Kim Mills: A skeleton walks into a bar. The bartender says, "What'll you have?" And the skeleton says, "I'll have a beer and a mop."
All right, it's an old joke but maybe you laughed at it, and if you did, why? What makes it funny? And what is it about puns that tickles our funny bone? Or dad jokes? How about practical jokes? Or even a person slipping on a banana peel? What could possibly tie all of these very different things together under the heading humor? That's a question that's fascinated people for centuries, and not just comedians. The writer E.B. White is supposed to have said that explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: The thing dies in the process. But scientists and philosophers, undaunted, have nonetheless long tried to figure out what makes some things funny and other things not. Today, just in time for April Fool's Day, we'll explore that question and maybe help you figure out whether your practical joke is likely to soar or make people sore at you.
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association, that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Peter McGraw, a marketing and psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the Humor Research Lab, also known as "HuRL." He has spent more than a dozen years studying what makes things funny and has developed what he calls the "benign violation theory" that explains why people find humor in everything from tickling to puns. He's also explored humor on a more practical level, even trying his hand at standup comedy and hosting a podcast where he interviewed comedians about their lives and work. These days he's exploring how people can apply lessons from comedy to become more innovative and creative thinkers in all areas of their life and work.
Thank you for joining us today, Dr. McGraw.
Peter McGraw, PhD: Kim, it's a great pleasure. What a wonderful introduction. I actually feel good about myself right now.
Mills: That's one thing that humor does for use, right? It makes us feel pretty good. Let's start by talking about how you got interested in studying the topic. What made you, as a psychologist, want to understand humor?
McGraw: One thing that's probably obvious: Like most people, I greatly appreciate good comedy, whether it be consuming it–going to a comedy club or watching a movie–and then I would say by professorial standards I got a kick out of trying to be funny in my professional life, but especially in my personal life. And yet, 10 years into my career at the time, I stumbled on this question of what makes things funny. I had never even considered it as a worthy emotional phenomenon to study, to research. Part of it was no one else was doing that. It was running in the background. A bit of a niche kind of topic: interdisciplinary topic. One that, as you mentioned, goes back centuries, millennia, to some of the great scholars who psychological science, their ideas were built on.
I stumbled on this question in a very peculiar way. I was giving a talk at another university about what makes things wrong. I was studying moral psychology at the time. And because I wanted to be a good speaker, I used a kind of provocative, entertaining example of religious marketing that people might find wrong and I got some laughs. And a hand went up in the back of the room and I was asked the most important question of my professional life. Actually, maybe the most important question of my life. This professor, she raised her hand, and she just pointed out the incongruity between what I was saying and what was happening, which was I was saying that moral violations cause anger and disgust and then she rightfully pointed out, "Yet, we're laughing. Why?" I stood there dumbfounded and I went back to my university and I recruited a very bright graduate student, Caleb Warren, and I said, "We should answer this question." As they say, the rest is history, or at least ongoing history.
Mills: Well then, let's dive into the big question that I posed in the introduction, which is, "What makes something funny?" And what is benign violation theory? How can it help us answer that question?
McGraw: This very bright graduate student, Caleb Warren, and I jumped into a more narrow question, which is, "What makes moral violations funny?" But in order to answer a question like that, you need a good theory. So I think the average person doesn't understand what the value of a theory is, and it's very simple, in my opinion. A good theory helps you answer questions. It doesn't have to be totally right. It just has to be good enough. And then a good theory will allow you to make predictions about questions you haven't even considered yet.
And so we got started on this and our look at the literature was disappointing. So I did something I'm not proud of, Kim. I Googled, "What makes things funny?" That was my starting point. That's what my undergraduates do when I give them an assignment. They just Google this. And what I found was, hearkening all the way back to these Greek philosophers, Aristotle, Plato, and then other great thinkers–Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, Sigmund Freud–frankly, people way, way smarter than me had put forth theories of humor and those theories take one of three flavors. They point out what we call superiority theory: we laugh at something–we sort of laugh at the follies and foibles of others. Relief theory or release theory, which is humor is this kind of release of tension that we carry around all the time. Freud's responsible largely for that. And then the 800 pound gorilla of humor theory: incongruity theory. We laugh at some mismatch there.
What we realized, I think, very quickly–and the benefit of coming to it as I was approaching mid-career–was, first of all, it didn't make sense that we needed three theories of humor. A good theory is what we call parsimonious. It's simple. You shouldn't have to select from a menu, like, "This theory works for pratfalls but that theory works for puns." So we found this little known paper written by a linguist that served as the basis for, as you called it, the benign violation theory. In short, what we found was–and we find time and time again in HuRL–is that people laugh at, they're amused by, they judge something as funny if it is simultaneous wrong yet okay, threatening yet safe, doesn't make sense yet makes sense. You can imagine kind of a Venn diagram, an overlap, between benign and violation. What happens is the violation gives us arousal, makes us concerned, and then what we call the benign appraisal, seeing how this is okay, flips it and turns it from bad to good and we laugh to tell the world this thing that seems so threatening is actually harmless.
Mills: Before I forget, what was that moral juxtaposition that made people laugh?
McGraw: In this research, I was looking at how some people find religious marketing to be morally reprehensible, for churches to use commercial principles to save souls. They just find it icky. They're concerned that it may take you away from the righteousness that religion may have. The example was a church in Tampa, Florida, that had very good intentions, and that was to get people to go to its winter retreat. "You want to save souls? Let's get people to the winter retreat." So they decided to have a raffle. "Come to the winter retreat. You get enrolled in a raffle." And what people found funny was the choice of grand prize, and that was a yellow H2 hummer SUV. Not exactly a gut buster but good for a chuckle.
Mills: Take it on the road to paradise.
McGraw: What we found to be the case was, depending on your perspective about how wrong or right that was, that example was funny or not. Those academics who aren't very religious, don't have a very strong connection to this church and so on, they were able to see how it was both wrong and funny at the same time.
Mills: How do you study humor in a lab? What are the experiments that you've done over–I'm sure you can't tell us all of them, but maybe a couple that you've done over the years that have helped you formulate the theory and better understand what makes things funny.
McGraw: I'll give you an example of one of the more fun ones. A lot of them, I'll admit, is just basically showing people funny images or funny jokes and then just asking them, "How amusing is this? Did you laugh? Do you find this offensive? Do you find it boring?" By the way, this is an important set of questions because in any study we do that we ask someone a judgment, we ask three styles of questions. One is, "How amused are you?" Getting at that experience of humor. We ask, "Are you offended? And if so, by how much?" And, "Are you bored? And if so, by how much?" The reason for that is a joke can fail in two different ways. You mentioned dad jokes. Dad jokes, when they're not funny, are rarely ever offensive. They fall on the boring side of the continuum. But there's a lot of jokes that are very risque and when those jokes fail people are offended. They're outraged. So a good theory of humor is able to not only predict when something's going to be funny but also, when it fails to be funny, which side does it fall on. So we always ask those questions.
But this one was designed to measure smiling and laughter and I'll give you an example from it. We've always been very critical of incongruity theory because one is, oftentimes, incongruity is not well defined, but oftentimes what people will say is–and you ask the regular everyday person, "What makes something funny?" they'll say, "Something surprising." We laugh at things that are surprising. We make the argument that actually that's neither necessary nor sufficient for humor. For example, we laugh at jokes that we know the punchline to. That is, there's nothing surprising about them. I re-watched “There's Something About Mary” 20, 30 years after it came out. By the way, still very funny, and I know all the jokes, and I found myself laughing.
In this study, we had our subjects engaged in a conversation with what we call a confederate–basically, a research assistant who is posing as a student. This is a very common technique in psychological studies. Basically, at some point in the interaction, the person grabbed a handful of Skittles and threw them at the subject, which might seem to be kind of an insulting thing to do. In one of the conditions though, we either announced, "I'm going to throw these Skittles at you," or didn't say they were going to throw the Skittles at them. In that condition where they announced it and threw the Skittles, there was actually more laughter than when not in part because–and we did this to show that surprise is not necessary for comedy. The less surprising condition in that experiment actually got more smiles and laughter than the surprising condition.
Mills: There's a saying that humor is tragedy plus time. You've written about when it's too soon to joke about something tragic. What is the answer? How long does it take, can you say, before we can find humor in tragedy?
McGraw: I'm glad you asked that question because we ran a huge cross-sectional study to answer that very question. I'm going to give away the punchline before I describe the study. The answer is the amount of time depends on a lot of things, including how big a violation it is. But as a result of that work, we revised the idea that comedy is tragedy plus time to be comedy is tragedy plus the right amount of time. I'll lead with intuition, and that is there's lots of things that are too soon and then at some point it becomes okay to joke about them, but at some point enough time passes that thing is no longer worthy of being joked about. What you get is too soon has the outrage, too late is boring, and there's, again, that sweet spot, that peak, in terms of time. Why is it that time helps make something funnier? Because the passage of time creates distance from it, and distance, whether it be the passage of time or physical distance or relational distance, helps turn violations into benign violations by removing their threat.
In that study what we did was we measured people's reactions to a parody account of Hurricane Katrina. What we found was as Katrina was wreaking havoc on the New York metropolitan area, the jokes coming out of this parody account weren't funny. Then with the passage of time they started to become funny and less offensive. And then further, months and months later, those jokes no longer seemed relevant. They were boring. I can't remember the exact date but it was like 39 days after Hurricane Katrina we found that those jokes peaked. Of course, in some cases it peaks an hour later. In some cases it peaks–and there are some tragedies in the world that may never peak because it never becomes okay to joke about.
Mills: That was my next question, which is: Are there some topics that are just never funny?
McGraw: I think it depends on who you talk to. I think a comic says, "There's no such thing as too soon if a joke is funny." I have Israeli friends who make Holocaust jokes. They have some sort of license that non-Jewish people don't have. What that question reveals is the incredible complexity around studying humor, is part of the reason that people haven't studied it, because at first blush it seems so mysterious, it seems so difficult. But as you know, as someone who values science, science has the ability to take the complex and explain it. If we can map the human genome we can figure out what makes things funny. We just need to have an experiment.
Mills: How much does what's considered funny vary by country or culture? Are there universal jokes or universal-type humor?
McGraw: There's very little that's universal when it comes to comedy, to be honest, but the explanation for this is–as I said, a good theory explains puzzles, and one of the puzzles is, "Why are there two ways that a joke can fail?" which we've already alluded to. It can be too benign or it can be too much of a violation. But also, how can the same joke make one person laugh, another person yawn, and another person stomp their feet with outrage? At least from a theoretical standpoint we can explain this, and that is, "What is wrong and what is okay?" What is benign and what is a violation depends on the individual: the audience members' values, beliefs, lifestyle, the number of drinks they've had, the context they're in, whether they're in a comedy club or in a church, and of course their culture because culture creates norms, culture creates rules. A lot of comedy breaks rules, so it depends on what rules you value and don't value in that way.
Now, what is likely to be universal? The most universal thing is physical comedy. That is, on the individual level, things like tickling and play-fighting. We know this because non-human primates laugh when play-fighting even–and this is mind-blowing, Kim. You can type into YouTube "rat laughter" and you will find videos of rats being tickled and them doing the rat equivalent of laughing. When you take this into the world of comedy the closest we can come to is the classic–as you mentioned on the intro–slipping on a banana peel, and the reason behind that is when someone falls, falls down a flight of stairs or something like that, that is obviously a violation. We're concerned for their safety. But if there's something about that that makes it safe, perhaps they get up and are fine, dust themselves off, and look perplexed. Maybe there's someone we want to fall down a flight of stairs, you know what I mean? So there's these different ways.
That's as close as we come because there are no cultural norms, there is no language, and it all is connected to that idea of physical play. But as you know, not everybody finds pratfalls to be amusing, so there are real limits to the universality of comedy.
Mills: And pratfalls, also, if you know the person who fell or had the pratfall it's funnier than if it's a total stranger where you don't know whether that person got hurt or what might've happened.
McGraw: It depends. Look, I love it when my friends fall up a flight of stairs but I don't like it when my friends fall down a flight of stairs.
Mills: Is a sense of humor correlated with higher intelligence? It just seems to me that smart people get jokes and people who are maybe not quite as intelligent–I'm not even sure how I'm defining that. That's wide open. But can you be–my other question that's related to this is, "Can you be intelligent and have no sense of humor?"
McGraw: Yes and yes. First of all, when people talk about a sense of humor we should be clear. There's two sides of a sense of humor and they're surprisingly uncorrelated. That is your ability to produce laughter in others and the likelihood that you laugh in response to someone's attempt to produce laughter in others. The little work that's been done finds that those things are surprisingly uncorrelated: that someone who might be very good at making people laugh may not be very easy to laugh, and vice-versa.
However, when it comes to the production of comedy, you are correct. Your intuition is absolutely correct. Smart people are better than less smart people. That makes sense, I think. One is intelligence is correlated with creativity and creativity really is at the foundation of this process. Smart people are knowledgeable about the world, and so if you want to be able to make comedy a lot of comedy is about what's happening in the world in that sense. Then lastly, it really is, and this is not something we've talked about to this point, but there is a third element to the benign violation theory and that is that judgment of wrong and okay has to occur simultaneously. That term, being quick-witted, really is about how do you bring those appraisals together at the same time. That's not easy to do. We know that most humor attempts fail. We know that most professionals really have to write lots and lots of jokes in order to find that one very, very good joke. So being smart certainly helps.
Now, I want to be clear. Being smart is not in the traditional sense of getting high GREs or high SATs necessarily, because we often have that class clown who is very good at making people laugh, may not actually excel in traditional forms of education in part because they're counter-normative. They don't behave. So really it's not about the–Valedictorians, I actually don't think are the funniest people. It's the people who are smart but also can sit in this space where they're willing to break some rules. Valedictorians are very good at following rules. They're not very good at breaking rules. It's sort of more the entrepreneurial person, I think, who has that edge.
Mills: You published a paper a little while ago on humorous complaining and found that if you have something you want to gripe about that there are advantages and disadvantages to complaining in a funny way. Can you talk about that a bit? What did you find?
McGraw: I'd be happy to. I have to say, that might be my favorite paper. I came to the idea behind that paper through–I caught myself claiming that I don't complain about things, which is completely false. It's not even–I complain all the time. You know why? Because humans complain all the time. People complain all the time because complaining, in some ways, is useful and sometimes falsely useful. That is, we have theories about the value of complaining. Not all of them are correct. For example, complaining doesn't help us through catharsis in the way that we think it does. It does help us because suppressing a complaint is really bad. Suppressing an emotion tends to make it worse. But sometimes people complain in order to get something. Sometimes they complain to show the world that they have expertise, so I complain, "This dessert. It's terrible." Because I want the world to know I know what good food tastes like and so on.
But what I found was I am a complainer but I tend to be a humorous complainer. I make a lot of sarcastic and witty quips to make people laugh about the bad weather, the bad traffic, a bad dessert and so on and so forth. This makes sense. A complaint is an expression of something negative and a joke is a way to take something negative and make it positive. This work on humorous complaining–Caleb Warren was a co-author on that paper, also. What we found was people like humorous complainers. Humorous complaints are attention-getting. People will share humorous complaints, so if you want to complain about a company a humorous complaint is great if you wanted to, quote unquote, go viral.
The downside of humorous complaints are they don't spur the kind of reaction we often want them to. If you complain to your roommate about the dishes in the sink, that may get him or her to clean the dishes. But if you make humorous complaints about the dishes in the sink you're taking this thing that's wrong and making it okay. As a result, it may not spur the kind of remedial behavior that you want in that sense. So what I say is pick your weapon depending on which of the outcomes that you want for a complaint.
Mills: What is the relationship and the difference, say, between laughter and humor? We laugh at funny things but there's nervous laughter, there's uncomfortable laughter. How are laughter and humor related?
McGraw: We find that the emotion, amusement, the judgment, funny–so we have emotion cognition–and then behavior, laughter, are the three elements that make up a humorous experience. They don't all have to be present but when they are it tends to be a more intense experience. Laughter is really, I think, the biggest puzzle and the one that I think is most difficult in part because people are more likely to laugh when others are present, less likely to laugh when no one else is present because there's nothing to communicate. Laughter can be faked. Anybody who's had a boss knows that you can fake laughter. And laughter can be suppressed. That is, someone tells an off-color joke that you think is funny but you don't want the world to know that you think that's funny, so you can stifle laughter.
But laughter, again as I said, serves this communication function and we know it does because we see it in species that don't have the ability to articulate ideas in the same way that humans can. So I find that to be a really interesting element to all of this. But again, the best, most funny things, you bust a gut, you get that positive, delightful feeling and you go, "Kim, that was hilarious."
Mills: That takes me to the question about animals and a sense of humor, because we think that what some animals are doing sometimes–and you mention rats–that they're laughing. I think we have recognized it in some apes, some of our closer relatives. But what other animals have a sense of humor? And how do we know it?
McGraw: This question is wide open. It's not easy to answer. Most of the work has been done with chimps, bonobos, monkey, apes, and so on. The researchers don't call it laughter per se. They call it play panting. This is connected–really, the roots of comedy are in play, and play panting, which is really fascinating, is this sort of, like, kind of sound. What the research shows is that the primates that are closest to humans in genetic–genetically closest to humans have play panting that is most akin to the way we laugh. We know that they are connected.
Mark Bekoff is an expert in animals and especially an expert in dogs. There is emerging work that suggests that dogs have a sense of humor: that dogs laugh. Anybody who's a dog owner will say, "Absolutely. My dog has a sense of humor. My dog, quote unquote, laughs, especially when playing." Cat owners not so much. It's hard to know. My feeling about this, though, is that any mammal has some, in its repertoire–any mammal that engages in play with its own species has something akin to humor as an emotional experience. But again, the work hasn't been done. This is a projection based upon what's been done and the theory I rely on.
Mills: I think cats laugh but we can't hear it. They certainly laugh at us.
McGraw: I think that's true. I think they laugh on how they're getting over on the world, yes.
Mills: You teach at a business school and your most recent book is called "Shtick to Business," which is about how lessons from comedy can help people in their work lives. Can you talk about that? And should we or shouldn't we try to be funny at work?
McGraw: I used to think we should and now I think only some of us should. I'll make the easy case for why we all should not try to be funnier at work and it's that guy. You know the guy. The guy who thinks he's funny. If I tell everybody to go forth and be funny at work we’ve got to really worry about that guy, you know what I mean? He's like, "Oh yeah, here's my chance." And because bad comedy may at best case bore people, at worst case offend people, the workplace is a place that should be inclusive and it should be one where everybody feel welcome and comfortable.
What I have pivoted my thinking to is something that everybody should do, which is to think funny. As you mentioned at the beginning, I've tried my hand at standup. I've taken improv classes. I even developed a live comedy show. I've dipped my toe into the professional world and what I've realized is it's incredibly difficult to be successful in that world, yet those people who are successful in that world, not only are they incredibly creative innately and intuitively, but there are tips and tricks, there are practices and perspectives, that they use to make things funnier. It's those practices and perspectives that we can use not to make comedy but to make things that are creative or innovative that can help our lives.
I'll give you a quick example. Comedy 101. The first lesson you learn as a comedian, if you don't already intuitively know it, is what I call reverse it or the reversal, and that's to produce an opposing perspective. I'll demonstrate it with a joke by Henny Youngman, the king of the one liners. Henny Youngman said, "When I read about the dangers of drinking, I gave up–" Kim, what do you think that Henny gave up when he read about the–
Mills: Reading! Reading! He gave up reading.
McGraw: He gave up reading, exactly. He did the opposite of what you might expect there but that makes that violation benign because we know Henny likes to drink. "I don't want to give up drinking so I'll give up reading." Those reversals, and those reversals, as I just demonstrated there, the punchline to a joke but it could also be a premise to a comedy bit. The movie "Trainwreck" with Amy Schumer is a reverse rom com. The typical rom-com: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. In "Trainwreck," it's the opposite: girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy back.
You can find the reversal in the real world and it's often useful to break out of very tired, status quo-style thinking. I'll give you one quick example of this. Imagine you're two entrepreneurs based in Brooklyn and you're looking to take on Apple and Samsung in the smartphone market. How do you outsmart Apple and Samsung: teams of engineers years and years ahead of you? What these guys did was they reversed it. They didn't create a smartphone. They created the dumbphone: a phone that is made for people who want to be not more connected but rather less connected. They've been able to stand out in the marketplace by thinking in reverse. So I invite people to think in reverse especially when they're stuck on a problem.
Mills: There's been quite a bit of psychological research into who's funnier: men or women? Of course, as a woman I have a point of view here, but I'm going to ask you. What's the answer to that? I know there was a recent, pretty big, meta-analysis that concluded that it's men but then there's other research that says no. Is the jury still out?
McGraw: I think from a data standpoint the jury is still out. There's a lot of work that needs to be done. I think it's the wrong question, though, I'll be really honest. I think a lot of the work on gender that compares men and women fails to recognize that men and women are more alike than they are different. Knowing whether someone is a man or a woman and predicting whether they're going to be funny or not is less important than knowing a whole bunch of other things about them. I'll give you–the little work that I've done is–first of all, all of that work is very limited. Because there are an infinite number of ways to make comedy, if you choose one way to make comedy, for example, writing funny captions for cartoons, that may tell you that men are better or women are better making captions for cartoons funny, but it doesn't explain the vast array that people make things funny: quips, satire, irony, pratfalls, etc.
Also, all of that work doesn't do what I think needs to be done, which is to look at how those jokes fail. I'll give you an example of a little pilot study I ran. It's not worthy of publication but I thought it was enlightening. I did this with my class where I had students doing exactly that: basically making jokes. Then when we measured the funniness of these jokes and we compared men and women we found that men's jokes tended to be on average slightly funnier than women's, so consistent with the existing research. However, we also measured how offensive the jokes were, and guess what? The men's jokes were also, when they failed, more likely to be offensive. So any good study that compares men and women–which I don't think is that interesting a question, frankly, because I think that there are funny men and there are funny women are there are not funny men and there are not funny women. But any research has to measure how are you failing, because the failure part of it is as important as part of the success part of it. What my hunch is, I haven't written a paper yet, that depending on how you look at the question the answer is yes.
Mills: Okay. You mentioned offensive jokes and I'm going to venture into the politically incorrect department now and ask why does it seem that every culture have what we in the U.S. call Polish jokes or dumb blond jokes. What I'm talking about, of course, is the jokes that denigrate a particular group of people for their supposed lack of intelligence.
McGraw: Indeed. That seems to be a universal. Christie Davies, who was at the University of Reading, has done a lot of work on this. It's really fascinating work. Qualitative research mostly. Essentially, the reason for that is that comedy can be used as a tool. It can be used as a tool to entertain, as we've talked about with humorous complaining. It can be used as a tool to get people to like you, to garner attention. But it also can be used as a tool to critique the powerful or to critique the weak: to punch up or punch down, so to speak. That idea, punching down in terms of making fun of someone's intelligence due to some stereotype, some existing prejudice, is clearly punching down and really is just designed, I think, twofold. One is to make the joke teller feel superior, hence that form of theory that has existed for such a long time. And then it's just using it as a tool to keep those differences in play, o continue to marginalize and to discriminate and to prejudice.
I believe that the best comedy–I'm not speaking as a researcher, I'm speaking as a human–punches up. It takes on the powerful and it looks to make the world a better place as a result of that. And I think that the best comedy, when it's looking down, is designed to draw people up. I think that good comedians recognize that it is completely inappropriate to make jokes about homosexuals but it's appropriate to make jokes about homophobes and, in a way, to right a wrong.
Mills: I'm going to put you on the spot, which really probably isn't asking you questions as a researcher but just as a guy who's interested in humor. What's your favorite joke? Do you have a favorite comedian? A favorite funny movie?
McGraw: That's a tough question because it's constantly changing. We can try this. This may not work well for a podcast but you can edit it out if it doesn't work. Why don't we do one of my favorite jokes?
Mills: All right. Go for it.
McGraw: Kim, I want you to ask me, "What is the secret to good comedy?"
Mills: I know this joke. What is the secret to good come–
McGraw: Timing!
Mills: I knew were going to do that! And as you demonstrated, an old joke and I still laugh at it.
McGraw: You knew it was coming and it was still funny. That's right.
In terms of favorite comedians, I don't want to pick just one in part because comedy rewards novelty, so it's easy to fall in love with a new comic. I'm living in Los Angeles right now and last night I had a wonderful, what felt like, pre-pandemic experience. I dined outside and had a lovely dinner and the gentleman at the table to my left, I look up, he signs the check, walks by me. I hear him say something and I go, "I know that voice." It was one of my favorite comedians. I had a Chris Rock sighting last night, which was nearly as delightful as my meal.
Mills: That's a good story. Well, thank you, and thank you for joining us today, Dr. McGraw. If I dare say, it's been a real riot talking to you.
McGraw: It's been my pleasure. Thank you, Kim.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www.speakingofpsychology.org. We're on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. That's speakingofpsychology, all one word, @apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.
Peter McGraw, PhD, is a marketing and psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the Humor Research Lab, or “HuRL.” He developed “benign violation theory,” a theory of humor that explains why people find amusement in everything from tickling to puns. These days, he’s exploring how people can apply lessons from comedy to become more innovative and creative thinkers in all areas of their life and work. He is the author of “The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny” and “Shtick to Business: What the Masters of Comedy Can Teach You About Breaking Rules, Being Fearless, and Building a Serious Career.”
