The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [54]
Oy, Phil, lend us your brain? We’re trying to build us an idiot.
Similarly, bons mots are slicker than pig grease for squeezing out of tight spots. Ninon de Lenclos, salonnière and calumniated pioneer of rights for women, such as changing lover every three months, sharpened her wit repulsing amorous suitors. Just as well. One day the queen, pressed by scandalmongers who accused Ninon of poisoning the flower of French youth, sent an order to quit town for “a convent [couvent] of her choice.”
“I pray you,” Ninon told the messenger, “say I choose the Grands Cordeliers.”
Punning on couvent (also “monastery” in French), she had selected one whose monks’ debauches were legendary. The stunned messenger returned to the palace and repeated her word for word.
“Fie, the villain,” said the queen, laughing. “Let her go where she wants.”
Comic Steve Allen explained the paralysis caused by laughter as a “short-circuit” because humor plays games with our mental processing. The brain begins
filing away the material according to what appears to be its face-value meaning, when suddenly . . . our consciousness perceives that there is more than one interpretation of the material. The brain is therefore momentarily startled, and its normal function interrupted. We suddenly face the fact we have been tricked.
The tingly adrenaline rush that follows makes it harder still to be angry at the laughter’s cause. Happily, this mind-body trade flows both ways, and physical ruses can tickle an unsuspecting mind into feeling funny.
LAUGHTER WITHOUT WIT: SOME TIPS
Philosopher Henri Bergson observed that “all laughter is inherently social,” and psychologists confirm that nothing eats away a sense of humor like isolation and its concomitant, self-consciousness. Conversely, there’s nothing like other people to make us laugh.
Experimenters asked some seven-year-olds to listen to comedy tapes on headphones. Alone they laughed little, but with another child their giggle rate shot up. What is more, the closer they sat, the more both laughed. Even if only one could hear the tape.
Not only is laughter a reflex, but it is contagious. Hence broadcasters go in for “laughspeak,” a giggly style of talk, to tame interviewees; hence laugh tracks are dubbed over sitcoms; hence, while traditionally it is wrong to laugh at your own jokes, laughter analyst Robert Provine found that speakers laughed on average 46 percent more than listeners. And just as it has been observed that we laugh harder at people we find sexy, so the reverse is true: the more you make others laugh, the more they’ll be attracted to you.
All of which suggests some wit-free techniques for magnifying mirth:
Relax: be informal, focus on them (inhibition squashes laughter)
Stand close: the nearer, the more they’ll laugh
Touch them lightly, occasionally
Use eye contact
Show your amusement
Don’t fake smiles or laughs: always obvious (real smiles reach the eyes)
Be near laughing people, the more, the merrier
Bring others in (note: laughter’s SOS will attract others, helping dilute bores)
Expect to be amused: optimism optimizes humor
Laugh at your own jokes, except in larger groups (with an audience, joking becomes performance, and the same criteria apply as for stand-up)
Drink alcohol
WHAT IS FUNNY?
If humor is organic to certain situations, can it be cultivated? What is funny anyway?
Defining humor seems almost the definition of foolish, like trying to sculpt sunbeams or bottle rainbows. Indeed, fitting farce ensued after Clarence Richardson, fifty-five, of Wessington, South Dakota, died in 1946, bequeathing a princely $30,000 to whoever sent his postmaster the best definition of “joke.” Seven thousand entries in, the postmaster went to court,