How often have you heard someone say, “I just can’t tell a joke?”
How often have you then heard the person who made that self-deprecating claim attempt to do just that?
According to recent research, if you truly believe the former, you should stick to your guns, because telling a bad joke in a social situation can actually be hazardous.
And by bad jokes, we’re not talking about dirty jokes, racist jokes, or ethnic jokes. We’re talking about jokes that just aren’t that funny. Specifically, in fact, this joke:
“What did the big chimney say to the little chimney?”
“Nothing. Chimneys can’t talk.”
It was this joke (discovered by Googling “bad jokes”) that Nancy Bell, an applied linguist and assistant professor at Washington State University, sent her students (whom she calls her “minions”) out into the world to slip into otherwise normal conversations–and then record the results.
(Why? “You can’t have a complete theory of humor without understanding how it fails, also,” Bell says. Whereas the study of humor is well-established, the study of bad humor has been neglected.)
In all, they told the joke 207 times–and 44 percent of the time, the reactions were what the students classified as “impolite,” intended to embarrass the joke teller as punishment for such a lame joke. Fake laughter, sarcasm and insults were common responses.
“These were basically attacks intended to result in the social exclusion or humiliation of the speaker–punctuated on occasion with profanity, a nasty glare or even a solid punch to the arm,” Bell says.
She was surprised by the result. “I thought, well, everybody’s had the experience of trying to be funny and having it not be funny,” she said. (In her case, that experience came when she lived in France, and found that many of her attempts at humor did not translate well into French.) “I wouldn’t expect that people would twist the knife and make you feel even worse.” But that’s exactly what happened.
Interestingly, the toughest responses came from people who knew the joke-teller well, whereas strangers are most likely to at least be polite about it.
As well, the younger people were–and the closer in age to the poor joke-teller–the more likely they were to attack.
Why do people react so strongly to bad jokes? Bell thinks a couple of factors are involved.
She notes that telling a joke disrupts the normal flow of conversation. We’ll tolerate that if the joke is funny, because then the reward is worth the inconvenience. But if the joke isn’t funny, the disruption is upsetting.
Telling a joke that fails to deliver a laugh is also a violation of one of the many unspoken social contracts that govern our interactions with each other. Punishing the failed joke-teller is a way to discourage that person from similarly violating the social contract in the future.
Bell also thinks that telling a bad joke is insulting to the listener, because it suggests that he or she might actually find it funny. “It’s offensive to them,” she says. “It means, you think I’m an idiot, huh?” Lashing back at the joke-teller is a way to warn him or her not to make that insulting assumption again.
Finally, she thinks family members and close friends react more strongly to bad jokes than strangers because, basically, they know they’re going to be stuck in many other conversations with the joke-teller, and they’re trying to protect themselves. Or as Bell puts it, “With intimates you have a long-term investment. Your sister can’t fire you, so your mean response to her lousy joke says, ‘Guess what, I don’t want to spend the next 10 years listening to those kind of jokes.”
Combine the facts that younger people and family members are among those who react most strongly to bad jokes, and you can figure out why it is children are particularly hostile to bad humor from their parents.
But really, that hardly seems fair. After all, parents have to pretend to enjoy their children’s jokes. You’d think turn about would be fair play.
(Oh, and if my daughter is reading this, Daddy is not talking about your knock-knock jokes. They rock!)
