Free Ha! by Scott Weems Page B

learned that it always reflects an orienting response. When people see something they don’t expect, or something that grabs their attention, they invariably show a P300. The N400 is just as well studied, though it reflects a different kind of processing. The N400 occurs when the brain has to fit new information into existing knowledge—a process called semantic integration.
    Sadly, the presence or absence of P300 and N400 effects alone tell us nothing about how subjects process jokes, but when they are combinedwith muscular-response data collected from subjects’ faces, a new picture emerges. Derks found that subjects clearly perceived some jokes as funnier than others, indicated by the subjects’ zygomatic muscles. When Derks separated the trials containing jokes that were funny from those that weren’t, he saw that all of the subjects showed a P300 effect, regardless of joke funniness. However, the N400 effect emerged only when the subjects’ zygomatic muscles were activated. In other words, jokes that weren’t funny didn’t make people laugh, and didn’t elicit semantic integration or an N400.
    Derks had found proof that humor involves more than just being shocked or surprised. Jokes that weren’t funny still brought on an orienting response—a P300—because they included a surprising punch line. But that’s all they did. They didn’t lead to a satisfying resolution, and thus never made it to our third stage of humor processing. They didn’t activate an opposing script, allowing for the joke to “come together.” And so, after encountering the incongruity, subjects’ brains became silent.
    Derks’s findings clearly differentiate between reckoning and resolving because they show that it’s one thing to hear a joke but quite another for that joke to make us feel satisfied. Putting everything together and “getting” the joke is distinctly separate from being shocked or surprised, and I call this stage resolving because humor requires not just dealing with the unexpected but activating a new frame of reference.
    Interestingly, the anterior cingulate has been closely linked with the P300 but is unrelated to the N400. In other words, the anterior cingulate helps manage competing responses, but it’s not responsible for activating a new script following the punch line. That responsibility is shared across our entire brain, which holds all the knowledge necessary to know what jokes actually mean. So, conflict may be essential for humor, but we won’t find a joke funny without some resolution. Indeed, without resolution, we get no pleasure. It’s the difference between telling a waitress we’re on a diet, and expecting that a knife will miraculously make calories disappear.
    B EYOND THE S TAGES
    It’s important to note that the constructing, reckoning, and resolving stages aren’t just a way of looking at humor. They reflect common beliefs about how we process all aspects of our environment. We humans are always guessing and jumping the gun, just as we’re always dealing with conflicts and looking for ways to resolve them. Jokes are merely a specialized way of dealing with these stages very rapidly.
    This isn’t to say that jokes can’t involve multiple stages occurring simultaneously. Naturally occurring humor frequently mixes up the three stages, as we sometimes see in humorous newspaper headlines. “Red Tape Holds Up Bridge,” claims one. “Doctor Testifies in Horse Suit,” claims another. These headlines are each worthy of a Jay Leno stand-up routine, but their most impressive aspect is that in just a few words each calls on us to simultaneously construct, reckon, and resolve conflicting interpretations. It’s not enough for a headline to be merely ambiguous, because if this were the case, then “Doctor Testifies in Suit” would be just as funny. Rather, it’s that the