Free The Humor Code by Peter McGraw

the UCB Theatre to catch the hottest stand-up show in town: “Comedy Bang Bang.” The small black-box theater is crammed with twentysomethings in hipster T-shirts and baseball hats, swigging booze from brown paper bags beneath the venue’s prominent “No drinking” signs. As usual for the show, nobody knows who’s going to perform. But that doesn’t matter to folks in the know. Tickets for the event sold out days ago, as they do most weeks.
    When the show starts, Pete and I sit in back, taking it all in. We’ve seen so much stand-up lately we act like snooty connoisseurs, nodding and whispering to each other, “Oh, that’s funny,” rather than laughing like normal people.
    Then, at the end of the night, the big special guest: Aziz Ansari,co-star of the sitcom Parks and Recreation and, alongside Louis C.K., one of the biggest comedy names around. He’s here to work on material.
    Ansari works the audience, asking what dating sites people frequent, and segues into an extended bit on internet matchmaking. He complains that as a child he was ignored by pedophiles, something he doesn’t understand: “For child molesters, I must’ve been like the hot chick at the bar.” The crowd eats it up, but with one graphic molestation joke, he takes it too far. The laughter dies.
    â€œOh, come on!” he cracks in mock annoyance, gesturing at a digital recorder he has running nearby. “Other people have laughed at that. I’ve taped it. Want me to play it for you?”
    Later, Pete realizes something: “Comedians are using science.” While comics like Louis C.K. might deny there’s a formula behind what’s funny, they’ve all developed their own formulas—by experimenting bit by bit, recording their shows night after night and gauging the results. As we’ve learned here in LA, it’s not about whether or not you’re funny, it’s how you’re funny: how you learn the ins and outs of the business, how you develop your comic perspective, how you mix honesty and humor, how you deal with bad venues, and how you handle your shot at fame. And the only way to learn is through hard, repetitive, empirical work. “Comedians are experimenting every time they go up on stage and try a new bit and they gauge how the audience responds,” says Pete. “They tweak it, see how it changes, tweak it, see how it changes.”
    Yes, non-scientific stuff plays a role, too. Several months after our trip to Los Angeles, comic hopeful Josh Friedman sends us an e-mail. He’s turned his attention to improv, he tells us: “As an art form and personal activity, I find I enjoy it a whole lot more,” he writes.
    The talent scouts’ gut feeling was right. He didn’t have stand-up in his soul.
    Call it whatever you want, but experimentation is integral to being funny. “To say that science can’t help comedy is to ignore what comedians have learned throughout the years,” Pete says.
    Yes, comedy’s a bit messy, a bit dangerous. But then again, so is science.

3
NEW YORK

How do you make funny?
    Pete and I are staring at a cartoon from the New Yorker magazine, willing our brains to come up with the perfect caption for a drawing of a wolfman sitting in a barbershop.
    The caption has to fit—but it also has to be funny. And how do you do that? In Los Angeles, we poked around in the strange and off-kilter minds of the gatekeepers of comedy and came away with a rough idea of what makes them tick. But how do they create those jokes and routines in the first place? Not to mention, how do people come up with all the other forms of comedy—narrative poems and plays and animated cartoons and novels and sketches and sitcoms and short stories and movies and satire and caricatures and puns?
    That’s what Pete and I aim to find out—starting by creating a funny caption for a wolfman getting a haircut. How about,