Athena:	00:00:04	Have you been zombified by humor? By funny, by laughter? Welcome to the Zombified Podcast, your source for fresh brains. Zombified is a production of Arizona State University and the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance. I am your host, Athena Aktipis, psychology professor at ASU and chair of the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance.
Dave:	00:00:30	And I am your co-host, Dave Lundberg-Kenrick, media outreach program manager at ASU and brain enthusiast.
Athena:	00:00:39	Yes. We love brains.
Dave:	00:00:40	Yes. And humor.
Athena:	00:00:43	Yes. And so, um, humor. So Dave, when you laugh, like if something is funny, do you like say, "Oh, I'm going to laugh" and then you laugh or is it just like you laugh and you don't have any control over it?
Dave:	00:00:55	That's a good question. Um, when I, when something's like really hilariously funny, I think I just start laughing.
Athena:	00:01:02	Yeah. How about if something is like kind of funny?
Dave:	00:01:05	I think I almost note it, sort of like, that's funny. Like checkbox. So-
Athena:	00:01:10	Do you ever do like, "Oh ha ha."
Dave:	00:01:14	I don't know. I don't know if I'm a big fake laugher.
Athena:	00:01:16	I don't think you do that.
Dave:	00:01:17	I think I just sort of, I might sort of nod or smile like, yep.
Athena:	00:01:21	Alright, nice try.
New Speaker:	00:01:21	I acknowledge it, so yes.
Athena:	00:01:25	Yeah, so in this episode we're going to talk about laughter, about humor, about funny, about like what funny really is and some theories about laughter and funniness and we're going to be talking to, or I'm going to be talking to Tom Wisdom.
Dave:	00:01:43	That's right.
Athena:	00:01:43	Sorry you couldn't be there.
Dave:	00:01:44	I'm always, yeah, I miss everything.
Athena:	00:01:47	So I talked to Tom Wisdom. He is a PhD in psychology, so he's a Doctor of Psychology. Um, he also is a comedian, so he does like stand up comedy and his name is Wisdom. That's totally awesome. Right?
Dave:	00:02:03	Yeah.
Athena:	00:02:03	So, uh, so I had to ask him, I like literally he gave a talk here and then I dragged him into my office afterwards. I'm like, "I want to interview you for my podcast." He's like, "oOkay."
Dave:	00:02:15	And so-and so he's talking about the science of humor?
Athena:	00:02:18	Yeah. He's talking about uh, how humor works. Um, we talk a little bit about the physiology of laughter, too. And what makes laughter voluntary or involuntary.
Dave:	00:02:30	Interesting.
Athena:	00:02:31	Cause you know, in a way like laughing is this thing that we don't really understand very well. Like what, what's the point of it? What's the function of it? And it's an involuntary thing. And so...
Dave:	00:02:44	Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Cause it's sort of loud and it seems like there's some resource costs to it. So it must serve some function. Right?
Athena:	00:02:51	Yeah, it seems like it. Yeah.
Dave:	00:02:53	Interesting.
Athena:	00:02:53	And the fact that, you know, we just, I mean when something is really funny is like you just can't help but laugh. Right? And then laughter, it's also, it can be contagious, right? You start laughing and then someone else starts laughing. Sometimes they don't even know what the joke was. But like the sound of laughter makes people laugh.
Dave:	00:03:12	Do you guys do that in this podcast?
Athena:	00:03:13	Uh, do we make people laugh?
Dave:	00:03:15	Or just laugh contagiously?
Athena:	00:03:17	I don't know. I mean, I think in general in this podcast we, we do get a little zombified by laughter because I don't know, we love brains so much that at the, I think it's kind of, there's a little bit of contagions-
Dave:	00:03:29	We can see if it's contagious to the listeners, too.
Athena:	00:03:29	Yes, that's right. But I mean that's how like so many like sitcoms and stuff work. They had those laugh tracks. Right?
Dave:	00:03:36	Oh, yeah the fake ones, sure.
Athena:	00:03:36	And so then you-you laugh even though you know that it's a, not for real, but just the sound of laughter zombifies you and you start laughing. Laughing. So, so should we, let's laugh now. [Dave and Athena both fake laugh] Ha ha ha. Okay, everybody. Have a seat.
Dave:	00:03:51	We could cut in-I could just record laughs and you could just, even though I'm not there every once in awhile-
Athena:	00:03:55	Just have your laughter in there.
Dave:	00:03:57	Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha.
Athena:	00:03:57	That's pretty good, Dave. But...
Dave:	00:04:03	No? I need to work on it?
Athena:	00:04:04	I think you need to work on it. Well, alright, so let's jump right in?
Dave:	00:04:07	Well, hopefully the natural laughter will-will work then. Alright, let's jump right in.
Athena:	00:04:09	Yes. Yeah. We'll jump into our episode with Tom Wisdom, Psychology PhD and comedian.
Intro:	00:04:17	['Psychological' by LEMI plays]
Athena:	00:04:54	First of all, thank you so much for just being willing to come into my office and let me interview you spontaneously because I came up to you after your talk and said I would like to interview you for my podcast.
Tom:	00:05:03	Yeah. I'm a person who can talk, so that's all I need.
Athena:	00:05:08	Awesome. So, uh, first of all, your name is Dr. Wisdom, which is totally awesome. Now is that actually your real name or were you like, I'm gonna go and get a doctorate and before I do that, let me change my name, my last name to Wisdom so I can be Dr. Wisdom?
Tom:	00:05:24	No, it's my real name and it's, it's kind of an albatross. Like my, my father's a pastor in the army. So he was, I mean, by the time he retired, he's like Reverend Doctor Chaplain Colonel Wisdom. So I feel like I'm not even close to that. Doctor-just Doctor. That's fine.
Athena:	00:05:42	Okay. So that is your real name?
Tom:	00:05:43	Yes.
Athena:	00:05:44	Yeah. And so we discovered we have something in common because my name, Athena, she's the goddess of wisdom, which I guess makes me the goddess of you in some weird way.
Tom:	00:05:54	Yeah, sort of a weird power to have-
Athena:	00:05:55	Yeah, yeah. Sorry about that.
Tom:	00:05:58	-somehow you're going to kick me out of Greek Heaven.
Athena:	00:06:02	So, uh, now because I just pulled you into my office to do this interview, you basically have no idea what Zombified is or what the podcast, is except for like the two seconds that I spent explaining it before dragging you in here. Right?
Tom:	00:06:15	That's fine.
Athena:	00:06:16	Yeah? Okay. So, um, a little bit about Zombified, so we're a podcast, um, run by ASU and also by this organization, a wonderful organization, called the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance, which is a very interdisciplinary group that is dedicated to reducing the global burden of zombification, among other things. Now, what is zombification you might ask?
Tom:	00:06:42	I might.
Athena:	00:06:43	You might ask. So, our whole idea of zombification, um, is essentially anytime you have an entity that is affecting another entity's behavior, manipulating their behavior, controlling it in one way or another. So it's kind of everything from parasitism, like the crazy zombie ants, right? The fungus that gets into their brains and makes them do-
Tom:	00:07:11	Cordyceps.
Athena:	00:07:11	Exactly, cordyceps fungus; to everything from that to thinking about, you know, how do humans manipulate each other in their relationships or in business or how do our interactions with technology take over our brain or how to-advertising influence. So all of these things that can influence our behavior. So, uh, one of the big influences on the sort of evolutionary side is the Richard Dawkins Extended Phenotype idea. I don't know if you-
Tom:	00:07:44	I'm generally familiar, yeah.
Athena:	00:07:44	Richard Dawkins, um, nerd like me, but uh, you know, this whole idea that there can be genes or really like any kind of replicator that influences not just its own body but also the bodies of other entities and makes them do stuff that can help to make the replicator do better.
Tom:	00:08:09	Yes. [Athena agrees] So you're all about personal autonomy. This is a libertarian podcast.
Athena:	00:08:13	Oh, well we are about autonomy. There is no like political bent really-I mean, I think we should be questioning like what, uh, what things are affecting us and figuring out if there are things that are affecting our autonomy. But I definitely don't actually consider myself a libertarian. So, um, yeah, in fact, I think the Zombie Apocalypse is a totally bipartisan issue, honestly. [Tom laughs] So really, uh, and that's actually part of why I really liked doing this podcast is because everyone can kind of get behind this idea that we shouldn't be zombified and that maybe we should be, you know, thinking about how we can leverage our autonomy, get back in the driver's seat to avoid the apocalypse.
Tom:	00:09:02	Yeah. What's the opposite of a zombie?
Athena:	00:09:07	[Athena thinks for a moment] Like a totally autonomous entity that has no influences. I mean, that's kind of bad too, right? If you're just like cut off from everything.
Tom:	00:09:13	Yeah. Is that kind of going back to, no, was it Daniel Dennett's idea of free will-is that you have to have influences in information to exercise your will. [Athena agrees] So yeah, it's a, it's an interesting kind of middle ground to think about where is freedom at?
Athena:	00:09:27	Yeah. Right, right. And also being affected by your outside world is not necessarily a bad thing. Right? You're being influenced by those around you. Maybe to cooperate more or to care about people or to do something that's in your own best interests. All of those things... maybe in a way you're being zombified but they can also be good things. So yeah. So zombification: complex, multifaceted topic.
Tom:	00:09:58	Yeah. It sounds like a nice flagpole to raise up whatever if you want to put.
Athena:	00:10:03	Yeah, yeah. And so you, Dr. Wisdom, what is your first name may I ask?
Tom:	00:10:09	Tom.
Athena:	00:10:10	Can I call you Tom? [Tom agrees] Okay, Tom. So Tom, you exist in this really cool in-between space where you are both trained as a academic psychologist, is that right? [Tom confirms] And you are a stand-up comedian at the time. So how do you, how did you get to that and, and why are you in the middle there? And what is that like?
Tom:	00:10:37	Um, I think it's just, I have a really hard time sitting still. I have a strong, I mean if I can put this-I have a strong novelty bias. So that new things, different things, changes and uh, developments and stuff are more attractive, more interesting to me than kind of building up something stable.
Athena:	00:10:55	Yeah. I don't know anything about that. [Athena laughs]
Tom:	00:10:56	That's just a personal difference, I think. Like some people go one way, some people down the middle. For me it's a strong bias toward new, different things and trying to fit things together that might not fit together.
Athena:	00:11:08	Right.
Tom:	00:11:09	A lot of times it doesn't work. But this is something I'm trying out, trying to make these things work as far as they can with trying to use humor to make science better.
Athena:	00:11:17	That's really cool. So can I ask you some questions just about humor and like what it is? [Tom agrees] So because the podcast is Zombified, the questions that like I really like to ask are about things like, you know, why does this thing affect us? Both the evolutionary reasons and sort of the mechanistic reasons. So in terms of humor and jokes and like things being funny, like why is it that that influences us, you know, why are we affected by someone telling a joke?
Tom:	00:11:52	So, with the caveat that I haven't done any of this research myself, this is not my field, that I studied social learning-how people learn from each other and, and to imitate and innovate and stuff like that. So rather than learning from a book or a teacher, how do you learn from watching other people do things? But, um-
Athena:	00:12:07	Can I just totally interrupt you already?
Tom:	00:12:09	Sure.
Athena:	00:12:09	Which is-in terms of social learning, is humor important for learning from others?
Tom:	00:12:15	Oh, um, yeah, a million percent, if you'll allow that very numerical-
Athena:	00:12:18	A million percent? [Athena laughs]
Tom:	00:12:18	This is all very useful numerical-
Athena:	00:12:22	We are quantitative psychologists, not...
Tom:	00:12:25	Yes. Um, I think so much-so the, the big idea of the origin of humor is that it's some sort of a display to indicate that you are not presenting a threat. So like animals have play interactions, that could be misconstrued as fighting. So the idea is the various creatures have had is that these sort of, uh, facial displays of smiles and, um, the kind of vocalization that sounds like laughter whenother animals do it, that we also do, evolved from a common signal to indicate that whatever this interaction is, I'm not actually trying to, uh, hurt or dominate or whatever. This is outside of the, the competitive and survival mechanisms.
Athena:	00:13:11	It's kind of like a signal that comes before an interaction to clarify that it's like, it's not about dominating or about trying to-
Tom:	00:13:19	You can do it before, during, after. I mean, again, this is not like my specialty, but from what I've read and, and, you know, watch documentaries on stuff like that. Um, the origins of it, as people think of it, is that it came from this idea that in situations of ambiguity where a signal could be a perceived as a threat you have, uh, this kind of counter signal that makes sure it's the other way so that, uh, things, misunderstandings don't escalate into dangerous situations. And then the, the theory presented by Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams in their book "Inside Jokes" is that this-so that that signal is a correction, right? It's a you if, if some situation that's happening, if you're being, you know, stepped on or whatever, you know, wrestling gets too rough, you might be tempted to predict. The next thing is you have to defend yourself because you might get hurt or killed. So, um, their idea in this book is that that kind of prediction is happening all the time. People and pretty much any, any conscious-ish being has this kind of real time prediction happening about the world and your internal model of the world all the time. And so you want to avoid dangerous situations and bad situations and go toward good ones. And, but obviously if you're doing this in real time with very noisy information, you're going to be wrong a fair amount of the time. And their, as I understand that, their theory overall is that the experience of humor is when you see some sort of incongruity or mistake in the prediction that you made in your, in your world model and that is currently not threatening or, or terrible in some way. And you get enjoyment from noticing that. And that's what they, I think they referred to as basic humor or basic mirth, which means that you've, you avoid some sort of possible mistake. And just that noticing gives pleasure because we've-and that is evolved, um, from these earlier or instinctual things. Um, I mean that's a dangerous word to use, but you, I mean.
Athena:	00:15:21	So one of the funniest things that has ever happened to me, it was we had a lab retreat and in the evening we were all sitting around the campfire and this was like on the edge of national forest land. And so it was, you know, kind of out there and you could hear coyotes and occasionally, you know, other animals and owls and stuff. So we're sitting around the campfire and there is some rustling coming from one little area. And one person gets up to go and look and sees that there are glowing eyes and gets a little bit freaked out. Their boyfriend goes up and says, "There's thousands of them!" And everybody starts to freak out and it turns out, in the end, it was just one of them and it was my friend's dog, who's a beagle. It's like about a foot tall, who is like the sweetest dog ever, but everybody had mistaken that there was some threat that was out there, but it was so, I mean, it's so funny. I'm like remembering it now, it's still like we all just laugh every time it comes up. Is that an example of this?
Tom:	00:16:42	Yeah, it's a really good example of what I mean when people use the phrase, "You kind of had to be there."
Athena:	00:16:47	Oh, you totally had to be there, right.
Speaker 3:	00:16:50	You notice I didn't laugh-
Athena:	00:16:50	Yeah, right. Really, I didn't do a good job telling this one. [Athena laughs]
Tom:	00:16:54	No, no, exactly. It's not that it's not funny. It's that, is that humor is an experience of your internal kind of situation. Your internal model of what's happening and what's about to happen. [Athena agrees] I didn't have all the, important stuff, which is the, the experience leading up to that, the darkness and isolation, the, you know, suddenly noticing you don't have a bunch of, you know, weaponry on hand, which bad job on you being- [Athena laughs] All this zombie talk, you didn't have your, you know, katana with you or something.
Athena:	00:17:22	Right, right.
Tom:	00:17:23	Um, and your, your situation, your prediction about what's about to happen gets higher and higher intention as you think you're in danger. And that suddenly is released with a realization that the same stimuli, the same things you think you perceive, could be applicable to actual danger or to your buddy, the beagle, just wanting some, some pets. [Athena agrees] And it's not that-there's no situation that is funny or isn't funny. It's just that I didn't have that internal state that you had when you experienced that.
Athena:	00:17:51	So when you have this sort of mismatch into what you think is happening in the world and you get new information and it's actually less threatening, maybe that's time when you're really like, "Oh, this is hilarious."
Tom:	00:18:05	Yeah, that seems like it would be kind of down the middle of, of this canonical idea of what humor is or is for, how it, how it developed.
Athena:	00:18:11	Okay. So in that kind of idea of what humor is, it's really for the benefit of the organism who is having that response, right? Of the funniness of the thing. It's like helping you re-update your representation of the world?
Tom:	00:18:27	Yes, as well as reinforcing the activity of checking your models. Right? So it's not just that this feels good right now. It's that you can look forward to that good feeling in the future if you keep on watching out for these incongruities and possible mistakes. So the idea in his book, "Inside Jokes", which is again, not mine, I'm just, I've just read it and been really interested in it, is that you kind of need this pride because it's really a taxing activity to keep on checking through what your beliefs and understandings are and looking for problems because you have millions of them, but the one that's currently active that you can activate by telling a joke or seeing a meme or being in some situation. All those things are just bringing, uh, making ideas active, making some, some thought patterns or models, internal models of reality, making them active and then finding some flaw or some incongruity in them.
Athena:	00:19:23	Yeah. And so when you have this response that you just can't help but laugh at something hilarious, you're kind of like being overtaken by that laughter in these kinds of situations. That is, the theory is it's providing a fitness benefit by somehow just helping to shift your representations about the world.
Tom:	00:19:44	Yeah. I think, yeah. So the experience, the internal experience, the pleasure of mirth, I think has that function. Um, I'm not sure if anyone has really nailed it's, it's maybe like, like hiccuping or yawning or something like that. The reason that, that your lungs are involved, I don't think anyone really has nailed down a cause for that. But I think the theories are more or less along the lines of, uh, it's, you know, resumes breathing if you are tense and not breathing, you know, if you're holding your breath. But also to signal to others because humans are, what do they call obligatory social animals. We really can't survive without other humans around in some way for extended periods of time. [Athena agrees] So it's a way of signaling, not just that you're experiencing this, but that we can all relax. Or we can all share the experience and understand the flaw in, you know, maybe our shared model of some situation and enjoy the upgrade to our cool new accurate models of reality, but also the pleasure of it as well.
Athena:	00:20:42	So could it be that part of why that laughter response is, uh, outward expression that other people can hear and process, is so that you're simultaneously updating everybody's representation of reality?
Tom:	00:20:59	I don't know if it has that hard of an edge to it, but I think, I think people would generally agree that's one of the things that can happen. I'd say that it has to or always will, but-
Athena:	00:21:09	Maybe a way to get common knowledge, right? It's like if you're laughing and everybody's laughing about something, then I don't know, it seems to me, it feels sort of like that helps to adjust multiple people's-
Tom:	00:21:21	Or at least signal that you might need to catch up with the situation. Right? I'm sure you've, you've seen people or you actually have yourself, laughed when you didn't know what was funny yet.
Athena:	00:21:29	Right. But then, you know, you need to figure something out.
Tom:	00:21:31	Right. So that's a possible signal, too. I don't, again, I don't want to make any strong predictions here. It's not my field, but that it makes general reasonable sense.
Athena:	00:21:39	Yeah. Well, we can speculate wildly on this podcast, so.
Tom:	00:21:42	And it's, it's interesting to note that, that physical proximity actually helps. So comedy clubs do this on purpose. They'll put seats and tables packed in really close to each other and to the stage to create this, uh, like literal physical proximity that makes laughter happened much more reliably. They'll put lower ceilings, they'll focus the room so the laughter bounces back.
Athena:	00:22:04	Interesting.
Tom:	00:22:04	So the audience can hear the audience. There are, um, I mean I again, not research exactly, but many anecdotes of just rooms that were set up wrong for comedy either because the space echoed too much so that the wording wasn't clear or the, the seats were too far spaced out or there was weird, you know, kind of physical barriers in the, in how the room was set up, you know, like tiers of seating or whatever. And it, people who are telling very reliable, good jokes that they loved that just fell flat because of-there wasn't this sort of physical social component of people nearby me are laughing. So it's easier to laugh because when you laugh, you're, you're giving a signal about your internal state, which is a little bit vulnerable. Right?
Athena:	00:22:50	Yeah. Well they literally didn't resonate. [Tom agrees] It's interesting that we use that language even of 'resonating.'
Tom:	00:22:57	Sure. It's a phenomena that fits a lot of situations. Because things that are moving together are, have a lot of things in common. Right? [Athena agrees] But, uh, anyways.
Athena:	00:23:05	Alright, so, so we've sort of talked about the individual side of the human, right? So as an individual it can maybe help you update your representations. The social side, maybe it can help update everybody's representations or make some people know that they need to catch up to everyone else's at. Um, what about the side of humor that, you know, could you use humor? Do people use humor and jokes to manipulate other people for things that aren't in their benefit? You know, it can, can it be used as like a dark art is the question?
Tom:	00:23:42	Of course. I think any tool is also a weapon if you have the certain intentions in mind. Right. Um, I've seen people use jokes to rile people up in very dark ways, right? Like, um, you can like things like, you know, I want to say #notall4chan, but you know, 4chan is, is known kind of as this place where these kind of, this gross do of bad ideas and poorly, well, I don't know, I don't want to make a strong statement on this because it's not my world, but many of the things that I associate with 4chan because they became famous, were famous for being, you know, poorly timed, bad taste, intentionally aggressive and mean to marginalized groups already. In service of the 'LOLs.' Right? There's no, there's no higher goal than making the people around me laugh, but that does, that doesn't just make people laugh. There's like an affiliative kind of effect where it's not just that I laugh. That is, I can see other people laughing at this. We're in this together. We agree with each other. So you, again not to go too far field, but the idea of a quorum effect like that, you know, everything from bacteria on up uses. If there's enough of us here, we can do bigger things than we would have otherwise. And this being used in, you know, in weaponized ways. Memes and jokes have been used to motivate people to either just at the low end, like not care about someone to make them only the object of fun as opposed to being a subject on their own to just legitimizing terrible behavior.
Athena:	00:25:19	Wow. So in a way, this sort of, this social signal of laughter, if the way that it's getting sort of used is by making fun of outgroups in one way or another to sort of establish in group camaraderie, then that can get really problematic.
Tom:	00:25:40	Sure. Yeah. Um, the same things that establish, you know, in group loyalty and good feelings have the mirror image of establishing a boundary between you and other people or between your people and those people. So there's nothing, nothing wrong with establishing, you know, inside jokes or common reference points or something like that. But they can be, you know, used more intentionally to establish a boundary and in ways that are, you know, pretty, pretty negative overall I'd say.
Athena:	00:26:09	Yeah. That's really interesting. So, so that's potentially one side were jokes can get used in a, in a way that's manipulative and are not in the interests of certain parties to sort of use it as a dark art. Would you say in those situations or in other situations, is it ever the case that the person who is experiencing the humor or enjoying the joke is themselves sort of the target of manipulation?
Tom:	00:26:41	Oh, of course. Yeah. At the, in the simplest mode you can think of like a community doing crowd work and roasting someone in the front row, just like it can be completely unprovoked just cause the comedian runs out of things to talk about. Or maybe that's their whole thing. Like there's some comedians who just, that's their, their main thing. They roast people and people would go for that reason cause they don't mind it. Right? So you can be the butt of a joke and love it. That's some people are into that. That's fine. Um, but it can also be, you know, hey everyone look at this person and hate them. Right? Yeah. It never, at least so far hasn't really been like a political tool that you can point to one thing and say like, "Oh this is the dark side", whatever. But you see it all the time. It's just an easy thing to go for. If you're struggling on stage or in some situation you can make a joke about those people and kind of, if it can get people on your side in a way that is not, that makes the other side, you know, it makes it a gross situation.
Athena:	00:27:39	Yeah. So how is technology changing the way that humor works? Or is it? I mean, is it the sort of the same general psychology and just in a slightly new environment or is there something qualitatively different about how humor is working socially and emotionally given our interconnectedness now and the ability people have to, you know, connect online and find groups who have similarities to them and identify outgroups and, and all of that. Do you see it as changing the landscape of humor?
Tom:	00:28:20	Um, it maybe is changing the effects of, of what activity might have been already gone or going on anyway. Um, I definitely have to issue the caveat. Again, this is not something that I've studied in depth, so I am talking from a general familiarity with some of these topics, but I don't think jokes have changed for sure. If anything that's like the actual jokes, themselves. When a time of course that has to change all the time. You tell a joke twice, same audience, the second one, the second time is not going to be as fun for anybody. Um, so the actual jokes of course have to change constantly. But the general topics that you talk about or just any, you know, as people often say, like comedy is made from tragedy plus time and the time part is kind of optional depending on the audience. Right? And people say, "Too soon", well, some people don't say that, right? So it's this discomfort with failure and misery and, and hardship and difficulty that makes you more possible because you can see the going, going back to this original models, you can see that there's some gap between what you predicted or hoped for. Because most people hope for good things to happen and what actually happened in that gap, that's where the humor can happen. So I think that's, that's a universal constant. I don't think anything about that has changed or probably will change. But, um, and again, I'm not deeply involved with the study of technology in society, so I can't say much, but the way I see things-
Athena:	00:29:48	Yeah, just as a comment, what's your...?
Tom:	00:29:49	So like I'm a, I'm a comedian, so I have a ton of Facebook friends who are comedians who are constantly issuing hot takes on the issues of the day or just making silly, wordplay jokes and you can kind of see those things change. Some certain things become hack and like you're making a joke about that, you get the feedback. You get zero likes on your stats-or only that one guy who likes everything. Um, but on the other side of that, if you get a bunch of likes for something that you thought it was just a tossed off joke, you're like, oh, I should do more of this. You know, that feedback helps.
Athena:	00:30:18	Interesting.
Tom:	00:30:19	And the feedback happens no matter what the, I think it feels probably the same no matter what the context or group is. If you're like, if whatever your expectation is, if it's more than that, you're going to probably want to do more of that thing. If it gets not what you want, you're going to continue under your own intrinsic motivation. If you just like talking about those things you can, can you see these, these jokes and things you're going to point them out. But the groups in which that feedback happens can-don't have to be local anymore. Many, many people have talked about the network effects on culture from the Internet because you can find "your people". I've used that phrase in invisible quotes here, but because you can, you can define a social group just by some "silly" idea you have. And I use silly, again in quotes, meaning, you know, toxic or terrible or just a random hobby. And so whatever feedback, whatever reinforcement you get will tend to guide your behavior no matter who it is, probably.
Athena:	00:31:16	Right, right. So now you can find people who share your worldviews no matter how offensive they might be to other groups, right?
Tom:	00:31:24	Because you're literally not hearing from anyone else. Like if, depending how closed your network is. You don't have anyone making a little angry response.
Athena:	00:31:33	Yeah. You have an echo chamber where what you say does resonate. [Tom agrees] So even if it's something that might not with a broader audience of people.
Tom:	00:31:44	Yeah, because you, everybody wants that reinforcement to be like thought of as cool and smart and, and capable and wherever you can get it, you'll get it. And I think that can be obviously turned to bad ends. Intentionally or unintentionally, you just, it's, it's kind of a gradient you go up, right? You want to go toward the stuff that makes you feel good. So you do it and you're not necessarily paying attention to the context or what other bad consequences there might be.
Athena:	00:32:11	Yeah. So, um, let's talk about the other side of humor a little bit, which is the creation of humor. You know, making jokes. So evolutionarily speaking we talked about why we might find things funny, right? There could be an evolutionary benefit from that. Why do we make jokes though? Like, why produce a joke? What's the evolutionary reasoning behind that? Or is there a-
Tom:	00:32:42	As with any evolutionary reasoning, I mean we're kind of making stuff up from limited evidence, but some of the stories hang together better than others. Um, but I think the major ones are, you know, building off the idea of basic humor, basic mirth, these kind of odd situations. You go, "Huh," you know, to one where you laugh, where you LOL. Um, you can notice those things and try to make them happen artificially. So like there's this idea of supernormal stimuli, which I have rudely forgotten the name of the researcher who coined the term. But it's like if you, if you show a bee a typical flower that it's used to seeing, it has a certain color in its in its range of vision and so forth, it'll go toward it. And then in many cases you can make just a bigger, brighter version of that and they'll be many times stronger-
Athena:	00:33:34	Sort of a sensory bias.
Tom:	00:33:37	Yeah. It's just, it's a open ended sensory bias. You can make it as big and as orange as you want and more and more bees will more and more often go toward it.
Athena:	00:33:45	So this explains a lot of advertising.
Tom:	00:33:47	Yeah. You're trying to concentrate some experience into something that is not found in nature. The beer commercial experiences, like the, the most obvious one that comes to mind, like, oh, or the soda, whatever it is. It's like, "Yeah, I am the kind of person who has just a bunch of friends who have a spontaneous party and dance around." Like-
Athena:	00:34:04	Yeah, that's me. [Athena laughs]
Tom:	00:34:06	Can you go toward that? And the most important part that you go toward is buying the thing. [Athena agrees] And so that's, that's like a textbook example of like this.
Athena:	00:34:14	Yeah. So back to why do we make jokes? Why do we make jokes?
Tom:	00:34:22	So there's many theories about that. Um, a lot of them center around like social status, you know, the person who is, which is strange in practice because actual comedians are often of low status in-on many different, you know, metrics. Um, one of the most common jokes from comedians is how poor and what losers they are, right? It's just a very typical kind of joke topic for comedians. Um, but that is often intentional to not try to be 'big timing' the audience members, if you assert that you're of high status, people are like, "Okay, prove it." Where as if you start that you're low status, they can see there's lots of things that they can project from their own experience onto yours and get it more easily.
Athena:	00:35:04	Okay.
Tom:	00:35:04	So you're not likely to, uh, strangely enough, you're not likely to get people to laugh by asserting high status, but you can gain a certain kind of status by using jokes that rely on low status. It's a kind of contradictory thing.
Athena:	00:35:22	That's interesting.
Tom:	00:35:22	But I think most people who do comedy on the consistent, you know, longterm basis, just like have an itch to do it, have an urge to do it often, you know, depending who you ask, it's very, a wide range of experiences. But some people do just feel that good and this makes them feel good. I mean, I've certainly experience that if I'm not feeling good then I have a good set, the rest of the day is great, maybe I start over again the next day, but it's still like, all right, I can do stuff. I'm good at things, I'm capable and you know, whatever, whatever the actual effects are, the feeling is there.
Athena:	00:35:55	Yeah. So it provides some emotional benefit of some sort.
Tom:	00:36:01	Oh yes. Of a very specific kind, I mean-
Athena:	00:36:03	You can make people laugh.
Tom:	00:36:04	Yeah. I don't want to, I can't, I don't want to say anything definite about like the neuroendocrinology of it or whatever. But like, you know that that squirt of, of folk psychology, dopamine that you just, you feel good immediately in a very unambiguous way. And it's, it's kind of addictive, I'll say.
Athena:	00:36:21	So it sounds like you're zombified by doing comedy.
Tom:	00:36:24	Yeah. Which is weird because I'm trying to control people in a certain way. Get them to do what I want. But that is controlling me, too? It's very confusing.
Athena:	00:36:34	So there's like a collective zombification dynamic happening with comedy.
Tom:	00:36:38	Yes and with, with the result that I think many, maybe most comedians don't know why they're doing what they're doing. They couldn't really explain it. But it's one of the most common questions is like, "Why do you do what you, how'd you get started doing this? Why do you do this? What, what keeps you going?" And I think people have, you know, from interviews I've heard or read and from thinking about it from my own experience, like I don't really know and it goes up and down sometimes I don't feel like it's, sometimes it's like, "Oh, I thought of something today, I got to go try this out." Um, so it's kind of like very personal research, you know, like, are my thoughts interesting or funny? Can I, you know, survive based on this? And the answer most of the time is no, just because most things are not good. Because the, you know, the goalposts move all the time. [Athena agrees] But, um, you can certainly imagine how that process could keep you going, that kind of random, semi-random reinforcement that you can, there's a little bit of skill, a lot of luck, but when it pays off, it pays off in a way that makes you motivated. Try it again.
Athena:	00:37:37	Yeah. Cool. So it sounds like there's some element of it that's just like almost a feeling of efficacy, right? If you can make people laugh, you can get that done at least. And that feels good to see.
Tom:	00:37:49	Yeah, the efficacy. I don't think most comedians would use that word, but yeah, I am, I'm effective at what I'm doing. I'm capable. I'm competent at something. So it's, it's a very, if you can do it, it's an easy way to get that feeling. Easy is not the right word, but it's a, it's a, it's some kind of consistent way because there is sort of a culture built around people going up and talking to strangers through a microphone and getting that response or not. So it can, it can feel like, oh yeah, I just keep doing this. And, and steps five through a hundred: unclear, but it's gonna be great.
Athena:	00:38:25	Right, right. So to get back, sorry, I keep coming back to evolution because I love evolution. From an evolutionary perspective, making people laugh. Is that associated at all you think with mating motives, even if it's not consciously? Like, do people make people laugh to look attractive to the opposite sex?
Tom:	00:38:51	A million percent. Absolutely. So I've, I didn't catch her last name. Erica, I'm sure you know her. Um, she's doing research on the association between humor and, you know, mating status, mating attractiveness or whatever. And I am not involved in that research, but I totally, I've seen, I mean actually like you're in a bar or a restaurant and you can see what is obviously a first date that is not going well. The first sign is that no one's laughing. They don't seem to be having fun and, and vice versa if-
Athena:	00:39:27	It doesn't even need to be a first date, right? [Laughter]
Tom:	00:39:30	Sure, yeah, it's you're 21 before marriage and once they've heard all of their jokes and they're-
Athena:	00:39:35	It could be a very bad anniversary date.
Tom:	00:39:37	Yeah! Woo. Um, but someone live tweeting it very funny.
Athena:	00:39:44	Have you done that?
Tom:	00:39:44	No!
Athena:	00:39:45	Okay. [Laughter]
Tom:	00:39:46	But I do absolutely subscribe. But also like, I don't know anyone if, if you, if you are like on a date or just in a, in a situation, if you make someone laugh, it's just like, ah-ha! Cause it's not just that like "I am good." It's like, oh they're paying attention, whatever it is that I'm saying they find not just interesting, but I mean, no one's doing this, doing this explicitly, but evolutionary helpful, right? They find, they see that thing, too. And I, I found a solution to this funny awkward situation or whatever it was. So that it's like a pretty unambiguous signal that things are going well usually.
Athena:	00:40:28	Are there, uh, any-
Tom:	00:40:28	I can see why people do it on purpose.
Athena:	00:40:30	Yeah, yeah. So are there any do's and don'ts for humor on dates that-
Tom:	00:40:36	Woah. I think we're just climbing the ladder of my incompetence [Athena laughs] further and further away from what I actually have any expertise in.
Athena:	00:40:42	Any, any big mistakes you've made? No, I'm just kidding.
Tom:	00:40:46	I mean, well, again, going back to comedy: you hear, one of the, one of the big topics of standup comedy is dates that went bad or dating in general, how dating can go bad. And so much of them are about someone who made the wrong move of the conversation. Like they, they, it's either someone saying, "And then this person tried to start talking about the civil war all the time." And you know, like wherever it goes from there, it's not a good start. [Athena agrees] And, um, or they'll, they'll make a joke that's obviously meant to, and like you hear people still sort of like Uber drivers or cab drivers doing this too. Like I'll be like a racist joke that the whole point is like, "Hey, we get this right we're together on-about those guys? They're bad." And often people in a situation who are trying to make those jokes don't notice when it bombs because they're not trying to make a joke for, for creative humor purposes. They're trying to get people together. And so like if you're dating, you're trying to, you know, literally get together and if someone doesn't respond to that, I'm like, "Well, that didn't work, but whatever." My goal remains the same. It's not about trying to see what happens, it's about trying to make something happen. And that's a lot of where these weird stories come from, I think. Just because they're not paying attention to the response so much as just so overly focused on some outcome.
Athena:	00:42:05	So, so it's almost like if you're trying to make a conversation and use humor, humor, whether it's you're a Uber driver or Lyft driver or you're on a date or you're meeting some new people and you're trying to be funny. If your joke doesn't really go over, that might not so much be also about whether you're funny or not. But just like misjudging who your audience is and saying something that you think is going to establish camaraderie but actually shows that it doesn't exist. In a way.
Tom:	00:42:39	Yeah, it's not that they didn't get it is that you don't get it, that you're, you're trying to do something that is beside the point of whatever else it's there for. [Athena laughs]
Athena:	00:42:47	So if, if your joke bombs, it's because you don't get it.
Tom:	00:42:50	Uh, at least you should reevaluate where that joke came from. Cause like if, I dunno, I would hesitate to make any prescriptions here. But if you want to go back to whatever the evolutionary purpose of humor is, which is like finding potential problems and understanding the situation better and being able to, uh, to see things differently, then that can just be the goal. Like, just seeing things more clearly and avoiding, you know, harmful mistakes. It doesn't have to be like a, like a saintly kind of thing. Just like, well, if we have anything in common is that we don't want to fall into a manhole or whatever the other situation is that is equivalent of that. And you're probably doing a lot more listening than someone's who's just trying to get a one liner off because at least these days, I think there's enough comedy in the culture that you can hear when someone's telling a joke that is not, that they've kind of pre arranged. [Athena agrees] As opposed to being off the cuff or if someone is relating a joke that happened before, they'll say it like, "Oh, I heard this joke from this guy." And one of the horror stories, it's like you're on a date and you start hearing, uh, someone trying to tell you a joke. Someone else, a professional comedic joke as if it happened to them. They're just stealing the joke.
Athena:	00:44:09	Ohhh.
Tom:	00:44:09	And I've heard about this happening a bunch of times. It's like a common thing, apparently, is someone who's just like, not there themselves, but like to borrow that.
Athena:	00:44:17	Wow.
Tom:	00:44:17	But when some, when you get caught, it's gotta be horrific. Um, if you see people will do it, open mics once in awhile too, they'll just tell and they don't realize they're in a room of people who are trying to become professional comedians. So they're familiar with the genre. And uh, it's, I think it's hopefully more and more obvious when someone is trying to make a joke to manipulate someone because they're not reacting to the situation or the people involved there. They have like a function in mind.
Athena:	00:44:47	Oh, that's interesting. So maybe one way of kind of detecting if someone is trying to use humor and jokes in a manipulative way is that they're not responding to the context as much?
Tom:	00:45:02	Yeah, I think that makes a lot a lot of sense. Um, I mean if I, if I do say so myself, but yeah, that's like a good, I mean if they have sort of zombified themselves, if they've attached themselves to some idea of a goal they want from a social situation and they won't be dissuaded from it, that's a pretty good sign that they're trying to do something for-to other people as well.
Athena:	00:45:24	Interesting.
Tom:	00:45:25	I mean, that makes sense to me. [Athena agrees] I really wish I had any theoretical or experimental basis for any of this, but I, well it's hard to sit still and do science. Like I have immense admiration for people who can because I know plenty of them and I've found out that I'm not one of them. I get along well with a lot of people who do it, but it's, it's really hard work to like nail these things down and be reasonably certain of your conclusions.
Athena:	00:45:51	Yeah. So what do you think of this idea that part of what people are doing when they're making jokes and being funny is advertising the quality of their brains in some way that they, you know, the quick thinking, they can pull things together from lots of different places. They can also, you know, be the center of attention and other people will at least defer to them for the purposes of listening to what they have to say. Do you buy that kind of argument or...?
Tom:	00:46:22	I think it makes, yeah, pretty, pretty solid sense. I mean, I've seen it happen, so it's not like a theoretical idea of like what could be true. I've seen it. I'm sure you've seen it as well. [Athena agrees] Um, not necessarily like perfectly reliably or, but in certain context it's like easy to see how someone would use a joke and there's manuals about it, you know, but it's like public speaking manuals and CEO like management manuals that tell how to use relating to other people as a way to, you know, manage or manipulate, whatever way you want it to turn that. But, um, it's not hard to find examples of it in the real world and it's not hard to find yourself in that situation. Just, someone says something, you laugh in spite of yourself and you're like, "Hey, I don't agree with that at all. But man, they did a trick there that really got me." And it's not necessarily like an intentional thing, but there's structures in your brain, world models that have some overlap and they tweak it in a way that just works.
Athena:	00:47:22	Yeah. So it seems like there's a interesting relationship between humor, being funny, and having charisma. Maybe they're not fully overlapping, but partially.
Tom:	00:47:33	Yeah, I think, yeah, I wouldn't, I've seen people who are charismatic, who were not very funny.
Athena:	00:47:41	Vice versa? Have you seen people who are funny but not charismatic?
Tom:	00:47:43	Have you met a comedian before? [Athena laughs] I mean, you may wonder now, but like, I'd, I certainly am not terribly charismatic and I'm not that funny. Um, but you can see-
Athena:	00:47:55	You're both funny and charismatic.
Tom:	00:47:56	My friend Tyler has a joke where he says he wishes he was tall because that is often mistaken for hot. [Athena laughs] It's a good joke because it's a very, you can understand it immediately. You see someone who's tall, you're just like, "Well, I can see them better, so maybe I should look at them close." You know, like, "Maybe I should look at them more. Maybe they're attractive," but these things often overlap. Humor and charisma are, are together sometimes, but often that's a mistake. You, someone is funny and you mistake them for charismatic and vice versa. You see people laughing at the jokes of people who are charismatic, when, if anyone else told them, you'd be like, "What are you talking about?" There's a very, a strong like delivery and source component to when you laugh, it's not, there's no like isolated "this is funny" in all situations, in any form. It's like really, I mean, I've seen some jokes that get toward that, but that's very hard to do to make a joke that's so context free that you can get people no matter who's delivering it or whatever. [Athena agrees] So, um, I think, I think humor can help get people aligned or affiliated with you. It's like charisma because it involves understanding your audience and connecting with them and having some sort of common experience that all is, you know, affiliative, which is what charisma is for; getting people to follow what you're, where you're leading. And uh, but obviously it's not, one doesn't cause the other.
Athena:	00:49:21	Right, right. So let's loop back to social learning, right? So you studied social learning and I'm curious how humor plays a role in people learning from each other. Is that, did you work on that piece of it or is that something that-
Tom:	00:49:40	I didn't, but one thing we did work on was whether if someone has the option to imitate what you're doing to learn from you more or less, does it help for them to see the outcome of what you're doing or just to see that you have the same intention or that you already have a lot in common? So it wouldn't take a lot to change what they're doing to what you're doing. Um, so all these factors affect those decisions in a day in a big way.
Athena:	00:50:07	They all affect?
Tom:	00:50:07	Yeah. So in our particular experiment, hiding the score information in this game that we had, um, it made people obviously copy more randomly and they also would use a similarity bias. So they would pick things that were closer to what they already had if they couldn't see score. And if you, if you think about that for a second, at least it seemed to us and talking to some participants that kind of was born out, that if you're, if you're looking at someone who's doing something that's kind of like what you're doing, that has two benefits. First of all, it's not going to take a lot of change to, to make that imitation. You're going to make a lot of effort to adapt to that. [Athena agrees] And if that change gives you a good outcome, you know exactly where that improvement came from.
Athena:	00:50:51	Right, that makes sense.
Tom:	00:50:51	So you can make small changes, which are low effort and very high, highly indicative of the outcome.
Athena:	00:51:00	Interesting.
Tom:	00:51:01	So it's, it's, there's the whole, the social learning literature is, is rife with signals that can, uh, encourage or discourage imitation.
Athena:	00:51:12	Hmm. Yeah. And so how does it relate to learning then? Like why... Well, do people pay-are people more likely to imitate people who are funny than people who are not?
Tom:	00:51:26	That I don't know. So going back to that, this, this pretty common, uh, joke topic of, you know, "I'm so broke." How broke are you? You know? [Athena agrees] Like the Rodney Dangerfield kind of thing, getting no respect. Like, making yourself intentionally low status, which is more or less a vehicle for explaining where you went wrong. Right?
Athena:	00:51:48	Huh.
Tom:	00:51:48	But not in a Ted Talk kind of way. Not like bullet points, but here is what I intended because we all want good things and here's what happened and here's how it happened. There's room for all the different forms that humor takes in that gap between intention and result. And so you're-I just off the top of my head, I think people... Like experiencing humor from a person, but they won't necessarily imitate their life choices because so much humor is about making mistakes.
Athena:	00:52:18	Right. So it's a way of like learning from others about mistakes. What you're learning is not let me do things this way, but you're, maybe what you're learning is, let me not do things this way. [Athena laughs]
Tom:	00:52:30	Right! A huge part of learning is learning what not to do. Negative examples. And I wouldn't make any strong statements about, about the suitability of comedians as leaders, but you don't see a lot of them. So just, just statistically in the world you don't see a lot of very funny and very politically successful people.
Athena:	00:52:49	But it's really interesting actually to turn this whole idea of learning from others upside down in a way and say, well, you know, what does it look like if what you're learning from others is not how to be super, super successful, but what you're learning is how to avoid mistakes that can be highly costly or mistakes that are avoidable, um, mistakes that you, you know, you should have been able to not have happened, right? So, I don't know, I mean maybe in a way we, we focus too much on success and how to imitate success and not as much on like learning about how things go wrong.
Tom:	00:53:36	Yeah. I think there's probably like an element of like a risk aversion there. Like you, you want to look out for mistakes so that you don't make them and you know, realizing that there's any uncertainty about something, it's good to have information that other people experienced first. And if you're trying to follow someone or you're following someone, like, you know, if you're, if you haven't helped you, if you are an influencer, or you're being influenced by someone like that, mostly you're trying to emulate them. And if some of-the weird thing is that we learn so well from mistakes and missteps, but we don't seek that out. I think the, the idea behind this book, "Inside Jokes," is that this is, this humor isn't-the evolution of humor was Mother Nature bribing us to somehow enjoy finding mistakes, because-
Athena:	00:54:29	Maybe attend them more, to process them more.
Tom:	00:54:30	Yeah. To keep, to keep an eye out because it'll be fun when you realize it before it causes harm. Because otherwise we would only go toward the things that seem to work. [Athena agrees] And so like I think there's, there's something to say there about how, how celebrities and influencers and so forth work and how they don't work, what they, what they function poorly as examples of. But I don't have the cultural or scientific depth to talk about that. But it seems-think about that you only seem to want to follow or imitate things that are apparently flawless. [Athena agrees] That you don't, you don't think of comedians as people to emulate in any other way, but their funniness there's no like halo effect for almost anyone who's really funny. There's no, like if someone is good at something often that halo effect extends to whatever they do like. So when, what is it, some physicist just got really into the benefits of vitamin C, for some reason. I think it was like Pauly... Pauline, something like that. My memory is terrible.
Athena:	00:55:35	I don't know.
Tom:	00:55:36	But because he was such a brilliant physicist, people followed and he believed his own halo effect is about, he was a genius biologist, too. Just vitamin C. Big important thing for everyone. And it didn't bear out. But you can see exactly why someone would say, "Oh, they're good at that. They're good at everything." But that doesn't seem to be the case for humor.
Athena:	00:55:56	Well, to me that really suggests there's something kind of different about humor and taking the, the social learning idea and sort of bringing that in with this idea about humor, helping you to update your mind about things you might've been mistaken about. It just, it seems like maybe part of what is going on is it's like a, you know, humor and finding things funny is, it's not just a bribe for engaging about, you know, updating how you might be wrong about things, but maybe it's also a bribe for engaging in these stories about how things can go very, very wrong, so that you, so that you learn about it and avoid it. Right? Cause I mean stories about scary things. Like people want to avoid stories about things that are frightening.
Tom:	00:56:49	Except when they love hearing about murders, which is-
Athena:	00:56:53	Yeah, well and so, and this, this is actually like a piece of-
Tom:	00:56:57	Zombie apocalypses.
Athena:	00:56:58	Exactly.
Tom:	00:56:58	People love stories about that.
Athena:	00:57:00	That, I was just going to go there. So part of why we have this podcast, why we're doing this Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting is because the apocalypse and zombies can be super fun. Right? It's like imagination. You're thinking about, well, yeah, what would you do if the apocalypse came? Where would you go? Who would you have on your z-team? Like that is fun. Why is that fun? I don't really know because it's not fun to like go to a seminar and listen to what is the likelihood that there'll be a disaster like this or a disaster like that. Right? That's not fun, going to a seminar and hearing about it in dry terms. [Tom agrees] But it is fun to like go into imagination world where we're playing and imagining, you know, what the future might be like and-
Tom:	00:57:44	Every aspect of the reality of it is awful. [Athena agrees] Including, including just the specific information about it is just not fun. Everything about the actual situation would be terrible, but we keep returning to these stories and simulations and imagining how it could go. I think there's some sort of like, uh, like competence porn aspect to that where you're like, "Yeah, I would survive."
Athena:	00:58:06	Totally! I haven't heard that term competence, competence porn.
Tom:	00:58:09	It was, it was, I read it in a review of some movie, I think it was like Matt Damon was on Mars or something like that and he's, you know, somehow survives. He recapitulates civilization as a solo dude out there in space [Athena laughs] and, and people describe it as like not a good movie in a lot of ways, but it allowed people to live this fantasy of like, "I could do this, I could survive this. I could make the best of the situation." It's in someone's definition of porn as being not really about sex, but about controlling the situation in the same way that food porn isn't about eating the food. You're looking at a blog or something like that. But it's about, "I could do that. I could have this kind of capability and expertise to way to make things delicious for me and for my friends and I could just really do it. It's, it's about, you know, having a sense of control of the situation.
Athena:	00:59:01	Interesting. Hmm.
Tom:	00:59:03	And these are all borrowed ideas, I want to disclaim that.
Athena:	00:59:06	Well, they're very fun ones. So, uh, speaking of borrowed ideas, you know, in the behavioral ecology literature there's this idea of, um, predator inspection. So you will have organisms who will go up to their predators and poke around and smell near them and watch them. And the question is, why are they doing this? Why are they not just running the fuck away when there is a predator nearby? And one of the ideas is that they're doing it to gather information, right, about what this predator is like, so that in the future they'll be more likely to be able to run away. And maybe they also sort of know how close they can cut it, right? Like how-
Tom:	00:59:50	And maybe not that individual in particular. Maybe that individual gets eaten, but everyone else can learn from it. So they're, they're conspecifics can see what are the edges of, you know, the safe zone and don't do that in the future.
Athena:	01:00:04	Yeah. Well, you could have the social learning, but in terms of like how is it going to evolve, it has to, it'll have to be beneficial to the individual doing the predator inspection or there can, right? For that to evolve.
Tom:	01:00:14	Oh, there's just enough noise in, enough, enough of a range in any individual's or individual differences of, you know, curiosity and boldness and risk tolerance so that there'll be a few percent of individuals that won't survive it, but they'll get a lot of other benefits during their lifetime and they will reproduce, but at some point they're going to get too close and get eaten, but they've given that benefit to possibly their close kin and offspring and so forth. So there is-again, you know, I'm telling stories here. It's not hard science, but you can imagine the idea.
Athena:	01:00:50	Yep. Well, speaking of stories, I have to get us to a question that I always like to ask guests at the end of the show, which is what is the zombie apocalypse of like humor and jokes. Like if you take it to the extreme of like, you know, people being manipulated by humor and jokes. Like what, what is that zombie apocalypse like? What would the world be like if we were just so manipulated by humor and jokes? Would be just be like sitting around in a pile, like laughing contagiously?
Tom:	01:01:28	I've got three references.
Athena:	01:01:29	Okay. Alright.
Tom:	01:01:30	So, uh, Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. There's an episode where he decides to try to understand humanity by, by doing standup comedy on the holodeck.
Athena:	01:01:39	Oh, I don't remember that episode.
Tom:	01:01:40	And he gets discouraged really quickly, it's like this comedy club simulation, but they laugh at everything, not just that he says, but every like tiny gesture that he does. They're programmed in this very zombie-like way to respond. He gets quickly discouraged from it.
Athena:	01:01:51	Interesting.
Tom:	01:01:52	But there's also, uh, have you heard of Andrew Dice Clay? [Athena confirms] So he's this 80s comedian who just embodied this character of just like [in a tough guy voice] ah, chain smoking on this guy from the neighborhood and I'm real tough guy or whatever. And, you know, very insensitive. People really just, you know, were very triggered by it, but also like a certain, you know, millions of people loved it. And there's a concert video, like a, like a performance of his, that's, I think it was an HBO special, where people-he had put out an album or a special or something like that. It'd been on TV. And people showed up to the concert and said the jokes along with him.
Athena:	01:02:29	[In a tone of disbelief] What.
Tom:	01:02:29	Like said his material all along as if it was a singalong.
Athena:	01:02:35	That's weird.
Tom:	01:02:35	Like not like karaoke. But singing along as if it was, or talking along with him as if it was a song. And some of it's like little rhymes, like, you know, twisted nursery rhymes. It's so bad. Um, but people would just say things along with him. Huh. And like Steve Martin talks about in his book about when he had this, this early huge pop of success, that he got really bummed out because people would want him to just do the stuff they'd already heard and he couldn't do new stuff as successfully. Like people would be upset if you didn't repeat the things they already knew and they would have such a great time. People loved it. But it wasn't creative. It wasn't moving at all.
Athena:	01:03:08	That's interesting.
Tom:	01:03:09	So, it's, you can imagine the nightmare from multiple points of view. Like, I don't know, like there's Jeff Dunham, so that puppet comedian, who like has a bunch of like kind of racist puppets. It's not like a lot of people that I know don't think it's particularly funny, but he's hugely paid. He gets, he's made so many millions of dollars from these things that are considered by many people to be either like mean or hack or both. But people love it. And so many, and this is not just the single example, there's many people who are considered hack because they're doing this thing over and over again and getting a big response and getting success from it that people are kind of embittered by it. Cause they're like, no, I'm doing the work. I'm trying to do all this new stuff and who, who makes money? This jerk. [Athena agrees] Or like, like Big Bang theory or something like that. It's this TV show, it's very huge. And it's like, you know, culturally appropriating nerds. Um, and doing it badly, like misrepresenting things and doing-like using these very hack joke structures and particular joke topics and people just like, [sigh noise] they feel, they feel like they're in some bizarre zombies situation where people keep responding, keep reacting this thing that's not new or distinct from their point of view and they feel like they're not in control of a situation, that they can't change things. So, that is, that's the zombie apocalypse of humor.
Athena:	01:04:33	We talked about another kind of zombie apocalypse if humor earlier, which is these, you know, echo chambers online where people can kind of get positively reinforced for really, you know, for humor that is offensive to some groups and like creates this, you know, greater and greater kind of polarization, right? [Tom agrees] And so that's maybe a bit of a humor apocalypse that we're in right now.
Tom:	01:04:58	Yeah, when those things cross over to the mainstream, when someone like tries to use that idea or make the joke or, or whatever. Cross, cross the boundaries of the echo chamber to the wider world, you can see the result in, ehhh, most of the time thankfully it's just awkward. It's just like, "Oh, you thought that was cool? Thank you for telling us that's the kind person you are." [Athena agrees] But so thankfully it doesn't seem to have that kind of carryover broad influence. But, uh, who knows, who knows what could happen.
Athena:	01:05:25	Yeah. So is there any advice that you would give to people about like how to use humor in non-apocalyptic way and if you're going to use it in a zombification way, to use it in like a positive for mutual benefit kind of zombification?
Tom:	01:05:41	Well, uh, this is going to be boring. It's not very funny, but like, listen more. I think like some of the best, like, you know, best successful comedians, that I like, are people who are really sharp and in the moment reacting to things that are happening and be able to like call back to things and make it, experience this in the present rather than just kind of reciting.
Athena:	01:06:02	That makes a lot of sense.
Tom:	01:06:02	So, but they do a lot of listening and some people like, um, there's a particular comedian, uh, I'm thinking of, I can't remember who, um, his name is escaping me, but I've heard stories from other people who've worked with him that he'll listen to the whole show just so he can pick up those things later and use them because they'll still be on people's minds. Maybe not in an immediate way, but he can bring them up and use them as material. To the point where even he has to go use the restroom. He'll say, listen to what this comic is saying and tell me what it was when I come back.
Athena:	01:06:36	Wow.
Tom:	01:06:36	So he doesn't miss anything. Um, who was it? Uh, anyways, it's, it'll come back to me about, you know, an hour or so.
Athena:	01:06:43	Yeah. Well, and this also kind of harkens back to what we were saying earlier about how one way to maybe detect that someone is trying to zombify you with humor is that they're not responding as much to the context if they're just sort of using it in a rote way to try to get a certain response. While, if they're really listening, then there may be more like cocreating something with you, in a way.
Tom:	01:07:05	Sure. Yeah. Well, of course there's like dozens, hundreds, thousands of comedians who would disagree with me and do well by taking the opposite approach. People have very polished material that just works in a lot of places. I'm not saying that my view's universal, but that's just like that's what I find the most interesting and fun things.
Athena:	01:07:22	Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on Zombified and thank you to all of our listeners for listening.
Tom:	01:07:31	I see what you did there, very nice. [Athena laughs]
Outro:	01:07:44	['Psychological' by LEMI plays]
Athena:	01:08:50	All right, it is time for my shoutouts. Thank you so much to the Department of Psychology and to ASU in general for supporting this podcast, especially the Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative, which is a strategic initiative from the President's Office and also the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. Thank you to my lab, the Aktipis Lab, and to the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance. If you're looking for us on social media, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram as zombifiedpod, and on Patreon we're zombified, and our website is zombified.org. If you want to support us, we are an educational no-ads-ever podcast. We will never, ever have ads because we are trying to reduce the global burden of zombification, not increase it. So yes, consider supporting us. Just $1 a month will help us make more episodes. And thank you to all of the brains that help make this podcast. Tal Rom, who does our sound; Neil Smith, who does our illustrations; and LEMI, the artist behind our theme song 'Psychological'.
Athena:	01:10:04	As is my tradition at the end of each episode, I share my brains. So I have a few things I want to share about humor, laughter, funniness, fun, that kind of stuff. So the first one is that I was really struck in this episode and in talking with Tom Wisdom about how important paying attention is, and I think this kind of loops back into a lot of our themes for this podcast, that you kind of need to have your attention available in order to take advantage of lots of opportunities. Not just for kind of being autonomous and not being zombified but for enjoying your life. So turns out, it seems like really you need to have your attention available and be paying attention in order to find things funny and also realize what might be funny to others. So I love that because it really helps kind of bring us back to the present and to our attention so that we can enjoy all the benefits of humor.
Athena:	01:11:21	Alright. The other thing I wanted to have a little chat about is this idea that Tom brings up from the literature about laughter and you know, the sort of enjoyment that comes from, um, sort of the unexpected when there's some sort of mistake or something, that that can be essentially like a little reward for learning. And to me there's some really cool implications from this. Like, for example, should we be thinking about making learning more fun in general and education by introducing more surprise by actually allowing more opportunities to make mistakes or even completely fuck up and then be engaged and interested in learning afterwards.
Athena:	01:12:16	So I'll, I'll give an example. I taught social dance for awhile. I was a salsa instructor. And I tried to make it fun for me and also for the people who I was teaching. So one of the things I would do when I was teaching is I would have all of the couples go into a circle and, um, we did a step called the Cuban Salsa Basic, where you sort of step towards your partner on one step and you kind of push off on their hand with your's. So you're kind of have like a compression step and then you open up and uh, you kind of all facing the inside of the circle on the other steps. So you're kind of going like together two, three, open two, three, and you're facing the circle. And I would have people give a high five to the person who was behind them when they did that open step. So it would be like, you know, together two, three, pushing off your partner and then open two, three and you would give a high five. So there'd be like a clap. Um, so people love this and it was super fun for them when they would, you know, open up and they would connect and you'd hear that, you know, high five happen. They loved it, but not as much as they loved it when they messed up and didn't actually hit the other person's hand, or they like slipped or it was not on time. People would just laugh and have a riotous good time when they were fucking up. And I didn't really have much of an explanation for that until this episode with Tom Wisdom about laughter and learning. And you know, it sounds like they're having this opportunity to, to fail. It like provides this fun moment, um, and also increases maybe the motivation to get it right. And so I think maybe we should take this more seriously in education. You know, how we can sort of harness the joy of fucking up and then the fun of trying again in order to make education more engaging for everyone. Thank you for listening to Zombified, your source for fresh brains.
Outro:	01:14:40	['Psychological' by LEMI plays]