So you think it is easy being a comedian?

Two Irish guys walk out of a bar……..Hey, it could happen! ” what is this a joke?” well not really it is serious science according to Jim Wilson and Popular Science Magazine. What makes people laugh is the Mount Everest of neuroscience. Neurologists understand the auditory system well enough to restore hearing with cochlear implants. Biomedical engineers have successfully implanted vision chips. Brain surgeons know that poking the brain in one place will conjure an image of your third-grade teacher,while prodding elsewhere can evoke the aroma of her perfume. Neuropsychologists have gone as far as isolating a cluster of brain cells that become active when deeply religious people pray. Yet the knock knock joke remains as mysterious as area 51.

The difficulty in comprehending how humor works reflects the complexity of the task. The subject intrigues scientists because understanding jokes could ultimately explain how the brain works, and provide insights to repairing damage inflicted by a stoke or disease. Recently scientists who take jokes seriously reported some interesting findings. With the help of the Internet and volunteers from around the world, British researchers identified and ranked the world’s funniest joke. Then using a brain scanner identified the part of the brain that becomes active when we laugh. In a separate experiment, Canadian and British scientists made an equally astounding discovery: different types of jokes tickle different parts of the brain.

The perfect joke

” Past research into humor has revealed important insights into brain functioning” says Richard Wiseman, A psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire near London. About this time last year, he created a project called Laugh Lab. It’s mission find the world’s funniest joke. Wiseman’s quest for the funniest joke began with a call for jokes put out over the Internet. After his staff weeded out the obscene submissions and edited away racial epithets, he recorded the most poplar jokes and posted audio files on a website. Visitors were asked to rate what they heard. Last fall, a computer picked a joke that was most appealing to both sexes, in all age groups, in all countries. It was submitted by Gurpal Gosalla 31 year old middle act from Manchester. No, I a just kidding the guy was a psychiatrist from England. Perhaps you heard it, the joke goes like this:

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing , his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out a cellphone and calls emergency services. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! what can I do?” the operator in a calm soothing voice says : “just take it easy. I can help. First, Let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says: “Okay, now what?”

Wiseman said the winner as well as the runner up joke and country by country favorites, which you will find on the PM. zone, fits a pattern. ” We find jokes funny for lots of different reasons”, he says. ” They sometimes make us feel superior to others, reduce the emotional impact of anxiety provoking events, or surprise us because of some kind of incongruity. The hunter joke contains all three elements-we feel superior to the stupid hunter, realize the incongruity of his misunderstanding the operator, and the jokes helps us laugh about our own concerns about our own mortality.

Wiseman concluded his experiment by putting volunteers in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine and watching the blood flow change in different parts of their brains they listened to jokes. “The ( test results) show that there is a very precise area of the brain involved in understanding why a joke is funny,” he says. ” It is mainly located toward the back of the frontal lobes. Interestingly, this fits in with other research suggesting that people who have damaged this part of the brain often lose their sense of humor.”

Into the Brain

Vinod Goel of York University in Toronto and his colleague Raymond Dolan at the institute of Nuerology in London focused their search on what happens inside the brain as it processes a joke. Like Wiseman, Goel placed each of his volunteers in an MRI device. Here they listened to prerecorded puns: ” Why did the golfer wear two pairs of pants? He got a hole in one” ( which by the way is the lowest form of comedy) They also heard Goel describes semantic jokes, such as: “Why don’t sharks bite lawyers? Professional courtesy.” Goel limited his jokes to a format in which the set up line is couched as a question, and the answer is the payoff line. He also threw in fake jokes as controls. In drug research, controls are sugar pills. In comedy research, controls are jokes with a bland payoff line: ( which would include any joke from Argus Hamilton’s act) “Why did the Golfer wear two pairs of pants? It was a cold day.” Good night Ladies and Gentlemen! Try the veal ! You have been a wonderful audience!

When Goel analyzed his data, he found that both puns and semantic jokes activated the medial ventral prefrontal cortex. The part of the brain involved with reward and control behavior resides her, so the finding was not expected. The second discovery was a surprise, and my favorite part of the article, The brain did not treat all jokes equally. Puns and semantic jokes traveled through different neural circuitry. The golfer’s pun stimulated a structure called Broca’s area, which is associated with speech. The semantic joke about lawyers, however, increased oxygen flow in both temporal lobes. This was unexpected because language processing is believed to be confined to the left temporal lobe. Lawyers in seems are really turning up everywhere.

In conclusion there remains much about humor that has yet to be resolved. Perhaps we will never understand why women don’t get the Three Stooges. Or why, statistically speaking, ducks are the funniest animal. What the limited insights into humor have taught us is this: Jokes are more than funny, they are and expansive window into how the brain actually works and if laughter really is the best medicine then stand up comedians would be earning PhD’s that said, a smile can still be a pretty handy umbrella against a possible downpour of health problems as well, “Just the act of laughing can be beneficial from both emotional and a physiological perspective” says Joel Goodman, Ed.D., Director of the Humor Project in Saratoga Springs, New York . ” “Physically, respiration and circulation are both enhanced through the act of laughter. We oxygenate the blood, which energizes us and helps us think more clearly.” Plus, Goodman says,”Research shows that laughter stimulates chemicals in the brain that actually suppress stress related hormones. So next time you see a comedian on-stage and you feel the need to heckle….Don’t ! It probably means you really don’t have much going on between your ears and that you are probably should be wearing a helmet in your everyday life. Someone should do research on that, anyway I hope you have a new appreciation for the Art of Stand up comedy!