Mark Twain, Humor, and Cracking the Code for Delivering Successful Jokes

From start to finish, Mark Twain was a bad businessman. In fact, his reputation as the American humorist probably spawned because he was so awful at business and investing. Twain began his journey in the American West by failing at a silver mining scheme. He fled from Nevada to escape a duel with a rival newspaper journalist, got fired in San Francisco as a reporter, and posted bail for a friend who got arrested for brawling - who happened to skip town, leaving Mark Twain with the bill. He fled from that to the one trade that he could rely on, comedy.

Afterward, his first real writing success came from a county writer called ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.’ It ran the Saturday press in New York on the other side of the continent. From there, his word spread like wildfire and cemented Mark Twain as a comedy man - a humorous man who was sadly still bad with money late in life Mark. Twain would dump $200,000 investing in a flawed automatic typesetting machine. That's not converted into today's money value either. That's $200K at a time when most families earned only a $1k year. He also turned on opportunities to invest in the telephone with Alexander Graham Bell and instead put his Capital into a self-pasting scrapbook and a line of unpopular elastic trouser straps. Eventually, Twain would lose a family publishing business. Has declared bankruptcy, was forced to sell his 25 Rue Manor and moved to Europe where living was cheaper.

But once again, comedy would save him. In the summer of 1895, Mark Twain would start a speaking tour, the likes of which have never been attempted in this time. He would travel across Vancouver, America, Australia, New Zealand, and India, and he would perform more than a hundred times to deliver memorized chapters from his humorous essays in a deadpan Southern drawl. This tour will start as a desperate cash-grab to save his sinking family and it eventually grew to become something more, something special for Mark Twain. It was, in effect, the first successful International Comedy Tour and it was wildly popular, rekindled his book sales, and cemented Mark Twain in the eyes of history as the first world-traveling lecturing humorous, aka, one of the earliest models of a stage comedian. Of course, it made bank and as Mark Twain put it, humor is humanity's greatest blessing.

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During our episode last year about Linda Riss and attraction, we uncovered a study that listed humor as a number one trait women look for in men. Other sources, like a 2004 United Kingdom poll from The Guardian, rated humor as a number one desirable trait for both men and women as scored by the opposite gender. So today, we want to talk about humor. If we're already funny, we want to know why. If we're not funny yet, how do we get there? We also want to go through a guided discussion about clowning culture, and we have a few myths to dispel.

Myth 1: We should leave the jokes to the comedians. Besides, how necessary is it to be funny in the modern workforce? It's not like humor will make you more attractive or earn you more money, right?

Todd: Joe has a challenge for me, which he seems to think will be very funny, but I'm doubtful.

Joe: I just pasted into our script for this episode, like literally ten seconds ago, an announcement segment.

Todd: I'm guessing that is so I can't cheat and be prepared.

Joe: Yes, it is so you can't cheat. This is sort of a joke, but it is also like a product line. You've been in sales, right?

Todd: Yes, my whole life.

Joe: Have you ever had to read a sales script where they list all the specs?

Todd: Yes.

Joe: So, this is a sales spec joke for a made-up thing called a retro encabulator, and there are various versions. There's the turbo and encabulator, but I wanted to challenge you to this since episode one. I have waited 50 episodes to torture you with this. Would you mind reading this? And again, for anyone listening to this is, Todd never practiced, and this is unprompted.

Todd:  Here at Rockwell Automation’s world headquarters, research has been proceeding to provide a line of automation products that establishes a new standard for quality, technological leadership, and operational excellence.  With customer success as our primary focus, work has been proceeding on the crudely conceived idea of an instrument that would not only provide inverse reactive current, for use in unilateral phase detractors but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters.  Such an instrument, composed of Dodge gears and bearings, Reliance electric Motors, Allen Bradley controls, and all monitored by Rockwell software is Rockwell Automation’s retro-incabulator.

Now basically, the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes it's produced by the modial interaction of magneto reluctance, and capacitive duractance. The original Machine had a base plate of prefamulated amulite surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two sperving bearings run a direct line with the panametric fam.

The lineup consists simply of six hydrocopic marzel vanes so fitted to the ambiphasient lunar wang shaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotazode deltoid type placed in panendermic simi-boloid slots of the stator. Every seventh conductor being connected by a non-reversable tremi pipe to the differential gurdel spring on the up end of the grammeters. Moreover, whenever fluorescent score motion is required, it may also be employed in conjunction with a drawn reciperocation dingle arm to reduce sinusoil depleneration. The retro-incabulator has now reached a high level of development and its being successfully used in the operation of milferd trenyas.  Its available soon, wherever Rockwell automation products are sold.

Joe: This was a joke that engineers came up with because they're sadists and this was originally in 1944 Students Quarterly Journal. It was basically made for students and it's a complete and total prank. Do you want to watch the original? If so, you can find that here. It sounds dead serious, yet it's all nonsense.

Because our major focus of this episode is Mark Twain and his rise as a humorist, let's look into how necessary that is as a life skill. Do you think people who are funny at work get away with it? Probably, right?

Throughout history, both philosophers and scientists have tried to tackle exactly why humor works. There isn't an agreement on what is actually funny. Greek philosophers thought that people who find humor in something and laugh at it are doing it because the misfortunes of others make them feel superior. Fraud thought that humor was a way for people to laugh off steam and/or release nervous energy. There's also something called the theory of incongruity, where people laugh at the juxtaposition of incompatible concepts, and whenever something defies expectation, that's when it's actually funny. Generally speaking, people employ humor as a voluntary strategy, using smiles and laughter to almost like punctuation marks. It almost acts like social grooming and social integration. Now, all of these theories are nice, but when you break it down, humor is the number one sexy attribute of either gender because it is a hack. It suckers people into liking us because it shows intelligence, social awareness, and self-awareness.

So now we get down to your funny coworker; we want to figure if humor helps them excel.  First off, when your coworker cracks a joke at work, it makes people happier, right? It makes everybody laugh and it lightens the mood. For this, we're going to focus on if it actually makes people happy. Like what does that do for people at an economic level? This data all comes from a collection of studies and articles, but we will just link the big ones in our research links. The first one comes from a meta-study that covered 225 academic studies. They showed that happier employees have 31% higher productivity and 37% higher sales, doctors get more correct diagnosis when they're happier, and teams solve problems quicker when they're happier. So, humor in the business world is a facilitator of trust. It eases tension, and it establishes a sense of cohesion. The professional world is all about comfort, humor, good social skills, and good communication. According to a University of New Hampshire research study, humor also makes someone feel safe, especially in communication. It makes people willing to accept challenging goals. It also, of course, increases attentiveness and persuasiveness. Overall, showing humor to a leader helps you relate by breaking down the power structure and equalizing people in an organization.

So, when does humor go bad? When do you see it not work? Usually, it is when a joke has offensive ties, like sexism or racism - things you don't agree with. These studies talked about how good humor is empathetic. It is not about attacking or undermining people who are socially on poorer footing than you. In a nutshell, we want to make fun of the bully who has power, not the kid that just got pushed down by the bully. It's not just about being canceled or not being socially accepted. It's really more about making people feel safe around you in a social environment. It's important to note that when we opened this episode, we talked about the Guardian UK study that talked about how humor was number one for both genders as far as attractiveness. There was also a 2006 study on evolution and human behavior where a researcher theorized that this has to do with humor being an indicator of high intelligence.

Myth 2: You are either born funny or born boring. Whatever cleverness you started with, that's just what you get.

Now let’s get into the neurological process of jokes and what makes somebody funny from birth. This comes from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In this study, they put people in a functional MRI and discovered the neurological process behind making a joke because why not take something interesting, entertaining, and magical and turn it into a scan?

When somebody tells a joke, the medial prefrontal cortex is mostly active. Even more, whether it's a professional telling the joke or an amateur like me, different parts of the brain light up a little differently. So there actually is a difference in the way the brain works for a trained comedian. Maybe somebody who is trained at jokes is better at starting with more emotion, which is why they are more memorable. The part that separates us from true joke tellers is the activation in the brain. When someone experienced at doing comedy tells a joke, there is more activity in the temporal lobe. The temporal lobe is the brain's area that takes in sensory information and interprets speech and images. It also takes abstract information and makes associations. Comedians like to tell jokes with no answer, allowing you to have a free association in what the answer actually is, aka activating the temporal lobe more than we can.

However, they found that non-comedians and amateur comedians offer more activity in the prefrontal cortex. That's the area that deals with executive functions and planning and decision-making. So basically, non-comedians are reciting or rehearsing and lights up the prefrontal cortex, which is home to executive functions and planning. Professionals do more improv, allowing the listener to have free association and less need to engage in top-down control. The best way you can train yourself to be good at humor is to not memorize jokes quite so much. Don't rely on a script so much.

So, are you born a comedian and do comedians have thin skin? For this, we are going to look at the findings of a husband and wife team, Seymour and Rhonda Fisher. The Fishers made a name for themselves by crusading against overmedicated children. They actually wrote the book on the female orgasm and are almost like the Doctor Spock of their field. They put out a lot of books that got wildly successful for a brief period of time. They wrote that the kids who become class clowns and naturally eventually become comedians are because they lived in stressful home lives. In one of their books, they talked about the Rorschach Tests that they put 40 professional comedians through, which found that comedians come from chaotic households who have critical indifferent mothers, and all of them are obsessed with notions of good and evil and demons and things like that. They also proposed that comedians' major motive to conjuring up funniness is to prove they're not as bad or repugnant. Basically, they are obsessed with defending basic goodness.

In more recent studies like the results of 523 American British and Australian comedians doing self-assessment tests measuring their personality traits, found that comics tend to score higher for psychotic traits in the general population, but they did not have more problems in childhood than typical students or anybody reporting at a university. They also did not appear more neurotic. So, they did have higher psychotic traits but did not seem to have worse paths or neurotic things or tendencies. This means the whole Woody Allen's sad clown background doesn't really hold water. But what does hold water is that they're more introverted and disagreeable.

Myth 3: Okay, so I'm funny, but I'm not standup comedy funny. I'm better at reacting in a conversation. It's not like we could learn the structure of jokes and apply that to my everyday life.

When it comes to comedy, there is a working mechanism. It’s like the parts of the bicycle. Now, we don't have to just be on the outside, wondering how a joke works. For this section, we're going to start with how a joke begins. Have you ever heard the term setup? I was watching an interview with Chris Rock and he went on and on about the premise of the church joke. A lot of comedians talk about how efficiency is key. You want it to be as short as possible but also say as much as possible. The classic one is when three guys walk into a bar. This setup is simply here's a place, here's a genre, and here are the people going to it. It gives you an image in your head. I actually want to do this for the rest of the episode. The last 30 minutes are just going to be spouting premises to jokes without actually fulfilling any of them.

So now we're going to get to the second part of a joke. The second part of a joke is called the assumption. The assumption is basically what the joke is going to imply from the set up. When you say a rabbi and a priest are at the bar, the assumption is that you'll have a drink calmly when you arrive at the bar, and then you'll go home at the end of the night. An anti-joke would end exactly like that. Generally speaking, the assumption is where things are supposed to be going. Then there's the shatter. The shatter is the thing that shows what the setup is really about.  If the joke starts at a bar, when you arrive at the bar, there is the priest and the rabbi who begin bedding about something that is religious. Then that thing comes true and then shattered. It Is something in the joke revealed and it's also called the turn, the target assumption, or the second story. That's where we get into where we will effectively get our punch line.

Next, there is something called the connector. This is the thing that your setup allows you to perceive in two ways, which is also called the pivot or switch. We're going to sort of breeze over this one because it starts the punchline. It starts the section that's going to be the end of the joke. Now, connectors don't have to be words; they can be phrases, gestures, attitudes, ideas, purposes, etc.

Have you seen the movie, Sherlock Holmes? It shows him making friends with people, but it doesn't show the beginning of the joke. So, he's entertaining everybody with jokes, but it only lets you hear the end of it, or the connector. So, it jumps into the scene and where there is a punch line and everyone laughs, but you never get to hear the beginning of the connection to it. And then there's the punch, also known as the punchline. It's the second part of the joke. It's the part that makes the audience laugh, but the reason why it works. It's the surprise that reinterprets the connector. This is the driest, unfunniest way you will ever hear a joke described. We have a YouTube video that we are going to link into our show notes, and it's a really good breakdown of how Louis CK tells a monopoly joke. It uses Louis CK's famous monopoly joke used to show how a joke structure works. If you watch this YouTube video, you're going to look at all standup comedy differently.

You will see how deliberate it is, how it incorporates these elements, and it also introduces something that comedians know about called a tag. a tag is when you look at a joke you just made a punch line for, and you go back and repeat it with a slightly different observation. You get the same humor out of the same joke, but it pays off again because you look at it slightly different. If you're ever at a joke, you tell there's always a way to look at that same joke again with a new metaphor and that's oftentimes what it is. It's just reusing a different metaphor to hit the same joke again.

Final Thoughts

Mark Twain didn't set out to invent standup comedy as we know it. He did it for a better life, which is something we all can learn from. Humor seems to be a multi-purpose hack socially, depending on the polling source. Humor is either the most important factor in desirability or the number one factor across the board. Using humor well demonstrates intelligence, social awareness, and social flexibility. Injecting humor into your work life can make you a more trustworthy persuasive speaker, as long as you stay clear of hostile racist, ageist, or sexist content.

Humor isn't like athleticism either. You don't have to be born with it. However, you have to practice, especially if you want to be truly fast and witty. The more experience you get, the less you'll rely on the planning part of your brain - the prefrontal cortex. You'll be free-associating your way to laughter, just like experienced comedians. You will be letting the more artistic temporal lobe hit those side-splitting punchlines for you.

Anyone can be reaction funny or in the moment funny. Anyone can watch comedy specials on Netflix. But if you devote just a tiny bit of time identifying the structure of a joke to see what works versus what flops, you could turn that Netflix hour into a fruitful and fun learning activity. And if nothing else, you will have a new comedy routine to repeat at the water cooler tomorrow.