the blackboard but actually find I'd never realized do you know that you you spend your whole life doing normative incongruities it's so the first thing i go to go a joke is a normative incongruity and if you started showing welcome ladies and gentlemen welcome to my carnival of normative incongruities we're leaving you know it's kind of that that moment where it does take the joy sometimes out of the the delight of it all i've got a friend who's an american comic called dennis leary do you know his stuff and he He moved to LA for a time and he phoned me up and he said, I'm in LA.

He's a Boston guy.

And he he said, Everyone here is getting analysed.

Everyone I know.

He said, Promise me, I've phoned you up so you can promise me you'll never do any kind of analysis.

I said, Why do you?

He said, Because our brains are wired in a certain way, and that's why we make jokes.

He said, If you let someone in there and they make that wiring more orthodox, you'll be finished.

He said to me, He said, Frank, would you rather be happy or funny?

I said, Well, funny.

And he said, Yes.

And that was, I've sort of made me swear an oath

that I'd never get analyzed.

Is there something specific about comedians' brains that makes them create jokes?

I think there is.

It's like this kind of lateral thinking.

I think that they tend to be highly intelligent

and social misfits.

They are very good lateral thinkers.

They also have a very good memory for jokes.

And so they hear a lot of them.

And you start to, I think, unconsciously sort of bubble up the forms and functions.

So when I was like, I think it was like eight years old, my dad told me this Victorian joke.

And the Victorian joke was: two boys knock on the door, and a woman answers, and the boys say, Have you got any empty beer bottles?

This is when you collect beer bottles for tuppence or whatever it was.

And the woman says, Young men, does it look like I drink beer?

And the boy says, Okay, have you got any empty vinegar bottles?

So my dad tells me this joke.

Every time I see vinegar bottles, I just think of that joke every single day.

And I think comedians absorb a vast amount of humor and it's kind of there and unconsciously they're good at finding the form.

And it could be quite nuanced.

I mean, comedians know to finish

the punchline on the funny bit.

So somebody told a joke a couple of weeks ago.

at an event I was at and it's the joke of the guy that goes to the doctor the doctor says you're going to live till you're 90 and the guy says I am 90 and the doctor says well that's that then yeah

The way the guy told it to me was, I guess, the doctor, the guy says, 90.

The guy goes, I am 90.

Oh, that's that then, said the doctor.

And it's just trodden his own punchline.

And just, I think comedians learn these little kind of little tricks of the trade, as it were, plus having this incredible ability to link things together that shouldn't really go.

Sorry, Sophie, you, you.

Oh, no, no.

Just on that point about the personality,

there is quite an interesting mismatch between what we think comedians are like and what they're like.

So there's quite a big idea that

they're very sort of depressed and low in mood frequently.

And actually, there isn't good evidence for this.

If you just statistically compare a group of comedians with a group of normal undergraduate students, if anything, they're slightly less neurotic than normal undergraduate students.

They do come out different on a couple of other scales.

They come out different on openness, which exactly like Richard said is because they're creators.

You know,

so would songwriters, so would novelists.

And they also come out differently on scores associated with social approval.

They need less social approval.

And every comedian I've asked about this has said, well, I get it on stage.

I don't need, you know, I don't need to get people to like me once I come off stage.

Not that you're not likable, but you're not looking for it.

You don't need it.

So

it's quite an interesting,

I think, way of thinking about it because often I don't think we give comedians enough credit for the

creativity in what they're doing and

the rhetoric.

Everything that Richard's saying about comedy is true of any kind of skilled public speaking.

You've got to get the words in the right order, you've got to be reading that room and

doing it the right kind of rhythm for how everything else is going.

And

it's not a skill you walk into, it's a skill that you work at.

And I think that's another side of it that people often don't realise is exactly how much thought goes into it.

We like to believe you're just riffing off the top of your head.

And that's part of the flip side of wanting it to be spontaneous is that we're somehow thrilled by the idea that somebody could just be doing that.

You're just able to just, you're just effortlessly throwing it out there.

Sophie, why do you find comedy and comedians an interesting academic research subject?

Because I know you write plenty of papers in this.

So

what is it about this area that makes an interesting academic field?

I got into this because I was interested in human communication.

I never set out to study laughter.

I wanted to, you know, what we're doing now, that's what I've always studied, speech and how we understand it and why we sound the way we do.

And I started looking at an emotion in the voice, and then I started looking at positive emotions because most of the work that's done is on negative emotions.

And as soon as you start doing that, as soon as you like glimpse laughter, it just runs away from you because it's everywhere.

People, if you look at the world of non-verbal emotional expressions, and non-verbal emotional expressions are the sorts of things you do that are more like animal calls than they are like speech, and you do them when you're in more extreme emotional situations, like a mouse ran over my foot, or I've got vomit on my hands, or something.

So you might not just go, oh, I am disgusted.

You might go,

that kind of thing.

So laughter fits with those.

And it's compared to anything else we do in that way,

it's just orders of magnitude more frequently found.

And we use it in an incredibly nuanced way.

It's absolutely universal.

We're not the only animal that does it.

And exactly as Richard was saying at the top of the show, we tend to think it's about amusement and jokes.

And it is about amusement and jokes, but it has its roots in this kind of playful, joyful behavior that's completely social.

And I find it really interesting because if you look at how people use laughter in conversations, they're frequently doing a lot of the really important stuff in conversations with the laughter.

So we know it's good to talk to each other.

We know people's social

networks are incredibly important.

Loneliness is really bad for you.

And the way that we make and maintain social bonds, the way we interact with each other, is in conversations.

And in those conversations, laughter is happening all the time.

We found that

if you have two friends talking to each other, 10% of the time in that conversation, on average, is just spent laughing.

It's a phenomenal amount of time.

I don't know if that's involuntary laughter though.

Oh no no it's communicative.

A lot of it is just put your arm around someone type laughter isn't it?

But also people are doing things like showing oh I agree with you I understand you I get that reference I know exactly where you're going with this and in fact and this is really crazy at any one point in time the person who is laughing most in a conversation is the person who's talking because people actually are getting trying to get someone to show they agree with them show them often the white mic eats I must say.

It's not a particularly lovely example, but if that in that Prince Andrew interview, he kept laughing.

And not big laughs, but he was laughing.

And he was trying to get the person, Emily Metless, to laugh.

He was trying to say, Show me you agree with me, show me you understand.

And she wasn't doing it.

But it's quite a basic thing.

You only really notice it when it goes wrong and someone doesn't join in.

When somebody normally offers that to you, you just reflect it straight back normally.

So, is the suspicion, or do we know, did it evolve or emerge at the same time as language, in parallel with language, these kind of involuntary sounds?

It's older.

You find these emotional vocalisations, they are part of our evolutionary heritage.

So

our laughs don't sound that different from the laughter produced by chimpanzees and apes and orangutans.

It does sound quite different from the laughter you get from rats, but there's a few more steps between us and rats evolutionarily.

And that seems to speak to it being both probably quite a common mammal vocalization and probably a really important one.

And the thing that's something that's really one of the things that are odd about mammals is that we have enormous brains.

Even small mammals have got really big brains compared to other animals that size.

And we have this extended period of being juveniles when we grow these brains.

And one of the main ways that we grow the brains when we are juveniles is through playing.

And the main way that you show that you are playing, if you're a rat or a human or an orangutan, is through laughter.

So it's showing this is a fun activity.

I'm not going to hurt you or eat you or try and have sex with you.

This is play.

This is fun.

It's incredibly important, in fact, that you show this.

The same behavior could just be violence if you didn't frame it as play.

So it's very important that this is done and that it's understood.

And of course, some animals, like humans and dogs and otters, play their whole lives.

So I suspect that one of the really important things about laughter is it's kind of giving you a very easy way of signaling this important emotion, which is showing we're doing this thing that matters to us.

So you think play is stupid and you know, they're just playing.

Actually, any child or any animal that's playing is doing something incredibly important for their brain and their social world.

And laughter, the guy who did the work with the rats, Pank Skep, he said that at its heart, laughter, it's an invitation to play.

Come and take part in this behavior.

And it's so it's always got that kind of fun,

joyful, safe activity being connoted.

But I'd like to distinguish between two types of laughter here.

I was on a train recently, recently and there was a guy t um doing tickets and he was saying things like, uh,

where are you off to?

And they'd say, Edinburgh, have a few whiskeys, are you?

And everyone laughed.

Now there was nothing funny about that at all.

But he was saying something and they laughed to say, Yeah, we approve of the fact that you are being friendly and whatever, but it isn't comic in any way.

They they they wanted to laugh to what but when you talk about comedians, what do you do for a living?

I make people laugh.

And I think the significance of the word make in that, this is not team effort.

They don't really want to laugh.

It's a challenge.

Well,

I mean, listen to these guys.

Nothing.

Well, this is an interesting thing, actually, which is, I knew this was going to happen when this was mooted.

This would probably be the least funny show that we ever did.

Because the one thing that comedians take seriously is comedy.

We're going to be flipping about everything else.

Well, no, I think, you know, Jung has a very different take on the nature of laughter.

And they say something funny.

Okay, now we'll deal with funerals and the bubonic plague and we'll have fun with that.

Oh, no, comedy.

And that's an interesting moment where the one thing where we kind of to create laughter out of talking about jokes becomes an entirely different kind of scenario.

And I think one of the things that's really interesting about that situation, and it is interesting how recent it is.

If you look at stand-up comedy as an art form, it's relatively new.

You get that, is it Frank Fay, the first sort of guy who dropped all the props and didn't have a sidekick and didn't have a feed and just talked to the audience.

And that was, you know, he was around in the 1920s, 1930s.

Weren't court jesters, weren't they?

There's always been laughter in theatre, absolutely.

There's people who there's been a fool, there's been someone, a clown, that role has been there.

But specifically,

standing up and having what feels like a conversation with the audience.

I mean, it's a weird conversation where only one person gets to talk.

But hopefully, the rest, you know, the people in the audience will react.

And most of the time, they react with laughter.

They'll also react with groans.

Or in America, they might start cheering if they really like it.

In the UK, if the audience really like a joke, they'll clap.

You know, so it is already more nuanced.

And you don't realise it.

This is so unfunny.

I come to apologise in advance.

But as soon as you start having a conversation with anybody, you start aligning your behavior with them.

So you start breathing together, you start speaking at the same rate, using the same rhythms and the same pitch.

And you kind of entrain your behavior.

It's one of the reasons why a conversation is really important.

You're sort of getting on, literally, aligning yourself with other people, like in the dance.

Now, I wonder if, in a stand-up comedy environment, that same entrainment is happening, except you are entraining the audience, and they are, you know, you're getting onto the same wavelength as you, it's just that all other things being equal, they don't then say anything, they're reacting in these other ways.

They're not complicit, are they?

Completely.

So, they are you've obviously never done second house at Glasgow on Saturday night.

Well, it's why, if you, you know, if you if you have an audience that are seeing a comedian they really want to see, exactly like you say, just like the people

on the train with the ticket guy, they are ready to laugh.

They want to laugh.

There's a beautiful clip of Morcom and Wise appearing on Parkinson.

And they come in and everyone's clapping and cheering.

And Eric Morcombe makes a throwaway comment about Raquel Welsh.

He says, oh, I remember my equipment coming in or something.

And the only reason he does that is to give the audience a reason to laugh, right at the top.

And it works, but they want to.

They wanted to laugh immediately.

Just get going, give us something.

And that means, it's one of the reasons why, and in case you hadn't guessed this, why if you are a stand-up comedian who nobody knows and walking out in front of an audience who know nothing about you, you have a much steeper hill to climb because you haven't earned that yet.

They may not have decided to go along with it, and they'll make their minds up really quickly whether or not they're going to, exactly as you would do in any other side of social interaction.

This is exactly what happens in interviews.

As soon as you meet anyone new, you make up your mind immediately.

So it's still, it's got this phenomenal sort of social baggage that we use for normally talking to each other.

We take into that space.

I I told you that was very unfunny.

I was right.

Yeah, we also shouldn't forget that humor is just good for us.

So, laughing at something that otherwise we'd find stressful is associated with lower levels of heart disease, boost the immune system.

There's been experiments where you take people who are post-operation and they can self-administer drugs.

And you get them to either watch a serious film or they watch a comedy film, a film they've selected they find funny, and there's about 40% less drugs administered when they're watching the the funny film.

So it's just simply physically good for us.

That they added a third group to that study, which was they made people watch films that they didn't find funny, but other people did.

In which case, they're just sitting there administering the drug all the time, because it's the most annoying thing ever.

So I think humour plays that role of reducing stress.

We have complicated lives, there are events in there that make us feel very stressed, and humor takes the edge off it.

That is what's happening a lot of stand-up comedy gigs.

You're talking about things that people would otherwise find stressful, and you're finding a way of making them laugh at it.

We shouldn't forget that's really, really good for us, not only at the level of bonding, but just physically as well.

There's an interesting

bit where when people don't find something funny that the majority find funny, that agony, like I don't know if you've ever noticed, Frank, under kind of articles about comedians in any newspaper with a comment section, will be absent, it will be busier than anything about a major world event, about genocide or anything like that.

The fury in which I, this comic is not funny.

And you go, but three and a half thousand people laughed at them last night at Hammersmith Apollo.

So it's a very subjective thing.

But the fury, the demand to say, I've got to persuade you to stop laughing is a fascinating bit of anger.

Yeah, I mean, it should be, as Sophie said, it should be synchronized.

Everyone should find it funny or not.

Now, if you don't find it funny and everyone around you does, that's really annoying.

And if you find it funny and they don't, that's really annoying to them.

So there's all sorts of stuff.

But also there's a kind of physical element to it as well.

I mean, you mentioned sort of playing a huge room.

You know, there is a thing I've heard, which I don't know if it's true or not, which is the lower the ceiling, the bigger the laughs, because the laugh echoes around the place, and so it's easier to get that kind of rhythm going with an audience.

You play a really large venues, as Frank, you'll be playing on your tour.

I can't remember.

The Garrick Theatre,

and so the dynamic becomes different, and so you need a change of material or whatever it is.

So these things are all very nuanced, and psychology doesn't deal well with nuances, particularly in the arts.

You know, it likes to come in and go, this is why this this is funny, and here's the theory, and that's that.

And you say, well, you get up on stage and be funny then.

And suddenly you find out it's a lot more nuanced.

Which is interesting because this room is very high ceiling, doesn't it?

Yes.

For anyone listening at home.

Sophia, I've got one of your research papers here.

We talk about this the communal nature of laughter and also this signalling.

It's called this catchy name, a modulation of humor, ratings of bad jokes by other people's laughter.

In which it's actually that towards the end, you say

laughter tracks were originally introduced because listeners did not always realize that radio comedies were meant to be funny.

Yep.

But that's an interesting thing, that idea that there's a signal required, and if you signal that it's funny, then everybody's much more likely to join in, which is what you found.

Basically, yes.

So we've done lots and lots of studies with laughter, and quite often we play people laughter, and we ask them, you know, rated, how much does this make you want to laugh?

How nice is this laughter?

And my PhD student, Ceci,

suggested that we try to take a different kind of approach and instead look at like an implicit test of the laughter.

So we had people listening to jokes and their jokes were gruesome.

What's orange and sounds like a parrot?

A carrot?

And we had

a comedian come in and read them.

Ben Vanderveld came in and really went for it.

What's orange and sounds like a parrot?

You know, really, really like properly being presented to you as a joke.

And then we had people rate the jokes and they did not find them funny, which was deliberate, because we wanted it to be possible for them to be made funnier.

We'd started with amazing jokes, we'd run the risk that you couldn't make them any funnier.

And then Ceci edited laughter onto the end, and the laughter was either people kind of going, ha ha, ha, ha, ha, like a nice fake laugh, or they were properly, helplessly laughing.

And we find when we just got another group of people to rate all the jokes, what you find is that adding any laughter to the joke makes the joke seem funnier, and the more spontaneous the laughter, the funnier it makes the joke.

So So people are only rating the joke, but they've not been told to pay any attention to the laughter.

You can't ignore it.

Laughter is never neutral.

It's always there.

And it's carrying, it's influencing this apparently semantic decision on how funny this terrible joke is.

And

we were wondering if it was effectively the same mechanism.

Well, one of the things that might be going on is that if it sounds like somebody else liked that joke, is that just enough for you to be tipped slightly more positively towards it?

And, you know, we are exploring it.

We're going to go in and try it all over again with single funny words, you know, because that's how science works.

We tried terrible jokes.

Let's take it down to rude words.

But that's, you know, that seems to be our best guess at the moment.

And interestingly, it was exactly the same for people who are neurotypical as for people with autism.

Everybody showed the same profile.

We shouldn't forget, of course, that Freud wrote an entire book about jokes and

humour.

And it is one of the most boring books ever.

It's extremely dull.

But of course, they are absolutely central to Freudian theory because Freud has this idea that whenever we encounter a topic that makes us feel stressed or worried, we repress it into our unconscious.

And that then builds up what he refers to as sort of psychic energy, and that needs to be released.

And it's released either in analysis or in dreams or in jokes.

Now, his ideas are the idea of sort of repressing topics, whether they're sexual or whatever that make us feel very anxious is very contentious amongst psychologists.

And of of course it's completely untesticle.

But still,

thank you.

And so there are various theories of humor.

One is the sort of incongruity thing of two fish in a tank.

One turns to the other and says, do you know how to drive this?

I got a bigger laugh than the untesticle, actually.

So

you see that incongruity stuff, which is, oh, look, something's surprising.

Oh, I see what you mean.

Then there's the Freudian stuff, where you're laughing at worries and concerns.

That's all the doctor-doctor jokes and so on.

And then you have the superiority theory, which goes all the way back to Plato, which is that you're laughing at other people's misfortune or their idiocy.

So the guy completes the jigsaw in two to three days and he's really happy because it says seven to eight years on the box.

So then we're laughing at this idiot thing.

Now, all of that is, what I find amazing about humor, all of that's happening in our brain and we're not aware of any of it.

We're not aware of any of it.

We just find it funny or we don't.

And all of that is going on in terms of superiority or in terms of what it makes you feel anxious and resolving some of that or whether it's incongruous.

All of that's happening a split second.

Can I say that on the subject of canned laughter?

There was a story someone told me about I think it was at London Weekend Television, I think it was Cannon and Ball were doing a live thing.

And they were a bit the the production team were a bit uneasy about some of the punchlines and whether they'd get good laughs.

So they said to the sound engineers, when it goes to the laugh, crank up the volume a bit to make the laugh sound louder.

And apparently, some of the laughs literally got nothing.

And so they'd do the punchline, and then it would go,

it was the roar of a joke not getting a laugh.

So it can go wrong, certainly.

I remember a recording of a Radio 4 show many years ago where there was a sketch where, it was a show because I'm like, what if?

And this guy said, what if?

What if OAP wasn't for old age pensioner?

It was for old age pirates.

And then they did an old age pirate sketch, and the producer just came out and he went, Hello, everyone.

Thank you very much for listening to that last sketch.

But could you enjoy it more a second time?

And I thought that was a delightful thing.

John of Force, just enjoy it a little bit more, relax.

You know, Richard, we're talking about this, this, the delicacy of telling jokes.

And I think you found that the sounds in the words can make the joke funnier.

I was thinking about the cows.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So this was part of Laugh Lab.

um we did lots of mini experiments and um before i get to that i've got a science joke for you brian

would you like to hear my science joke i'd love to hear thank you um this came from laugh lab uh so a uh a neutron

walks

a neutron

get get ready with the sound effect again that's what i'm saying neutrons don't have legs they do uh

but see that's the thing so

entering into the comedy universe my favorite one of those is two prawns dancing at a seafood disco.

And one turns to the other and says, Well, I think I pulled a muscle.

It's the setup line of two prawns dancing at a seafood disco.

And we all kind of go, Yeah, all right, okay.

It doesn't exist.

Anyway, a neutron walks into a bar, orders a beer, says, How much is that?

The barman says, For you, no charge.

If you're wondering, by the way, 94% of physics jokes end with the punchline either, yes, I'm positive or no, I'm negative.

That's almost all of them, isn't it?

There's almost no

apart from that one, which is that they're all charge-based.

Just say you know.

So, anyway, we had

somebody put in two cows, two cows, this is a joke that somebody put into Laugh Lab.

Two cows in a field, one turns to the other and says, Moo, and the other one says, Oh, I was going to say that.

So, never had two laughs before.

And so, what we did was resubmit the joke with different animals and different sounds.

And so, you had two dogs, and one turns to the other and says, Woof, and the other one says, I was going to say that.

And then we found the funniest combination of animal and sound, which is much funnier than the cow one, so brace yourselves.

It's two ducks.

One turns to the other and says, quack, and the other one says, I was going to say that.

Yeah, we have to be there.

But anyway,

I do feel telling the cow joke earlier on possibly tipped the punchline.

So

part of that is that duck and quack have got the comedy K in, and that some sounds are funnier than others, and that hard, what's called the comedy K,

and that Krusty the Clown from The Simpsons and so on.

That seems to be a word or a sort of thing that makes us laugh.

Quack is actually quite a funny word.

Do you find, Frankie, this is entirely sort of instinctive for you?

Do you find there are rules when you're writing a a stand-up show, writing jokes?

No,

it's very,

you know, that George Bernard Shaw thing about breathing's the easiest thing in the world until you start thinking about it.

And I think if I started, if am I going to now think I need to get more K's into my acts?

Whereas keeping up with the Kardashians is completely unfunny in my opinion.

So it's not foolproof.

No, I don't know if you could go to it as a prescriptive comedian who is working from that nuts and bolts point of view.

And

I think even this show, and this is completely honest now, there's been a couple of moments in this show when I've thought, I hope this is not going to damage me in some way as a comedian.

Just hearing these things, I've got slightly alarmed that I'm hearing stuff I shouldn't be hearing and that it might come back to me when I'm

at the garrick, obviously.

Coming towards the end, but a final question.

So in your research, Sophie,

you find laughter, comedy, interesting.

Is it one of the ways that we can begin to understand what consciousness is, what our experience of the world is about, the way that we've developed as a species?

I think it probably tells us some really important things about what matters in interaction.

So know, I

if you'd asked me ten years ago what do you study, I'd have said I study speech.

I do speech.

I look at how people talk to each other and how our brains support that.

And

more and more I realize that I've always been looking at voices and there's a lot more information in voices than just the words we say.

Words are important, love words, very I'm not dissing words, but there's all this other stuff that's in there.

And in fact, some of the really some of the really important stuff is being conveyed by the things that we're not saying with words.

And laughter is a huge bit of that.

I actually found one other scientist joke in our huge database here, which I thought you might enjoy, which is: why can't scientists tell jokes timing?

Anyway, we asked the audience what makes you laugh and why.

And we found a first answer here from Aaron is other people laughing.

I wish I knew why.

I hope they aren't laughing at me.

That's a comedian in the making, isn't it?

There.

I enjoy laughter, but it's the laughter of paranoia as well.

Oh Oh God, yep, you're going to do very well on the circuit.

This one just says Robinins.

And then in brackets, I'll do anything to get mentioned on the radio.

Glad you read that one.

Anything to do with beavers?

I have had therapy, so I am largely over it.

What have I done wrong with that?

How would you have delivered that, Frank?

Because the trouble is it's.

I've stopped at beavers.

Yeah.

Well, my problem was.

Sorry, I'm terrible.

Sorry, everyone.

Alpha testing, because things can only get better.

I think these have been very poor.

But no, but this is this has illustrated again that the one thing that is the hardest thing to be funny as you said, like, you know, Freud's book on humour, Jokes and Arrow, where you actually have an entire chapter analysing a German pun.

And that's not a good start to any day, is it?

And that's not an attack on German puns.

When we did Laugh Lab, it was the Germans that found the jokes funniest, and the Canadians that found them least funny.

And the Canadians were furious and asked to see our raw data.

And we sent over the jokes, and they said, These jokes are terrible.

What kind of idiots would find this funny?

We should say the jokes were in German.

Oh, of course.

Yes.

Bob Monkos told me that he, when he did a live gig, this thing about audiences being, you know, different, that he had a tester joke that he did early on.

And he said,

I love those animal-shaped biscuits.

He said, I really love those.

He said, but I got a box the other day and it said on the box, do not eat if the seal is broken.

And he said, Well, well done, because he said, If they laugh, then he knows it's a good crowd.

If he has to say, and would you believe it, they're going to be an average crowd, if he has to say, The seal was broken, it's going to be a tough night.

So,

well, thank you very much to our panel: who were Richard Wiseman, Sophie Scott, and Frank Skinner.

Next week's panel is it's a very exciting panel.

Next week we've got Elvis Presley, Lord Lucan and the man who painted the backdrops for the moon landings because we're going to be discussing conspiracy theories and asking do conspiracy theories really exist

and that was definitely required for that joke.

Goodbye

without your

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

Hope you've enjoyed listening to that podcast.

If you haven't, don't worry about it.

In many worlds theory, it means there's lots of worlds where you absolutely loved what you just listened to.

But if you really didn't enjoy it and you'd like to listen to something else, it wasn't your taste, you're not interested in science and logic and rational thought, then you can find many other podcasts on BBC Sounds and you can download those and

not enjoy them either.

Dream World.

You sound miserable.

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Winner, best book.

We the man to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

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