The Art, Science, and Practice, Practice, Practice of Humor | Bob Mankoff | Talks at Google

It's a great pleasure to introduce Bob Mankoff to Google. Bob agreed to come here. Hi, Google. Bob agreed to come here to help us celebrate the launch of the Google cartoon book which you're holding in your hand. Bob is a cartoon editor of the New Yorker. He also teaches a course in humor at the University of Michigan. He's been the editor for 10 years now. Right. And 20 years before that he drew cartoons for the New Yorker. And two years before that, he tried to get his first cartoon into the New Yorker, which I believe took you about 500 tries to get the first one. Actually, I did 20 cartoons a week for 2 years. 20 cartoons a week for 2 years. So if your first product isn't launched, try again. I was in beta for a long time. That's a good lesson. So without going into a long introduction, because every word I say is one less word for Bob. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, wow. Gee, this is great. Because if this thing goes out, I could do a whole set of hand shadows. It's really a pleasure to be here. You know, almost everything everybody does these days has to do with Google. The team that's here from the New York and the Cartoon Network used gmail. We used GMAPs. And I don't know if you guys know about this Gclose app I have. Oh, it's nice, right? Thanks. You know, one of the things we'll be doing is you all have the book and which has cartoons about the Internet and Google and whatnot. And afterwards I will be very, very happy to sign this book for you. And all I ask is, you know, a decent waiting time period before you put it on ebay. I think that's only right. Or put it on ebay, but, you know, split it with me. Well, this is my crew here. These are the cartoons actually of the New Yorker. It's a cover I did in, in 1997, which is a Photoshop collage. I was maxing it out. It was 100 layers in Photoshop. I took all the characters, I put them together at the party and whatever organization I'm in, whatever group I'm sucking up to, in this case Google, I put that there. And I hope you appreciate that. Sort of what I do, my sort of four jobs. I'm the cartoon editor of the New Yorker. Might notice that left hand there. And it's sort of interesting phenomenon, I think, having to do with the right brain, left brain distinction. Over 60% of the cartoonists are left handed, you know, and whether they get into cartooning because they can't do anything else or incompetent or something else. I don't know. But I'm one. I help with the team at the Cartoon bank, run the Cartoon bank site, which licenses the cartoons and sells them and we hope gets involved with NOLs and whatnot. I see 1000 cartoons a week and I help David Remnick, the cartoon editor, select the 17. So, you know, there's sort of an ethical ethos here and you might well ask, wait a minute, this guy draws cartoons and then he helps select the cartoon and then he sells the cartoon. I mean, is this guy the Google of cartooning? Isn't there some sort of conflict of interest? You know, and I have considered it and I thought about it hard or as hard as I can think about anything. And I've delegated a blue ribbon committee, bipartisan, it's looking into this. These things take time. I'm heading that committee, so I'll look like I'll be cleared of all charges. But I was thinking, you know what, Instead of really this whole committee thing, why don't I just adopt a certain mantra and isn't that enough? I sort of think so. Isn't that enough? What do I have to do to the committee? I'm just not going to be evil because, you know, humor can be a force for great good or good evil. Great evil. Actually, I prefer evil because it's more fun. Okay, so the Cartoon bank is a site and we license it and we have about 20,000 cartoons. And you can search for cartoons on many, many topics. In addition to the actual cartoons, we have these animations. I hope we have these animals. Everything I eat goes straight to my ass. And actually a lot of these animations are up on YouTube. Not every product has been successful at the cartoon practice. I don't know. I'm sure you guys try a lot of things. I just thought it'd be a great thing. You know, Granddad is a funny guy. He had a favorite cartoon. I thought he'd enjoy it, but that wasn't that successful. One of the things that's really interesting and I'm happy with and it's certainly non evil, is that we can do search for the cartoon. So if we put in, you know, Internet on the Cartoon bank site, we get, you know, all these. Actually about 170 or much more than that, but 15 pages of these cartoons. You know, cartoons like this, you want. It's called Bloggers without Borders. You want my latest opinion about presidents? How about my opinion of Japanese enzyme baths or breakfast wraps? You need to hear about what I have to say about breakfast wraps. We've also put out the complete cartoons in New Yorker, which UDI has, and that has all 70,300, what is it, 63 cartoons that we've ever published. And this is standing offer I have of $10 if you can find any cartoon that we missed. Udi, I'm sure is going through that right now. And $20 if you just showed up. Don't be a pain in the ass. We tried. We got most of the cartoons. Interestingly, there's a record not only of the Internet, but really of almost any institution that we have through the New Yorker cartoons. For instance, this is a 1955 cartoon. That's what computers looked like then. They said, before we jump quantum theory, gentlemen, let's make sure that we haven't blown a fuse somewhere. And there's something very interesting about cartoons because I don't. I think cartoons actually are a medium of information, a medium somewhat of doubt, and which is what I call a counterweight against sort of the hegemony of rationalism that we can just figure everything out. But they're also very prescient. Look at this cartoon from 1955. Here's a guy with a computer. Shift the outfield to the left, play the third basement deep and feed the batter a curve low and on the inside. So there. That seems so fantastic that somehow you'd be using computers to do anything like this. This is a cartoon I did in 1982. Fine, Alan, how are you? Your charming wife Joanie. Your two wonderful children, Charles and Lisa, ages 13 and 15, and your delightful German short haired pointer, Avondale. So this is sort of really before you could do that. But the comic imagination sort of precedes what is actually going to happen. And of course, in the cartoons there is sort of a rough and ready history of the Internet through the eyes actually of ordinary people who don't care about the Internet until it becomes a big thing in their lives. This cartoon is from 1993. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Actually, on the Internet now, everybody knows everything about what you are. But the interesting thing, this is done in 1993, before most people have any concept of what it is. And yet it became one of the most reprinted cartoons. It became sort of a Rorschach test for how people felt about this medium and that there might be. They didn't know what it was and they didn't know what it actually represented. I just want to step you through real quickly, sort of the 15 years of the Internet. 19931994 Excuse me, I'm lost. Can you direct me to the information superhighway? That's what it was called 1995. I think I'll head back to the house for a little net sex and a nap. 1996. You know, sort of the whole URL. This is 1997. Check out our website at WW 1998 first they do an online search. So here you see search coming about. 1999 sparadigm. Sparadigm.com right during the boom when everyone was giving money to it. 2000 go ask your search engine. 2001 thank you for your recent email. I appreciate your concern. However, I am at this time completely satisfied with the size of my penis. 2002 I want my bubble back. 2003 by Bruce Eric Kaplan My beer. How are you? I've been all over the Internet looking for you. 2004 Sorry, I get all the stuff I don't need on the Internet. 2005 I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant blogs. 2006 I just think it undermines our organization's fiery rhetoric when you close your Internet postings with a smiley face and 2007 would you like to see the top on Google Earth? The New Yorker has a wonderful ethos in terms of all the articles and certainly cartoons. How we were able to do the book with all the cartoons is right from the very beginning, right from 1925, and every single cartoon that appeared in the magazine was essentially keyworded and filed in books, both in written descriptions and in images. And everyone or the cartoonists, like me, I started in 1977, gets an album with all their cartoons, and that's matched up with a written document, incidentally, when you die, they put this little part in and it's very, very nice. Here is what's in the books. And it's not just in one book. Even to this day at the New Yorker, even though we have obviously a database on computers, every single cartoon is typed out and there's a strip on this long typewriter and pasted in these different books, essentially categorizing the cartoons. When we started the cartoon bank, what I did was I ocred all the books because the New Yorker had already done it. They had the page, they had keyworded it, and all you had to do was write a sort of simple program to create the code from that. Now, interestingly, most of the cartoons about Google never get into The New Yorker because most of the cartoons are rejected, because 1,000 cartoons a week come into the New Yorker, five or six hundred just from the people who actually do cartoons for the New Yorker. The New Yorker only has 16 or 17 slots. And in a week where Tiger woods would be in the news, we might get 40 or 50 cartoons. So one of the things I've been talking about, Rudy, is it's really interesting, all the cartoons about Google. Son, we think it's time for you to Google the birds and bees. Rejected. Google the author. Rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected. Not because, of course, many cartoons are rejected because they're not funny or they're not good, but most are rejected simply because that topic we can't be that overloaded with. So the artists come in and they also fax in. And so here's the piles of stuff that I process with my wet wear. You know, the cartoonists, many women now are cartooning, they all come in and one of the things about being a cartoonist is you have to be very resilient because you get the job. But one of the nice perks of the job is not rejecting the cartoonist, do all this great work, but rejecting everybody, especially very well known people who want to get into the New Yorker in cartoon. So when I became cartoon editor, David Mamet wrote me. Dear Mr. Mackough, congratulations. I've taken the liberty of sending you a batch of cartoons. Famous playwright and I had the fun of sending this back to him. Dear Mr. Mamet, thank you very much for your submission. I've taken the liberty of sending it. I mean, there is a certain conceit among people who are famous and also even people who are very smart, that if you're very smart or very famous, if you just took your lunch hour off, you could do these wonderful cartoons. And there is a difference between different types of intelligence. And intelligence isn't talent. Talent is something else. And you can be very intelligent in one sphere, but you can't actually use, for instance, sat horsepower to do jokes. Jokes are really, you know, sort of unconscious. They're part or whole different part of the cognitive continuum. So when you wake up in the morning, you can really analyze things. Coffee. And you know how to categorize things, that you are thinking your thoughts like a syllogism, you know, this is this, that is that I can put it all together. As the day drifts on, you move to a different cognitive part which is much looser, more associative, more by analogy. And by the end of the day, if you drowse off Your thoughts are thinking you and what has to actually happen. To associate along the dimension of humor is to let your thoughts be free, not control them, but to control you. And that's sort of, I think, the essence of, you know, the essence of creativity. But I know a lot about rejection because I myself experienced it, as I say in udi, constantly, constantly rejected by the New Yorker. Rejection, rejection, rejection, of course. And I really needed it because I just got kicked out of an experimental psychology program for. Well, I don't know if you remember, but in. You don't remember. Most of you are too young. But in the 70s was the heyday of behaviorism, and I was a behaviorist experimental psychologist, and I had a pigeon who was in a Skinner box pecking away at reinforcement schedules. And I was. I had all my credits except my Ph.D. but the pigeons, they only worked an hour a day, and that was it. They were off. It's like they had a union and they didn't have a union. I did some research, and they don't really sleep. I found that. So they said, look, why not speed up my whole dissertation instead of taking a year, I'll just run them around the clock, have the right reinforcement schedule, feed them enough, and boom, I'm out. Now, I was on amphetamines, too. So there were a lot of variables going on here. Me up at night and pulling it out, the things and the pigeon going away, and everyone saying, wow, Mankoff's gonna totally revolutionize this thing. And then I did happen to open the Skinner box, and I saw the pigeon listing dangerously and down to a third of its body weight, and he died. And I took that as an omen. Actually, the whole faculty took it as an omen. Anyway, I never went to my father and mother who had gone through the Depression, said, you know what? I'm not going to be a psychologist. I'm going to be a cartoonologist. I thought I could fool him with the ologist part. My father looked at me very sternly, said, you know, they already have people who do that. But I persisted. I persisted, and finally I did finally, you know, sell a cartoon. This changed to this. Now, of course, this is not what the New Yorker actually told me, but, you know, this is actually partly this little lesson here in humor. What is. It's an incongruity. It's the contrasting. It's two schemes overlapping, which shouldn't go together, but are connected along some sort of emotional bond. Because this is what I thought. Here are some of the early cartoons I sold to the New Yorker. There is no justice in the world. There is some justice in the world. The world is just, you know. And one of the things I really do try to do in my own cartoons and often other people is use humor as a medium for communication. Another channel that says something, not like a politician says it, not like an essay says it, but is loose and actually believes in an ambiguity. It doesn't come down on one side really or the other. Hi, I'm Iman. You'll have to forgive me, I'm terrible with names. It's called what Lemmings Believe. I'm sorry, dear, I wasn't listening. Could you repeat what you said since we've been married? Now that's product placement. And this. No, Thursday's out. How about never? Is never good for you? Now a lot of these cartoons, when you're looking at humor, there is a certain model for a certain type of humor that it's not exactly true, but it's a little bit true. And you can look at it. It's a two stage model. It basically says that the humor starts in one way. It says story of cartoonist setup, prediction of income. If the ending is predicted, that's normal. That's a statement. If you can find the rules that make that ending thing and a rule is found, you're going to laugh. If you don't, you're sort of puzzled. It's completely incongruous now what's actually happening here? And once again it goes back even to what I did with the rejection notes. It's two frames of reference. Why write the sentence like this? No Thursdays out. How about never? Is never good for you? Why not just stop at never? Sort of the same joke? How about never? You do it because the two different frames of reference are this the default condition. Our script here is one of politeness and one of appointments. That's what we expect. We expect that the syntax is one of appointments, politeness. And politeness, it continues throughout. The message is rude. What we like about it is a cognitive synergy. Both things that are in our mind at the same time. Both things sort of like that illusion, like a NECA cube that moves back and forth so it never really resolves itself. It's a polite message and it's a rude message. And impolite syntax. You can often make people laugh just by saying frown like this and then say I'm happy. They'll actually laugh. Because the contradiction, the two things, sort of the synergy itself not making any sense is sort of at the heart of Humor. Here's the same type of cartoon from Bruce Eric Kaplan. We structured the deal so it won't make any sense to you. When we start with, we structured the deal, we think that that person is going to be caring and it's about them. Instead, the message becomes rude. So what you see is you have script opposition. Now, almost all of humor is going to be a script opposition. Someone is going to seem as though they're very polite and they're rude. They're going to seem as though they're very chaste, but they're actually sexual. That the background knowledge is going to be different than the front, than the facade. And when you have these script oppositions, the two scripts, the two things, the cognitive synergy one, the humorous thing, always diminishes. The first. Humor always makes it less. It must always make it a diminishment. So here in this cartoon, you'll be awake during the entire procedure. The anesthesiologist is on vacation. Once again, we start. I mean, that whole thing is, you're going to be awake, it's going to be trivial. I care about you. I'm a doctor. He doesn't. People say, how do you get your ideas? That's the big question. I mean, when you actually think of what a sense of humor is, I mean, it's really three things. It's one, it's appreciation, what type of humor do you like? Then secondly it's, are you funny? Do you do funny things? Do you create funny things? And thirdly, in a deeper way is, do you use humor as a way of coping with problems in the world, seeing what would normally be disturbing and reframing it? So, I mean, all. And the things actually are not necessarily related. You can be very great at making jokes and not cope well and actually not think other things are funny. But my basic answer, which is flip, is, oh, that's one thing I thought of, but I think of them. That's how I get my ideas. I think of them. But the question begs the question, well, how do I think of that? I do it through conceptual blending. This is called military solution to last week's puzzle. Arthur Kessler, in a book the act of Creation, called it by association, you take two normally independent, consistent frames of reference, and it's a mash up. You put them together. Now you have to make it something more than complete incongruity. So there is a bond, and the bond is feeling how we feel about these things. So we make that connection of these two completely different associational matrix, like this One heaven. And it's an easy pass. So now, I mean, I could do the same thing with you. I could say, well, what would you blend? You know, if you had heaven, you see what heaven looks like and you. You see the props and the object. There's a gate, right? So now you have to think of the other situations in which there are gates, which is important to get in and out. Could it be a nightclub? Could there be bouncers? Maybe there's a gate. And what happens if there was barbed wire on top? That itself is sort of funny. It's sort of raising the ant. It's heaven. But you don't want people to get over the gate. And maybe on one side, there's undocumented angels. But what I'm saying is, this is the basic thing. You have to imagine something as more than one thing, as more than what it is, and imagine it from a different frame of reference, Blend it. And that doesn't make the joke. I mean, everything I'm really telling you doesn't enable you to make the joke, but it enables you to see the type of thinking that you need to make the joke, which is very loose, very fuzzy, very sort of emotional thinking. You know, just looking at these bars would make me think, what are bars? Bars make you think about prisons. Maybe it's not good in there. Maybe everybody thinks you're getting into this great place, and you look to the side and you see this haggard guy like this, saying, no, no, go back. You see. But how am I connecting? I'm connecting cognitively, but I'm also connecting emotionally. I'm imagining myself in the situation. I mean, all of. I mean, humor is going to basically be. It's a social phenomenon. It occurs between people. Even when you're alone, it occurs between people. People laugh and have humor 30 or 40 times more. When everybody knows that when you're with people and it's this cognitive appraisal, something's wrong, but everything's okay. Something's out of place. If I did that, but the water spilled, everyone would have a little shock, and then we'd make a little joke. Something is wrong. Our initial reaction is an old reaction, an old evolutionary reaction. Look, most stuff that goes wrong with us doesn't matter, but you can imagine 50,000 years ago, anything going wrong could matter a lot. So our initial thing is it's a big joke. And then we, you know, humor is there. So there's this. There's a cognitive appraisal, and there's an emotional side. There's an emotional side and all of those things come into it. So one of the difficulties, you know, in cartoons is it's mainly cognitive. So you have to ramp up the emotions in some way to get your ideas to work. It's very easy to get people to laugh in a normal situation, but in a situation where you have to manipulate ideas, you have to falsely sort of put the emotions, conceptual blending to you. It was fast. Okay, Einstein and sex. Okay. Never, ever think outside the box. Now, this, I think, is interesting because the next slide I'm going to show you is what happens at the cartoon bank. Of course, we keyword it. We say it's pets and it's cats and it's animals. It's keyworded that way. But what comes in online in a very, very. Faint thing of what you guys do is the keywords people use for presentations. So when we look at this cartoon, this is what comes in online, how people actually use it in presentations. So it's a type of really functional, not so much keywording. But this is the topic. This is what they said. Some of them don't make any sense, but. But some of them do. And one of the things we're really interested in, partnering together is somehow giving. When people use cartoons for NOLs and stuff, adding this knowledge to it. Oh, what happened? Oh. Oh, there's. Oh, I had a video. That's what it looks like. Very impressive. I'm quite. Okay, look at this one. Lassie, get help. Okay, so you have, you know, and these are the numbers of cartoons. We have dogs and psychiatry. But what do people actually think it's about? And once again, you see the list. Leadership, counseling, obviously, psychotherapy, law consultation. This is how people are actually using the cartoons. Suggestions are supposed to go in the box. And once again, this is heavy. This is how people are using those. Okay, once again, you see the. This is sort of the metadata coming in. The other way I look at cartoons is in a formal way, a couple of formal ways. And one is what is doing the work really? Is it the words or the pictures or the interaction? So generally, there are a lot of cartoons which are primarily verbal cartoons. My normal law office Hours are over, Mr. Hodel, but I always have time and a half for you. Okay. If I covered up that image, you would pretty much know what it is, and you would object it. Here is sort of the gag diagonal. We've completely childproofed our home. And they're over here. And here is where both interactions. Here is sort of what I call a fantasy quadrant, where if you silly. You crazy bastard. How are you? Where you have a very unusual picture and you have a very strange sentence. And here is sort of a slice of life, this kitchen where everything has gone wrong. And the guy's saying, so this is where the magic happens. There are four very different types of. Or there are different types of jokes. And you shouldn't judge one by another's criteria. The gags are really unrealistic. They couldn't happen. And so you can complete manipulate. You want. The slice of life takes a theory of mind for the viewer. You have to sort of project yourself into this situation to appreciate it. And it's something actually that's not done as much as it used to be. So what I'm going to show you now is this is actually how I view all the cartoons. It's great fun experiment at the University of Michigan. We have these cameras that look at the pupils, the eyes, as they look at these different types of cartoons, and also measures pupil size, which is a measure of interest. The people who are looking at the cartoons are students about 21 years old. They're asked to, as soon as you get the cartoons, stop, and then rate the cartoon. Okay, so when we look at a cartoon like this, which is primarily a verbal cartoon, this is what it looks. This is what it. This is what the two eyes look like. When we look at a cartoon like this, you'll see there's much more interaction involved. See the finding of that. So one of the things in the magazine or. Or anywhere else that you want is you want variety. Why do you want variety? One of the things is there are jokes that are structurally the same and you'll have a serial effect. You might like a verbal gag and another verbal gag. If you actually show five in a row, you actually do an experiment with similarity humor. There can be a satiation effect. So it's sort of obvious, but you want a rhythm of the cartoons, actually, which sort of potentiates the humor. This is actually the pupil size. When they get the cartoon, at the moment that they get the cartoon, pupil size increases as much as, like a flash ball. It's sort of a recognition of. I understand it. And in cartoons that they like, you know, these are cartoons they don't like and cartoons that they do like, pupil size increases very dramatically. And there's also a brainwave that goes along with it called an N wave, which is sort of a. It's a wave that usually shows when something happens that's a little mistake, and you understand it. And in the wave that Happens with cartoons. There's a what's wrong? And then a resolution. How does it come together? But what has to happen is the two frames of reference there can be a little bit delayed, but they primarily have to be simultaneous. If you sort of look at the stuff and then get the joke later and can't bring it together, you'll understand it, but you won't think it's funny. So let's say you have a cartoon like this. Okay, what's the joke? There's no doorknob. Okay, so for you it wasn't a joke. Right. Because it would take too long. Now, that might well appear in the New York magazine. It did, in fact, in the 40s or 50s. Because when you're reading it, it's not that important. You might actually enjoy the thing of. Oh, oh, I see. But it's like a puzzle. But really, cartoons shouldn't be puzzles. Because if they are puzzles where we have to figure them out, we don't laugh. We laugh when we very quickly, with almost a tiny delay of 300 milliseconds, put it together sort of like this. There is a little delay, but then you do bring it together. Now I'm going to sort of go through what humor is. And one of the things you have to understand about humor is it's a type of play. Play is different. There's two modes. We go, we move in, basically in and out all the time. Psychologists call them the telic mode, the purposeful mode. We're doing things for some other reason, you know, and we want to be relaxed and we want to accomplish things. We're not doing the things because we necessarily enjoy those things. They're for a goal. It's goal related. It's future. And there's another mode which is the paratelic mode, where you just simply do things because you enjoy them. You do things for play. And serious is one way to think about it. But it's deeper than that. And play is really the heart of humor. And you can see it. We share it not only with chimpanzees, but even with mice. But I want to show you this little film of this daddy chimpanzee and his son fooling around and clearly having fun and actually smiling. Let's go. Little peekaboo. Hey, what's going on there? Hey. And that's a chimpanzee smile face. They also laugh. And basically what they do is a type of. Even with older chimpanzees, please play fighting. So even in chimpanzees, there's essentially a duality, okay? The duality, it's fighting, but it's not fighting. And all animals really have this. This thing. It's sort of a preliminary of the duality that we have cognitively when we bring these different things together. You also see in the play frame things that would normally make us feel terrible or frighten us. We like. In the play frame, we really like arousal and high excitement. I'll show you this now. We like horror movies. We like amusement parks. We like things in the frame that we wouldn't like. And it's one of the reasons why we like humor that might seem very cruel or nasty or gross, and that in another context, we would be repelled by. Now what's this guy here on the roller coaster? Because he gets. They're going to go up. You'd normally think this would be a horrible thing happening. Certainly if you were going down El Camino or whatever, and all of a sudden this happened to you, you would not be happy. But watch what this happened. Watch how close it actually is to humor. Go, guy. I'm smiling, right? Happy. The tension is building. You can feel it too, right? Here he goes. Here we go. See, he's laughing, right, isn't he? In the other duality, what is it? He's frightened and he's safe. Once again, it's a duality. His emotions are way up. Everything about him said this is dangerous, but it's not dangerous. And that's one of the hearts of play and these cognitive synergies. You know, a cage without a tiger is very boring. A tiger out of a cage, not very good. Tiger in a cage. Interesting. So a lot of these forms from play and excitement, and also humor create situations which would normally be disturbing in a safe frame, in a distance frame, all of humor is going to require some distance. That distance can be the distance of geography. It can be the distance of time. It can be the distance you will find that events that happened to you that were not tragic but were very unpleasant, like my wife's day last night at a Holiday Inn in which we couldn't get any food and there was no heat. As time goes by, I assure you, Cory, this will seem very funny. But that's it. I mean, that's the truth of it. So comedy is like that, too, and it enables us, because of this frame and the distance that comedy has, to enjoy things that would be disturbing and that would be like in jokes. Oh, another slide. Quick, boring slide. Okay. The point is that in the telic state, the purposeful state when we have high excitement levels, we're anxious. If all of a sudden we're all worked up, but we're actually purposeful, we actually try to maintain really calm. And in the parata state, in the play state, if we're relaxed, we're bored. You don't go to amusement park to be relaxed, so you actually seek excitement. And cartoons also are essentially a play frame. As soon as you enter that play frame, you want some type of excitement. And that's why you like jokes like this. Or this. This is going to hurt like hell. Poor kids. Or this. Now, don't you feel a little bad about yourself? I should. Or this? Yeah. I mean, there are different types of jokes. Laughter is. It's not a reflex, but it's a stereotypical response. And it's an honest response in that when it comes out. But when jokes are too strong or they bother people or whatever, there's two responses. There's the actual response, they have the laughter. Ha. And then there's the social response of telling people they're not evil, which is high. Oo. One of the things humor does is it targets people. You know, not all humor targets people, but an awful lot of humor is based on some type of ridicule, some type of making fun of something or someone that you're not in any way connected with. Usually it's easy. You know, you have a pretty good case, Mr. Pitkin. How much justice can you afford? So it's easy to make fun of the, of the law or politics. That's an excellent pre screen question. But before I give you my stock answer, I'd like to disarm everyone with a carefully rehearsed joke. You know, and of course all that. And also it's very, very general. It's really very general. They're generic characters, but audience factors are important. They differ, like who you're connected with. Here everybody's crying, but then Charles Adams Uncle Festus is quite happy. So audience factors are important to consider when you are making humor. For instance, look at this. Would you like to buy some Girl Scout crap? Now, what do you think the Girl Scouts thought of that? You think they wrote letters? They were not pleased. This is not the. If I gave a presentation to the Girl Scouts, you know, if I was really oblivious, brain dead, whatever, autistic, I'd say, hey, it's funny, it's about Girl Scouts. Why aren't you laughing? Or let's take a cartoon like this. It'll be a little animation. Discouraging data on the antidepressant. Now in surveys I do online. Let's look at that. Is that funny? Is it not funny? The point is, actually nothing is funny or unfunny in and of itself. It's reactions to. To your experience and your audience. So here, a lot of people like that. They rated a 10, but this person didn't like it. I like animals. Look how much this person liked them. They liked them. Five exclamation points. I don't want to hurt them. That doesn't seem very funny to me. Two, I don't like to see animals suffer, even in cartoons. And what people don't understand is we use a special anesthesia in the ink when we draw animals suffering in cartoons, so they don't suffer at all. Totally painless. But this person. Oh, sorry, let me get back. This person. It seems just like the results in my lab. Funny, unappealing. I mean, when it comes to humor, which ridicules. I mean, essentially there's a dispositional theory and it's pretty simple. It says humor. It varies inversely with the favorableness of disposition towards the agent or entity being disposed disparaged and directly with the favorable disposition towards the agent or anything doing the disparagement. Generally, what it means when your friends make fun of your enemies, you like it. When your enemies have the upper hand, you don't. I mean, if, for example, there's a disparagement. If, for example, I don't like Hillary and she is making a disparagement about George Bush and I like George Bush, well, that's minimal humor for me. If it's the reverse where I like her and she disparages Bush, I have a negative opinion of him. It's maximal humor. Now, not all humor, almost all editorial humor is of this nature. But look at this cartoon. Now that takes a little while. Interesting cartoon, but why is it funny? One of the ways is to look at the targeting part of it. Look how the cartoonist has drawn this woman. She's very, very unappealing. We actually don't have any sympathy, any empathy for her. We know that she's just a pain in the ass. She kept trying on these shoes and it appears she's well deserved of being curious, killed. But because we don't have any empathy, if we create empathy in the picture, it wouldn't be funny at all. So now no one's going to find, now not only are you killing this woman, there's an orphan involved, even though it's only a cartoon orphan. So one of the things is humor is a separation it works, but it partly works because it's a type of play frame in which there's a moral anesthesia. I mean, one of the coping functions of humor is not empathy, not sympathy. It's important that we don't have incredible empathy. It's important that we understand that we have not suffered. Humor often acts as a way to separate us and say, it didn't happen. It didn't happen to me. And all the black humor, all the terrible humor that people think is so horrible after 9 11, is partly a person's defense mechanism for telling them that they're alive and this thing did not happen to them. The truth is also, you can only really laugh at things that you don't care about that much. It's really important because we often care about things dramatically. We shouldn't. And humor can reframe that and say we do. You don't have to care about that. But if you're tremendously invested in something, that's when you say, hey, don't joke about that. That's not funny. Look at things that can arouse ire. Okay, this guy is getting shorter. I thought it was a completely harmless joke. This is the email I got. Another joke on old white male. Ha ha. The wit. It's nice, I'm sure, to be young and rude, but someday you'll be old unless you drop dead. As I wish. Cordially, Robert Ryan. Now, I think there's a couple of things that's interesting about this, is that the guy is actually being funny. He means it, and he's being funny. The cognitive synergy is. This is cordially, which is actually. Actually quite funny. Oh, okay. Okay. This. Remember, I don't know if you guys took the survey. You went up there. These were cartoons from the rejection collection, the cartoons the New Yorker rejects because. Because they're too gross. And here are your. Here are the two. The two funniest. The two surveys. This was a group of caption contest. People from the New Yorker rated these cartoons. There were 10 of them. They rated this the funniest one. Yes, Mr. Hargreaves, thumb sucking can be cured. But first, let's talk about what your other hand is doing. And this is the one everyone rated the least funny. And really, that was the second. So here I two different. Very demographics and groups of people. There certainly are differences among them, but among the people among the 81 who took it here and the 60 or so who took it there, it was also really a great deal of similarity. And so these are some of the Surveys I do. I can also put other variables such as aversiveness, aggressiveness, and often people can think cartoons are very, very offensive and very, very funny. But one of the things about what the cartoons appear in the New Yorker and why a lot of the humor may even be mild and intentionally show is that it's not a comedy club. It is not a complete play frame. And in a complete play frame you can have very, very transgressive stuff. But when you're in a serious mood and you're reading all about Seymour Hersh and really the end of the world and the corruption of the United States and everything, and then you, you're likely to judge the cartoons differently as well. Oh, what's this? This is another example. This is a survey. There's someone actually taken, 32 year old male, and he takes the survey and okay, this is that gross cartoon. He likes it and he doesn't really think it's offensive. Okay, now here's a 49 year old female and she's taking the survey. And anchored on the far side, we have the oldest ship in the fleet. She thinks that's very offensive. And this is what she writes. This is disgusting, male, sexist, patriarchal humor. I. So the point is, audience is very important, okay? The things that make things funny. So in the play frame, all the things that would normally be bad and all the things that sort of raise our emotional temperature, like stupidity, flaws. This would be stupidity, greed. Remember to round each billable hour off to the nearest week. Gluttony. Your skin is enlarged. Lust. You slept with her, didn't you? So all the things you would normally think are bad become good for your. So really, if I were to say how you should make jokes, think of bad things, because in just thinking of them, bad things are actually bad. But when you think of them, they're not that bad. You're just thinking of them. They become once again these parapathic emotions. Not real emotions. It's really what all entertainment is about. You don't even have the humor. I mean, you go to see Die Hard, people are getting killed, shot left and right. Hey, it's fun. So it's fun to think about bad things and it'll be funny as well. Exaggeration. Your car, you know, extremism. Your car will be right down, Mr. Lundquist. And of course, this is a flaw too. Now, exaggeration also has its opposite, which is really the same thing, which is understatement. Oops, sorry. Surprise. Now surprise occurs in humor. It's more like a Phase change. Change from one state to the other. That has to happen quickly. But there's a few really simple rules about it. One is that, okay, this is a council department of government in jail. So if you want surprise, you run it left to right. Because that's how they read. Unless it's in Israel, in which you'd have it different. So don't do the joke this way. Okay? You wouldn't do that. A lot of you people wrote your captions for your thing sort of backwards. You didn't save the joke for the end. I think when you start doing jokes, you're so happy about them, you want to put the funny part at the start. That's not a good idea. Okay, watch. Also, there's a pace. And generally that sort of. Things are funnier in three. Or there's a sequence of three. So let's watch this. If these walls could talk one. So I'm setting up, and they knew what was good for them, they'd shut the fuck up. You need a sequence to subvert the sequence, okay? Conflict. There are no cartoons, and there's nothing funny about good relationships. I wish good relationships on everyone. But if you want funny, you know, it's better to get divorced a few times. So, like, we're fighting, like Bill. Counterfactuality. Which just means once again, you're in a play frame and you're not realistic. So you create these situations called January 3rd in Rockefeller Center. And within the play frame of the cartoon, you accept the counterfactuality. Not only that, to create the cartoon, you have to create counterfactuals. And one of the best way to do is just lie. In other words, just say things that aren't true and you'll see and illustrate them. And actually, it'll end up being pretty funny. Flash of context. Two things coming together once again. This is in the two frames that come together. One diminishes, the other one makes it less. Now, it doesn't necessarily have to do with greed or lust. It can simply make one thing more trivial, more commercial in the other. Oh, now we're to the caption contest. And I think we'll hope we have your caption contest. I just want to. At the back page of the New Yorker every week we have this incongruous picture like this. And we get between five and 10,000 selections. And so for something like this, where we see those arrows in the guy, I have a little computer program that breaks down the word frequencies of what's coming in. And from the word Frequencies themselves. You can see some of the jokes that are actually going to come. Arrows, acupuncture, you know, HMO hurts. You know, the good news, Cowboys and Indians insurance only covers. So one of the fascinating things, I mean, it's a very simple program, but immediately of these 5 and 10,000 people gives you the comic landscape of this situation. And although there are five or 10,000, five or 10,000 different ones, they break down like this. Good news, great news, your extremities are fine. The good news is your cholesterol's down. But look on the bright side, at least your hat is still completely intact. And this is one of the finalists. On the plus side, it's a terrific example of Native American press. Number of arrows. I'd like you to get your arrow count down and Ms. Elaine, have you tried sleeping on your side? So that's sort of. That's how that breaks down. Now, you did this, the Google thing. Now, one of the things I would say made the contest somewhat hard is there wasn't enough incongruity, there wasn't enough conflict in there to get a hold of it. And, you know, there weren't enough props or anything. But so you have the thinker and, you know, one of the answers was, give me 0.23 seconds and I'll have an answer. And from a generalist point of view, you know, I'd say, okay, that's a Google thing. I understand that that's a joke and that will get my vote. Okay, here are other ones. Let's see. On this infinite grid of ideal 1 ohm resistors, what is the equivalent resistance? Well, you can see what the problem is with that. You can see why that may not be something you want to take on the circuit and then just to suck up to. I mean, you want to make fun of something. I know it's a great place and you get free food, but for God's sakes, that's too much. How come other companies spend so much brain power in pointless power games when all you have to do is create great things, let engineers work freely. That's not a joke. That's not a joke. I mean, it's pr and I hope that works out for you. But, but. And this is the one I stole. You know, gclose the next Google service coming soon, we hope. But he should have done it the opposite way. That's his joke. The G close is a joke. Why would I want to read the next after that? You told the joke so I would just have something like, I've got it. G. Close. And this is sort of the end. I need someone well versed in the torture, you know, the art of PowerPoint. I hope it hasn't been too torturous. I mean, I hope the point of this is to make you stop and think a little bit about cartoons. So thank you. And I'll. I'll answer some questions, if you like, about humor, about anything. New York Giants. Thank you. They never illustrate any of the stories. Okay, okay, okay, I'll repeat it. Young lady asked how the cartoons are placed in the magazine in relation to the stories and the articles in the magazine. They are always placed so that they never illustrate or relate to a story. The nice thing about the New Yorker, and it's a little bit anachronistic, is that the cartoons give it some air. They're not illustrations. They're not about the stories. They are another wavelength, a really comic wavelength and a humorous channel. I mean, as I said alluded to in the lecture, I think humor is important because it's a counterweight against this hegemony of rationalism. The idea that we can figure out certain things, but most of the things having to do with people and the things people are absolutely sure of in terms of countries and nations and opinions and politics should always be. We'd be very skeptical about any other questions. Go ahead. Yes. For a while, it seemed like I can't see much. That was a top. That was more of a topical cartoon. Now, the New Yorkers using that space to promote their online site because we know the world is online, and so we lost the cartoon and we gained advertising dollars. Something you can appreciate differently. Yeah, because that cartoon would be topical. And the truth is, a topical cartoon doesn't have to be that funny. Isn't that funny necessarily? It can be funny, but it plays off of the fact that this thing just happened to. And our emotions are involved. So we chose it not to illustrate a story, but to illustrate something that's actually happening in the news. But different than an editorial cartoon, because an editorial cartoon, as I said before, is basically going to always be these spheres of politics into interacting with each other, like Hillary Clinton and Obama. The New Yorker filter is always politics through the filter of our humanity. So if you had a couple watching TV and the guy was saying, gays and lesbians getting married, haven't they suffered enough? So that's not about it on the political realm. It's about it on the human realm. Yeah, go ahead. What can you say about the style of drawing and its relationship to humor as A general observation. It seems like the New Yorker prescribes to a more like, classic, you know, pen drawing with wash. And it seems like almost. Although there's some variety, like a specific style. Is there something about that type of drawing? You think it's inherently funny. And one of the things that changed over the years in the 30s and 40s, there used to be gag writers and cartoonists. They weren't just illustrators. So you had people who were enormously skilled artistically and had gone to art school. Then it became more of like a singer, songwriter model, where one person does everything. And I think you lose something in terms of the pure skill of drawing, but you gain something in terms of authenticity. And it's like you listen to Bob Dylan and maybe Pavarotti could have sang Like a Rolling Stone better, but I don't think it would be very effective. So the style is a simple style. And some of it really would you say, is bad drawing. But there's such a thing as good bad drawing, which means that we relate to it and we can embrace its silliness. It enables us also to do things. I didn't show you this cartoon, but let's say I have a cartoon in which it's a gallows and there's steps going up to the gallows, and there's also a ramp for the handicapped. You wouldn't want that drawn very realistically. Okay. Any other questions? What are you, like, your top three writers that you find funny? Like, if it's just one, it's fine. Well, I mean, in terms of the cartoonists, I mean, I love cartoonists who do different things with their humor. Jack Ziegler, for instance, who did January 3rd at Rockefeller center, always creates in every picture a different world. And my leaning. One of the personality variables in terms of the sense of humor is called incongruity resolution. Sort of a get it factor. Corny on one side and weird on the other. My personal preference is to weird, where there's something left a little, where you enjoy it just for its absurdity. So Jack will have a lot of cartoons where there'll be a guy at a bus stop and have a suit on like this, but just in his undershirts and all. Sometimes we call waiting for pants. Now, that's something in which there's nothing to get. Now, one interesting variable is that incongruity resolution is one of the things that determine sense of humor. And on the spectrum from conservative to liberal, you'll find people who like weirder stuff. Let's say Gary Larson Would be example would tend to be liberal. They would like more modern art, more adventurous music. So there's a whole personality instead of a variable. Roz Chast I love because she has invented a form of cartooning, a form of narrative cartooning. Charles Barsati, who did too. Silly, crazy. You bastard. How are you? Because of his complete iconography. And what I love most about them is that in a world in which everything is so slick and it can be great slick, but it's like a four star production and it's directed by so and so from a story by so and so written by. And it's everybody. You know, you go to Hollywood and ever. And I don't know if Bruce Kaplan is here and he was the executive producer of Six Feet under and a writer for Seinfeld and. Well, Bruce can tell yourself, but I'll tell instead of him is that one of the things about the cartooning is that it's autobiographical. He completely controls it. And I think that's the thing I really love most about the cartooning, that it's really one person, one person's thoughts, one person's ideas. Any other questions? Yeah, I want to ask you about the caption contest. It's always why you didn't win. No, it was really good. So it's always sort of bugged me because it seems in some ways. Do other things bug you as well, though? I mean, I just want. I got to. It encourages that sort of the David Mamet feeling of like, well, anyone could do it. And it takes away from what you were just talking about that it's a singular vision. It's one person. It starts to, you know. And so I'm sort of wondering why you do higher. Heavy lifting on the caption contest is done by the images, the incongruous images. That's the things that people cannot do. In other words, it actually is, you know, people handing Ross Chast cartoons all the time. Once Roz Chast has the template, you can do it. And you know what, you can even make it a little better. But it's still Roz's cartoons. So the caption contests, for the most part, they're not real cartoons. They're not real cartoons. They're more like a parlor game where we set up a situation and only work within the context of a caption contest in which you see an image for three weeks. And it's very incongruous. And now, because a lot of cartoons, there's not much going on in the caption when the picture is incongruous there's not much at all, but when you have three weeks, you expect a little, you know, tour de force. So I don't think it takes away from the artist, but it does add to the people who do it, and they like it. And I think that's one of the great things, is that this is. Humor is not restricted to a few people. And the other thing is, it's one thing to do it every once in a while, it's the other thing to do it every week. Any other questions? Yeah, before people go, the team tips group is actually looking for cartoonists to illustrate some upcoming flyers. So I figured this would be a good target audience. If you're interested, mail teamtipsoogle. Can I? Well, you've got the email address. I do. We don't pay. I'm used to that. You will get free lunch and free dinner anytime you come here. I get the T shirt, right? You do that, too. Well, you know, go ahead. You have more questions. It seems like comic strips in the newspaper aren't very funny anymore. Would you agree with that? And why do you think that is? Well, I mean, I think the. I don't. I mean, I'm not sure that they're not, but I think one of the things is, at the Yorker, although it's clearly subjective and many, many good cartoons are eliminated, there's this enormous process where we see the cartoons and we pick. I work for a syndicate. When you do that type of stuff, it's your five cartoons going in no matter what. And I think they suffer. I mean, I think they suffer really from that. From essentially having to be funny five times a week and you being the judge of your own humor. But otherwise, they're hilarious. Yeah, go ahead. Were you influenced a lot by any particular cartoonism in your life? I mean, I was enormously influenced by Saul Steinberger, and my early cartoons were Steinbergian, of course, not nearly as good. But what Steinberg was doing and his cartoons were. And laugh out loud funny was that there was enormous dignity to them. And there was such thought that you could think through this medium. And that's what I thought was interesting. And although his type of humor eventually was not my type of humor, that overriding idea, there was a way of thinking, was really just incredibly important to me and the other cartoonists. I've been influenced by. You just, after a while, don't want to be influenced by. I mean, when I started cartooning for the New York, I did 35 cartoons every week, but I wasn't doing just my cartoons. I mean, some cartoonists us know right away who they are. Someone like Roz Chass right from the very beginning. But in the beginning, I was doing Steinberg cartoons and every single type. Okay, one more question and then I'll be it. Okay. Do you also select the little marginal series of drawings? And if you know about that, what are the criteria for those that's done through the illustration department? So I don't have anything to do with it, but I think it's delightful, as I think all, all of you are. Thank you.