Why, for example, would jokes circulate after 9/11 if we weren’t collectively grasping for ways to parse how unsettling and disruptive it was? Humour that is in bad taste or cruelly targeted at particular groups may generate conflict, but, for Weems, humour is our way of working through difficult subjects or feelings. This, in part, he says, is why we laugh in response to dark, confusing or tragic events that, on the face of it, shouldn’t be funny at all. In the book, he posits a theory: essentially, that humour is a form of psychological processing, a coping mechanism that helps people to deal with complex and contradictory messages, a “response to conflict and confusion in our brain”.
In his recent book, Ha! The science of when we laugh and why, Weems reviews a raft of academic studies, including those that have used scanning to show which parts of the brain respond when we encounter something funny.
“My first thought when I think about humour is it’s a great way for us to have evolved so we don’t have to hit each other with sticks,” says Scott Weems, a cognitive neuroscientist and author. While this is clearly the function of some comedy – anyone who has flinched at a comic’s lame attempt to poke fun at, for example, disability will attest to this – it’s a relentlessly bleak and far from complete explanation of the purpose of humour. It asserts that humour is ostensibly about mocking the weak and exerting superiority. One of the most enduring theories of humour arrived courtesy of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. But what is it for? And can humour, as comedy, change how we feel, what we think or even what we do? Whether you’re sharing an amusing story down the pub, making a self-deprecating joke after someone pays you a compliment or telling a dark joke at a funeral, humour is everywhere. They’re interwoven into the fabric of our everyday existence.
“This is totally a therapy for me, doing this show.”Ĭomedy is more than just a pleasant way to pass an evening, humour more than something to amuse. “This is perfect for me,” says Ronson of the set-up, an intimate informal space in which the two hosts casually banter and tell stories in between a succession of comedians taking to the stage. Making people laugh has the potential to make the joke teller feel a bit better, too. “You see a couple,” Higgins says, “and you can tell that they’re checking each other’s responses. It’s a communal thing it’s a release.” Perhaps, she says, because audiences tend to be squeezed together in comedy clubs, acts get to be accidental anthropologists and observe at close quarters how individuals interact when exposed to jokes or funny tales. It’s about us and the audience connecting with each other… There’s something about being in the same room with somebody, reading each other’s body language, too.”
Higgins (a virtuoso comic, author and TV personality in her native Ireland) and Ronson (better known as the bestselling author of The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare at Goats) suggest there’s something particularly special about being part of the shared experience that is live comedy – that curious alchemy that occurs when people come together specifically to laugh (or not, depending on the quality of the acts).
The show is loosely predicated on the theme of being bewildered recent arrivals in a new town, as Higgins and Ronson were not so long ago in Brooklyn. Tonight’s assorted comics went down well with the punters, a youngish, hip crowd who’d braved the bitter weather to sit in a packed, dimly lit venue under a pub – all in search of some laughs. Higgins and her friend Jon Ronson are huddled backstage behind a thick black curtain, mulling over how the latest gig in their monthly stand-up series, I’m New Here – Can You Show Me Around?, went. It’s coming up for 11pm on a bone-chillingly cold Tuesday night in New York. “Laughter is a lubricant and is expected, and it’s really hard not to do it.” Turns out it wasn’t as easy as she thought. The Irish-born comedian wanted to see what life would be like if she stopped laughing at things that weren’t funny.