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Interview: Bob Mankoff, New Yorker cartoon editor
Apr 8, 2005
Here's yet another Gel 2005 speaker I'm totally excited about: Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of the New Yorker. I have admired his work for years. We spoke recently about his new research project.
Q - What are you doing with the University of Michigan?
It’s a 3-year research project with their psychology department, using New Yorker cartoons to see how people process humor. My general idea is that humor shares its cognitive apparatus with 99% of other brain processes. The other 1% makes it look completely different.
We’ve started preliminary experiments. We watch with high-speed digital cameras to see where people focus their eyes while looking at a cartoon, how long it takes to understand the cartoon.
Most of our work as human beings is conceptual blending. One situation is another - that’s analogy, or even metaphor. “The moon was a ghostly galleon,” etc. Thinking that the moon is a ship - that’s blending. We do it all the time when we’re getting ideas. Let’s say I have an iPod in my hand. It’s the size of a phone. I might think, maybe it could be a phone. We do this all the time.
But in cartoons, in humor, the conceptual blends combine things most people wouldn’t think to blend. Say you imagine people getting into heaven, at Saint Peter’s Gate, but then think, what if there was a toll... a toll on a highway... maybe there’s EZPass in heaven. That’s a cartoon.
The experience of humor is similar to the “ah-ha” moment of two things coming together. For humor, two things have to come together to produce the experience of laughter. Normal and abnormal; these things reconciled in a moment, and usually it’s a normal situation violated in some way that we can tolerate. You have to have something normal that becomes abnormal, or something that looks abnormal and then become normal.
So, normal: there’s a guy on the phone, saying “No, Thursday’s out. How about never - is never good for you?” Everything is normal - the office, the syntax of politeness - and yet the message is rude. We have a violation where we have a normal situation.
Or, start with a violative situation - a guillotine, and there are two baskets in front, saying “paper or plastic” - bringing it back to normal.
Q - What’s your goal with the research?
I’m trying to build a model of how these things can work. Think about all the variables, both intrinsic - from your personality, for example - and extrinsic - like no one laughs at a cartoon sitting alone in their living room, but everyone laughs when they see it on Power Point in a big audience.
I’m trying to show that humor is a legitimate thing to study. A few things have been done by academics, but very little, and humor has a bad odor about it for research purposes, just like sex does. People at a humor conference think they’re going to have a good time, and they’re disappointed if they don’t laugh. It’s confusing as a topic.
For humorists itself, such research is a forbidden area. The actual process comes from the unconscious. If they know about it, they won’t be able to do it. It’s the forbidden fruit. The more you think about it in this way, the less you’re actually free to free associate.
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Bob will speak at Gel 2005 in NYC, April 29.
Bob's cartoons and books are all available at the Cartoon Bank.
I would love to be a participant in a study like this.
Well, I do disagree with the statement:
no one laughs at a cartoon sitting alone in their living room
I do.
But, I know what your saying, the whole reason why there is a laugh track; people are primed to laugh out loud a lot more if others are laughing.
I think the humor described is also a New Yorker one panel cartoon sort of humor which is only one kind of humor...
I am one of those strange academics who have done studies of humor. But not psychological studies, more on a par with ethnographic or anthropological research. I observed a group of middle managers back in the 1980s for about 1.5 years as they put their inventory management unit (they were part of one of the major mainframe computer companies in the US) out to pasture. The humor stood out, and so we analyzed it using interpretive organizational theory. This is just to say that, in presenting that research over the course of about 10 years, I too experienced the intense disappointment audiences feel when they discover how serious the study of humor can be! I hope to connect with some of you at GEL who are interested in humor research and share war stories as well as insights!
New Yorker cartoons are not humorous, they're droll, bland and poor, witless, self-serving crap. The editor of them doing "research" on humor is probably a good idea. Maybe he'll discover a sense for it and impart that new wisdom into his job. What a waste of time to even post it as news.. I can't believe I wasted *my* time even acknowledging it.
If you could incorporate the Jungian concepts of psychological types into your study you will double the richness of the results. People process humor in different ways. These differences are categorized by type psychology. When you run the statistics you will find that type patterns will sort nicely.
The problem with using type psychology in a psychology department of a university is that the professional paradigm will not allow such a concept to be considered. Then, your statistics will be blended and the richness will be lost in statistical variance.
gross methods hide errors; precise methods disclose them.
Good luck. It sounds like a fun experiment.
Chuck
You can find an interesting cognitive explanation of humour in Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works."
Like Mankoff, Pinker describes a humourous situation as a cognitive switch from one frame of reference to another. He uses this theory to explain how a person falling down might be seen as funny. A tripping person changes from being an agent in control of his own actions to a physical object controlled by the laws of physics.