The Humor Code Read Online Free PDF

Chicken—he’s lost much of the audience.
    â€œThanks. Have a good night,” Pete says, then leaves the stage amid polite applause. He’s replaced by the open mike’s MC, who’s eager to punch the crowd back up. He has the perfect target.
    â€œI thought you were going to talk about your humor theory!” the comic calls after the professor. “He has this theory, see . . . well, who cares. Obviously, it’s WRONG!”
    The crowd’s back, laughing uproariously. But the MC’s not finished.
    â€œAll you black people, that’s a sweater vest he’s wearing, not a bulletproof vest.”
    He waits a beat. “So go ahead and shoot him.”
    Standing at the bar after his act, Pete considers his performance. “You can’t just get up there and expect to kill.”
    But why didn’t he kill? He spends the night mulling it over. “I clearly underestimated the audience and the challenges in creating sufficient violations,” he tells me later. “This means the Seinfeld Strategy would have needed to be multiplied severalfold.” Of course, trying to outdo the other comedians in Squire-appropriate violations wouldn’t have been a good move, either. Once word got out about the professor who spouts one-liners about slavery and crack cocaine, Pete might have had to start looking for another job.
    Pete’s stand-up attempt gives the usually confident professor pause. It’s clear, he tells me once the article comes out, that he has a ways to go before he understands the vagaries of comedy—and HuRL alone won’t take him the rest of the way. There’s a big, comical world out there, he says, and if he wants to figure out what really makes things funny, he’s got to venture beyond the confines of his lab.
    But he can’t do it alone. Just as his scholarship needs to be vetted by his academic colleagues, he needs an objective observer, someone willing to call him out if his conclusions don’t pass muster.
    Someone, in other words, like me.
    I’m in. The adventure sounds like a blast, plus it may help me figure out why I am such a screwed-up, hopelessly lighthearted reporter. It will be like Eat, Pray, Love , but with awkward guy hugs and dick jokes.
    Still, I offer a condition. At the end of the journey, Pete has to again try his hand at stand-up. But this time, at a slightly bigger stage than the Squire: The Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, the biggest comedy event in the world. Comics work for years to earn a shot there, and a single routine can make or break a comedy career. If Pete thinks that he’s going to crack the humor code, he has to get up at the festival—and win one for science.

2
LOS ANGELES

Who is funny?
    It’s a half hour to show time, and Louis C.K. looks miserable. The comic is slumped alone in a chair in the dingy greenroom of Denver’s Paramount Theatre, the toll of weeks on the road apparent on his face. Clearly, all he wants to do is eat his ham sandwich and get ready for his show. But instead he has to contend with the likes of us—an overexcited professor and a nervous journalist who’ve just barged in to ask him to deconstruct what he does on stage.
    It’s a wonder we got back here at all. C.K., with his stand-up specials and hit FX series Louie , is one of the biggest names in the stand-up business. Every one of the 1,800 or so seats for the show tonight at the Paramount Theatre—one of the largest and swankiest venues for comedy in the region—has long been sold out.
    It makes sense to start our search for the secrets of humor by talking to comedians like C.K. In many ways, stand-up is the perfect petri dish for figuring out why we find things funny. It’s comedy boiled down to basics—just a comedian and an audience, no backstory, no sets, no editors or producers or censors, a place where you either score a laugh or you don’t.