Chapter 3: What Is Funny?

Author’s note: This is Chapter 3 from my forthcoming book, ‘That’s Not Funny: How America Lost Its Sense of Humor’. I’m sharing it as-written. It’s a bit longer than my usual posts. But I am interested in any feedback so if something’s confusing, unconvincing, or just sucks, please say so in the comments — I’m still finalizing this before it goes to my editor, and real reactions are worth a lot to me.

“Julia Roberts told reporters today that her marriage to Lyle Lovett has been over for some time. The key moment, she said, came when she realized that she was Julia Roberts [a photograph of a beautiful Julia Roberts appears], and that she was married to Lyle Lovett [a goofy asymmetrical Lyle Lovett appears]” — Norm Macdonald

I think farting in my dog’s face is funny. My wife doesn’t. But she doesn’t just think it’s not funny; it really upsets her. To settle the matter, we asked her friend, Abbey, whose sense of humor we both respect. Abbey sided with me, but said that farting in a baby’s face is even funnier, which upset my wife even more.

If farting in a baby’s or dog’s face strikes you as the humor of a twelve-year-old boy, fair enough. That’s the point. A theory of humor can explain why we laugh, but it cannot predict what any given person will find funny. That depends on temperament, experience, tolerance for risk, and what a person is willing to see, admit, or recognize as true. As comedy writer Jesse Fox put it, “The sense of what is funny is so subjective—so completely built into your persona—that it feels objective.”

This is why a disagreement over a joke feels so personal. It’s not like preferring the Beatles to the Rolling Stones; it feels more like an argument about reality. Less a difference in taste than a mistake in perception. A joke is either funny or it isn’t. You get it or you don’t. Because what we find funny is so central to our identity, our sense of humor becomes a battle over what is obvious, what may be acknowledged, and what kind of person you are willing to be. Good jokes bring into focus something we had noticed, suspected, or dimly understood but had not yet put into words. The experience feels less like invention than recognition. As Simpsons writer George Meyer put it, appreciating humor is “like seeing in two dimensions and then opening the other eye or looking through a View-Master and suddenly seeing in three.”

This does not mean that whatever gets a laugh is objectively true or even defensible. People laugh at all kinds of things—stereotypes, paranoia, and flat-out stupidity. But humor is often strongest when it captures something the audience resonates with, even if uncomfortably so. The truth might be observational, as in the familiar “you ever notice” structure of stand-up. Or it might be social—exposing the hypocrisies, status games and taboos everyone pretends not to notice: that even Mr. Rogers has a favorite porn category, or that Bill Clinton has a bent dick. Or it might be psychological, revealing the vanities and the gap between who we want to be and the animals we actually are.

This chapter examines the folk wisdom that things are funny because they are true—or more precisely, because they express something we recognize, however reluctantly, as true.

Why do we laugh so much more in the company of others? If laughter were merely a private reward for recognizing patterns, it would be a silent, internal affair. But it isn’t. It’s loud, contagious, and social. Where the previous chapter examined humor as a private cognitive phenomenon, here we turn to its social function. In a social species like ours, the same mechanism that helps an individual update their model of the world can also help establish a shared perception.

While many animal species laugh—over 60 as we saw in Chapter 1—human beings are the only ones that can fake it. Biologists call it non-Duchenne laughter. And as opposed to Duchenne laughter, which is involuntary and honest, non-Duchenne is tactical. It is deliberate and carefully timed; and it evolved because we are the only species with language. In a world where deceiving others has obvious survival and reproductive advantages, language enhances our ability to manipulate beliefs and influence other people’s behavior to our benefit—whether by lying about resources, alliances, or why the basement smells like bleach. It gives us the ability to influence each other not just through force; but through stories, symbols, and imagination. Try convincing a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising eternal paradise or warning of a mythical curse and see what happens. Tell the right story to a human, however—and they will give you all of their arable land.

In other words, once we have language, we have bullshit; and once you have bullshit, you need a way to tell who’s full of it. Biologists call it an “honest signal”; and for a slick-tongued species of tricksters, the best we’ve got is Duchenne laughter. Less corruptible than speech and harder to counterfeit, it works as a backchannel of communication—showing the feeling inside, unfiltered by words. Studies suggest that few people can voluntarily produce crow’s feet in their eyes—the tell-tale sign of Duchenne laughter—without feeling genuine joy; that it is easy to identify and that we respond more positively to it than the fake stuff. In a species that depends so heavily on cooperation, Duchenne laughter serves as a reliable way to say “I’m with you”—a non-verbal cue that builds trust and social cohesion.

But laughter doesn’t merely allow people to signal agreement; it allows them to signal agreement selectively, under a cloak of ambiguity. A joke works like a shibboleth or a coded message, allowing insiders to recognize each other while keeping outsiders in the dark. In this way humor became a powerful way of sorting allies from outsiders, cooperators from free riders, and genuine recognition from empty performance.

Anthropologists call it the encryption model of humor, and it explains one of humor’s widest social functions. Jokes depend on shared knowledge: like the German Enigma machine of World War II, they only make sense to those with the key. To get a joke, you need enough background knowledge to decode it. When people laugh at the same thing, they are signaling that they have the same information and preferences, marking themselves as members of the same in-group: “You had to be there.” “If you know, you know.” In this sense, all jokes are inside jokes.

Research by Thomas Flamson and Clark Barrett showed that the more encrypted a joke is—the less that is stated explicitly—the funnier we find it. Ambiguity is the point. It allows us to transmit sensitive information—about loyalties, taboos, and perceived truths—while preserving plausible deniability for everyone involved.

Whether we’re making fun of someone else, ourselves, or the situation, we laugh because in some hidden, half-said sort of way, the joke forces us to connect the dots already in our heads. It is an unspoken reality suddenly made obvious—but only to those laughing. Much of human communication works this way, depending on shared experience, tacit knowledge, and things left unsaid: “Want to come up for a drink?” But jokes make this structure especially visible. Part of the pleasure is that not everyone gets them. This is why comedy engineered to offend no one so often feels broad, obvious, and boring: “Working hard or hardly working?”

It’s also why being offended by a joke is often the same as not getting the joke — the listener hears the transgression, but can’t decode the message. Sarah Silverman’s joke, “I was raped by my doctor — which is bittersweet for a Jewish girl,” works only if you understand the old stereotype of the Jewish girl whose family dreams of her marrying a doctor. Explaining the stereotype would ruin the joke; Silverman assumes the audience has the key. Without it, all you hear is that she was raped—and what’s funny about that? At the opposite end of the spectrum is comedy that requires no key at all, like America’s Funniest Home Videos, which explains both its popularity and why it’s predictable stupidity: kid fell off his bike again, but don’t worry, nobody got hurt.

Not every joke is for everyone and part of humor’s power lies in the fact that it is selective. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes good sense. Human social life depends to an extraordinary degree on cooperation among unrelated individuals, a problem Robert Trivers famously addressed in his 1971 paper “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.” Trivers proposed that cooperation among non-relatives could evolve when the same individuals interacted repeatedly, making it advantageous to help those who were likely to help in return while avoiding cheaters who took benefits without reciprocating—i.e. “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” The theory offered an elegant solution to one of social life’s central problems: how to identify trustworthy partners, avoid free riders, and keep the whole system from collapsing.

Although humor does not solve cooperation by itself, it is part of this social machinery: a low-cost way to test whether others share the same assumptions, loyalties, and moral boundaries. By allowing people to communicate recognition and shared understanding in coded form, jokes help solve the problem of identifying trustworthy partners. Laughter is not just a reaction to the joke itself; it’s evidence that the signal was received, the code was cracked, and that, at least for a moment, we’re on the same team. Nothing is objectively funny in itself, and as much as it pains me to say it, not even farting in a dog’s face. What lands depends on the person—on their temperament, their experience, and on what they are prepared to recognize as true.

This is why the loss of shared laughter matters. As we will see in Part Two, the recent collapse in happiness across the United States and much of the Anglosphere is largely a crisis of loneliness and declining trust—two problems humor is unusually well equipped to answer.

Humor works by exposing the gap between our concepts and our perceptions: the friction between the world as we frame it and the world as it is directly experienced. If laughter evolved to help us navigate a social world full of ambiguity, deception, cooperation, and inference, then what people laugh at may reveal something about what they believe.

Although Flamson and Barrett had shown that jokes function as encrypted signals of shared knowledge, the idea that things are funny because we think they are true had never been tested. To move beyond what people claimed to believe and study what they actually felt, I brought Rutgers students into the lab to watch a half-hour HBO special by Bill Burr, whose jokes played on stereotypes about gender and race. While they watched, I filmed their reactions, coding for Duchenne smiles, the involuntary facial movements of genuine laughter. Afterward, participants completed explicit survey questions and Implicit Association Tests (IATs) to measure their underlying preferences regarding gender and race. A clear pattern emerged: laughter was content-specific. Participants didn’t just laugh at “good” jokes; they laughed when the punchline validated an intuition they already held. What people found funny was not just an abstract matter of taste; it was a map of their hidden assumptions about the world.

This doesn’t mean that whatever gets a laugh is objectively true. Jokes aren’t truth detectors. The “truth” humor reveals is recognition—a felt agreement between the punchline and some half-conscious sense of how things really are. Sometimes that truth is just an observation; sometimes it exposes a hypocrisy, a taboo, or some bullshit hiding in plain sight that people are pretending not to see, and sometimes it’s just about reframing the way we are choosing to look at something.

What is “true” about farting in a baby’s face? Perhaps only that most of the outrage belongs to the adults. The baby isn’t thinking, How disrespectful. We are. It’s funny because it momentarily makes our own moral seriousness look ridiculous. Or maybe I’m just an asshole who likes farting in babies’ faces. And, well, even that’s kind of funny too.

The “truth” humor reveals doesn’t have to be profound. One of the headlines I submitted to the Onion read “Man brings herpes home to his wife, mistakenly believing that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” The truth there is simple: what happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas. The herpes you got from a hooker comes home with you.

This tension between how we think about the world and raw experience lies at the heart of nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of humor. Schopenhauer argued that laughter arises when we notice a discrepancy between our concepts and our perceptions—when our abstract conceptualization of something is suddenly “corrected” by the thing itself. He described humor as:

“The victory of knowledge of perception over thought... For perception is the original kind of knowledge inseparable from animal nature.”

This is why the subjective interpretation of a joke is critical: a violation only exists if there is a point of view to be violated. When I fart in my dog’s face, Ham may appear alarmed, saddened or confused, but she is definitely not enjoying the joke with me. She lacks the conceptual framework of adult manners and social status (e.g. how infantile or inappropriate it is for a fifty-five-year-old man to bend over and fart in the face of a Golden Retriever), so for her, there is no violation— just the raw, sensory reality of the smell. It’s either stupid or funny; but if you’re laughing, it’s probably because on some level you’ve recognized that it’s stupid too. And whatever Ham is feeling about it, just like the baby, she’s definitely not “insulted.”

Comedians so often begin with some version of “you ever notice...?” because they first have to get us to see the world as they do. Chris Rock says this ability to get the audience to adopt your view of the world is what separates the best comedians from everyone else. As he puts it, a lot of comics have great jokes that fail for one simple reason: “the audience does not understand the premise.” Before the audience can laugh, they have to see the situation the same way the comedian does. As we saw in the previous chapter, humor is logic-chomping; it works by forcing a shift in perspective. But surprise is not enough. What gives the incongruity its force is that the new angle feels truer than the old one. Take Homer Simpson’s toast: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” It forces us to admit a messy, contradictory truth that we usually try to keep separate. The laugh comes when that shift clarifies something we were already ready to see.

As Erving Goffman argued, social life is performance, and humor works by exposing the sweaty guy backstage trying to hold the whole thing together. This is why comedy is about stripping down rather than elevating. The Greeks understood this and for them, comedy was a literal unmasking. In The Frogs, Aristophanes has a god and a slave switch roles, mocking the fragile hierarchies that structure society. Their comedies used masks, but those masks didn’t just hide—they revealed. By exaggerating, flipping, and distorting, they exposed the ridiculousness of all the different roles we play.

Trivers’s theory begins with a simple but unsettling idea: natural selection did not design minds to perceive objective truth. That is not evolution’s goal; reproduction is. The mind was shaped less to understand the world than to navigate it effectively in pursuit of the kinds of grubby rewards you would expect of apes forged in Darwinian competition: power, sex, status, and resources. In pursuit of such ends, our lofty moral language is often just a self-flattering public relations department—the mask we wear to hide our baser motives from the world and, more importantly, from ourselves.

Self-deception evolved in the evolutionary arms race between liars and lie detectors. Trivers’ key insight was that we deceive ourselves so that we can better deceive others. A conscious liar often gives himself away through what he called “leakage”—shifty eyes or a strained voice. But if the liar believes his own lies, those avenues of detection become harder to exploit, allowing lies to roll off the tongue with the same fluency as the truth. This internal filter protects us from admitting to beliefs that might expose weakness, lower status, or trigger shame (e.g. ninety-five percent of professors think they are in the top half of their field). It allows us to insist that our motives are pure, our marriages are sacred, and our politics are about justice rather than status.

But if self-deception works by keeping certain thoughts, motives, and perceptions safely out of view, comedy works by yanking them into focus. As the philosopher Alan Watts once put it, “Humor is the awareness that you yourself inwardly are very incongruous with what you appear to be outwardly.” Chris Rock’s joke that “a man is as faithful as his options” plays on the tension between grandiose theories about marriage as a sacrament and the messy reality that it’s a lot easier to be faithful if nobody wants to fuck you. He’s not trying to convince you; he’s asking if you’ve noticed what nobody is supposed to mention. If humor is one way of revealing truth, then those practiced at hiding uncomfortable truths from themselves should have the hardest time laughing.

The study testing this hypothesis started with an observation. I used to end all of my anthropology talks with a related headline from The Onion, and noticed that while the biological anthropologists often laughed, the cultural anthropologists usually sat in grim silence. College campuses these days are some of the most inhibited places in America— filled with some very smart people who are desperately afraid of being misunderstood. Humor dies in this kind of risk-averse environment where people feel watched and ambiguity is dangerous. At first, I dismissed the cultural anthropologists as humorless prigs. But the better question was whether their failure to laugh revealed something more basic: an inability, or unwillingness, to recognize the truths that a joke smuggles into the room.

In 2012, Trivers and I brought this question into the lab. Participants first completed a self-deception questionnaire—which asked them to admit or deny minor impulses like “I sometimes feel irritated when I don’t get my own way” and uncomfortable taboos like “Do you have sexual fantasies?” Once again we filmed them while they watched stand-up, using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to measure their Duchenne smiles—the involuntary facial movements of genuine laughter. The results were staggering. The data produced a correlation of r = -0.47—a statistical relationship that is virtually unheard of in the noisy world of social science research. To put it in perspective, this relationship is nearly as strong as the correlation between a person’s height and their weight. The more you lie to yourself, the less you laugh.

This helps explain why comedians are so attuned to seeing through our bullshit. Larry Wilde, author of Great Comedians Talk About Comedy, wrote that the key characteristic shared by the comedians he interviewed was “extraordinary self-awareness.” That makes sense. If humor depends on seeing the gap between who we pretend to be and who we are, then comedians are likely to be unusually good at noticing the evasions, hypocrisies, and self-flattering lies that keep that gap hidden.

Laughter reassures others because it signals that we are not entirely trapped inside our own self-presentation. Studies find that laughing with another person predicts greater intimacy, positive emotion, and enjoyment in later encounters and recent work on self-deprecating humor shows that people who laugh at their own mistakes are judged as warmer, more competent, and more authentic. People who can laugh at themselves are telling us something important: they are still in contact with reality and can see how they are being perceived.

This helps to explain why we are often unnerved by public figures who lack a sense of humor. Leslie Savan once speculated that Donald Trump was likely highly self-deceptive because he is almost never seen laughing. Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, noted that his father drilled into him that “laughing is to make yourself vulnerable, it’s to let down your guard... and that can’t happen.” Where self-deception narrows the field of vision, humor splits it open. It lets you hold more than one perspective at once. Crothers wrote:

“The pleasure of humor is of a complex kind... To enjoy humor one must have at least two ideas. There must be two trains of thought going at full speed in opposite directions, so that there may be a collision.”

It is what the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’—an ability to keep in mind two incompatible truths which circle one another without resolution. Shakespeare, he argued, forced his audience to hold both the positive and negative aspects of a character in view, denying them the sort of facile judgment most of us make all the time. This also might explain why people who laugh less are seen as less trustworthy. Laughter is a social signal of warmth and shared understanding. Failing to laugh withholds a signal that reassures others that you see what they see.

But humor does more than reveal what we know individually; it reveals that everyone else knows it too. Consider the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu. In December 1989, the Romanian dictator was giving a typical televised speech when a single person yelled “Boo” before the cameras could cut the live feed. Within four days, the “living god” was executed. That single jeer created “common knowledge,” doing what the little boy who said the emperor was naked had done.

Political discourse today is often a protective shell—a competition to see who can be the first to turn any public event into an excuse to talk about themselves. Humor breaks this cycle. This is why authoritarians are so afraid of comedians: they don’t just reveal the truth, they reveal that everyone else knows it too.

My sister, a high school counselor, once had a parent come to her looking for special treatment for her daughter. The mother claimed the girl suffered from “test anxiety.” My sister replied, “Yeah…my daughter doesn’t know the answers either.” It was blunt and arguably mean, but it landed as a joke rather than an insult because it was self-deprecating. Hiding behind a euphemism like “test anxiety” was the mother’s way to avoid acknowledging that her daughter might not be that smart or didn’t study hard enough. And my sister admitting her own daughters’ struggles was a way to soften that harsh truth. Without a sense of humor, the conflict ends in either servility or cruelty.

Humor is often better at getting people to see another side of an issue than by making the same argument with evidence—facts, figures, etc... Facts matter, but people are not passive truth-receiving machines. We are strategic, defensive, status-conscious primates with a genius for motivated reasoning—using our intelligence to defend our preferred narratives—and a talent for self-flattery. We do not like being told, by someone else, what is obvious about us. Decades of research on self-persuasion and cognitive dissonance have shown that we are more open to changing our minds when we feel that we arrived at the insight ourselves. Someone else may have planted the seed, but we rarely experience that outside influence as the real cause of our change. I know that I am an alcoholic, but even after twelve years sober, I still get defensive if someone else calls me one. But when I laugh at Homer Simpson making a toast “to alcohol: the cause of and solution to, all of life’s problems,” nobody is accusing me. The joke lets me arrive there on my own.

By delivering an encrypted punchline, a good joke lets the listener make the connection. The comic leads us to the stream, but we have to decide whether to cross. This is why jokes die when they are decoded. As E.B. White wrote, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. [We] understand it better but the frog dies in the process.” The explanation robs the listener of the pleasure of discovery and takes the half-buried recognition and turns it into a lecture. Or even worse, it makes explicit what the joke needs to keep partly hidden. The point is to experience the recognition without revealing, or perhaps even admitting to ourselves, why something feels true.

Ronald Reagan’s line that “everyone in favor of abortion has already been born” and George Carlin’s question, “Why is it that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?” favor different views of abortion, but they both work the same way rhetorically. They each expose a hidden motive or frame the audience may not have fully admitted to itself. The power of a joke is that you don’t have to admit anything to anyone to laugh. A joke’s wisdom is ambiguous; but it’s also more accessible.

Some truths are easier to hear when they arrive indirectly. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Where a sermon tells you what to think, a joke lets you entertain a thought before you drop into a defensive crouch. It doesn’t batter down resistance so much as slip around it. By the time your ego realizes it has been challenged, you may already have laughed.

Humor is also a powerful antidote to self-deception. In the summer of 2012, I came up with an “ingenious” solution to my heroin addiction: I would lock my drugs in a timed safe and gradually teach myself moderation. I was close to achieving every addict’s fantasy—controlling and enjoying drugs without being addicted. For alcoholics this is the dream of becoming a “social drinker”; for heroin users it’s called “chipping”—using just enough to get high but not so much that you go through withdrawal if you can’t get more. I set the timer for six hours. After spending the final hour and a half staring at it, I snorted the two bags I had allotted myself, locked up the rest, and extended the timer to ten hours. Three and a half hours later, I smashed the safe to pieces with a hammer and snorted six more bags. The absurdity of my plan had eluded me in the fog of addiction. But once I saw my fantasy literally smashed to pieces in front of me, I laughed. Humor did what sermons and resolutions couldn’t: it made the absurdity impossible to ignore.

Sometimes, humor highlights obvious truths that still need to arrive indirectly. Brandon Vestal has a bit about the absurdity of ads pretending that tequila makes you smooth: “Nothing smooth has ever happened to anybody after they drank tequila... You don’t wear a $3,000 suit if you know you’re going to be drinking tequila. I think all tequila should come with a 99-cent gas station poncho.” The joke punctures the fantasy without scolding. It doesn’t merely restate what’s true; it lets us examine the fantasy from a less guarded angle. It cuts through the social performance and reveals when the emperor has no clothes.

Sometimes, however, the truth that is exposed is hard to state directly at all. Direct speech invites punishment, argument, or denial. Humor provides cover. It allows the teller to hide behind the joke and the audience to hide inside the laugh—it was just a joke. Often this is the only way to communicate awkward or disturbing truths. I have a bit in my stand-up that plays on this: “Like everyone else I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to survive the first twenty-four hours in prison. My plan is to walk straight up to the biggest, baddest fucker in there and start sucking his dick.” The joke swaps the familiar tough-guy fantasy of establishing dominance on your first day in prison with the reality that I am a pussy whose best move is strategic submission. Stated directly, it would be depressing and humiliating. As a joke, it becomes sayable and sneaks an ugly truth into the open.

This is one reason court jesters had a limited license to mock power. Their insights were coded in humor, which made dangerous criticism seem less offensive and confrontational. Beatrice Otto’s history of court jesters shows that fools across cultures often survived by saying dangerous things indirectly, while Ralph Lerner describes the fool’s task as provoking the powerful to question their convictions “preferably while avoiding a beating.” Will Somer, Henry VIII’s fool, once told the cash-strapped king that his problem was all the “Frauditors,” “Conveighers,” and “Deceivers” around him—a pun on auditors, surveyors, and receivers. The joke is an accusation of corruption disguised as wordplay. Jesters couldn’t just say anything but through satire and subtle insinuations, they could point out flaws, poor decisions, or hypocrisies in the king’s actions without as much fear of reprisal. Like comedians today, it could be dangerous to tell the truth to the king, but it was just as dangerous for the king to ignore what the jester was saying.

Not every truth needs humor because it’s obscene or embarrassing. Some truths require a frame shift we would never make on our own. Larry David asks “Who is more free? The married man in America or the single guy in communist China?” Freedom is supposed to be an abstract political concept: China is supposed to be unfree and America free. But by introducing marriage, the comparison changes, and so does our sense of what freedom means. A lecture about the burdens of domestic life and the difference between formal political liberty and everyday personal constraint would just sound like a man complaining about his wife. The joke gets there sideways and does it fast. Humor can move us between frames before our defenses have time to organize.

There’s an old Soviet joke about a dissident handing out blank leaflets in a public square. When the police arrest him and demand to know what the papers mean, he replies: “What’s there to say? It’s so obvious.” Jokes rarely tell us anything new. They reveal what people already suspect but are afraid to say aloud. Things are funny not because they are objectively true, but because they express something we are already prepared, however reluctantly, to recognize.

We are too vain, too tribal, and too self-deceived to face our own absurdity directly. Humor provides the mask that allows the truth to show its face. It lets us notice what we already suspect without immediately defending ourselves against it. When we can no longer laugh at ourselves, and when comedians are no longer willing to risk offending us, that small act of recognition disappears and there’s nobody left to break the spell. Before humor becomes a democratic force in public life, it begins as something smaller and stranger: a flash of shared recognition and a glimmer of truth.