Philosopher offers formula for best jokes

University of Chicago professor shares humor with bored crowd

By: Dan Poster

Posted: 11/12/04

His gray beard, balding crown and tired-looking face were no indication that this man was anything but an aging scholastic, a professor in his 60s who had spent his life in pursuit of Ivy League degrees and the meaning of existence.

But looks can be deceiving.

Ted Cohen, a professor of philosophy from the University of Chicago, didn't just come to Syracuse University last night to lecture; he came to entertain. As the seventh invited member of the Syracuse Symposium on Humor, he blended his philosophical insights with the art of telling jokes.

The night's lecture focused on an issue that most anyone who's ever told a joke can relate to: "What if they don't laugh?"

Cohen attributed failures of humor to a myriad of problems.

"Some people don't have the timing, some people don't have the confidence and some people don't like the despotic way in which humor often is," Cohen said, responding to a question from the audience about how, sometimes, the speaker can be the deciding factor in the laughter a joke evokes.

Most often, though, it's a problem of the audience not understanding the joke's context or setting, or that listeners miss some key implication vital to the joke's punch line, Cohen said.

It was at this point in Cohen's lecture that he veered away from amusing the audience and started to sound like a philosophy professor. In spending 20 minutes breaking down jokes into their fundamental building blocks, employing terms such as "x and y" to quantify comedy as a formula, he lost touch with the youth base of his audience, which was small to begin with.

He also discussed the ethics of ethnic jokes. Personally, Cohen said, he doesn't take offense to them, and actually finds some of his favorite jokes are those of ethnicity.

"People say, when I start 'How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb' that that's not funny," Cohen said. "The problem is these jokes are funny - otherwise we wouldn't tell them."

Maybe it was the emphasis on the science of jokes instead of jokes themselves, or that Cohen read his entire speech off sheets of paper or that some grew tired of combing their arm hairs, but students began to flake off and exit.

Probably realizing this, Cohen reoriented the second half of his time on stage to an open dialogue and joke-telling session.

For the most part, though, aside from a few Lewinsky references, the jokes weren't what mainstream jokes are today. Cohen told them in a stand-and-deliver style, often chuckling to himself before he regained enough composure to tell the joke. They were the long, drawn out knee-slappers that our fathers' fathers loved.

Some got more crowd reaction than others, and Cohen would stop to analyze why that was.

"In the end, you can't say anything," Cohen said. "Just that we're different."

He emphasized to would-be jokesters the importance of reaching out to understand what makes us human, if they want to understand what makes us laugh.

"You can't recognize your humanity until you recognize it in other people," Cohen said. "That's the deal."