Another banger. I only skimmed the paper, but one thought I had was about irony (which I've been pondering for a long time without success).
Assume a three-player game with a speaker and two listeners: one naive, one savvy. The speaker wants to form a closer social bond with the savvy listener, who has a better sense of mirth, & exclude the naive listener. In the simplest case of verbal irony (sarcasm), they do something quite sophisticated & generally neglected by scholars of language: they send a signal that has two intended meanings, a literal one for the naive listener, an ironic one for the savvy listener. I think many forms of humour (including some of the absurd stuff you mention) are about forming an elite or high-status coalition, signalled by the use of irony (speech or other performance that is confusing or banal to a naif, funny or clever to the cognoscenti).
This can get more complicated & exclusive as more & more additional knowledge is required to "get" the ironic meanings. E.g. one needs knowledge of the conventions of some art form in order for their ironic subversion or absence to be understood, one needs insider political/cultural knowledge to get satire, etc. But ultimately it's about signalling & status. My own taste is towards hyper-ironic work that bends so far back on itself that it's not even about anything — the joke being the absurdity of all things. & even though I consume this privately it must on some level be about colluding with the author & feeling I'm savvy enough to be part of an elite.
If better social partners are more likely to get your joke or your irony, then you can tell the joke or make the ironic statement to covertly exclude uncool people while affiliating with likeminded cool people.
In the Succession example, I’m not sure serious and mirthful could be plotted on an x,y diagram. Logan was always serious but was sometimes mirthful even when he didn’t intend it. The kids were never serious even when they intended it but were usually mirthful. Each variable needs to be considered from the perspective of the deliverer and the deliveree.
To be a serious person isn't to experience mirth at low frequencies. A person's seriousness depends on how others perceive them. If others perceive them as worthy of non-mirthful attention, as someone who can inflict costs on others, then they are a serious person. The Joker would be a good example of someone who experiences mirth at high frequencies but is still a serious person because of the harm they can inflict on others.
Isn’t being serious inherently related to having status? In what context would you be taken seriously if you had no status? You aren’t serious people strikes me as status signaling and painful to the recipients since it hits home. Great post but hard to take seriously on the Everything is Bullshit blog - lol.
Seriousness and status are very highly correlated, yes, but they’re not identical. It seems to me that an infamous serial killer or terrorist is low-status but serious.
Incredible writing! I am fascinated by the way that technology has influenced this dynamic, especially in young people like myself entering the work place, and finding themselves not yet knowledgeable enough to be taken ‘seriously’ at all times.
I have found it surprisingly difficult to accurately relay that very beneficial ‘mirth’ through communication like email or teams. It is a steep learning curve to translate this concept (which is often communicated through laughter and inflection) into digital corporate communication. Ironically, I think many young people, (or at least myself) intend to communicate playful mirth as they are earnestly learning within their career, and inadvertently commit faux pas of digital communication that negate the mirth that they were attempting to signal. Thereby, breaking rules of digital seriousness and undermining their attempt to suspend seriousness as they plastically work through an unknown concept.
Thanks, Truett. The digital medium definitely makes it harder to signal mirth and defuse the costs of mix-ups. We can use emojis and lols but without the rapid back and forth of real laughter combined with facial expressions and body language it’s much harder to create common knowledge of mirth. I don’t know the solution to this aside from more face-to-face communication and zoom calls.
Great theory ! Explains a lot and gives a lot to think about.
I heard that most laughter happens in conversational settings, not at jokes but at simple statements like “I missed my bus.” This conversational laughter tends to start and stop quickly and is synchronized at the end of statements and the person who laughs most is the one speaking. Often we don't even realise this is happening. That seems to fit very well with your idea of laughter as coordination and maybe deserve a bit more exposure than the very noticeable comedies. What do you think? source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d34lQ8LEYsk&list=PLz1pLGZvT9YzBPxiexdHwoCnGuRLJsg9x&index=7
The meta-sense of humor is about displaying coordinatoin skill trhough humor initaly for fixing mix-ups. I had ahought before that most jokes are actually displays of skill. That fits well here since coordination itself is a skill but it is also a neat way to play the status game. You can signal good taste or competence more plainly than usual because the humor softens or defuses the usual backlash of overt self-display. Self-deprecating humor, for example, often ends up doing the opposite of what it claims and subtly highlights how capable you are. I assume you though of this way more, curious to see if you think there is something partciular in the interaction of mirth and status game or not.
Yea, definitely humor is an effective status seeking strategy. Doesn't come with the costs of overt self-promotion as you note. It is also a much more effective way to lower other people's status. If you punch someone, you look cruel and they might punch you back. But if you mock someone, you look funny and they look foolish, and there's nothing the person can do to retaliate. I talk about status games in one section of the paper. Specifically, I make the point that status games are themselves coordination games: we have to coordinate on who is high or low status, and if we disagree about that, we pay a cost. I argue that embarrassments arise when audiences struggle to coordinate about whether the person lost status.
I find the mixed up the theory of humor quite interesting. Does it say anything about why we laugh to show understanding? Or is that a separate phenomenon
Yes, part of the function of laughter to signal that we've sensed the mix-up (or get the joke). And part of the function is to defuse the costs of that mix-up by reciprocating laughter. They are related, of course, because we cannot defuse the costs of the mix-up unless we both know (that the other one knows) that there has been a mix-up.
Sorry I’m thinking about when there is no mix up, just understanding. Like when we laughed bc someone is coming across as relatable. Might seem like just doing the annoying “well what about this” thing but i think when i usually read about theories of humor i get stuck here
I’m not aware of any examples of people laughing at something merely because they understand it or relate to it. Usually people only laugh when the thing they are relating to or understanding is some kind of mix-up. If we both know what it’s like to grow up with divorced parents or take the bus to school, or if we both understand quantum theory, it doesn’t really make sense to laugh at that fact.
Glad to see this write up. I did a "vibe read," Kling style, of your paper last week, sparked by your recent podcast guest appearance (the read was better spent time). Pretty thought provoking and generally convincing. Felt like a stretch on the absurd humor, but maybe I missed something.
I was thinking of the Naked Gun example and at first blush it seemed a stretch with no clear party for the mix up, or multiple possibilities for the source of mix up: what is noir, what is a credit sequence for, etc. The movie itself being the foolish character.
But maybe the mix up is between the source and the viewer, with their model of what's normal. "What exactly am I watching?!" We're kinda metaphorically walking down the hallway and the scene is juking side to side.
That requisite model might explain absurd humor being viewed as more cerebral. Ok, maybe not so much Naked Gun, but more Monty Python or Norm MacDonald's "bombing" roast. And there, Naked Gun would naturally not be as "high brow" or cerebral because it announces itself as a parody. You already know to expect the unexpected in an expected way. But it takes a second to figure out what the fuck Norm is up to teasing Cloris Leachman about her hoopty.
Just spit-balling. Going to bump that recent Pinker book toward the top of the pile.
That's a good point that it may be judged as a mix-up along the lines of "what am i even watching" or a mix-up about what a movie is even supposed to be. I added a sentence about that to the paper--thanks.
I had a friend who was studying how to use humor in advocacy for climate change action and he said there was research/evidence that people were more open and able to listen and learn in the context of humor. Which is the whole functional purpose of the "ice breaker" joke at the beginning of a speech, etc. I'm interested if you know about such research. Also - he clearly distinguished between humor and laughter. Humor doesn't have to evoke a laugh - but rather puts a different, amusing, frame on interactions.
I'm not sure if humor directly increases people's willingness to listen and learn, but I find it plausible that it indirectly increases these things, through social bonding. We're more likely to listen and learn from people that we like. I'm not aware of any research on this.
Another gem! I have two observations and a question. First, it seems that unpredictability is a sine qua non for humor. A joke where the punch line is obviously coming isn't as funny as a surprising punchline. Similarly, the unexpectedness of someone's misspeaking seems to be part of what makes it funny. The second observation is that perceived lack of conscious intention helps us to laugh at/with someone's misspeaking. Intending to laugh out loud at the death of a loved one is cruel rather than funny. (However, conscious intention might be undermined by unconscious intention, à la Freudian slips, as "I hooked up with your mother last night" might be interpreted.)
My question concerns the suggestion that well-designed mirth should prevent illusory dangers from sending either party into a panic: "Insofar as mirth is well-designed, it might produce a general deactivation of emotions that process costs, in order to stop the wildfire of negative representations from spreading throughout the brain and disrupting the process of mutual cost defusal." I understand that this claim has to do with panics over the relationship between speaker and listener being potentially undermined. But what I am wondering is, does this also apply to cases where the speaker/writer seems to want to make the listener/reader laugh about a scary, horrible situation that is external to both of them? In particular, political satire about dangerous politicians. Even more specifically, I am thinking about the Substack "Are you f'ng kidding me?" where Jo Carducci describes the horrible behavior of politicians with brilliantly funny metaphors.
Unpredictability matters because there are diminishing returns to defusing the costs of, and creating common knowledge of, a mix-up. If everybody already knows about the mix-up and knows to avoid it, laughter isn't really needed. In fact, if you laugh at a mix-up that we're already intimately familiar with and know to avoid, then that shows us you are a bad coordination partner, a person who is not one of us. This is why puns and potty humor are funnier to kids than adults. We've already learned toilet etiquette and homonyms, so the humor is beneath us--a "dad joke" as they say.
Intention matters, because if the communication was intentional, then it was not a miscommunication. No mix-up actually took place, so laughter and mirth should not be activated. If someone intentionally laughs at the death of a loved one, there was no coordination failure; they were just being cruel. Freudian slips are still accidental because even if you're thinking or feeling something unconsciously, we still have norms and conventions not to say it out loud. And the person is violating those conventions unintentionally.
In the case of political satire, the goal is not to get people to panic about the dangerous politician. In fact, humor is likely to thwart that goal, which is why people who are afraid of a dangerous politician are often disinclined to joke about them. They would rather talk seriously about the threat of that politician than make light of it. The goal of political satire is, instead, to make the politician look foolish, to make them look like an oaf, buffoon, nincompoop, philistine, slob, klutz, or ignoramus. This is an entirely different political strategy than trying to drum up fear about the politician's policies. The goal here is to make the politician look bad or lower their status so people don't want to affiliate with them. I have no idea which political strategy is more effective.
Great article; any reminder that language itself is a coordination game gets a like!
What do you make of the fact that not all faux pas get met with laughter-as-forgiveness? Sometimes laughter gets used both as a signal of group membership (laughing with) for those coloring within the lines and group exclusion (laughing at) those who committed the faux pas, literally in the same breath.
So this gets to a part of the theory I didn't mention, which is the meta-sense of humor. We evolved to sense others' senses of humor. Why? Because a person with a better sense of humor is going to be better at coordinating with you over the long run. So when a person commits a faux pas, it sometimes reveals that they are a very a bad coordination partner, a fool or an oaf or a buffoon, someone to be avoided in the social marketplace. In that case, we would laugh *at* the person instead of with them. If the faux pas was an honest mistake that anyone might have made, or is being recounted by someone else, we might laugh *with* the person instead of at them. This also ties into the distinction between shame and embarrassment, which I discuss in the paper. Embarrassment is when we lose status in an ambiguous or confusable way, and we try to tip the scales of coordination in favor of us not losing status. Humiliation is when we fail at tipping the scales and people coordinate on our lowered status--when they see us as a fool, oaf, klutz, buffoon or philistine.
The idea of a meta-sense is very interesting, because there are at least two different interpretations of "Sally has a sense of humor." "She makes me laugh" and " she laughs at my jokes" are not the same thing, and both might be distinct from "we laugh at the same jokes." All of which could have different functions as coordination signals.
Clearly, humour is a serious topic. I couldn’t stop thinking about how the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team struggled to explain to the media, and probably their WAGs and friends and family, why they laughed when their president invited them to the White House, and groaned that he would now also need to invite the Women’s team. I’m curious to hear your take on this!
Another banger. I only skimmed the paper, but one thought I had was about irony (which I've been pondering for a long time without success).
Assume a three-player game with a speaker and two listeners: one naive, one savvy. The speaker wants to form a closer social bond with the savvy listener, who has a better sense of mirth, & exclude the naive listener. In the simplest case of verbal irony (sarcasm), they do something quite sophisticated & generally neglected by scholars of language: they send a signal that has two intended meanings, a literal one for the naive listener, an ironic one for the savvy listener. I think many forms of humour (including some of the absurd stuff you mention) are about forming an elite or high-status coalition, signalled by the use of irony (speech or other performance that is confusing or banal to a naif, funny or clever to the cognoscenti).
This can get more complicated & exclusive as more & more additional knowledge is required to "get" the ironic meanings. E.g. one needs knowledge of the conventions of some art form in order for their ironic subversion or absence to be understood, one needs insider political/cultural knowledge to get satire, etc. But ultimately it's about signalling & status. My own taste is towards hyper-ironic work that bends so far back on itself that it's not even about anything — the joke being the absurdity of all things. & even though I consume this privately it must on some level be about colluding with the author & feeling I'm savvy enough to be part of an elite.
Yes, this is an example of covert signaling: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22926-1
If better social partners are more likely to get your joke or your irony, then you can tell the joke or make the ironic statement to covertly exclude uncool people while affiliating with likeminded cool people.
Thanks, that paper is great. The fact that I never discovered it in seven years sums up my scholarly career.
Better late than never.
Yes, I am also a big fan of I Think You Should Leave
In the Succession example, I’m not sure serious and mirthful could be plotted on an x,y diagram. Logan was always serious but was sometimes mirthful even when he didn’t intend it. The kids were never serious even when they intended it but were usually mirthful. Each variable needs to be considered from the perspective of the deliverer and the deliveree.
To be a serious person isn't to experience mirth at low frequencies. A person's seriousness depends on how others perceive them. If others perceive them as worthy of non-mirthful attention, as someone who can inflict costs on others, then they are a serious person. The Joker would be a good example of someone who experiences mirth at high frequencies but is still a serious person because of the harm they can inflict on others.
Isn’t being serious inherently related to having status? In what context would you be taken seriously if you had no status? You aren’t serious people strikes me as status signaling and painful to the recipients since it hits home. Great post but hard to take seriously on the Everything is Bullshit blog - lol.
Seriousness and status are very highly correlated, yes, but they’re not identical. It seems to me that an infamous serial killer or terrorist is low-status but serious.
Point taken and accepted. Tangential point - serial killers are serious but also still status seeking / status broadcasting amongst serial killers.
Incredible writing! I am fascinated by the way that technology has influenced this dynamic, especially in young people like myself entering the work place, and finding themselves not yet knowledgeable enough to be taken ‘seriously’ at all times.
I have found it surprisingly difficult to accurately relay that very beneficial ‘mirth’ through communication like email or teams. It is a steep learning curve to translate this concept (which is often communicated through laughter and inflection) into digital corporate communication. Ironically, I think many young people, (or at least myself) intend to communicate playful mirth as they are earnestly learning within their career, and inadvertently commit faux pas of digital communication that negate the mirth that they were attempting to signal. Thereby, breaking rules of digital seriousness and undermining their attempt to suspend seriousness as they plastically work through an unknown concept.
Thanks, Truett. The digital medium definitely makes it harder to signal mirth and defuse the costs of mix-ups. We can use emojis and lols but without the rapid back and forth of real laughter combined with facial expressions and body language it’s much harder to create common knowledge of mirth. I don’t know the solution to this aside from more face-to-face communication and zoom calls.
Great theory ! Explains a lot and gives a lot to think about.
I heard that most laughter happens in conversational settings, not at jokes but at simple statements like “I missed my bus.” This conversational laughter tends to start and stop quickly and is synchronized at the end of statements and the person who laughs most is the one speaking. Often we don't even realise this is happening. That seems to fit very well with your idea of laughter as coordination and maybe deserve a bit more exposure than the very noticeable comedies. What do you think? source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d34lQ8LEYsk&list=PLz1pLGZvT9YzBPxiexdHwoCnGuRLJsg9x&index=7
The meta-sense of humor is about displaying coordinatoin skill trhough humor initaly for fixing mix-ups. I had ahought before that most jokes are actually displays of skill. That fits well here since coordination itself is a skill but it is also a neat way to play the status game. You can signal good taste or competence more plainly than usual because the humor softens or defuses the usual backlash of overt self-display. Self-deprecating humor, for example, often ends up doing the opposite of what it claims and subtly highlights how capable you are. I assume you though of this way more, curious to see if you think there is something partciular in the interaction of mirth and status game or not.
Yea, definitely humor is an effective status seeking strategy. Doesn't come with the costs of overt self-promotion as you note. It is also a much more effective way to lower other people's status. If you punch someone, you look cruel and they might punch you back. But if you mock someone, you look funny and they look foolish, and there's nothing the person can do to retaliate. I talk about status games in one section of the paper. Specifically, I make the point that status games are themselves coordination games: we have to coordinate on who is high or low status, and if we disagree about that, we pay a cost. I argue that embarrassments arise when audiences struggle to coordinate about whether the person lost status.
I find the mixed up the theory of humor quite interesting. Does it say anything about why we laugh to show understanding? Or is that a separate phenomenon
Yes, part of the function of laughter to signal that we've sensed the mix-up (or get the joke). And part of the function is to defuse the costs of that mix-up by reciprocating laughter. They are related, of course, because we cannot defuse the costs of the mix-up unless we both know (that the other one knows) that there has been a mix-up.
Sorry I’m thinking about when there is no mix up, just understanding. Like when we laughed bc someone is coming across as relatable. Might seem like just doing the annoying “well what about this” thing but i think when i usually read about theories of humor i get stuck here
I’m not aware of any examples of people laughing at something merely because they understand it or relate to it. Usually people only laugh when the thing they are relating to or understanding is some kind of mix-up. If we both know what it’s like to grow up with divorced parents or take the bus to school, or if we both understand quantum theory, it doesn’t really make sense to laugh at that fact.
Also maybe there are mix ups in these examples that dont seem obvious to me
More please 🙏
Glad to see this write up. I did a "vibe read," Kling style, of your paper last week, sparked by your recent podcast guest appearance (the read was better spent time). Pretty thought provoking and generally convincing. Felt like a stretch on the absurd humor, but maybe I missed something.
Lmk what you find to be a stretch. Happy to elaborate or even change my mind on it (it's still a working paper).
I was thinking of the Naked Gun example and at first blush it seemed a stretch with no clear party for the mix up, or multiple possibilities for the source of mix up: what is noir, what is a credit sequence for, etc. The movie itself being the foolish character.
But maybe the mix up is between the source and the viewer, with their model of what's normal. "What exactly am I watching?!" We're kinda metaphorically walking down the hallway and the scene is juking side to side.
That requisite model might explain absurd humor being viewed as more cerebral. Ok, maybe not so much Naked Gun, but more Monty Python or Norm MacDonald's "bombing" roast. And there, Naked Gun would naturally not be as "high brow" or cerebral because it announces itself as a parody. You already know to expect the unexpected in an expected way. But it takes a second to figure out what the fuck Norm is up to teasing Cloris Leachman about her hoopty.
Just spit-balling. Going to bump that recent Pinker book toward the top of the pile.
That's a good point that it may be judged as a mix-up along the lines of "what am i even watching" or a mix-up about what a movie is even supposed to be. I added a sentence about that to the paper--thanks.
I had a friend who was studying how to use humor in advocacy for climate change action and he said there was research/evidence that people were more open and able to listen and learn in the context of humor. Which is the whole functional purpose of the "ice breaker" joke at the beginning of a speech, etc. I'm interested if you know about such research. Also - he clearly distinguished between humor and laughter. Humor doesn't have to evoke a laugh - but rather puts a different, amusing, frame on interactions.
I'm not sure if humor directly increases people's willingness to listen and learn, but I find it plausible that it indirectly increases these things, through social bonding. We're more likely to listen and learn from people that we like. I'm not aware of any research on this.
Another gem! I have two observations and a question. First, it seems that unpredictability is a sine qua non for humor. A joke where the punch line is obviously coming isn't as funny as a surprising punchline. Similarly, the unexpectedness of someone's misspeaking seems to be part of what makes it funny. The second observation is that perceived lack of conscious intention helps us to laugh at/with someone's misspeaking. Intending to laugh out loud at the death of a loved one is cruel rather than funny. (However, conscious intention might be undermined by unconscious intention, à la Freudian slips, as "I hooked up with your mother last night" might be interpreted.)
My question concerns the suggestion that well-designed mirth should prevent illusory dangers from sending either party into a panic: "Insofar as mirth is well-designed, it might produce a general deactivation of emotions that process costs, in order to stop the wildfire of negative representations from spreading throughout the brain and disrupting the process of mutual cost defusal." I understand that this claim has to do with panics over the relationship between speaker and listener being potentially undermined. But what I am wondering is, does this also apply to cases where the speaker/writer seems to want to make the listener/reader laugh about a scary, horrible situation that is external to both of them? In particular, political satire about dangerous politicians. Even more specifically, I am thinking about the Substack "Are you f'ng kidding me?" where Jo Carducci describes the horrible behavior of politicians with brilliantly funny metaphors.
Unpredictability matters because there are diminishing returns to defusing the costs of, and creating common knowledge of, a mix-up. If everybody already knows about the mix-up and knows to avoid it, laughter isn't really needed. In fact, if you laugh at a mix-up that we're already intimately familiar with and know to avoid, then that shows us you are a bad coordination partner, a person who is not one of us. This is why puns and potty humor are funnier to kids than adults. We've already learned toilet etiquette and homonyms, so the humor is beneath us--a "dad joke" as they say.
Intention matters, because if the communication was intentional, then it was not a miscommunication. No mix-up actually took place, so laughter and mirth should not be activated. If someone intentionally laughs at the death of a loved one, there was no coordination failure; they were just being cruel. Freudian slips are still accidental because even if you're thinking or feeling something unconsciously, we still have norms and conventions not to say it out loud. And the person is violating those conventions unintentionally.
In the case of political satire, the goal is not to get people to panic about the dangerous politician. In fact, humor is likely to thwart that goal, which is why people who are afraid of a dangerous politician are often disinclined to joke about them. They would rather talk seriously about the threat of that politician than make light of it. The goal of political satire is, instead, to make the politician look foolish, to make them look like an oaf, buffoon, nincompoop, philistine, slob, klutz, or ignoramus. This is an entirely different political strategy than trying to drum up fear about the politician's policies. The goal here is to make the politician look bad or lower their status so people don't want to affiliate with them. I have no idea which political strategy is more effective.
Great article; any reminder that language itself is a coordination game gets a like!
What do you make of the fact that not all faux pas get met with laughter-as-forgiveness? Sometimes laughter gets used both as a signal of group membership (laughing with) for those coloring within the lines and group exclusion (laughing at) those who committed the faux pas, literally in the same breath.
So this gets to a part of the theory I didn't mention, which is the meta-sense of humor. We evolved to sense others' senses of humor. Why? Because a person with a better sense of humor is going to be better at coordinating with you over the long run. So when a person commits a faux pas, it sometimes reveals that they are a very a bad coordination partner, a fool or an oaf or a buffoon, someone to be avoided in the social marketplace. In that case, we would laugh *at* the person instead of with them. If the faux pas was an honest mistake that anyone might have made, or is being recounted by someone else, we might laugh *with* the person instead of at them. This also ties into the distinction between shame and embarrassment, which I discuss in the paper. Embarrassment is when we lose status in an ambiguous or confusable way, and we try to tip the scales of coordination in favor of us not losing status. Humiliation is when we fail at tipping the scales and people coordinate on our lowered status--when they see us as a fool, oaf, klutz, buffoon or philistine.
The idea of a meta-sense is very interesting, because there are at least two different interpretations of "Sally has a sense of humor." "She makes me laugh" and " she laughs at my jokes" are not the same thing, and both might be distinct from "we laugh at the same jokes." All of which could have different functions as coordination signals.
Fantastic! Well done :)
Clearly, humour is a serious topic. I couldn’t stop thinking about how the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team struggled to explain to the media, and probably their WAGs and friends and family, why they laughed when their president invited them to the White House, and groaned that he would now also need to invite the Women’s team. I’m curious to hear your take on this!
the JOKE president extends an invataion & of course the only thing it could invoke - - Laughter ! what else?
It’s ok to give me a smack if you’ve already covered this!
It’s actually a great saying and a great insult.
I remember a tweet saying “if you drink less than two coffees per day you are a deeply unserious person”