If you have to explain a joke, the old saw has it, then it’s not funny.
It could even be dangerous to do so. For instance, take this gem of English-language humor: A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Hey, buddy, why the long face?” It’s just the sort of jape that a time-traveler would employ in conversation with, say, Genghis Khan, who would probably boil said voyager alive as just punishment for the groans that would ensue after an interpreter (never mind the differences between modern English and the Mongolian of centuries past) explained the idiom “to have a long face.” (On that note, this philosophical statement: Genghis Khan, but Immanuel Kant.)
Now try this one: A bee is flying alongside another bee. He notices that his fellow apian is wearing a yarmulke. “What’s with the headgear?” he asks. “You want I should be taken for a WASP?” comes the reply.
Certainly it can be socially and politically daring to explore the workings of a joke, as Albert Brooks discovers in the course of his not-so-funny movie Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. (On that note, this unobligatory aside for the benefit of the Iranian site that regularly hijacks this blog: Q: How many members of the Council of Guardians does it take to change a light bulb? A: None, because there are no light bulbs in the Middle Ages.) And as for the joke-dissecting that goes on in the exquisitely foul film The Aristocrats—well, you’ll just have to see it for yourself.
Jokes cannot kill, with all respect to the brilliant lads of Monty Python, one of whose sketches concerns a joke developed by British intelligence against the Nazis, a notoriously humorless bunch who nonetheless expire in spasms of laughter. Nazi scientists attempt to retaliate, as Hitler roars before an adoring crowd, “My dog has no nose!” The crowd shouts back, “How does he smell?” “Awful!”
All the same, according to research conducted a few years back at the University of Hertfordshire, the funniest joke in the world, the one that most easily travels across cultures, is about death. It goes something like this:
Two hunters are out hunting. One of them falls over and seems not to be breathing. His friend calls 911* and cries, “What do I do?” “Well, first, let’s make sure he’s dead,” says the operator. There is silence, and then a shot rings out. The hunter returns to the phone and says, “Okay, now what?”
It’s a good joke, to be sure. But curiously, the jokes that seemed to work the best on the cross-cultural charts were just over 100 words long, with the optimum number being 103. The full version of the hunters joke tips in at 102 words, lending credence to the notion that a strange numerology is at play. Couple that with linguistic studies that suggest that velar consonants are funnier than alveodentals and sibilants and such (thus “kayak” is a funny word, “yellow” and “sassy” not so much), and we have the beginnings of a formula. Back to the drawing board, then….
Oh, and breaking news, to return to the Python front: The Norwegian blue parrot, it appears, really did exist. Where’s that time traveler now that we need him?
* Or whatever emergency number is appropriate to the locale where the joke is being told.
Written by Gregory McNamee on May 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
We eat too much, and we know it. Worse, we can’t seem to stop ourselves from overeating. The obesity epidemic sweeping the United States, the United Kingdom, and other developed countries is, literally, a growing problem, waist lines included. We’ve so far been most successful not at burning off excess fat but instead at explaining away our weight problems, generally placing the blame on supersized fries, sedentary lifestyles, and stress. These factors have without a doubt influenced our eating behavior. But scientists have been digging deeper into our pantries and into our fat cells, and not surprisingly, the basic factors that drive our eating behavior are strikingly complex.
Chronic stress is known to be a major cause of overeating, although even the connection between stress and the strangely increased stickability of fat when we’re under a lot of stress isn’t clear. Scientists know that there exists of an odd disconnect between our brains and our bodies; they know too that our brains can dominate our appetites. The amount of food we eat is in general guided by two physiological control systems. The first is based in our gastrointestinal tracts and controls digestion and absorption of nutrients, and the second is housed in our brains and responds to signals received and transmitted by neurons. These two systems communicate with one another, forming a gut-brain axis that controls how much, how frequently, and what kinds of food we eat.
The various cell signaling pathways of the gut-brain axis, which communicate by way of hormones, peptides, neurotransmitters, and other molecules, are all integrated in the hypothalamus in the brain. Using signals relayed from tissues about the amount of energy we have stored as fat, the hypothalamus is able to determine how much food we need to eat and how the energy extracted from the food needs to be used.
However, the brain part of the gut-brain axis is vulnerable to other forms of psychological input, including psychological stress, which could be clogging the highways of our gut-brain axes with an overwhelming amount of traffic. We also seem to innately pay attention to some signals and to ignore others. One signal over which many of us have little control is stress; we often tolerate this signal, but it can easily escalate and evolve into chronic stress, which results in the release of cortisol and has the ability to induce long-lasting physical changes.
In the 1990s before scientists could really begin to investigate the link between cortisol and overeating, they first had to figure out how the hypothalamus received status reports about energy stores in the body. They discovered a gene, dubbed ob for obesity, that when inactivated in mice caused the mice to overeat no matter how fat they became. Their brains appeared to completely ignore their bodies.
The protein produced by the ob gene was later identified and named leptin. Scientists found that healthy mice had detectable levels of leptin circulating in their blood but mice with dysfunctional ob genes had no detectable leptin. When these obese mice were given injections of leptin, their food intake decreased, as did their weight, amount of body fat, and circulating glucose and insulin levels.
Simple enough then; treat obese people with leptin, and they will lose weight, and their overall health will improve—a pharmacological pot of gold. However, leptin injections are effective only in individuals who have an actual mutation in the human equivalent of the ob mouse gene. These people are very few and very far between. For the majority of us, our brains have found other, mysterious ways to ignore our stomachs.
Maybe if we could find a way to recognize that our brains have become disconnected from our bodies we could save ourselves from becoming obesity statistics. People used to go for hikes in the woods to get fresh air and to get in touch with themselves and the environment around them. Since a combined regimen of exercise and a healthy diet is the only way to reduce the amount of fat we harbor, maybe we should all just take a hike.
Written by Kara Rogers on May 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.