Knock, Knock

(Some people just take humor way too seriously)

Last week, while waiting to find out if Herman Cain ever hit on Rick Perry, I spent some time reading a fascinating scientific article on the evolutionary origins of humor. I learned three things:

1)    Humor, like sexual repression, has been around for a long time, and both are pretty funny.

2)    Sexual repression is the underlying cause of just about all bad behavior exhibited in humans, lab rats, and politicians.

3)    Some people have a thesaurus that's way better than mine.

The article was written by two professional synonym-wranglers at some university in northern Manitoba, that internationally recognized hotbed of hilarity. I think the general thrust of their article was that humor has evolved over the last 6 million years, which means the authors obviously wrote the piece without watching much prime time TV.

I have to say that I challenge their thesis. Personally, I'm not convinced that humor has evolved very much at all, as evidenced by a recently discovered glyph of the first jokes ever told:

1)    Two hominids knuckle-walked into a bar…

2)    Take my hunter-gatherer. Please!

3)    Knock.

(Source:  Jurassic Journal of Comic Bas-Relief, 1 April MCXIV BC)

So I'm fairly certain that the article was really just a contrived vehicle to let the authors show off a bunch of big words, probably hoping to impress chicks in Manitoban single-hunter-gatherer bars, assuming they have sexual repression in Manitoba. I can't think of any other reason for otherwise normal people to deliberately employ silly, made-up words like "exapted," "phylogenetic conspecifics," and "Schopenhaur."

Really? Exapted? Please. "Exapted" sounds like some kind of galactic disciplinary action – like big green alien parents taking away ET's ray gun.

"EXTRA WILSON TERRESTRIAL!"

(You know you're in trouble when your parents use your full name. Even in outer space.)

"Nzxtmk?"

"Don't nzxtmk me, young man! You ate Elliott, didn't you? You are so exapted! Just wait till your Y-Chromosome donor phones home! Keep it up, young hominid – I'll turn this spaceship right around!"

But simply saying "exapted" and "quasi-syntactical recursion" with a straight face wasn't enough for these guys in Manitoba. Not by half. The next time you single guys corner a colleen and are struggling for that just-right ice-breaker, try this crowd-pleaser:

"You know, ontogeny can sometimes recapitulate phylogeny."

"Weird. I was just thinking that very same thing."

"Wanna go to my place and see my glyph?"

The authors' exhaustive source materials on humor even included quasi-exapted observations from Charles Darwin. You'll remember Mr. Darwin as that 19th Century botanist who was hired to sail around the world looking for examples of Darwinism; instead, however, the shameless little shirker got sidetracked while watching a Galapagos finch trying to suck food through a stick, after which Darwin concluded that a humongous tortoise would eventually evolve into filmmaker Michael Moore. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Darwin also proposed a concept he called "natural selection," a theory which attempted to describe the complex inner workings of seemingly chaotic systems, like nation-states, and the NFL draft. Darwin conjectured that nature selected evolutionary winners (and culled losers) based on superior qualities, which still doesn't explain Michael Moore. Darwin referred to this phenomenon as "survival of the fittest," a proposition that was soon debunked in favor of the more obvious explanation, "survival of the most-heavily armed."

Obviously, by this point in his voyage, Darwin had … how can I put it gently? … Darwin had popped his clutch. Perhaps due to scurvy, perhaps due to spending way too much time observing giant turtles in equatorial singles bars, Darwin was clearly out of control. As our Manitoban friends point out, Darwin even managed to link evolutionary survival tactics to tickling.

Tickling, as a survival tactic. This may be the best evidence to date that Darwin not only studied interesting plants – he also knew something about interesting brownies, if you catch my drift.

Darwin noticed that the places we tickle each other – the throat, the belly, the soles of our feet – are also the places most vulnerable to attack from predators. So Darwin assumed that this was Uncle Evo at work again, subtly teaching us how to protect those vulnerable spots. This is obviously a stretch; if this theory were true, we'd all be wearing shoes on our neck.

By the way – this deep fascination Darwin had for survival issues is what psychiatrists call an "obsession," what politicians call an "agenda," and what students call "is this gonna be on the exam?"

My own "evolutionary laughter" theory is much simpler:  Only mammals can laugh, because only mammals have milk, which is biologically required if you hear a joke so funny that milk spurts out of your nose.

And, if I might, may I humbly point out that Charles Darwin apparently never noticed this vital nose-to-lactose corollary.

Of course, some will take exception to my "mammals only" argument, claiming that if grocers can sell soy milk, then soy must be a mammal. This is a classic example of what psychiatrists call "projecting conspecific transference" and what I call "being rock stupid." In response, I'll gently remind that there's just not a great deal of "soy" humor, now, is there?

"Two tasteless meat substitutes walked into a salad bar…"

But, lest you think our semi-frozen scholars got all that grant money just to talk about tickling, let's quickly riffle through some of their other observations – opinions about evolution, humor, and why rats giggle.

Witness:

"During conversations with each other, women laugh 126% more than men … and it has been observed that persons in higher positions of authority laugh less often."

The takeaway here is simple: if your boss is a man, and you like your job, shut your smart mouth.

"Theory-of-mind researchers have shown that children under age 6 have a particularly difficult time distinguishing lies from jokes."

As do sociopaths, and news anchors at MSNBC.

"Activation in the medial ventral prefrontal cortex bilaterally correlates with how funny the joke is."

Great. Now they tell me. And all this time I've been watching to see if anybody slaps their knee.

"Scientists detected a 50kHz chirp in young rats during social interactions resembling play, and wondered if this positive affective vocalization could be related to human laughter."

That's just sad.

Think about that. One day, in some lab somewhere, some over-zealous undergrad shouted, "Look! The rats are demonstrating play-like behavior during a social interaction again!"

But it's a cautionary tale, isn't it? I suppose that's the evolutionary price we all pay for leaving young, impressionable turtles alone with Michael Moore.