Ha! Read Free

time, especially when confronted with ambiguity. If a computer gets confused, it must be shut down and rebooted. The brain, by contrast, must keep working even in the face of the unexpected. Second, when was the last time a computer wrote a decent sonnet or composed a catchy song? With simplicity comes a cost.
    The last question is So what? In other words, how can we use inner conflict to better our lives, and how do we become funnier people? Though this isn’t a self-help book, I will show how improving your humor affects your health, helps you get along with strangers, and even makes you smarter. Nearly every aspect of our lives is improved by focusing on humor. This book explains why.
    Although my background as a cognitive neuroscientist certainly helped me write this book, I’ve tried to keep the science accessible to the general reader. One of the most exciting aspects about any emerging science is that at the beginning, everybody is both an expert and an outsider. While many scientists take the subject down some unusualroads—a recent study by researchers at the University of Louisville on the humor of French author Albert Camus comes to mind—the research is still so new it’s easy to follow. It also helps that humor has only recently become a legitimate topic of study for academic fields like linguistics, psychology, and sociology. My goal in this book is to act as translator, and perhaps mediator too, pulling out interesting findings from each of these fields. And, by combining their insights, to form a new field altogether—Humorology.
    Lastly, I should mention that my goal in writing this book isn’t to be funny, though if I occasionally stumble into that too, I don’t mind. In fact, I think our overwhelming desire to be funny is the largest impediment to humor research. Humor scientists are notoriously serious about their work, as they should be, because the topic requires precision and academic rigor. But because the subject is humor, many people see the field as an opportunity to tell jokes. And that’s a problem. To paraphrase Victor Raskin in his preface to the first issue of The International Journal of Humor Research, psychiatrists don’t try to sound neurotic or delusional when describing schizophrenia, so why should humor researchers try to be funny? It’s a good argument, and one I intend to respect.
    Now, on to a laughter epidemic, a disaster movie—and the dirtiest joke in the world.

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    Â Â Â  C OCAINE , C HOCOLATE, AND M R . B EAN
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them.
    â€”R OBERT B ENCHLEY
    L ET ’ S START WITH THREE DIFFERENT INSTANCES OF LAUGHTER —what I call “Kagera,” “Stopover at the Empire State Building,” and “Titanic.” Each is unique, yet together they say something important about what humor is and how laughter is about a lot more than just being funny.
    K AGERA
    Everybody enjoys a good laugh. But what if you started laughing and couldn’t make yourself stop?
    Our first laughing event occurred in the Kagera region of Tanzania, then called Tanganyika, nestled along the western shores of Lake Victoria. Located six hours from the nearest airport, Kagera seldom makes the news, which is why it’s surprising that the site became host to one of history’s most unusual epidemics. Sometime on Tuesday, January 30, 1962, three students at a local missionary boarding school for girls started laughing. Then, as they ran into more classmates, their friends started laughing too, the giggling quickly spilling over to nearby classrooms. Because the students weren’t separated by age, with younger and older students sharing rooms, it didn’t take long for the laughter to spread throughout the entire campus.
    Soon, over half the school’s occupants were uncontrollably