While the British sense of humor is something every Brit appreciates, it’s fair to assume that many British jokes would leave other cultures baffled. I think there’s something quite interesting about that: it means that humor is not universal. The things that seem fun to us are not innate, they are cultural.
That makes humor very different from laughter, which every human being (even the grumpy ones) will have experienced at some point. Unlike humor, laughter is much easier to understand and study scientifically.
For example, TV producers have long known that adding pre-recorded “laugh tracks” makes people find you funnier than when they don’t hear that laugh (I’m looking at you, ’90s sitcoms). But neuroscientist Robert Provine discovered that there didn’t even need to be a joke. In 2013, Provine made a studio where he simply played the laugh track aloneand strangely discovered that this was enough to provoke laughter in almost all of the study participants.
Provine revolutionized the way we understand laughter, taking it out of the laboratory and observing people laughing in public spaces. He was able to demonstrate empirically that people are much more likely to laugh in the presence of other people than when they are alone; in fact, 30 times more likely. And what’s more, the reason people laugh is rarely because they find something funny: more often we use it as a form of social communicationa non-verbal way of identifying something as a positive, non-threatening interaction.
And laughter is not exclusive to humans, you will find it throughout the animal kingdom. Apes love to be tickled and vocalize all the time; kea parrotsWell known for their playfulness, they have a distinctive trill to call others to have fun; and rats they have an ultrasonic giggle that they make when they play or having his tummy tickled. In fact, if rats have a caretaker who tickles them regularly, they will begin to laugh even when the person enters the room, such is their delight at the anticipation of being played with.
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But humor? Humor is much more difficult to nail down. Why are some things more fun than others? And how do you define what it means to be funny if it changes depending on who you ask?
Perhaps the most persuasive description I have heard is that humor is the accumulation and release of tension. This certainly does a good job of describing some famous comedic moments. Boy falling over the bar, Basil Fawlty hits car with tree branchor Mark Simmons’ joke at this year’s Edinburgh Fair: “I was going to sail around the world in the world’s smallest boat, but I bottled it”; However, it is a definition that falls short of being a usable formula to be funny. Especially when you yourself are not a human.
The newest batch of generative AI has been trained by reading the entire internet (minus some of the nastier parts) and is exceptionally good at recreating styles of humor that have existed before. That includes jokes that complete automatically, if given a clear frame. For example, I asked an AI chatbot to find a punchline for the joke: “I was going to sail around the world on the smallest boat in the world, but…” and it responded “it gave me a sinking feeling.” Not bad, right?
But finding the framework itself – finding a original way to limit yourself to strange and outlandish ideas that somehow communicate a shared human experience, that’s much harder for an algorithm that doesn’t have real experience of the world at all, except what you read online. And for now, at least, those are the surprising ideas that connect with the audience.
