I alluded to this on Twitter, and meant to leave that be, but the other thing I was going to blog today didn’t come together, and I probably shouldn’t leave a cryptic tweet as my only comment. So…<\/p>\n
One of the links getting passed around a lot in my social-media circles is this Tumblr post from Ben Lillie on The Humanities of Science Communication<\/a>, which argues that discussions of the science of communication often seem to ignore the expertise of people who communicate for a living– playwrights, actors, journalists, etc. This is a good point, but the post as a whole bugged me a bit, because of the trigger point. That is, Ben was reacting in part to a paper about jokes<\/a> that looked at the effect of “pre-exposing” key words from the punch line on how funny people found the joke, and find that “pre-exposing a punchline, which in common knowledge should spoil a joke, can actually increase funniness under certain conditions.” Ben writes:<\/p>\n \nThis is shocking. Not the conclusion, which is clearly correct. The problem is that the conclusion has been known to comedians for at least the last several thousand years. When I trained in improv comedy the third class was on callbacks, the jargon term for that technique. The entire structure of an improv comedy set is based around variations on the idea that things are funnier if they\u2019re repeated. And yet to the authors it was \u201ccommon knowledge\u201d that this will spoil a joke. There is a long tradition of people who know, from experience, how this works, and yet the idea of asking them is not evident anywhere in the paper. This is the problem \u2014 the sense that the only valid answers come from inside science and the research world.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This bugs me, because I suspect it’s unfair to the paper in a couple of ways– I say “suspect” because I don’t have access to the full paper, so I can’t check in detail. First, I would say that the idea that pre-exposure might ruin a joke isn’t complete nonsense– and, in fact, in the abstract, they note that “pre-exposing punchline words directly before a joke led to decreased funniness ratings.” And giving away the punchline too soon– here meaning “in the process of setting it up”(*)– is one of the canonical ways to screw up telling a joke. I don’t think it’s ridiculous to call that “common knowledge,” or for that joke-ruining kind of pre-exposure to co-exist with the notion of callbacks to earlier jokes.<\/p>\n More importantly, though, I strongly suspect that this misconstrues the purpose of the paper. That is, if this were research aimed at helping people to tell funnier jokes, I agree it would be pretty dumb. But looking at the abstract, and the fact that it’s in a journal called “Cognition and Emotion”– again, the paper is paywalled away from me– I don’t think this is really about jokes at all. They’re not really interested in humor, they’re interested in the idea<\/em> of humor, specifically in using it as a probe of the way the brain operates. They have a possible model, which arguably isn’t a very good one, and they’re making a direct test of that, not because they want to knock ’em dead at the next open-mic night at the University of Cologne Psychology Department, but because they think this might provide some insight into the deeper workings of the brain.<\/p>\n So, yes, taking this as a definitive treatment of humor would be foolish. But I don’t think that’s what they’re trying to do at all, and ridiculing it for not being good at something it’s not trying to do is kind of unfair.<\/p>\n Again, Ben’s larger point about it being useful to consult people who communicate things for a living is a good one, particularly if your goal is to offer practical advice on communication. You could also argue that they ought to consult comedians before doing research aimed at using comedy as a cognitive probe, though I’m less certain that’s strictly necessary– again, they’re not really interested in funny per se<\/i>, but funny as a way to test a particular model of how the brain works. But if you want to communicate stuff, not just test models of mental processing of information, you should absolutely talk to the professionals. That’s why things like the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science<\/a> exist, and are a Good Thing.<\/p>\n At the same time, though, I would caution against taking anything either scientists or professional communicators say as definitive. After all, the history of comedy includes a long string of people who became famous by doing things that shouldn’t work (see Kaufman, Andy). Yesterday’s Big Event of the day, President Obama going on Zach Galifinakis’s fake talk show<\/a> to promote health care signups, provides a nice example. Most of the stories about this– in the New York Times<\/a>, say– feel compelled to explain what the joke is, and the piece in Time<\/a> (via Kevin Drum<\/a>) even states outright that “There\u2019s a cringe-humor generation gap; if you\u2019re over a certain age, or simply haven\u2019t watched much of a certain kind of contemporary comedy, you\u2019ll probably watch it thinking that the segment is bombing and Obama is getting legitimately angry.”<\/p>\n That’s necessary mostly because if you go back in time, this wouldn’t’ve been considered funny, at all, and if you’d suggested the concept, people would’ve told you that it would never work. And it might not have, because tastes in humor evolve. Something that doesn’t seem like it ought to be funny turns out to work really well in the right hands. And once people get the idea that something that wasn’t previously funny can be funny, well, you end up with the President of the United States appearing on a deadpan fake talk show trading insults with the “host.”<\/p>\n Is the next comedy breakthrough likely to come from cognitive scientists trying to use humor to test models of information processing? Unlikely, but again, that’s not what they’re trying to do. At the same time, you shouldn’t take the conventional wisdom of professionals as the final word on the subject, either.<\/p>\n ——<\/p>\n * – This might benefit from a concrete example, so consider the following dreadful pun:<\/p>\n \nQ: What do you wear to hide in the desert?<\/p>\n A: Camel-flage.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That’s not very funny, but I think most people would agree that it’s even less funny if you spoil the punchline:<\/p>\n \nQ: What do you use as camouflage in the desert?<\/p>\n A: Camel-flage.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I think it would be fair to say that this kind of thing is a common-knowledge way to ruin a joke. And that’s consistent with their testing, at least going from the abstract.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I alluded to this on Twitter, and meant to leave that be, but the other thing I was going to blog today didn’t come together, and I probably shouldn’t leave a cryptic tweet as my only comment. So… One of the links getting passed around a lot in my social-media circles is this Tumblr post… Continue reading Communication as Art and Science<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,133,139,13,104,265,339,37,11,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-brain_behavior","category-culture","category-education","category-humanities","category-in_the_media","category-outreach","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-television","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}