 Hello, Neil. How are you doing this lovely day? First of all, I'm very well. Thank you. I'm very impressed by your rather fancy-looking beats, as the young people say. I'm looking fine. Hopefully this here is not too distracting. And I have checked to see whether there's anything incriminating on those shelves. And I think there is nothing. So if somebody does play this back and they've like, you know, spotted some sort of, you know, they might have to zoom in and find something crazy. But you have, you have your new book that I was, I was so fortunate that you sent an advanced copy of the psychology of comedy. So do me a favor and let, let these lovely people know like what, what inspired you to write this book? Cause you're a professor, correct? That's right. Yes. I'm a professor of psychology. I'm honorary professor of psychology at Regents University London. I did used to run the psychology department there. The, the book, which is the psychology of comedy is, is one that about 20 years ago, I'd have jumped at the chance of writing. But it's the genesis of the gestation of this was not what I was expecting because when I originally put a proposal to a publisher. So I've written quite a few books and I thought, well, what's the next one? And I thought, I know what I want to do because I've developed an interest in this profession is horror. So I knew a publisher. I knew a publisher that was doing a particular series, a very nice series called the psychology of everything. And they, it is a psychology of everything. There are little books on driving and the weather and prejudice. It's a really interesting set of books from Taylor and Francis. So the, the editor was following me on Twitter and I followed her. And so I sent this email of about five paragraphs of justification about why she should be interested in a book about the psychology of horror. It's, you know, it is the most successful horror film of all time. Look what the money it's making under these festivals and all the rest of it. And then at the end I said, oh, I got psychology of comedy. So you can imagine what happened next. I got an email back from her name's Kerry saying, ah, not sure horror would work. The one on comedy though sounds fantastic. So I ended up doing one on the psychology of comedy because I suppose like most people interested in comedy, you know, we like to laugh. I like to laugh and ever since I was very, very young, I had a real professional and meaningful interest in comedy. So when I was growing up, I used to sort of submit these generally awful scripts to TV shows. I get rejected more often. I was accepted. I did have one joke broadcast on the BBC radio one Steve Wright in the afternoon. I think I was about 14, 15. So it sort of started from there really, you know, sort of really enjoying comedy is to record comedy from TV and the radio and so store them on these little cassettes at the time because I'm 150. And then that sort of stayed with me until university. And when I did, I intended to study English. Yeah, because I wanted to be a television critic when I grew up. Yeah. But I went to a Scottish university. And my regent, as he was called, said, well, you have to take three subjects because I chose a philosophy in English. And I said, what do you do? And he said, I do psychology. I said, I'll do psychology then. And then two years after that, decided to move completely into psychology because they knew more about behavior than English people did. Then did my undergraduate thesis on the influence of audience laughter when it comes to comedy. And that really is where this all started. Yeah, that's really interesting too, especially because horror was going to be the original one. It sounds like comedy has had such a huge... It sort of couldn't be more different, but in a sense they are quite similar. I mean, there's a paper which has made comparisons between comedy film and horror film and how the emotions they arouse, although they're a bit different. There are some similarities between them. You know, like we go there because we want to express ourselves in a particular way, either through laughter or fear. Expressive responses as well as intellectual ones. But yeah, it's a little bit different. It's super interesting because at the time we're recording this, today I released an episode with sociologist Margie Kerr. I don't know if you've come across her book. It's called Scream, but she dives into some of the psychology behind fear, like from scary movies to roller coasters and stuff like that. And yeah, I think we need more. So hopefully Rutledge has you come back and do one on horror too, because I think that'd be super interesting. Is there a book on fear generally, then, the Scream book? Yeah, yeah, fear. She specializes in researching the psychology behind fear and pain. So yeah, check that out, and then you'll know the different stuff. But one thing that you and I were talking about, too, was just about your book on the psychology of comedy. Like, I didn't know what to expect when I came through it. I came across it on Twitter. I don't even remember how we like cross paths, but I'm like, huh, I like psychology. I like comedy. And I thought it was going to be kind of like this, like pop psychology, just like, you know, laughing makes you feel better. But you go into like so many studies and everything. And before we jump into some of that, you preface the book because here's my fear. Here's my fear whenever I come across anything that's like analytical of comedy. And it feels like once, once you start analyzing it, it's like, okay, cool. Now you just, now you just ruined it. Like I don't want somebody to dissect jokes and stuff like that. So how did you kind of navigate? I think you did a phenomenal job navigating that, but like, how did you, while you were writing? Yes, you're right. I mean, you know, there's that famous quote from of whites back in 1941, which I think was the New Yorkers saying that, you know, it's a bit like dissecting a frog trying to understand or analyze comedy is a bit like dissecting a frog. It's a very useful theoretical exercise, but in the end the frog dies. So, which is why, and I didn't want it to be that sort of book. I didn't want to be, I didn't want it to be two sorts of books to want to be too negative, but I didn't want it to be, as you said, a self-help book. That was no any of my minds. It's interesting. They should say that, you know, things like run without fun and your stride will falter, which is a quote from one of these self-help books, by the way. And I didn't also want it to be, you know, a rather turgid exegesis about the, the architecture and the mechanics of humor and, you know, you know, fairly abstract linguistics. I wanted it to be really one, an entertaining book because it's like a trade academic book, really. So it's for anybody who has no acquaintance with psychology or comedy, but presumably you like both. So if you like both, you might like the book. And I wanted to present what we know at the moment about studies that have been done empirically about one, our response to humor and comedy and why we produce humor and comedy and how laughter influences our behavior, whether it's in the health domain or the well-being domain or the learning domain or the selling domain, commercial or whatever. So I wanted to do that sort of book read to bring all these sort of threads together in a tiny book. So there's a lot of material that I had to cut out, but I've tried to condense the most interesting stuff into this, you know, fairly short. I think it's like 150,000 words in the, the books. That was the aim really. Yeah. Yeah. And, and yeah, it was exquisite. Like when I, when I, because I'm usually juggling multiple books that I read so dang much, but when I pick up your, it's like, I would go through like chapters because it's so interesting, like just all these different topics and seeing how, you know, like you mentioned, like, you know, from teaching to selling to all that, because I've always been like, you know, I goof around and stuff like that. And, and then just like when I got sober, like recovering from addiction, humor was a huge part like, you know, a story I don't think I've mentioned on this podcast, but the first friend I met sober is because we connected over a comedian, right. And just that type of humor and stuff like that. And when I got, because especially with addiction, a lot of people are numbing. Who's the comedian, Chris? The, the, sadly, Patrice O'Neill, he passed away a few years ago. Right. Yeah, but yeah, we were talking about, we were talking about him, but yeah, it was, it was just one of those things because, you know, one of my fears of getting sober was I won't have fun. I won't be able to do that because, you know, you use drugs and alcohol and stuff like that, but that showed me that I could laugh. And one thing that I found surprising about just even going to 12 step meetings was people would be telling these awful stories about the stuff we go through, but laughing about it. I'm like, okay, cool. And I want, in a second, we're going to go into some of like the theories of comedy, but the first thing I want to kind of discuss without giving away too much of the book is you talk about the differences between male and female humor, right. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of wires that get across and stuff like that, but there's also a lot of like commonality, right. Like where, you know, women find, you know, a male comedian funny or a men find a female community. So can you say, let us know, like, what is some of the studies kind of say about the differences between the genders? Well, I mean, this, I suppose, of all the controversial topics in the psychology of humor, this is probably the most controversial, but the most well-studied because, I mean, the headline, depending on how you read it, you know, may not be positive, but bear with me. Anyway, you've got two things, I suppose. One is the production of humor, and then you've got the enjoyment of humor. And are there any sex differences in either? And if there are, why should that be? Because, you know, it's not enough to look for, hunt for differences. There has to be a reason why you'd expect a difference in the first place. Otherwise, there's just a fishing expedition. And of course, what's interesting in the psychology literature is that if you bring together a mass of studies and one metro analysis did do this, Neil Greengross and two other authors at Aberystwyth University, meta-analyzed studies that examined the production of humor and whether the men or women produced more humor and whether they're perceived as being funnier produced by men or women. And, you know, what they found was, I think, from memory, it was about 28 studies, 36 individual sets of data, 5,000 participants, huge number. And I mean, what they did find was that 63% of the men produced more humor than the average number that women produced. So the finding generally was that men tend to produce more humor than do women. And what's interesting is that when you do surveys and you ask people, who do you think is funnier, men or women? Although both clearly are. I mean, it's, it's all that I say that, you know, men are funnier than women. No, I mean, there are funny men. There are unfunny men. There are funny women. But it's interesting that when you ask people, who do you think is funniest? Invariably, they always think that men are funnier and the percentages vary from study to study, but they're very high. I mean, one study found that both about 96% of men and 86% of women thought that men were funnier than women. That was back in about 2009. There was a more recent study or 2012. There's a more recent study showing that the percentage of proportionless stayed the same, but slightly lower. So about 68% think that men are funny. About 34% think that men and women are just the same. And about 7% think that women, around about 7% think that women are funnier than men. Which is interesting because then you think, well, why should that be? You know, why, first of all, why do men produce more humor? And that's the evidence. And secondly, why do people think that, you know, men are funny? They may be perceived as funny because they produce more humor. Yeah. You know, humor production ability to use the jargon. That's what it's called in psychology. And men tend to exhibit more than this than do women. And one theory is that it's related to evolutionary theory, sex selection. And it's humorous thought to be a mental fitness indicator. So these are the psychological characteristics, that attract a mate to another mate. Evolutionary psychology is all about sex and mating. And you can park that to one side. But what they suggest is that things like, you know, kindness, trustworthiness, intelligence, and humor, are these mental fitness indicators. By mental fitness, you know, you mean, well, this is somebody who I might want to have a child with. Yeah. And they'll be, they'll be attending to my needs and they'll be very thoughtful and trustworthy and give me security and so on and so on. And so it's thought that men are more likely to produce this because women are thought to be more receptive to it. Yeah. Which is interesting thought, because if you look at this in practice, say lonely hearts adverts, I mean, that's the most cliche but obvious example. When people have studied lonely hearts adverts, what they find is that men are more likely than women to state that they have a good sense of humor. Because women are more likely to say they enjoy laughing, like, would like somebody who could not. They're less likely to say, I have a good sense of humor. And in fairness, when you ask men what you'd like in a partner, having a good sense of humor doesn't score very highly for men when it comes to choice of women, but it does score very highly for women when it comes to choice of men. So I think that's the, that's the one explanation for why, you know, men, that you have this sex difference in the production of humor in men and women. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah. As somebody who just loves evolutionary psychology, like, you know, I hear that I'm like, okay, that makes sense. I was actually talking with David Bus, who does all this. Yeah. You know, psychological research around like sex psychology and stuff. And I'm like, okay, yeah. So like humor is kind of like the guys like peacock feathers. And, and yeah, you know, you see somebody funny who's like quick-witted and, you know, you know, can make, you know, these connections and stuff. And, or, you know, even watching comedians, I think one of the reasons we love comedians is because they observe things are really interesting ways. And so I could see that as being something guys use to impress. But as you mentioned, it doesn't mean women are less funny, right? You have unfunny on each. But yeah, we, I can see guys trying to do it more often to show off and hey, look, look at me and impress. You know, hey, you, you pick me as a mate. Not only will I produce great kids, but you'll have fun with me and all that. So that's, that's, that's super interesting. Um, so. So they make more attempts at it as well. Yeah. Humor. I said, you mentioned Donald bus. I mean, he did publish one of the more interesting studies, which looked at what people find attractive in a mate. You know, he found that a sense of humor was priced highly in women, but not in men. That is a men prize sense of humor, less highly in women than women did in, in men. But it's just sort of, you know, I suppose finish off this little bit really. I mean, the sex difference is interesting because it can sort of feed into this stereotype that women are not funny, which, you know, it's clearly not true. And in the book, I have like a whole paragraph. Um, female names where I think, well, look at this brilliant comedian. Bridesmaid's made 300 million dollars, you know, and it's in its opening year. And there's a, there's a very good book by Moana Banks. Um, I think Amanda Swift called, um, what's it called? They called the jokes on us where it begins with a BBC light entertainment producer responding to the book proposal by saying, Oh, a book about women's comedy. That'll be short. You know, so there was this, this was published about 20 years ago. So there was that prejudice, even in, um, you know, the echelons of a major, um, international broadcaster, the BBC, I think it's all, it has all changed. Um, yeah. But, um, you know, the, but the, the, the data, the research still shows this, you know, sex difference in what people believe, uh, about, um, which sex produces more humor and why. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's really, that's really interesting. So, so humor can help us potentially find a mate. I think that's half the, that's half the reason I've ever, you know, been able to date anybody in my life. It's cause I could hopefully make them laugh sometimes. But, uh, one, one thing is too, like, I want to, I want to talk about education, right? You dive into that in the book and you do a little research and, and I want you to explain it, but I think about it. Like I would love to have you as a professor. Cause nobody wants like a boring teacher. And when I was working at a, uh, a drug rehab, when I would be educating people about boring subjects, like, you know, dopamine systems and stuff like that, I would try to make it engaging and kind of fun. And then like reading your book, I'm like, Oh, makes sense. So can you kind of explain how comedy helps make things click for people and maybe some teachers are listening to this? Huh. Well, that is an interesting question. Cause the answer to that is we don't know, but it's some interesting evidence about, um, whether you should use humor in the classroom. So what we do know is that, um, students do respond more positively to tutors, stroke lecturers who do use humor in the classroom as long as it's relevant to the material. If it isn't relevant to the material, their interest plummets. And they become less bored, but they become, um, they're less satisfied with the nature of the work. And they do less well when they tested, you know, at the end of the semester or the end of, of the term. The other thing that students don't like in terms of humor is when the humor is overly negative or too self-effacing. Like what? You know, almost self-destructively self-effacing, you know, whether tutors might say, make a joke out of it, his or her own perceived. Oh, gotcha, gotcha. They don't like that. It's interesting, it's sort of a little sidebar to this. We did some research with colleagues at UCL, uh, about whether students prefer lecturers like themselves. And we did find that, yes, students did prefer, um, tutors who shared the same personality characteristics, you know, extraversion, openness to experience. The one trait they did not appreciate was neuroticism, which is having a sense of, you know, extreme anxiety and concern and worry and so on. So if they themselves were high in neuroticism, they didn't like tutors who are high in neuroticism. Uh, the paper was called Birds of a Feather, Flock Together, you know, so, um, so in terms of, uh, teaching, there is some evidence to suggest that if you inject humor into your teaching, um, students do perform better in tests at the, the end of the semester. There have been some attempts to introduce it into exams, which is probably one of the worst ideas I've ever seen. Imagine being in an exam and you're sitting there, somebody makes a joke out of the, the question, you've been asked, no, that's not very good at all. Um, and yeah, they didn't do as well. The idea behind that was to see if you could alleviate exam based anxiety, which is a perfect example. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, misguided in the context of sitting an exam. I would have thought. Yeah. There's quite a bit of research on that. The other thing that, again, there's some, but not very much, but what there is, um, there are a couple of things that you can do. Pick out one is, you know, what I've just said that, um, use humor, but use it judiciously. Don't use it all over the place. And around about three or four attempts per hour seems to be like the optimal rates. Um, if you're joking all the time, the students are not going to learn. They may find it entertaining, but, you know, they're obviously there to learn, you know, and not watch a HBO special. Yeah. So, so you, as a professor, like, uh, I don't know if diving into research has like helped you out more with like how you teach or anything like that. But you said like you make it relevant. Uh, to the material. So can you like, can you kind of give an example of something that might happen? Like, you know, in one of your classrooms or like the material and, you know, I know you don't got the whole, you know, I'm extemporizing on my, my sofa. I know one year it was Halloween where I was giving electrical frontal lobes. And my first slide was Phineas Gage. Do you know Phineas Gage? Yeah. The pole. Yeah. Yeah. Where are you based? The States, by the way, Chris. I am in Las Vegas, Nevada. Oh, okay. So at the opposite end, if you go to Harvard Medical School, you can actually see Phineas Gage's skull. Oh, wow. See over there in Massachusetts. Um, so yeah, I did dress up. Um, I had a Dracula's cape. So I did dress up as Dracula. Anyway, that's completely irrelevant, but the students. So a couple of things I, I do do to make things interesting is I do one lecture on localization of function in the brain. So, you know, where do, where do functions reside in each hemisphere? If they do. And I, I give them examples of how we are, although we look symmetrical, we're actually quite asymmetrical. So, you know, I say, well, you know, if you took mirror images of the, if you took a left, left and a right, right composite of the face, they would be very different. And, you know, you could do this yourself. Look in the mirror and do that. I'm just covering your face and then try and do the mirror image. You will look very different with a left, left compared to a right, right composite. So, you know, I get them to look at each other and I say, well, place a pencil on your nose there. And can you see a difference? And sometimes they say, oh yeah, she's got a wonky eye or yeah, my eyebrow has been badly made up, you know, through a bit, Kathy. So I start with this. And, you know, I say, well, you know, we have two nostrils, we have two eyes, we have two ears, but we're not, you know, the same. I say, you know, women of two breasts, but one is larger than, on one side of the other men have two testicles, but one descends lower than the other. So, gentlemen, if you could just stand up for a second. And you could see there's this flicker of recognition say, hang on, is he being serious? And then like a release, a relief of laughter when they realise I'm not expecting the men to expose themselves in the middle of a lecture theatre. So I try and do sort of little things like that. Then there's a session I do on smell and taste where I give them a pheromone and my favourite cologne. And the pheromone is androstomone. And this is very famous in chemistry world because half the population can't smell it. And the half that do thinks it smells like a gents' lavatory. So I can't, I'm an osmic to it. So when I prepare it, I have to do it in a toilet because if I spray it and you can smell it, it does stink to high heaven. I mean it's very urinous. So that's a little session that I do. I have these perfumer strips and I've doped them with a little bit of androstomone or a little bit of the cologne. And then you know hand it around and you know they sniff tentatively and they say oh that's very nice if it's the cologne. Yeah. Amani's attitude, by the way, if you're interested. You can't get any walkers. Every perfume I like cologne, they discontinue. Really? So if you want the estates, bring it over. I'll look around. Thank you. With the androstomone, you know, most of them just go oh smells chemical because they're smelling the paper. But then the ones that can smell it, which is about 10% of the group normally, I mean the reaction is just you know it's oh, I mean that's the reaction. You know, you try and make these things interesting by you know introducing a little bit of fun into the session. Yeah. Yeah, is this something too? Like I'm curious. So you know I don't know. Actually you know there probably is a decent amount of professors who do listen to this because a lot of you know authors are like yourself professors but I'm thinking about like work too, right? Like you have like work training and stuff. Do you think this is something that like employers should be kind of like aware of and stuff like that? Could I help with like training or boring seminars or whatever? Yes, I know interestingly because there was one study that looked at the perception of male and female managers using humor in instructional videos. Now the videos were fictional but they had a man and a woman either being humorous or not. And what was interesting was that the man was perceived as using the humor very functionally. So in exactly the same way it was suggesting that you know use the humor to deliver information or deliver you know some training. The response to the female instructor was not remotely positive. I mean she was rewarded as being less able to do her job because of the use of humor. So you know there's I mean that's just one study but I thought it was interesting. You know the prejudice that people have about you know the use of humor used by you know certain people. If it's done well Chris you're absolutely right. Doing something humorously does work and you may or may not know this but back about 20 30 years ago John Cleese set up a company where he did exactly this. Oh really? Made a lot of money out of it so he and a few of the Monty Python people and a few others used to create these instructional videos for company about how to respond to people who complain about companies and the right and the wrong way of approaching you know customer complaints. And they were really funny you know and Griffry Jones and Mel Smith they went on did sort of a similar thing. So done well I mean these were done by professionals. They're done well they're brilliant. I do remember vividly though one where it went really badly where it was I just started this job and we're all given a raft of HR training about various things. I was managing at the time and they started with a clip from the the British office which involved an appraisal being done by David Brent one of his employees. Yeah and they just showed this clip with no context you know and it was meant to say oh isn't this amusing. This is how not to do an appraisal and you're sitting there thinking well we sort of know this because it's the office and the office is known for putting people in terrible situations that shouldn't happen. Yeah I was using humor I thought in a way that was not the best in a fairly you know pack-handed way. Yeah so I that that's you know another thing so I since we're talking about this like you know whether it's in the classroom or at work or you know wherever it is and and I you've you've you've seen how kind of like I don't know it seems like over the last 10 years or whatever the climate's kind of changed right. So I'd imagine that there are many people afraid to make certain jokes and things like that and things evolve over time like some jokes that didn't use they they were okay and now they're not okay but anyways like you you cover this in a book like offensive humor and and I do want to talk about some of the the theories around humor but like since we're on this topic how how can people kind of navigate this like people need to read the book but like if if you had to give somebody like a tip like for navigating the workspace or if they want to bring humor to the classroom without getting written up or you know whatever it is how how do we navigate that offensive humor. Well it's the honest answer it's really hard which is why some employees lawyers shy away from it because even the most innocuous comment may be perceived very innocuously or noxiously yeah noxiously probably so you know you have to be real unless you're being blandly amusing which is fine um you know it's it's best to steer away from you know some things you know deliberately because um yeah causing offence is a is a big thing and it is all in the the eye of the beholder you know whether you you're meant to be offensive or not be offensive yeah some of these next offence then you know there's a likelihood that may be you know complained about it you know some people have more liberal views than you know than others and just think oh actually that's that's quite amusing um and i've been in situations where i've thought oh that's that's not quite i mean i'm quite liberal minded as you could imagine yeah that's a little bit near the knuckle of maybe you should have range yourself in a little bit there yeah um so yeah it's it's it's it's it's tougher i'm not sure if it's getting tougher um i mean it's i talk in the book about a particular tv show called a brass eye um which was a spoof news program on channel four in this country and they did a spoof episode about pedophilia but it wasn't about pedophilia it was about the press's response to pedophilia so basically it was satirizing the media's response to this um you know this horrible crime not not the crime itself but people got very angry because they thought they're mocking you know children being abused which was not at all charlie brooker was one of the writers chris morris who did three lines was the the presenter and at the time well until last year your last year it was the most complained about program on british television because it was so offensive to some people really it was superseded last year by complaints about the coverage of the death of the duke of edinburgh because people thought there was too much of it so um people were offended in a different way yeah you know about something entirely different in a different context yeah so causing offense but then sometimes causing offense is justified for example if you're being satirical so you know sometimes the point of creating something offensive is to try and change the way of thinking or to ridicule something you think is actually either dictatorial or offensive or injurious in some way which is why you know politicians tend to be the subject of satire and religious leaders tend to be you know the subject of satire of course the consequences seriously can be really bad you think of charlie hebdo you know the satirical french magazine which was a number of its staff were murdered by you know extremists who didn't like their representation of particular faiths you know so sometimes it can attract the responses of extremists as well as people who aren't extreme but just don't like what you say after all i mean there is no balance yeah yeah yeah it's yeah it's something where it's like i feel like i've had to learn like since i've always goofed around like you know there's lessons i learned like you know when i was a child and getting a little bit older and you know just my age and then you know how the world changes around me and stuff and you know the best thing i've learned like when it comes to like work or other atmospheres that could be professional it's like you know knowing the context getting to know people and just kind of having that overall awareness but it could be this fine line like you said too it's like the perception matters too and that's that's difficult that that could be difficult sometimes but personally i just try to like take a step back and be like okay what was their intent were they trying to be funny were they trying to be offensive like what what was it but but yeah that that's a good segue into some of these theories right so that was one of my favorite parts of the book are you like broke it down i'm like oh this is interesting so like uh a couple that i just dodged down on my notes like i wrote down like the superiority theory Freud that that guy had all sorts of wacky views about you know certain things but uh but yeah can you can you kind of give like a brief overview of some of the theories that you discuss in the book right like because you know it made me think about people who use humor to you know show status and put other people down you know and there's all these all these different kind of reasons so yeah i would love to hear a little bit yeah sure um yeah listen thanks about chris um i mean most theories of we call them theories of comedy and humor but really if you if you look at them they're actually theories of laughter i mean why is there these laughter and what's the purpose and um rather than the theories of comedy you know per se and i mean there are loads of theories i mean there are tens of them but i suppose if there are four or five i suppose you might call big general theories of of humor and one of them touching on what we just talked about is superiority um theory um and this is the and this is tied to disparagement humor which is you know sort of what we were just talking about really uh which is this idea that we we generate laughter we use comedy in order to belittle others and to establish our own superiority and social or physical status as well so in in a sense it sort of has a malicious you know purpose um it's quite an old one this one i mean Plato was one of the first people to you know touch on this as a as a theory and and then you've got you know you've got the triumvirate you've got all of them uh Plato Socrates and Aristotle more or less thought the same thing about the use of laughter and humor that is it was not a good thing because it indicated what a what an unpleasant person you are because um it's it's all about demonstrating your own purity and integrity and competence and belittling someone else or someone else's or something else's purity integrity and confidence when an Aristotle called people who make people off vulgar buffoons yeah imagine such a thing chris vulgar buffoons comedy industry would die out if that was the case um and then um you had so that was the ancient view of you know um laughter then i suppose that's the the uh the most well known advocate of this theory a little bit later sort of 17th century was uh Thomas Hobbes who described something called the sudden glory so the laughter was the sudden glory of recognition that you've established your own um competence and um seniority and authority compared to somebody else's you know it was a way of us of saying you know i'm better than you and he said this is why we use laughter that's the purpose of laughter to to demonstrate this superiority and it sort of runs through you know we talked about a fence a few seconds ago it runs through some really famous types of jokes as well so if you think of you know the subjects i suppose objects with the most other way of putting it the object of jokes they tend to be other based on sex or race or political party sometimes usually though an outgroup you know not a member of our own in group but a group that we are the dislike or is different to us um and and that's the butt of the joke so the very famous example is you know in America at one point the anti-polish jokes you know were very common and even within you know the states itself you know new yorkers make jokes about other parts other states you know like like the midwest states um yeah in the in the UK you know the very famous example is um irish people or scottish people being mean irish people being not very bright or welsh people and uh i'm a welsh person being obsessed with fornicating with sheep right so you there's the there is a very funny joke which i'll tell you you can cut this out if you like which is this right so it's it's a joke against my nation chris so very windy um i'm allowed to say this and the joke is uh what do you call a sheep tied to a light tied to a lamp post in wales a leisure center right the idea you know the welsh are obsessed with fornicating with ungulates right um and then you've got the blonde joke is sort of universal in western cultures yeah and can be specific to countries as well so in the UK we've got in so-called Essex girls jokes which are more of blonde girl jokes but you know translocated to a specific county and you know there are tons of those and again without wanting to be too offensive but i'll give you one example um which i think i did put in the book so i can say which is you know how do you get a one-armed woman out of a tree a one-armed blonde woman out of a tree you know the idea being that she's so dim that somebody's waving and she waves and she falls down the tree and she hurts herself you know so there are these you know traditional butts of jokes um that are you know very offensive actually you know it's okay if you are irish scottish welsh blonde yeah polish blah blah blah so when when did people when did it kind of like transition when they were like oh we can have huber to make other people have fun or whatever it is because there was one book i was really i can't remember if it was robin hanson's book the elephant in the brain but one of the few years i think i heard was like laughing as a way of saying like you know we're playing around right so like if you're wrestling i'm laughing it's hey i'm not serious i'm not really trying to fight you so so they they that was kind of signaling like hey this is okay this we're just here to have fun so when did people start to realize that hey maybe this isn't for like always nefarious reasons because there's still people who use humor as a way to put people down or you know uh uh you know just be cruel but yeah when when do they start saying like oh maybe we can have fun with this we're threading back to what you said earlier as well but a use of you know yasu can we use humor in a work context well of course you can because it used to break the ice and that's one of the one of the main uses of humor in um a non-social social context but i mean you know you with people you don't really know but it's still a social context like a work environment or a meeting you know i'm breaking the ice with a joke is a brilliant way of getting people relaxed you know defuse the situation maybe provide some relief if people are feeling quite tense um in terms of when things change i think things sort of overlap because superiority theory is just one i mean the the other big one is incongruity which well actually before i go on to that you talk about playfulness there is one theory that is specifically about playfulness and that is um um apta's reversal theory and apta suggested this he suggested that well during the day we we actually go in and out of two different states the paratelic state and the telic state and the paratelic state is our playful state when we're very receptive to laughter and you know a bit of wrestling um chris um don't ask me to wrestle i'm too far away i can arm wrestle you have that um whereas the telic state is when we're much more serious but we're very goal directed and these two um are sort of oppositional so they don't you know overlap at all but we do sort of dovetail and between these two things he says doing this like tells the unexpected we do do that during the the course of the day so that again is another sort of theory of of um humor but going back to the incongruity theory i mean this this is a big very interesting theory that does explain a lot an incongruity theory is the idea that we laugh at things because we two see two things go together juxtapose together that shouldn't go together you know it's like an oxymoron and that's the joke yeah um and and a lot of humor is about drawing this you know incongruity a lot of visual humours about um you know incongruity uh one more i mean one of my favorite cartoons is uh two firemen have turned up and there's a cat and the cat has a tree trunk stuck up it stuck up its bottom and one fireman says to the other well i suppose a tree up a cat makes a change you know the idea of being normally a cat is stuck up a tree in the fire yeah so um yeah so there are lots of examples of this in tv and film comedy as well you know this incongruity i mean airplane i mean it's like stuffed oh yeah in congress you know comedy examples yeah so yeah those are two sacks that's one of the playful ones you mentioned Freud i mean Freud's theory doesn't sort of hold much traction these days yeah which are typical of much of you know Freudian psychoanalytic theory just generally i think but you know Freud argued that that we use jokes in order to express things that we are prevented from expressing normally and those jokes tend to be sexual or aggressive and we can express our sexual and aggressive urges via the medium of jokes yeah make those feelings acceptable you know there's not much evidence for this by the way but you know um as with Freud everything's about yeah yeah he was probably doing a lot of cocaine when he came up with that theory but uh but yeah like there's also kind of this this social aspect and i and i one of the questions i've been dying to ask you while i had to hear is you you dive into laugh track so so let me let me let me tell you something that bothers me real quick you know there's there's people who dissect the frog if you will right uh maybe it's because i come from a youtube background but uh they'll they'll take like big bang theory or friends or some of these famous shows and they're just like look how look how unfunny this is with a laugh track and first off that makes me want to put a hole in the wall because like like the whole structure would be different if they weren't waiting for the laugh track you know what i mean like of course it's going to make it awkward if you pull this out it's just going to be a gap but anyways anyways uh the guy who like invented the laugh track he made like a bajillion dollars and stuff but can you kind of can you kind of explain like this kind of social like uh i can't remember if this has something to do with like mirror neurons or what but why why did they use laugh tracks you just say mirror neurons yeah like we mimic each other to aromatherapy next well well there's this there's this idea that laughter is contagious you know the contagion of laughter that is true um but the interesting thing is well what happens if you sort of add laughter to say a piece of comedy that is either funny or not funny you know would you laugh more to an unfunny joke if there was laughter added then if you listen to an unfunny joke without the the laughter which is a very interesting question yeah we have kind of laughter by the way i think it was time magazine back in 1999 who said this was the worst idea ever created which it is but only because it's used badly uh and laughter used well can actually make a comedy be perceived as funnier and can actually make people laugh and this is the key thing if the laughter seems natural then people tend to laugh more when they're listening to a watching comedy and the what's interesting is they also tend to find it funnier even though objectively you know there's no difference in comedy with or without laughter they tend to find comedy funnier if it's accompanied by audience laughter and that was the basis of my um undergraduate thesis because at the time there was um there was a sitcom um by do you know ben elton uh pretty stand-up comedian he he did queen the musical that is oh okay he wrote the lyrics for queen the musical say lyrics queen wrote the lyrics you know what i mean yeah i get it he's a very successful novelist and um you know he co-wrote black adder which you may know um and the young ones and so on so he wrote his first sitcom as a solo writer because he'd written with other people before um called happy families and his producer my uncle paul jackson very famous british tv producer and it sort of bond really and jackson said well you know people complained that there were no jokes in it uh bit like the people you know you described on youtube but he's saying well it was stuffed with jokes but there was no laugh to track to signal them in yeah that's an interesting idea so basically what you're saying is love the laughter acts as a sort of marker telling you that this is a joke and it's funny so what i i did was i mean i set up an experiment to see whether um you could test this hypothesis so i took um a radio series a topical radio series and i took the jokes that received more audience laughter in the live show because it was a live show i was being passed radio for saturday evening so a little bit of editing and then i presented men and women because that was the other thing i was looking at people had said oh women laugh more and they find comedy funnier when there's laughter accompanying comedy and as bits get the focus the literature was a bit up in there um so i asked them to listen to this either with or without the audience laughter and we found two things one that the audience laughter accompanying the sketches and the jokes did make people laugh more so i had a video camera you know recording their laughter an audio tape cassette recording their laughter and i was doing a lot of measuring and going to think so that happened also they found the comedy funnier when it was accompanied by laughter the second thing is there was no sex difference so both men and women laugh more and they found the comedy funnier when it was accompanied by laughter and the way i've tried to explain it is by saying that um bit like what jackson was saying anecdotally is that the the laughter tells you that there is something funny here yeah again it comes down to how well that laughter if it is inserted is actually inserted if it's done really badly it just looks like a badly edited piece of yeah yeah the way the way i've kind of always seen it is i don't know you got to kind of put yourself in a scenario like if you've like if you ever been friends with somebody and they introduce you to somebody else that they know that you don't know and they say something and depending on their their relationship you don't know if they are saying something mean to them or they're joking with them so the laugh is a signal like oh okay this scene i get it now you two are messing with each other and stuff like that and and sometimes you need that because you're like oh crap should i be taking this seriously do i need to watch out for these two people to start fighting or whatever that's kind of how i've always viewed like laugh tracks but like you said too like has to be done you know well right but i could imagine a writer too if they've had a certain type of writing that they've done and then they try to do comedy and if you don't have anything to really signal that people are used to what they've already done in the past and you gotta you gotta kind of have some kind of signal for this like tone shift and all that but but neil i don't have much i don't have much more of your time but i do i do want to hear what you were about to say and then i want to conclude by asking you some stuff about some comedians if that's all right well want to build up right yeah hopefully worth it so you said use of laughter is well it's like a social undo and a social oil and of course that is one of the uses of laughter to make people place them at their ease you know sometimes we use it for other things as well like trying to you know suck up to the boss so we will laugh yeah very unfunny jokes because we think oh this is the right thing you know to to do so you know laughter has you know different uses you know in different contexts that's what i was going to say oh no definitely definitely but but yeah like something that i've i've been curious about for a while and and i think you'd say it in the in the book you have a whole deep dive on like comedians and stuff but i i've i've always felt like like there's this there's this thing right where you know if they do a documentary about a comedian or whatever or you know you have just comedians who have you know taken their own life like robin williams and stuff like that there's this idea that they're they're more depressed but you say like the research is kind of sketchy around all sorts of stuff around comedians but what what kind of explanation is there like are comedians more prone to depression or do depressed people more likely get into comedy like i i i think a lot of people are really curious about that yeah there have been some researchers that have tried to examine i'll try to answer this question it's a really difficult one to answer but from what we do know we we sort of know this really from the limited literature right we know that um there's very little that is common in the backgrounds of successful comedians now these are professional comedians and amateurs i mean the the most the most commonly uh discovered trait that they all share is in sense low socioeconomic status when there was some growing up so they came from a family you know that was not relatively well off and that's what makes sense really because there are very few what you might call aristocratic uh comedians you know and there's one view that you know a lot of comedy is born out of hardship and you know it's a way of dealing with that hardship i mean rizamba is a fantastic example where he admits that a way of avoiding being punched or hit by her family was to make them laugh so it was very much you know a way of surviving in a way and you know rizan produced a very you know influential so-called middle class um sick of middle class in the states means cross something slightly different here um the the notion that they are more depressed than say other artists i mean there's no real research for that either there are there are individual pockets of research that suggests that they score more highly on depressiveness scales there is evidence for is to suggest that if you give them personality measures and there's a very big one in psychology called the big five um and it measures ocean openness to experience um conscientiousness extroversion uh what do we have got neuroticism and oca and agreeableness yeah i mentioned that yeah it's a very important one because that's the one most every study shows comedians score uh more uh not as highly as other people on so they're they're less agreeable according to these scales but they're also more extroverted more open to experience as well so you know swings and roundabouts um some studies find that they also score more heavily on the neuroticism um traits as well but the one consistent finding is this you know agreeableness um so it feeds into this notion that you know comics are you know fairly solely disagreeable melanic dark characters and of course there's something called the dark tetrad which i know we haven't touched on much i know you wanted to but maybe for another time we could talk about the dark tetrad and its relation and the use of aggressive humor you know in particular yeah yeah we might they don't tend to die the other thing is people are interested whether comedians die more quickly die sooner not more quickly that's ridiculous um die sooner than others and again there's no evidence for this uh uh either yeah yeah we we might have to do a follow but like one of the things i was going to ask about that you end on you're in the book with it saying how many things you didn't have the time to squeeze into this book or would have been even you know longer but yeah there's there's definitely enough that you said to make another book but one thing one thing last question last question i promise but on the topic of comedians this this might not even have to do with psychology or maybe it does because everything has to do with psychology but uh there's you know there's been this growing thing and conversation amongst comedians about how like comedy's dying because everybody's so sensitive and you can't say anything and all these all these other things here's my personal opinion right uh and it depends but i'd say 80 to 90 percent of the time i'm like comedians get a pass right because you don't know you don't know what's going to land what's going to make people laugh what's going to make people offended like you mentioned with that that satire and the you know people interpreted it in a way it wasn't the intention so i'm just curious your thoughts of you know it's 2021 like should comedians have like a little bit more wiggle room or do you think that they need to change to be more mindful of you know the climate or i'm curious what you think about that since you study all this stuff well i mean it's still going on i mean there are some areas that are thought to be you know like a verboten you know and not not to be broached under any circumstance and i suppose in the sense this is this is right in a way you know um but if you think of sasha barack Cohen and borat i mean that that is a a comedy that trades very heavily on embarrassment and very heavily on almost offense and especially the earlier films you know particularly were very very very sort of you know near the the the knuckle i mean one i think the sort of joke you wouldn't be able to get away with now is uh one that i talk about in the book but it's by allen's bible who co-wrote um it's gary shandling show you know and was saturday night life and he there were one of the sketches that were going for snl was can you come up with the worst hanukkah present and allen's bible's joke was a drum kit for and frank you know so if you think it through it's a it's a very funny joke but it was it was perceived to be insensitive even at the time when he was working at snl you know so are some things i think you know people naturally sort of shy away from uh and sort of in a sense rightly you know making jokes about people's race for example you know people are not right or not this or that simply because of the colour of their skin is is nonsensical and i don't think you get much traction um you know generally for for that sort of humor so i think people are sort of shying away from from that there's been a sort of you know revolutionary in the way of comedians think about the sort of subjects they think are important so now they will focus on things like you know social injustice um or or or satirizing the powerful you know like don trump you know for example yeah yeah absolutely it's it's such a it's such a weird situation i don't know what it is and yeah i try to just you know analyze myself like all right when i look at stuff i'm always thinking about like intent right you could tell when there's there's people where it's like the the superiority thing right you could tell it's like you are saying something mean to try to put this person down and like that is nowhere near funny right but then yeah then there's it depends on which one it is like because there's sometimes where it's that that two conflicting ideas like you said right like and that's where we get the humor from and it's it's all really weird i'm glad i don't got to make decisions about who gets to you know do comedy but you do well though it's brilliant you think of rickie javais's golden globes um interest oh yeah right where he really lays into the celebrities with some very funny jokes yeah you know i like a drink as much as the next man unless the next man is mel Gibson you know that sort of it's funny uh but it's very very sharp and very near the knuckle and it's offensive to the people involved and some people did get very offended offended of robert dadney jr was you know famously you know ruffled by some of the comments that javais made in doing that but they they're perceived as fair game because you know they reach liberties and they have power i mean they they can they can do uh you know equal comedic damage to javais if they wanted to you know yeah yeah exactly depends on context you're right depends on context yeah yeah it's really interesting and and i'm sure there's somebody who can break it down and like take the data and stuff but then we're dissecting the frog again you know what i mean so some people like javais they just got to get as close as possible and and see what happens but but yeah like that yeah we're not alone is what we're saying grizzly exactly so uh we're recording this right before your book comes out but can you let everybody know and because we didn't even touch on all the topics and you got a thousand more so when's the book come out where can people get it and where can people keep up with you your work and uh when we pressure you into writing a follow-up book or the book on horror so so yeah let us know where we could find it or where we could find you now you can be my agent chris yes so um the the book is the psychology of comedy it's published by ratledge teller francis it's out on the 18th of august um you can get it on amazon.com barns and noble uh the publisher's website if it's anywhere waterstones you have waterstones in the states but i think you do got barns and noble down yeah yeah um so you can find it there um the hardback is eye-wateringly expensive so don't go anywhere near the hardware oh yeah we were looking at that yeah yeah it's not even a nice cover chris you think for that price yeah 111 pounds which is about like 200 dollars you think i'll give you a nice cover but the uh the paperback has you know very nice red nose on it it's about 12 pounds which is about 17 dollars i imagine something like that i think we're close and uh yeah if you want to get in touch with me let me know what you think of the book if you got it i'd be delighted to hear from you um i'm on twitter at uh that neil martin neil m-l-t-i-n and i'd love to hear from you if you got the book yeah yeah absolutely that's that's how we got in touch you are very communicative on twitter so i'll link all that stuff down below so neil thank you so much for doing this yeah it's like night time for you and mid-afternoon for me but yeah so but yeah we'll we'll be in touch and we'll probably do can i say how impressed i've been by all these podcasts that you're doing right and all the reading i think i in an email i described as being like a bibliophage right you just eat these books i've never known anybody read as many books you see these things here that'll probably take you like a week yeah it's it's it's my trick my trick is audiobook it's all audio and i just listen all day long but yeah i just i consume it but yeah i'll i'll give you some of my tricks sometime but yeah real thank you so much guys chris thank you