The Psychology of Humor || Bob Mankoff

Collaborators the only way forward is inward. Later on in this episode, I'll talk a lot more about the Perception Box and how it relates to this episode, But right now, let me tell you about today's guest. Today, we welcome Bob Mankoff to the show. For forty years, Bob Mancoff has been the driving force of comedy and satire at some of the most honored publications in America, including The

New Yorker and Esquire. He is founder of Cartoon Collections, parent company to cartoon stock dot Com, the world's most successful cartoon licensing platform. For twenty years. As cartoon editor for The New Yorker, Bob poured over thousands of submissions each week, analyzing, critiquing, and selecting each cartoon. In two thousand and five, he helps start the New Yorker Cartoon Captured contest.

Bob is the author of numerous books, including his New York Times bestselling memoir how About Never Is Never Good for You? My Life in Cartoons. In this episode, I talked to Bob about the psychology of humor, looking back at his illustrious career as a cartoonist. Bob talks about his early beginnings and the people he's mentored in the field. He explains the anatomy of a joke and reveals his

all time favorite cartoons. While humans are creative creatures, Bob believes that using AI and technology can further augment our intelligence and humor by opening up worlds of possibilities. This was a really fun and chat. Bob is hilarious as he might expect, but also really thoughtful and really forward looking. I really like how he ties the future of AI to the future of creativity and also his ideas about the theories of humor. This is really fun and I

know you'll have fun listening to it. So now I'll bring you the legendary Bob Mankoff BaHaB man cough. It is such an honor to have you on the Psychology Podcast today.

other things. I mean, school is incredibly boring. Yeah, I mean it's an incredibly restrictive environment for a young boy in that Okay, you're supposed to sit still for hour after hour and listen to people talk to you about things that are hard to understand through talking somehow, this

medieval way of communicating information. And so no, I was you know, I didn't get in a lot of trouble, but I was certainly, I would say by the fourth or fifth grade, I realized that that I was funny and that was like a card that I could play in life, although I don't think certainly at that age, you know, and the fourth filly, Oh, this is the

card I'm going to play. But in an instinctive way, you understand, this is a an influence, a power that you have that can get attention and can make people like you and to make fun of other people. So it's got that, it's got this, these all these dynamics. And certainly in the environment I grew up with in the Queens in the nineteen fifties, in a Jewish neighborhood, you know this, the Jews weren't fighting. You know, when you ask a Jewish kids, like, what's the worst fight

you ever got in? It was something like, well, one time, this kid really gave me a noogie. Like I would say most kids that I grew up with and now they're all in the seventies and say, have you ever been in a real fight, a real fight? That haven't? Okay, But they fought with their mouths. They fought with ranking, with insults, with that, you know, was that's that, that was the way. That was the daily kind of combat that existed. Ridicule mockery, that's a ridicular mockery. You know.

Trump comes out of that too, comes out of that environment too, So he's a queen's guy. But so that I think is somehow at training ground for the you know, that kind of combat, but also for training your mind from seeing and you know, different perspectives. Then I went to the High School of Music and Art, which was one of the specialized high schools in New York City alone with Brooklyn Tech UH and Bronx High School of Science. That was a high school you had to get into

and by passing a test. But it wasn't an academic test. It was a drawing test or a music test. So it was the high school that was later featured in the movie Fame and maybe the remake of Fame, although they conflated both the High School of Performing Arts with the High School of Music and Art for the movie. Music and Art had music, and it had art and art. So that was, you know, part of the journey, I guess, and then you know that that in the circuitous way

led me eventually to be a cartoonist. But before I was a cartoonist, I was a psychologist, an experimental psychologist at City University, where I tortured pigeons and rats in ways that are not acceptable anymore.

re enacted. So when you came out of the Scnarian tradition, it was the mind is a black box. You really can't know. It's inputs and outputs, inputs and outputs, and that's all you could know. You really couldn't know what was going on in there, those independent variables. So let's just look at behavior. It just goes back to Watson and to positivism and stuff. So I was very much enamored of that. It's a young man's philosophy. It's an

extreme philosophy. It's you know, but eventually both it didn't make any sense to me and I didn't make any sense to them the program I was in, so I mean, and also my pigeon died, so it was like a number of things. You know, you put that you put either mice or rats, but off of pigeons in a in a skinner box and they pecked on a little

disk and they got rewards for reinforced behavior. And you know, I think the there are trusive behaviorism that are important and simple, but a lot of things that are very simple. You know that behavior that's rewarded increases in frequency, and that the schedules of reinforcement the you know, one of the things we're see now with artificial intelligence is that based on a very simple, simple principle, very simple that just predicting what the next word is going to be

about vast amounts of data, you get emergent behaviors. So behavior's been sort of based on that, based on that a little bit. But I drifted away from that but then, but that's in my background. So when I got interested in the psychology of humor experiments, I think I had it, still had that analytic attitude.

while I became a cartoonist. So it worked out I adjusted the right amount of our ability that could mesh with my humor because the other road not taken was was to be a comedian, which I thought I might be. But when I went into college and in the early seven I mean, in graduate school and ended up being a cartoonist seventy one seventy two, there weren't a lot of comedy clubs. There weren't. It wasn't didn't really afford

you that possibility. So I think if I had been born a little later, five years later, I would have ended up going into comedy, not cartooning, because I think comedy, yeah, stand up. But you know, I think it worked out for me. It did because that's a very difficult field, and it's a field which is most people burn out.

are anywhere alonger continuum. But I think people are more a bunch. Some people, myself are what i'd call bistable. In other words, we're both We're in different situations. I have a performance aspect to me, but the other aspect to me is that you know, I'm just like exaggerating is Ooh, I'd rather not see someone and see some I've all of a sudden working on the street like many people. I think if you're extrovert to see Barry Scott count and say hey, Barry, how are you? And

I'm saying, oh, I don't know. I'm not in the mood right now. So I mean, that's uh, that's my take on myself. Anyway, Maybe I really ought to lock this down. By the time I'm going to be seventy nine, I want to really find that way I am.

by stable. They're moving from purposeful. They're trying to get, you know, like like Grace's maxims. Right then all of a sudden they create some sort of fantastical scenario the person understands is humor. So that's where I guess where I get that term. But the ambrovert is ambrovert is is better, and also it sounds a little bit more sexy, even though I have nothing to do with that.

my answer was don't go. So so I'm going on a little vacation to Dominican Republic, and but part of me is already dreading just oh, what's going to happen the plane? Is that? Not the plane crashing and just all the things. So I'm not open to like new physical experience and uh, I mean not completely close to it obviously, but open into intellectual experience. So yeah, me so certainly. And to contradict the ideas that kind of stuff.

I wonder if there are actually terms, you know, we think of these in terms of you know, emotions and in meat space, you know, the real world. But I think you could also look at it in terms of intellectual space, right, and I wonder if they're correlated. What do you think, you know are you know, you could be introverted or extroverted and looking at at the openness, you know, especially in the time now where people are not open to contrary views.

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Go to sacoaching dot org. That's sacoaching dot org. I look forward to welcoming you in December. Yeah. Yeah, well, just so you know, like aspects like thrill seeking and adventure seeking actually are more tied to extra version than openness to experience. So openness to experience really is about your cognitive exploration, your openistic cognitively exploring your inner and out our world.

it to themself. To people who like weird humor or z any humor or things, and that's true, and you see a correlation they are you know now, of course, remembering what you're saying in terms of take someone who likes weird humor, they're more likely to like weird art or or atonal music or all sorts of things in

which you well, you're just open to it. But then sometimes an intellectual dimension, there are some people who like things that are unusual so that they can intellectually engage with them and explain them, you know, maybe, I mean, you know, when I went to the high school of music and art, coming from a bourgeois background, that was one of the things that really, this is art, what is this? But the art was there, But the art was the art of talking about the art, not the art itself.

coping maybe in a difficult situation. You find self enhancing humor, which is very difficult, you know, but does exist when you can you're not with a group of people, you're you're undergoing some stressful situation, but somehow you can see it in a comic way and therefore you can cope with it, so you can enhance. And the other part is sort of self denigrating humor, which is different than self deprecatory humor. It's humor which you make yourself the

fool or whatever. And supposedly, or to some extent, evidentially that the more healthy humors are affiliative, but there's always a mix because a lot of affiliated humor within your group is actually aggressive to an outgroup.

You see how power is related to humor in that the boss is funny, right, You're going to laugh at the boss's jokes, and anyway, it's a whole interesting area because if the boss, even if the jokes aren't funny, if the boss is at least if well, as long as the joke isn't directed you, if the boss is joking, it's probably in a good mood and you're not in danger.

It's only it only exists temporarily before you just go back to the usual dread of existence, the the you know,

the the overwhelmed. I don't know, I can, I can get freaked out, but like stuff like, you know, I'm listening to the History of English podcasts and they're talking about the evolutionary language, the Germanic tribe tribes, the Etruscans, you know, the Indo Europeans, and you look at the scope of history and then it's you know, the guy is saying, then one hundred years later, you know, the dramanic and you realize your life is so short, It's

been so huge. You know, the whole scope of it, the whole scope of it, and you're you're you're here at like the tip of it for a moment before you just get sweeped in with the Etruscans, you know, and then it just it just sometimes just gives me a shiver in a way, just think how much has gone. And the other part of it is the way I think about it. You look at how those fucking Etruscans. They're so primitive. They they didn't even have an alphabet. Oh,

they finally get an alphabet. They borrowed from the the I forget the Etruscans borrowed from the Greeks now and maybe they get it from the Italians or something, and you know, and everything finally had the alphabet, and they think we're here at this apex of civilization and out there in the black universe or whatever ten thousand years hence, you know, they were the robots looking back at us and thinking, I can't believe it. They were made completely

a meat. How did they get anything done, and the meat was rotting from the beginning at the start. It's like they had you know, they'll look at us like look at may flies. You know, they're just here for a second. Anyway, I don't want to depress or anything because you because I know you have a book to write and which is going to last throughout all of history, and eventually those robots will be reading it and said, yeah, he was made of meat, but it was a pretty smart.

an interesting perspective. Also, It's like when you think about, well, how important to you is the Times obituary and you realize that, you know, there's there's like a sweet spot for the best positible obituary, and it's probably a lot, not like one hundred and two when everyone's forgotten you. So really, for mybituary purposes, it would be good if I if I knocked off in a year or two. But anyway, in any case, I think I know what's going to be in my visuary, which is not true.

And of course I'm a huge fan of jat GPP and I use it all the time, and I don't fear it. I just think this is a you know, we really are at a transformational moment in the augmentation.

And I don't think the replacement, but the augmentation of human intelligence and the It's very easy to find flaws in this, but if you interact with it at all in an intelligent way, you will be amazed, simply absolutely amazed that these problems which people have said are impossible to solve without some deep symbolic knowledge of language, are not impossible to solve. It's right there in your face,

you know, if I you know. So, before I got on here, I was interested in stuff like how the Internet changed armor and stuff, and I sent that to you and the concept and I was unclear because I've been read by the concept of affordances in psychology affordances like what you know, so I and like so in affordance it comes maybe out of ecology biology, like okay, what what is the affordance of a stick for a dog? Well? Not much? What's the affordance of it for chimpanzee? Quite

a bit? And so I could go up on chat GPT and I could say, how does the concept of affordances apply to this image, this image of the New York de capturing context? What are the different affordances it gives linguistically in terms of its image, in terms of it tirony and within ten seconds it's listing the affordances that are interesting and correct and then can make me think of ideas, and it will also think of ideas. The ability to do this is, you know, nothing less

than astonishing. And to remark that, oh, but you know it makes mistakes in math or it makes things up. This isn't a big criticism that makes things up. I think that shows that it's more like a general human intelligence than not. Okay, in that we when we when I'm talking about affordances, I can't look it up. I have to actually recreate the idea of it, and I'll often get things wrong. The fact this is generative language. It generates it. It doesn't look it up. It's not

like it has the whole. It doesn't look it up at all. So I find that, you know, we're at the beginning of it's not I don't think these things sent because they're not. They're made out of the wrong stuff. I said that. I think what they are is they are sort of cognitive savants sabs okay, and they can do things that no human being can possibly do in a combinatorial way. So for example, and most people haven't

experimented as much as I have. So for instance, I could say to is that I just did a while the guy said, imagine this is a scene from Seinfeld, okay, in which Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are all watching Citizen Kane okay on a TV set, and the TV set goes out, and they all decide to act out the rest of the movie because they know it well, Write me that scene, and it instantly writes the scene. In other words, it can combine that idea those ideas

is in a combinatorial way. So these are things that people that are almost impossible for people to do it anyway, Okay, you know you would need this kind of parody and to do it immediately. So I mean, so right now when I I you know I, and the way I'm using it practically is this. I have a company cartoonstock

dot com. Cartoonstock dot com. It is half a million cartoons, and you can go to a search bar and you can say, I want cartoons on psychology, I want cartoons on skiing, and you can look at filters, I want this cartoonist, I want this publication. That's horrible. That's a horrible, unnatural way for you being to interact with anything. So I'm using what I want and will I hope that by the end of the years you'll go to cartoonstock

dot com. An avatar is going to pop up and say what cartoons would you like for and you'll say, I'm really looking for car our tunes about accounting and regulatory issues, because this is what I'm interested in, and that's what it's going to find for you. And so we are because this idea of understanding intent. See right now, my database doesn't understand intent. It doesn't understand what you can only understand if it's the same word. We've all

had that experience on the internet. It's got to be the right word. So this whole thing is really opening up to explore. You know. So now in terms of the book you're writing, you could interact with it, not to write the book, but to ask it how to how do you think this concept relates to another concept? How could you build on that and so that we see For example, I could go right now and I could say, here are these two books, do The Obscure

and Catch twenty two? Is there any essay? So you know it's you know, people I don't want to name names. They're saying, oh, yeah, it just writes a b essay. We'll write an essay and something. No one could write an essay about that that would actually make you think, is there any relation at all between Catch twenty two and you The Obscure? Well, you know what, it's going to give it a try. It's going to give it

a try. So to me, it opens up sort of like the capturing contest is there are worlds of possibilities. Now can you go to the next step where you go from this kind of extrapolation and combination to real you know, ideas in the physical world and physics. I think you will. And it doesn't mean that I think these are conscious agents. I think we have now we're on the cusp of developing a tool like machines that augment, you know, exponentially our powers. Now everyone worries will maybe

replace us completely. I'm I'm going to be replaced completely anyway in that ten of fifteen years, So I don't give a short.

are just at the beginning of it. You know, you know, if you look at it and naturally, like everything else, is become a tribal argument when people who you know who think apocalyptically about everything. So this is yet another this is yet another way that we're all going to die, you.

my gosh. Both novels jump to the end. Both novels also deal with themes of isolation, weldliness, and the search for meaning and purpose in life. Additionally, both works are considered to be controversial, and we're met with criticism upon their initial publication due to their frank and honest portrayal, portrayal society and the human condition.

this in relation to any single human being. It's well, it's just sort of astounding, and you know, I guess maybe a little bit frightening or but I guess this is where my openness to experience comes in. I'm open to this experience and I've always been open to this kind of experience because I, I guess I'm a futurist. I feel that, you know, we this is what we are meant to do in some way as event, to

create and to transform. And you know, for people who you know, I'm not with people who think the industrial Revolution was a bad idea. I think it was a good idea. We wouldn't be here talking about this, so yeah. So I encourage people to be open to the open to these technologies and to use them. You know, you know,

there's no choice. I mean, you're now. I do think there will be actually there'll be money to be made with these and there'll be money to be made against it, because there's a whole neo Luddite sort of faction who you know, wants to think that we should basically well basically Luddites. They think we should give up all of this technology, or that this is so dangerous because it could create misinformation. It's actually pretty hard to get it

to say bad things. It's working against that. And if you want a world of bad things, just go on or nothing. Jack Gpt can't possibly Madge that.

anything like that. For me, these things are as criteria are reasonable in some situations. I didn't think they were reasonable here. I didn't think, you know, but you know, I'm for I mean, I understand the power of history to make the moment different for some people than other people. But yet, for me the most everyone could be interested in what they're interested in. For me, I'm just interested in the cartoons that was That was my job. It

would be someone else's job for something else, or society's job. Really, society's job, if it has one, or the government has one, is to create educational systems that can free enough people up to do so of things like submit cartoons to the New Yorker.

But you know, my, my, my favorite cartoonists happened to be white, although there there are number that happened to be white. But I grew up just I know what you mean. I know, you know that happened to be white, but I never thought of it that way. And I don't really have favorite cartoonists. I have favorite cartoons, you know. You know, what I'm interested in is actually the output, not the person. Really, I'm happy the person did it. But in the end, the cartoon cartoons, I did the cartoons,

ros Shast does the cartoons exists separate from them. That's the beauty of art, really, and the beauty of comic art anything that what you do is you know, you know, you know, I think in the Producers mel Brooks movie, maybe there's a joke where he says, you know, Hitler was a good dancer. Okay, So if Hitler was a good dancer, he was actually a good dancer, you know what I mean. And if he was a great paker, he'd still be a great painter. Okay, and he'd be

horrible because he was hitler. But okay, and if I was, and you know, that's that's our history, really, if we I mean, I'm not a fan at all of Donald Trump, and I didn't vog for him, and I wouldn't vote from me. I think he's a pretty bad person. But you know, if he invented a cure for cancer, I'd say, you know what, let's use it.

the walls of our perception box. The perception box is the invisible mental box that we all live inside, and it can seriously hinder our ability to understand one another and to understand ourselves. According to Bob's theory of humor, humor is related to laughter, and laughter is a kind of mechanism that allows us to deal with incongruity and surprise.

Laughter is often a relief after thinking something is going in one direction and then it surprisingly goes in a very different direction from our perception box perspective, We can use humor to expand the walls of our perception box. Humor gets everyone in the room in the same mode and then lets us all let go together. This can relieve worry and stress and also connect us to each

other by resolving something we didn't expect. Our assumptions about other people can change radically in a way that is totally delightful and surprising to find out more about. Unlike a collaborators and the perception box go to Unlike a collaborators dot com, I want to have a clock on my favorite and everyone's favorite cartoon, No Thursday's out? How about never? Is never good for you?

pissed it him. I said, hey, how about never is good for you? And once I said, I said, oh that's good. And then I then I, you know, rearrange it so the guy's on the phone doing that. But I know, but I but I mean, this is often with the case, and that that's like from a pre viral era, something sort of going viral that got reprinted thousands of times. Put on bumper stickers, put on panties, put on usually it's impressed. How about never is never

good for you? You know, Thursdays out? And now I have the trademark for it, and you know, so I can put it on panties if I want, and uh the uh or and where those panties if I so desire. But yeah, who knows. You know, it's not too lately.

thinking the world is just. And that cartoon gets So that's a cartoon that sort of as deeper meaning for me or even a you know, I think, uh, you know, I mean, I'll often do cartoons where I like to look deeply into a topic. You know, when we talk about abuse of power. So there's a cartoon in which one politician is saying to other they're walking away from the capitol, but how do you know if you really

have power unless you abuse it? And so with these cartoons that have a kind of you know, you know a kind of deeper insight. And then sometimes I'll just the ordinary cartoons about relationship cartoons where the husband is saying to the wife in bed, uh, what's your position on some sex marriage? So the the the.

Uh uh you know where a doctor said to me, it'll be a routine procedure, and then you know, I said, tell me, yeah, it's a routine procedure if you if it's you routinely have your stomach cut open and someone fiddle around with your insights, okay, And I said yeah,

And so then I'll change that into a cartoon. You know, for him it's a routine procedure because he's he's and he's in lunch, and I end up having a tube coming out of my dick that I don't find that routine that's never happened to me before.

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of been working with him on. It's going to be published by Saint Martin's Press for a nice advance, which is going to give you the whole history of the contest, which starts on a weekly basis in two thousand and five and now probably has four or five million entries, and we have there's a database online with all these entries that you can find out why you lost.

So that's the basis of it is all of a sudden, a change temporarily seems bad. And that's true of any joke. In all the times you laugh at what I said, there's a slight delay in your brain where you're actually a little bit confused, which is not what your brain wants to be before you reincommon.

cliff and becomes completely rude. And so the script changes, you know, completely, And the arc of a joke is almost from It's always that way, where you know, the surprise and the incongruity resolution has to be at the end. So if I have a joke as I did in a cartoon in with an executive saying to a board, he said, gentlemen, the upside potential is tremendous, but the downside is jail. Okay, okay, okay, it can't work the other way. It can't be in. The downside is jail.

But the upside potential is tremendous. It's not a joke anymore, okay. The And so that tells you a little bit about the mechanism and our brains that works that in which you get a joke, you don't get dishes falling, and all of a sudden it seems like there's something bad that you don't get it. Oh, I understand it. But what happens is, in a joke, we put a little layer, a little cognitive layer on it. That's pleasing to us. There's a pleasure of understanding it, pleasure of putting it

all together. And what's interesting is we put it all together, but we don't have to spell it all out. We don't have to spell it all out. It's actually rather hard to explain it, you know. So if there's a joke in which the doctor is saying to the patient, you'll be awake during the entire operation, and then he says, the anesthesiologist is on vacation, well, okay, that's a terrible thing.

He seems like he was telling him a good thing because it seems like it was going to be trivial, and he was telling them something horrible which also can't be true. And this is what I mean by the by stability of our cognition. And we moved to we're processing information right in a reasonable way to in a more fantastical, whimsical, a paralogical way. We still understand it. We understand it makes sense now that he would be awake because he'd be in horrible pain, because because he'd

be cutting it up. But at the same.

to tell you that it can't possibly be true. And I mean, this is the whole field of pragmatics right where where we're dealing with are we dealing with bona fide communication or are we dealing with humorous communication.

You know when uh, let's say this is a Jack Leageler who passed away but has done so many great cartoons, and one great cartoony did that I love is uh it shows the gallows with its steps, but it also has a ramp for the handicap And Okay, so that's so funny and sort of horrible in a way, and was published in The New Yorker, but would never be published now because because people write, what they want to know is what side are you on? Are you for

people places being accessible to a handicapped or not? You know what I mean? And then what does this say about capital punishment as a cartoonist for it or again? Well, Jack wasn't for or against anything. He thought this was funny. It is funny in its own space, and you don't. Making a joke doesn't mean this is anything that you believe about anything. This is your ability to be funny

in this context. So yeah, I would you know. I'm sure it looks like cancel culture has had its moment, thankfully, and it looks like that moment is passive. I think people are, but it's too road in a way to I mean, I'm for free you know, I'm for free speech, and cancel culture seems or certainly some kind of characterization of it is clearly just for free speech.

especially in humor. I want to create, you know, I want to I want to It's been a white whale I've been after for a long time, and now they're there to actually have uh, these collaborators to create humor that wouldn't have been created before more interesting, And I do still think there is I think we're collaborators in this.

So guess what I said before. When it turns out for that particular script is not really good, the fact that it could do it at all, that could create the Citizen Kane script and everything at all, say gee, well, maybe this is a way to create things that never could be created before. That neither the computer could create AI could create before human beings, but some sort of synthesis could. So I want that to be part, yeah, part of my legacy.

for this is chat GBT. He's been at it for over forty years, bringing joy and humor to all his peers. He's won rewards, he's been recognized, his humor timeless and never compromised. Bob Mankoff a legend in his own right, a true no notice, it didn't just say a legend. It's had a legend in his own right, A true inspread, a true inspiration, a shining light, for he shows us that laughter is key and a sense of humor can set us free. So let us raise a glass to Bob,

a true comic hero, a master of his job. May his humor continue to brand in our days and his legacy forever stay. Thank you Bob for being on the Psychology podcast.

Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.