Tina Fey once said, “If you want to make an audience laugh, dress a man like an old lady and push him down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push a real old lady down the stairs.” Strangely, evolutionary psychiatrist Dr. Gil Greengross agrees.

In his blog, Humor Sapiens—hosted on the Psychology Today website—Greengross says there’s a thick line separating joke creators from joke appreciators. Citing a study that used aNew Yorker cartoon captioning contest, Greengross says that out of the 159 subjects asked to come up with a funny caption for each cartoon, results showed, firstly, that those who produced the funniest captions also produced more captions overall—meaning that quality depended on quantity.

Second, funny cartoons were negatively correlated with appreciation of humor. In other words, funny people tend to find most jokes less funny than non-funny people. And lastly, extraversion was negatively related to humor production—meaning extraverted people are less likely to be funny than introverted people.

So do comedy creators have higher standards of humor than extraverts? Here with me to bust all the comedy myths (and create some new ones) is the author of Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for the Simpsons: Simpsons writer, Mike Reiss. Also cross-promoting studios with me is Jason Shebiro, the Director of Comedy Programming here at Sirius and writer at UCB.

Comments

comments