The Infinite Monkey Cage - Science of Laughter

Episode Date: January 13, 2020

The Science of LaughterBrian Cox and Robin Ince return for a new series of science/comedy chat. They are joined on stage, appropriately enough, by comedian Frank Skinner, as they look at the science of what makes us laugh, why we laugh at all, and whether humour and laughter are uniquely human traits. Joining the panel are experts in what makes us chuckle, Prof Sophie Scott and Professor Richard Wiseman. They look at why laughter is not only an ancient human trait that goes a long way to making us the social animal we are today, but that rats and apes also enjoy a good chuckle. They discover whether science can come up with the perfect joke and why a joke with the punchline "quack" is funnier than one with the punchline "moo". Producer: Alexandra Feachem

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. A 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... See, one of the problems with telling jokes to scientists

is they become peer-reviewed extremely quickly. So... Hello, I'm Robin Ince. 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 laughter. 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 set-up for the pub-based joke.

But anyway, and they are... Hello, my name is Professor Sophie Scott and a comedian, which is a much harder set-up 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, it 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 the menu, there's a tiny picture of a burger, and you just stick Actual Size. And this is our panel. And this is our panel. I was hoping for an even more crass plug. And what makes me laugh is Frank Skinner from the 13th of January to the 15th of February.

My publicist suggested exactly that. You know, I'll sink low, but not that low. 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.

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 to be true. Come on, come on. That was a great pause.

Thank you. That was 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 feed. Well, you should have spoke to me earlier. I would have given you both. 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, you 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. 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 science does that provide any insight as to the evolutionary origin of laughter the fact there's some kind of crowd like behavior it seems to so the first appearance of laughter is um

wherever you find it so that's in humans apes and rats uh that's there's almost certainly more out there but we know about these ones it always first appears in um interactions with babies normally something like tickling so tickling works across wherever you find an animal that laughs it will laugh at being tickled um now that's already a social situation you can't just walk the streets tickling babies the babies are only gonna let certain people tickle them everyone really don't um 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 right i don't see what you say about this, Robin. 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. So I am sort of tickling myself in that moment. You are tickling yourself to some degree. But I think also there's a whole argument that says when we think out 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 some sort, you know, 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 never 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 laughed so much on stage because I hadn't heard any of it before and it's sort 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 spontaneity i think i don't know what you think 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 garrick 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 then 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 because 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 but i think what's happening with a really good comedian is somehow you're almost forgetting the punch line until you say it i think it's a very weird state of consciousness where you 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 analyze i suppose what it is that makes a joke funny yeah we did laugh lab uh which was that we build it as the scientific search the world's funniest joke and um 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-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 uh so we had some jokes that submitted because they'd been produced by software that'd been designed to produce puns so one i can remember was um uh what kind of murderer has fiber a serial killer that came bottom of the uh thing uh we found out that some jokes you can say exactly how long it will be before the end of the punch line and the beginning of the laugh you can absolutely predict it so you can take a three second joke for example uh that would say this is absolutely exactly three seconds which i can tell if if you like. I'm going to 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 right yeah that's what

we ended up with with the world's funniest joke was like everyone going yeah that's all right yeah that's what we ended up with with the world's funniest joke was like everyone going yeah that's all right well let's find out if they do that then uh so there's two hunters in the woods uh one falls over as laying motionless on the ground uh the other takes out their mobile phone they call emergency services uh 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 it's played 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 there do you find that when you're you'll be doing your how many stand-up shows is it at the garrick

from the um 30 stand-up shows january february presumably with approximately the same jokes do you find that there's a kind of a 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 Berle, 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 they said and i said what what is it a sheep and it was 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 uh 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'd 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, which 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 laughs gone. Because there's something, I've broken the joke. Did you actually say that? That wouldn't have helped. No, that's the thing. Well, it's like in the same way that science doesn't necessarily you know brian sometimes 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 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 uh zygmunt 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 the practical um joke telling thing versus the theoretical there is always going to be an abyss between them I think I did a philosophy

I went and 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 I'd never realised do you know that you spend your whole life doing normative incongruities so the first thing I go to go a joke is a normative incongruity.

And if you start a show, I go, welcome, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my carnival of normative incongruities. We're leaving. You know, it's kind of that moment where it does take the joy sometimes out of 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 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 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 that 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'm so he made me swear an out an oath that i that i'd never get analysed. Is there something specific about comedians' brains that makes them create jokes? I think there is. It's kind of lateral thinking. I think that, A, 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 I 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 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 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 can be quite nuanced I mean comedians know to finish the the punch line on the funny bit so somebody told a joke a couple of weeks ago 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 to you're 90 and the guy says i am 90 and the doctor says well that's that then okay the way the guy told it to me was i got a doctor guys in 90 the guy goes i am 90 oh that's that then said the doctor and it's just trod in his own punch line and just i think comedians learn these little

kind of little tricks of the the trade as it were plus having this incredible ability to link things together that shouldn't really go sorry sophie you you um oh no no they are just on that point about the personality that there are it there's quite an interesting mismatch between what we think comedians are like and what they're like so it's quite a big idea that they're they're very sort of depressed and low in mood frequently and actually there isn't good evidence for this um if you just do a 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 on openness which exactly like richard said is because they're creators

you know they'll so with 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 likeable, but you're not looking for it. You don't need it, you know. And so it's quite an interesting um I think way of thinking about it because often I don't think we give comedians enough credit for the the creativity in what they're doing and the you know the and the rhetoric or 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 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 just that you're just effortlessly throwing it out there so 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 and 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 it's just orders of magnitude more frequently found and we use it in incredibly nuanced way it's absolutely universal we're not the only animal that does it and exactly as rich 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 behaviour 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 where we interact with each other is in conversations and in those conversations laughter is happening all the time we found that um if you have two friends talking to each other 10 of the time in 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, yeah. 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 trying to get someone to show they agree with them, show they understand it. That's often the way of my gig.

I must say. It's not a particularly lovely example. But 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 Maitlis, 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 or it's older you find these emotional vocalizations they are part of our evolutionary heritage so um 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 vocalisation and probably a really important one. And I think there'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 are 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 signalling this important emotion which is showing we're doing this thing that matters to us. So you think play is stupid and 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 did the work with the rats um pank skep he said that at its heart laughter it's it's an invitation to play come come and take part in this behavior and it's all so it's always got that kind of fun um joyful safe activity being connoted but i'd like to distinguish between two types of laughter here i i was on a train recently and there was a guy doing tickets and he was saying things like uh where you off to and they'd say edinburgh i 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 wanted to laugh. 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.

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 could be flipping about everything else well no i think you know jung has a very different take on the nature of laughing

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 that's and that's an interesting a moment where the one thing where we kind of to create laughter out of out of talking about jokes becomes an entirely different kind of scenario and i think one of the things is it'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 that you get is it frank faye 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 that was you know he was around in the 1920s 1930s

weren't caught jesters weren't they stand there's always been laughter in theater absolutely there's people who there's been a fool there's been someone a clown that that role has been there but specifically standing up and having what feels like feels like a conversation with the audience only 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 uh groans or in america they'll might start cheering if they really like it in the uk the audience really like a joke they'll clap you know so it is already more nuanced and you don't realize it this is so unfunny i come to apologize in advance

but as soon as you start having a conversation with anybody you start aligning your behaviour with them so you start breathing together you start speaking at the same rate to use the same rhythms in the same pitch and you kind of entrain your behaviour it's one of the reasons why 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 what that same entrainment is happening except you are entraining the audience and they are you know you're getting them to 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

how complicit are they completely so they are you you it's you've obviously never done second house at glasgow but it's why if you in if you if you have an audience that are seeing a comedian they really want to see exactly like i say just like the people on you know on the train with the ticket guy they are ready to laugh they want to laugh there's a beautiful clip of morgan wise appearing on parkinson and they come in and everyone's clapping and cheering then eric morgan makes a throwaway comment about um 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's it works and they're but they want to they wanted to laugh immediately just get going give us something

and that's that means it's one of the reasons why in case you hadn't guessed this whether if you are a stand-up comedian who nobody knows and walking out in front of an audience who have no 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 sort 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 told you that was very unfunny i was right um yeah we also shouldn't forget that that humour is just good for us so so laughing at something that otherwise we'd find stressful is associated

with lower levels of heart disease boost the immune system uh even there's been experiments where you take people who are post-operation and um they can self-administer drugs and you get them to either watch a serious film or they watch a comedy film or film they've selected they find funny and there's about 40 less drugs administered when they're watching 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 uh the drug all the time because it's the most annoying thing ever so so i think humor plays that role of reducing stress we we have complicated lives there are events in there that make us uh 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 and 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 that that 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, it will be busier than anything

about a major world event, about genocide or anything like that, the fury in which, this comic is not funny. And you go, three and a half thousand people laughed at them last night at Hammersmith Apollo. So it's a very subjective thing. But the fury, fury the demand to say i've got to persuade you to stop laughing is a fascinating a 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 and then 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 something 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 venue, as, frankly, you'll be playing on your tour.

The Garrick Theatre in February, yeah. really large venues as just frank you'll be playing on your your tour i well they're coming 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 goes this is why 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 it's interesting because this room is very high ceiling doesn't yes for anyone listening at home sophia i've got one of your research papers here we're talking about this uh the communal nature of laughter and also this signaling it's called this catchy name and modulation of humor ratings of bad jokes by

other people's laughter in which it's which it's actually, towards the end, you say laughter tracks were originally introduced because listeners did not always realise 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, rate it, how much does this make you want to laugh? How nice is this laughter? And my PhD student, Ceci, suggested that we try

and 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 um what's orange and sounds like a parrot a carrot and we had um we had a comedian come in and read them ben vandervelde 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, 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 people are only

rating the joke 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 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've 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 there was everybody everybody showed the same profile uh we shouldn't forget of course that freud wrote an entire book about jokes and and uh and humor and it is one of the most boring books ever it's extremely dull uh but of course they are absolutely central to freudian theory 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 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, 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 because it's completely untestical uh but still um thank you um and so there are various theories of humor one is the sort of incongruity thing of two fish in a tank one turns the other and says do you know how to drive this um i got bigger laugh than

the untesticle actually uh so um so you see that in incongruity stuff which is oh look something 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 uh so as the guy that 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 uh at this idiot thing now 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 makes us feel anxious and resolving some of

that or whether it's in congruence all of that's happening a split second can i say that there's on the subject of canned laughter there was a story someone uh 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 punch lines 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... And it was the roar of a joke not getting a laugh.

So it can go wrong, certainly. I remember there was 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 producers came out 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 trying to force them just 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 yeah the sounds in the words can make the joke funnier i was thinking about the cows yeah yeah yeah so so this is part of laugh lab um we did lots of mini experiments and um i suppose i get that i've got a science joke for you, Brian. Would you like to hear my science joke? I'd love to hear it. Thank you. This came from Laugh Lab. So a neutron walks...

A neutron walks. Just get ready with the sound effect again. That's all I'm saying. Neutrons don't have legs. But you see, that's the thing. Entering into the comedy universe, my favourite 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 set-up line of two prawns dancing at a seafood disco. And we all kind of go, yeah, all right, OK. It doesn't exist. Anyway, anyway um 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 no, I'm negative. That's almost all of them, isn't it? There's almost no other...

Apart from that one, which is no charge. Apart from that one, which is that they're all charge-based. Just so you know. So, anyway, we had somebody put in two cows. Two cows from... This is the 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 i was going to say that and so there's never had two laughs before um and so what we did was was resubmit the joke with different animals and different sounds and so you had two dogs uh and one turns 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 um 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 um i do feel telling the 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 crusty 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 stand-up show writing jokes i i know i i it's very um 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 gonna now think i need to get more k's into my act um i whereas keeping up with the kardashians is completely unfunny in my opinion so it's not foolproof no i 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 i think even this show and this is completely honest now there's been a couple of moments in this show when i 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 uh 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 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 we you know i i if you'd asked me 10 years ago what do 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 realise 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.

I'm not dissing words, but there's all this other stuff that's in there. And in fact, 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 i found one of the scientists joke in our huge database here which i thought you might enjoy uh which is uh why can't scientists tell jokes timing um uh anyway we asked the audience uh what makes you laugh and why. And we found our 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 is the laughter a paranoia as well? Oh, God, yep, you're going to do very well on the circuit. This one just says, Robinance. And in brackets, I'll do anything to get well on the circuit. This one just says, Robinance, and 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... I'd have stopped at beavers. Yeah, well, my problem was... Sorry, I'm terrible. Sorry, everyone.

Alpha testing, because things can only get beta. I think these have been very poor. But no, 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 Theorism, 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 and 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 monkhouse 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 um i love those animal shaped biscuits he said i really love those he said but i got a box the other 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. 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 an average crowd. If he has to say, the seal was broken, it's going to be a tough night. Well, thank you very much to our panel, who were Richard Wiseman, Sophie Scott and Frank Skinner. Next week's panel is a 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. APPLAUSE 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 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 the BBC Sounds. You can download those and, you know... Not enjoy them either. Dream world. You sound miserable.