This challenge on The Tonight Show was all about making people laugh by adding only a word or just a few letters to a product and giving us a whole new context to laugh at. And by looking at these tweets, one thing is crystal clear. There are volumes upon volumes of items that almost beg for our attention and ask to be put in the spotlight — in the most hilarious way possible.
But why are we so entertained by reading these jokes? Why do we often feel the urge to devour humor in the first place? Well, it turns out that comedy is much more than just a pleasant way to pass an evening, a night down at the bar, or get through a grueling day at work.
See, laughter brings us closer to others, whether we’re joking with our friends and partners or cracking up at jokes online. A 2016 study conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, looked at the cases when laughter works as a social glue, and when it doesn’t.
The scientists wanted to measure how shared laughter might impact a relationship with a stranger, so they asked participants to watch a funny, not-so-funny, or not-funny-at-all clip while supposedly video-chatting with another same-sex participant. Little did these people know that they chatted with a pre-recorded clip of someone laughing the same amount for the first and the second videos, but only smiling occasionally during the last one.
After watching these clips, the participants filled out questionnaires about the emotions they felt during the viewing and how much they wanted to get to know the person sitting on the other side of the screen. "For people who are laughing together, shared laughter signals that they see the world in the same way, and it momentarily boosts their sense of connection," social psychologist and co-author of the study Sara Algoe, told the Greater Good Magazine. "Perceived similarity ends up being an important part of the story of relationships."
If you want to become better at bonding but can’t seem to strike up funny jokes on the spot, then don’t worry! Many people believe that being humorous is an innate skill that only a few were lucky enough to be born with. However, it seems like wittiness is something that we can learn and that can be improved with practice.
As Alan Roberts, an Associate Tutor at the University of Sussex, UK, explained in a piece on the Conversation, humor is human, but not everyone has perfected this art just yet. He offered several rules of thumb to follow for anyone seeking to become more humorous.
The first one is simply to be more playful. "Keeping your audience in a state of play is essential for humor," he explained. "Evolutionary biologists have characterized humor as evolving from social play following observations that apes emit vocalizations resembling laughter during playful activities such as tickling, chasing or wrestling. This would explain why humor is fundamentally social."
The second guideline would be to contradict yourself. Roberts wrote that contradictory interpretation is a recurring tool in comedy. When it comes to puns, it can sound something like: "Never date a tennis player. Love means nothing to them." Talking about situations, he provided another example: "Claire calls Craig and warns him to be careful driving on the motorway because the radio says there’s a nut driving in the wrong direction. 'No kidding'’ says Craig. 'There are hundreds of them!'"
