The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

by Kevin Simler

You might be especially intrigued, for example, by the Seinfeld episode “The Contest” in which the characters wager to see who can hold out the longest without masturbating. The dialogue is careful to dance around the actual word “masturbate,” but you weren’t born yesterday; you know what they’re talking about. And the fact that masturbation is played for laughs tells you most of what you need to know about the topic: first, that it’s a taboo, not something you’ll want to discuss in front of grandma; and second, that it’s commonplace and more or less acceptable, at least in the eyes of mainstream TV-watching Americans. Society may not fully condone it, but it won’t get you labeled a deviant. It’s a norm violation, but also benign. Laughter, then, shows us the boundaries that language is too shy to make explicit. In this way, humor can be extremely useful for exploring the boundaries of the social world. The sparks of laughter illuminate what is otherwise murky and hard to pin down with precision: the threshold between safety and danger, between what’s appropriate and what’s transgressive, between who does and doesn’t deserve our empathy. In fact, what laughter illustrates is precisely the fact that our norms and other social boundaries aren’t etched in stone with black-and-white precision, but ebb and shift through shades of gray, depending on context.