A Joke Is a Tiny Work of Art

A fun new paper treats humor like aesthetics. Here’s what funny words, dad jokes, and dark comedy quietly reveal about us.

Look, we don’t usually file a good dumb joke in the same drawer as a Rothko. One you snicker at on the subway; the other you contemplate in a hushed museum. But a delightful new preprint by my friend Paul Silvia, with Vi Bui, makes the case that they belong together. Humor, they argue, is an aesthetic experience, and you can study a joke the way you’d study any work of art: by looking at the product, the experience, and the audience.

This isn’t a new idea so much as a forgotten one. Daniel Berlyne, the founder of the modern psychology of aesthetics, thought humor was central to the whole project. He wrote that there are “affinities between the lowliest joke and the sublimest art.” Then the two fields wandered into separate rooms and mostly stopped talking to each other. Silvia and Bui are trying to get them back in the same conversation, and the trip turns out to be a lot of fun.

Start with the funniest unit of language

Humor researchers have a “fruit fly” they study the way geneticists study Drosophila: the single word. And it turns out some words are simply funnier than others. The funny ones in English (jiggly, waddle, smooch, upchuck, giggle) tend to be short, a little rude, about people, and stuffed with unusual sounds. The effect is so basic that it even holds for fake words. People reliably rate woomy, wombo, and cloof as funnier than arthen or ressed, mostly because they’re packed with improbable letters. There is, apparently, a music to silliness.

Then there’s the humble, much-maligned pun. (“What’s green and likes to insult people? A provocado.”) A study of thousands of puns found something I love: the funniest puns keep the sound close to the original word (provocado is barely a step from avocado), while the funniest wordplay jokes shove the meaning far apart. Sound near, meaning far. Both at once. The joke lives right in that gap.

A joke can land a dozen ways

Here’s where the aesthetics lens really earns its keep. We tend to assume humor produces one feeling: amusement. But just as a painting can move you, bore you, or genuinely unsettle you, a joke can land as delight, or confusion, or irritation, or full-body cringe. The psychologist Willibald Ruch’s model maps exactly this. When a joke misses, it doesn’t land in neutral. It curdles into boredom, or “I don’t get it,” or “I can’t believe you just said that.” Anyone who has watched a joke die at a dinner table knows the silence has a flavor.

Your sense of humor is a personality test

And then there’s you. The single biggest variable in whether something is funny is who’s listening. The paper gathers the research, and frankly, it confirms what we already suspected. People high in sensation-seeking love absurdist, no-resolution humor. People high in the “Dark Tetrad” (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism) are the ones who enjoy cruel and disparaging jokes, rate sexist humor as “less serious,” and drift toward online trolling. You’re taking a personality test every time you laugh.

On the wholesome end sits the dad joke, that pun-loving, aggressively clean genre your father will not stop deploying. When researchers text-mined Reddit’s r/dadjokes, the people who found them funniest skewed more affluent, educated, religious, conscientious, conservative, and (naturally) parents. The corny joke at the dinner table and the dark joke in the group chat are doing the same psychological work. They’re both quietly telling you who someone is.

Why I love this

I have a soft spot for this paper for a personal reason. Years ago I co-wrote a piece called “The Tears of a Clown” about the minds of comedy writers, so I’ve long believed comedy deserves to be taken seriously as a creative act. But the deeper reason is this: humor is one of the most democratic forms of creativity we have. You don’t need a studio, a gallery, or a grant. You need a friend, a moment, and a slightly improbable word. Every time you make someone laugh, you’ve made a tiny work of art that existed for one second and then dissolved.

P.S. I'm bringing my Columbia course, The Science of Living Well, to the public this summer — learn with me: scottbarrykaufman.com/livingwell.