Book Review: Only Joking Takes a Serious Look at Humor

The surest way to kill a joke is to explain it. Yet, a serious-minded book titled Only Joking: What's So Funny About Making People Laugh? explains every joke ever constructed (or the theory behind it) and manages to enhance the underlying humor, rather than trample it.

This heavy duty approach to levity is written by Jimmy Carr, a seasoned stand-up comic and host of the game show "Distraction" on Comedy Central, and collaborator Lucy Greeves. With their distinctly British sensibility, they explore the universal qualities of laughter. "A sense of humor is one of our most valued social assets; have you met a person who will cheerfully admit that they don't have one?" they ask.

Carr and Greeves point out that by laughing, a baby joins the human race. "When a baby laughs, he gives his parents the first real signal that he's a contributing member of the community. By displaying that he has a sense of humor he shows that he has a sense of self, a sense of others and an ability to interact with them." This rite of passage is cause to celebrate. Carr and Greeves found that in the Navajo nation, for instance, "a Navajo baby's first laugh is so portentous it requires a ritual--a solemn ceremony to give thanks for the laughter, and a party for the whole community."

In researching this book, Carr and Greeves estimate they sifted through more than 20,000 jokes. One of the lessons they learned from the process is that "jokes, like martinis, are not designed to be consumed in private in enormous quantities." Although many of those jokes are shared here, this is not a joke book, per se. It is not a quick fix tool to be grabbed when you need to make a funny speech. It is a careful and deliberate study of what people find funny and why.

The authors include Immanuel Kant's definition of laughter as "an affectation arising from the sudden transformation of strained expectation into nothing." They dip into Schopenhauer's assertion that humor is "the incongruity between a concept and the real object to which it was designed to relate." That's all well and good, but how does it explain the popularity of plastic dog doo?

Thanks to Carr and Greeves' range and flexibility, Only Joking actually addresses a full span of humor. The book peeks behind the curtain of amusement to expose the devices that manipulate the universal spectrum of joking. The authors identify and explain such structures as The Superiority Theory, the Incongruity Theory, the Ambivalence Theory and the Release Theory. They discuss gender differences in humor reception and find that "women want men who make them laugh, and men want to make women laugh." They cite conclusions of a survey published in Evolution and Human Behavior that "men aren't interested in 'humor-producing women' for long-term relationships. The study concluded that women seek out people who make them laugh in all types of social relationships, whereas men only look for people who respond to their own jokes, especially in sexual relationships."

The authors tackle the issue of offensive, derisive or stereotyping jokes. They even offer advice to anyone prone to perpetuate such attempts at humor. "A good test: do you have to look over your shoulder before you tell a joke? If not, if you're happy to look your audience in the eye whatever their age, race, gender, sexual orientation or state of physical and mental health, then you are probably on the right track."

One of several professional comics discussed in the book is Lenny Bruce. Of his difficult career, the authors say, "It's interesting to speculate whether he would have been prosecuted so vigorously if he had merely lectured on the topics of church corruption and sexual liberation, rather than performing stand-up comedy. Was it his opinion of the Catholic Church that rankled, or the fact the he told jokes about it?" This may be a prime example of the theory that laughter is an outward sign of inward conflict.

Carr and Greeves are to be applauded for taking humor seriously and providing us with a solid analysis of a wiggly topic.

Only Joking: What's So Funny About Making People Laugh?
By Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves
Gotham Books, 300 pages, $23