Many of you may be unfamiliar with scientifical* humor analysis. While I won’t go over all of general humor theory, here are two fundamental rules of humor:
1. The evolutionary purpose of humor is to enforce social structure by ridiculing undesired behavior. This is best observed in the good feeling of being in a group laughing versus the bad feeling of being laughed at by a group.
2. All humor is ridiculing undesired human behavior. Thus, animals are only funny so much as we can project human characteristic onto them.
Already, you can see why a show that ridicules liberals would have an advantage among conservatives, because, to them, liberalism is essentially an undesired behavior to be corrected through ridicule. This is also why liberals don’t consider conservatives to be funny since liberals are often the ones laughed at, and being laughed at causes the opposite sensation of laughing with a group.
Measuring the level of humor of a joke is tricky as who the joke is being told to has a large effect on the humor perceptions of the joke. Not only do the joke recipients own prejudices and beliefs about human behavior have to be factored in, but so does that person’s affinity for the joke teller and other joke recipients who may or may not be laughing at the joke.
Ignoring most societal factors (for this show, we’re going to assume the joke recipient is watching the TV alone and has no special affinity for the fake new anchors since they are unknown actors), how funny a joke is comes down to the level of brain activation in comprehending the joke within approximately a quarter second of the joke telling. This comprehension can be do to the cleverness of a joke or processing it ridiculousness (for instance, seeing someone hit in the face with a pie if you have never seen such a thing before). I say approximately a quarter second because this space of humor activation–the cumulation period–varies from person to person, but this short time period is the sweet spot of humor. The more activation in the cumulation period, the more the humor area of the brain is activated. After this time period, the initial brain activity when the joke was first told will have died down and will not be compensated by the new activity. That’s why if a joke takes too long to comprehend, humor is lost. This ignores the delayed humor reaction in which, due to confusion, the cumulation period happens well after the joke was told. The reason brain activation is translated to humor is because, when a certain amount of brain activity is caused by another’s words, this is interpreted by the brain as showing that your thoughts are similar to that of the joke teller. Because of the social nature of humor, a perception of a similarity of beliefs and intelligence is most important.
For example, take this joke:
A woman orders a pizza. The pizza chef asks the woman if she wants it cut into six or eight slices and she replies, “Six slices. I couldn’t possibly eat eight.”
For a child who just learned the principle of the conservation of matter, this involves a large amount of brain activation and is perceived as quite funny. For most adults, the brain activation in comprehending the joke is low which causes most laymen to label the joke as “cheesy.”
Here comes the problem in marketing humor to a large audience. While its easy to find jokes that cause a low level of activation in most people, a certain joke will only cause high levels of activation in a very specific group. By going for the funniest jokes for a certain audience, other audiences will be confounded or bored.
Jokes are rated on the Fleming Brain Activation Scale which ranges from zero to ten. The extremes are both theoretical as comprehending any joke takes some brain activation thus making a zero impossible to obtain. Also, a high amount of brain activity in a short amount of time would activate a self-defense mechanism that would shut down the brain. Thus, before a level ten could be reached, the joke recipient would black out and forget the joke due to short term loss quite similar to be being knocked out with a tire iron.
Focusing only on brain activation misses two important factors, though: Approval and disapproval. If one already as a dislike of the joke teller or the subject causes offense, this can keep the humor area of the brain from activation despite high activity within the cumulation period. This is why liberals seem immune to clever jokes from conservatives. On the other hand, if there is already high approval of the joke teller or the joke is aimed at something highly disapproved, then humor activation takes less brain activity within the cumulation period. This is commonly known as the “girlfriend effect” seen when a girl laughs at all the jokes of a new boy friend. She is essentially submitting to his views on human behavior as is common in the mating process. This is also seen when liberals laugh at “BusHitler” jokes that don’t seem to be clever at all. Contrary to popular opinion, this isn’t forced laughter as the end humor activation is exactly the same as that which would be obtained through humor activation obtained solely through stimulation of brain activity within the cumulation period.
Now, with that explained, we can move on to analyzing The 1/2 Hour News Hour.
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