The Humor Code by Peter McGraw

The Humor Code by Peter McGraw

Author:Peter McGraw
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster


6

SCANDINAVIA

Does humor have a dark side?

The attack comes out of the blue. First we hear the yelling, an eruption of deranged Danish that shatters Copenhagen’s wintry early morning tranquility. We spot a hulking woman across the street from us, eyes blazing as she hollers in our direction. But she’s not just yelling. She’s on the move, head down and legs pumping in bulky black snow pants. And she’s charging at us.

Maybe she believes that Pete, who’s been taking pictures of eighteenth-century brick façades and colorful Danish graffiti, snapped a shot of her. Maybe she doesn’t like the look of us. All we know is that she’s enraged, and we’re the cause.

She charges at Pete, arms swinging at his head. At the last moment, she stumbles, pitching forward onto the sidewalk. She lies there, moaning, while we gape. Is she all right? Should we help her? Before we can decide, she pulls herself up, apparently unscathed. We move away, putting some distance between us as she turns her animosity toward whatever else dares cross her—other pedestrians, bicyclists, a passing car or two.

We’re stunned. This welcome is not what we’ve come to expect in Denmark. We’re here to explore the dark side of humor, how comedy can divide and degrade. We’ve learned that humor does all sorts of good, like sell comedy movies and magazines and build lasting bonds and bridge international divides. But comedy isn’t all fun and games, insists Pete. Take all the racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes out there, he says. Or how there was something so threatening about the routines of Lenny Bruce and Mae West that those in power censored their jokes. To him, the conclusion is obvious: “Humor comes from a dark place.”

To help prove it, Pete ran an experiment with HuRL undergraduate Robert Merrifield Collins that involved one of those newfangled bladeless fans, the kind that seem magically to blow air through an empty ring. When Pete and Merrifield had test subjects place their hands inside the ring while the fan was running, most subjects laughed and found it amusing. On the surface, this reaction doesn’t make sense; feeling air running past your fingers isn’t funny. But the exercise was humorous to people, believes Pete, because of all those times we were warned growing up of the gory things that would happen if we stuck our stubby little fingers in fan blades. And here they were, with their hands inside a fan, under the direction of a paid scientist. It’s dark, twisted stuff—and that’s where the comedy comes from.

We’ve been told that Denmark is the perfect place to dissect the dark and twisted side of humor. But so far, we seem to be in the wrong place to do so. Yesterday, when our plane dipped below the ashen cloud cover that stretched from horizon to horizon like a blanket, we gazed down upon picturesque vistas of the Danish countryside: wide expanses of deep-green farmland dotted with quaint, slate-roofed farmhouses. And what we’ve seen of Copenhagen,



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