Your Brain on Jokes
How To Engineer Success by Knowing the Science Behind the Art (Comedy Mindhacks #76)
Being a stand-up comedian is, at times, pretty exhilarating. There’s nothing quite like getting a room to roar with laughter. It’s such a great experience. That said, as a devout student of comedy, I’ve come to realize something important and fundamental to writing and performing: when a joke lands perfectly, I’m not just getting laughs, I’m watching the audience’s brains solve a puzzle in real time. And there are reasons it’s important to know that not the least of which is: it can’t hurt. But even more, the more you can understand what’s going on in the background, the greater chance you have at engineering success.
Personally, I’ve spent years studying the ins and outs of humor as a comedian-scholar. What I’ve gathered is that the brain processes humor through a pretty specific sequence. If I had to pare it down to its bare bones, I’d put it like this: a) the brain detects incongruity; b) resolves it, then c) responds/releases with laughter. Being aware of this sequence influences how I create material. Let me give an analogy that I’ve come up with and that I find helpful.
Think of two wires, one black and one orange. At some point, those two lines somehow get spliced and mixed up. In this analogy, that mix-up is the setup. When I’m crafting a joke, as I’ve said many times on this site, I set up a pattern that leads the audience down one path, then introduces the punchline that makes them realize I was taking them down a different path the whole time. When I get to the punchline, their brains detect something doesn’t fit and, in response, it rapid-fires through (re)solutions. When it finally finds the (re)solution, it’s as if their brain uncrosses and untangles those wires and wires them back the right way. In book speak, that’s something like the brain restoring mental integrity with laughter.
Another way to put it: the “Aha! Moment” during a joke must come before the “Haha! Moment.”1 The scientific/medical research actually bears this out. It shows that the brain’s right middle temporal gyrus detects incongruities while the left superior frontal gyrus handles resolution.2 (If you fell asleep during that last sentence, time to wake back up.) My point is, this isn’t abstract theory; it’s the actual neural pathway jokes travel in our brains. And when a joke doesn’t work for an audience? Well, we know exactly why: it didn’t travel this brain pathway! Writing jokes isn’t magic. It isn’t something a few select people can do. Anyone with an understanding of how the brain works can do it. And if you want to write and tell jokes, if you want to be a comedian, knowing this gives you a leg up.
Let me give a real-life example. I have a handful of joke writing strategies but one I often go to is to try to reverse-engineer jokes. That is, I start with the punch and, more specifically, I start with semantic ambiguity in the punch. This is where my linguistics background is really helpful. (“Semantic ambiguity” is just a fancy way of saying “words that mean multiple things.”) Recently I built a three-part joke around “ICE (frozen precipitation vs. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). I worked backward on this joke, which you can see in action below.
In working backward, I chose specific words (like “threatening”) that loaded both meanings without telegraphing the punch. The audience had no idea where I was heading until the final reveal. That mystery, that surprise, is the heart of the craft of joke writing. Many comedians telegraph their punches. They use the wrong words in setups, explain too much, or don’t give the brain time to do its resolution work.
I’ve learned that a comedian needs enough incongruity to create surprise, but also needs space for the audience to solve the puzzle themselves. The laugh comes from their brain catching itself making a false assumption. Ultimately, what this means is that, even though I’m the one telling the jokes, I’m not the one creating the humor. I’m just creating the conditions for their brain to generate it. And knowing this is a killer mindhack. Because, honestly, it’s the difference between just guessing and engineering and, when I’m engineering, I know my jokes stand a way better chance at working. And that, in turn, gives me way more confidence.
JOKE WRITING COURSE: By the way, if you have any interest at all in learning about your persona, how to write some jokes, or doing stand-up comedy, check out my online joke writing course, “The Joke Writer’s Lab,” HERE.
NEW: “THE COMEDIAN’S MEMORY LAB” COURSE: Hot off the presses, my companion course to “The Joke Writer’s Lab” is now live. “The Comedian’s Memory Lab” contains about an hour-and-a-half worth of material that shows, step by step, how to conceptualize, organize, and memorize your entire comedy set. This method I’ve developed works for 10 jokes or 100. It works for a set that’s 3 minutes of 1 hour. You can get it HERE. (More to come soon!)
See: Hurley M., Matthew, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams, Jr., Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (Cambridge: MIT, 2011), 421.
See: Chan, Yu-Chen, et al. “Towards a Neural Circuit Model of Verbal Humor Processing: An fMRI Study of the Neural Substrates of Incongruity Detection and Resolution,” NeuroImage (2013): 169-76.