Wow, that's the toughest question of all, what's funny. Anything I think is funny. I can't tell you exactly what it is, but I can tell you sort of where I think it comes from. Humor is really closely related to fear and despair. I believe the reason people have a sense of humor is if they didn't, then they would look around, they would realize, with their perfectly rational brains, that we live in an extremely dangerous, scary world, run by all kinds of forces over which we have no control, and we're all gonna get older and sicker and die. That's the way it's gonna work, biologically. It's a scary thing. And if we can't react to that in some way that allows us to release the fear and the anxiety that that realization comes along, we're in deep trouble. So we laugh. Oh, lots of humor about death. Whenever some horrible event happens, instantly your fax starts going, there's jokes, your phones. Jokes about, you know, when the Challenger went down, there were Challenger jokes all over the country. Not 'cause people didn't care, not 'cause people didn't think it was a tragedy, but because people have to react somehow to those unacceptably horrible things that happen all the time. So I think it's that release from anxiety that makes people laugh. I think what good humor writers do is take their readers close to some edge, something that's scary to them, you know--taxes, what the government's doing, nuclear war, the ozone depletion, the fact that your diet is wrong and you might get some disease--all these scary things. And it manages to let you release your anxiety about that by laughing about it. You say, "Well, god, this guy thought about that same thing too, and he manages to still laugh. I can laugh, too, and I'll feel better about that." And I think that's where the heart of humor comes from, that edge. Now, there's other things, like there's just plain zaniness, and wackiness, and just plain weird things are funny. And that's almost indescribable why some people laugh at what they laugh at. But I think most humor comes from, the humorous getting you to an edge that's scary on one side, and there's some humorous release on the other. Just pulling you to the edge and then letting you laugh about it. And you've eased a little tension there.
Published in the Annenberg Foundation, 2013
