The good humor man

Who invented jokes, and why do we laugh at them? Jim Holt discusses the history of funny.

By James Hannaham

Read more: Books, Humor, Jokes, History, Interviews, Authors, Books Interviews, James Hannaham

July 21, 2008 | A few years ago, wiry, loquacious New Yorker writer Jim Holt scrapped an ambitious philosophy book about "the puzzle of existence" when more practical matters caught up with him -- he was broke, having spent his big advance. Paradoxically, he decided to get out of that jam the same way he'd gotten into it -- by proposing another book. This time he chose not to pursue the cosmic joke of existence, but the history and philosophy of jokes. But the joke was on him. He thought it would be a "quick and appealing" book to write, and that he'd find a solid base of similar books about the history of jokes to use as source material, but there was, well, nothing. "Being terribly lazy, this was extremely irksome to me," Holt grumbles.

Somehow he overcame his indolence and wrote "Stop Me If You've Heard This," an entertaining and informative, if too-brief, overview of what we know about the setup/punch line anecdote throughout history, including a biography of its supposed inventor, the legendary Greek Palamedes, who is also credited with inventing "numbers, the alphabet, lighthouses, dice, and the practice of eating meals at regular intervals." Holt also introduces us to the 14th century Italian Poggio Bracciolini, who served as secretary to several popes during the Western Schism and wrote Europe's first joke book, the "Liber Facetiarum." Full of lascivious comments about virgins and bald female flashers, the "facetiae" also managed to escape papal censorship, proving how good it is to have friends in high places.

The second half of the book tackles deeper questions about humor: How does it work, and why? Though he could easily wax dry and analytical, Holt peppers his discourse with ribald and/or offensive riddles -- "Why should we feel sorry for the atheist? Because he has no one to talk to while getting a blow job" -- that prove his points and leaven his methodical approach to frivolity.

Salon sat down with Holt in New York for a rapid-fire low-residency seminar in hilarity, history and chimpanzee comedy.

Which theory of the evolution of humor do you find most convincing?

Well, there are these three theories of humor. The Superiority Theory -- that you laugh when you realize that you're better than someone else, so nasty jokes, racist jokes, jokes about gays and cuckolds and drunkards and henpecked husbands conform to that theory. Then there's Freud's Release Theory, which says that jokes are about ventilating forbidden impulses. The setup gets the forbidden material past the censor, and the punch line liberates your forbidden impulses for a moment. All of the psychic energy you used to repress them gets released and you laugh, expressed in chest-heaving, spasmodic laughter.

But then there's the one that makes the most sense to me, the Incongruity Theory, that jokes are about the pure intellectual pleasure we take in yanking together things that seem utterly dissimilar and perceiving similarities. In the 17th century, "wit" simply meant intelligence. As the meaning evolved, it came to mean the ability to see resemblances between apparently dissimilar things. Today it means the ability to see, to perceive or to take pleasure in absurdities or incongruities. That's the highest form of humor. As jokes get funnier, they rely more on incongruity and less on hostility and superiority or on sex and naughtiness.

So you think of humor as having evolved? In that case, what would a prehistoric joke be like?

A lot of what we say about prehistory is speculative. I gave a talk at the New York Institute for the Humanities a couple of months ago on the future of humor -- what jokes would be like in the year 1,000,000 -- and I used something called the Copernican principle, which is a way of predicting the distant future based on the distant past. Listen, if you want to know what's going to last for a long time, look at things that have already been around for a while. The Seven Wonders of the World -- when the list was drawn up in the third or fourth century, the oldest one was the Pyramid of Cheops. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, etc. -- and so what's the only one that has survived? The Pyramid of Cheops. All the other ones that were much newer when the list was drawn up disappeared. So I figured out what jokes looked like a million years ago by looking at what chimps find funny, because whatever's oldest is most likely to last, based on the Copernican principle.

Next page: What makes chimps laugh?