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HUMOR
Broadcast starting week of August 28, 2007

This week on The Infinite Mind, what makes "funny funny?" We hear from several of America's leading comedians and researchers studying humor and the brain.

Host Dr. Fred Goodwin's guests include Margaret Cho, an experienced stand-up performer, filling clubs throughout the country. She's released two albums of her comedy material and starred in a network television sit-com and an HBO special. Also, Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman, original members of the legendary Firesign Theater, a group of four comics who first came to fame on the underground FM airwaves of the late 1960s and 1970s. Their humor is surreal, absurdist, and satirical, with plenty of wordplay. They've been called the Marx Brothers of the baby-boom generation.

The comics and Dr. Goodwin discuss the importance of timing and rhythm -- how important it is to be in sync with the audience, not to go to another joke before the audience has time to respond. Cho, Bergman, and Proctor reveal the different ways in which they generate their humor -- Cho warns that trying out material on other comics may be misleading, as there are some things only fellow comedians find funny.

They trade stories about bombing and heckling -- and about the times audiences loved them so much that, in Cho's words "the audience's energy is so chaotic it almost feels out of control, like things are going to get away from you."

Cho talks about how she uses her family in her routines -- and how they feel about that. A lot of her humor is related to her experiences as a Korean-American -- including experiences of prejudice, which in her stand-up routines she is able to transform into something funny and, she hopes, educational.

Cho, Bergman, and Proctor agree that humor that pokes fun at those who can't defend themselves is the only kind of humor they consider off-limits. Edgy topics can generate big laughs, but are by definition risky territory.

Bergman and Proctor discuss their use of language -- puns, wordplay, deliberate mispronunciations--and sound. When they parody a commercial on their album, for example, they imitate a commercial announcer's voice and delivery. They see themselves as exposing some of the absurdities in our society through exaggeration of what's out there in the world -- and as Dr. Goodwin comments, sometimes their exaggeration is all too close to the truth.

For more on Margaret Cho visit margaretcho.com

Firesign Theater just celebrated their 40th Anniversary. Their website is firesigntheatre.com

Next -- commentary from Anne Beatts, a humor columnist for the L.A. Times and writer for the original Saturday Night Live. She discloses some of the secrets of comedy writers -- for one, that it's hard to make them laugh. What is funny? Alliteration is funny, surprise is funny -- but repetition can be funny too, as in a Road Runner cartoon or, she says, a Leno monologue. Misunderstandings can be funny too. Beatts recounts some of the jokes comedy professionals tell about themselves.

Dr. Goodwin is joined by Dr. Bill Fry. a psychiatrist and professor emeritus at Stanford University Medical School, and Dr. Don Nilsen, professor of linguistics at Arizona State. They have studied the social and linguistic dimensions of humor.

They say a punchline is a moment of discovery -- when you discover something you didn't know, or new insight into something you thought you knew. Culture plays an important role in humor. For example, in the Navajo culture, the first person who makes a baby laugh has a special relationship with that child forever after.

A caller who is a professional comedian asks why so many comics are depressed or otherwise mentally ill. Dr. Goodwin says that manic depressives often get into a state where they make many rapid and original associations. Drs. Nilsen and Fry talk about a need to entertain on the part of the comic.

Then we speak with Dr. Katherine MacDonald, who has worked with Dr. Itzhak Fried at the University of California, Los Angeles, testing brain function in chronic epilepsy patients. She describes how in the course of their work they found a spot on the left temporal lobe of one patient that induced laughter--and the sense that things were funny--when it was electrically stimulated. The patient thought that the picture of a horse she was being shown, the clock on the wall, and the doctors standing around her were all hysterically funny. The experiment shows how motor functions and affective functions are linked in complex neural networks.

Drs. Nilsen and Fry take another caller, Debbie, who teaches and performs improvisational comedy. She asks questions about people who can't pick up on others' associations, about differences in how men and women perceive humor, and about how others judge a person by their sense of humor. The panelists discuss how humor is based on recognition of patterns and deviations from those patterns

Dr. Nilsen can be reached at the Department of English, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287.

Dr. Fry can be reached through the Stanford University Medical School, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, 401 Quarry Road, Stanford, CA 94305.

You can find out more about the research of Dr. Itzhak Fried at UCLA by writing him at the Division of Neurosurgery, Box 957039, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA 90095-7039.

And finally -- The Infinite Mind's Executive Producer, Bill Lichtenstein, interviews comedian Robert Klein. Klein is a comedian with more than 30 years of stand-up experience who has hosted the Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live and appeared in the films Next Stop Wonderland and Primary Colors. He speaks about some of the giants of comedy -- Henny Youngman, Jack Benny, and Lenny Bruce--and the important elements in their work. There's a discussion of timing and rhythm and of the relationship of some of these men's humor to New York Jewish culture and speech patterns. Klein talks about -- and demonstrates -- how he puts together a routine.

Heard on this week's program:

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