How to Raise the U.S. Mirth Rate

By Frank Trippett

"From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere." Thus spoke Dr. Seuss, and true enough. Novelist Erich Maria Remarque made a kindred point: "Not to laugh at the 20th century is to shoot yourself." Yet the sad fact is that mirth in the U.S. is neither what it once was nor what it might be. As early as 1968, in The Rise and Fall of American Humor, English Professor Jesse Bier solemnly declared that "we are in great part humorless as never before." Other humor experts, who cannily refuse to be associated with their opinions, believe that laughter has continued to dwindle because Americans are losing their former skill at recognizing humor when it comes along unannounced. The good news: relief is at hand.

It has come in the form of a new theory that offers to identify humor with mathematical precision. John Paulos, mathematics professor at Philadelphia's Temple University, has worked out a way to plumb the anatomy of a joke by applying to it a marvelous flight of mathematical wizardry known as the catastrophe theory. It is based on a dazzle of equations so dense not even a child trained in the new math could grasp it.

The basic idea becomes somewhat clearer with an effort to visualize it. The theory requires one to imagine an arrangement of geometric surfaces at different levels and a point moving along one surface, until suddenly it plunges to another surface. The plunge of the point marks the convergence of the conditions that give rise to such catastrophes as war, riot, chemical explosion, deodorant failure. In Paulos' application of the theory to humor, the surfaces represent levels of shifting meaning, the point becomes the leading edge of a joke, its plunge signals the punch line.

As an illustration, Paulos offers the one about a fellow who goes to a computer dating service seeking a partner who is short, gregarious, formally attired and fond of water sports. "We are led by the joke so far along one meaning surface," says Paulos. "Then comes the punch line. . . the service provides the man with a penguin. We are suddenly jumped across an ambiguity in semantics, from one surface of meaning to another, in a way that can be represented by a mathematical catastrophe."

True, it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of this insight, but the effort should be made. After all, a surefire way to penetrate even the most obscure jokes would be a blessing to any era. And in this time, a humor-detector promises to provide the precise guide that is the very thing Americans need.

Certainly Americans are getting some laughs, but often of a low quality and seldom provoked by real humor. Laughter fans instead rely more and more on professional comedians. Many are so desperately in need that they even laugh at Don Rickles or Joey Bishop. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer people partake of the real humor that is all around. Studio audiences at TV talk shows of the Mike Douglas genre tend to laugh at the host, presumably for nervous relief. But they frequently fail even to chuckle when the list of guests is proclaimed, even though such lists usually contain more jokes than the show.

Newspaper readers commonly manifest an obliviousness to real humor. Many read Columnist Anthony Lewis, or even Evans and Novak, without a single yuk. Book buyers remain so unaware of the laughable nature of writings by Erica Jong and Ayn Rand that store owners usually mix these scribblings with serious fiction. Similarly unalert book shoppers often fail to flash even an anticipatory grin when reaching for the hard-cover jokes of, say, Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape). In the larger world of affairs, it has been years since George Gallup or Louis Harris reported that even one American spontaneously guffawed when solicited for an opinion about U.S. political leadership.

Plainly, no nation that has survived 95 Congresses and exalted the portrait of a soup can as a work of art and adopted John Wayne as an elder statesman can be written off as hopelessly serious. Such a nation could easily retain its sense of humor while losing some of its capacity to recognize real jokes. And-this is what has happened.

The public's peculiar blindness to real humor surely was certified by the absence of hilarity in 1976 when a politician actually promised never to tell a lie. That was the most sensational one-liner to reach the hustings since a certain utilities commission candidate named Carter-- the late Jerry Carter-- announced he was a cheap politician because his Florida constituents could not afford an expensive one. Admittedly, some small special skill may have been called for to recognize the never-lie promise for what it was: a punch line for which a joke would follow only later.

Now, happily, such a lapse need never happen again. With Dr. Paulos' breakthrough, Americans may have the means to recover the capacity to spot baloney no matter how it is sliced. The hopeful thing is that since the theory is based on numbers, it can be handled by a pocket calculator. Modern U.S. technology could, and certainly should, translate Paulos' insights into a portable Joke-Ometer. With the distribution of such a gad get, up will go the gross national laugh.

At the TV set, the JO, as it might be called, will be handy for finding out what, if anything, is funny about the alleged jokes that precede the canned laughter. The J-O will add popular pleasure to every political campaign, for Paulos ventures the definition of a joke that is the very essence of smart political rhetoric -- "a sort of structured ambiguity."

The J-O surely will be a good tool to have at hand in the presence of any State of the Union message, any advertisement praising airline food, any prose describing the coming fashions. With the JO, the public will begin to get at the deeper essence of Oscar award thank-yous, car-repair estimates, appliance guarantees and the thinking of Herman Kahn (Thinking About the Unthinkable). J-O-armed people will start responding with appropriate horselaughs to anybody coming along claiming to "relate" or to be "into my body." Laymen will be able to join former Harvard Economics Professor John Kenneth Galbraith in seeing economics as a fundamentally humorous science, in which "we must explain that a country can have inflation or recession but never both." People will discover that Dial-A-Joke as an idea is funnier than anything likely to be heard on a tape when the number is dialed.

In short, happy days could be here again. Not Utopia, however. Far more often than now, Americans will discover that the public itself is the butt of some of the biggest jokes around. In such cases, laughter might be reduced. Still, half a laugh is better than none .

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.