Gil Greengross wants to know why we laugh and what drives comedians to humor us.
Greengross, a humorologist who teaches a class at UNM West, came to UNM from Israel in 2000. His Ph.D. dissertation focuses on humor from an evolutionary standpoint.
"UNM is one of the best places in the world to study evolutionary psychology," he said.
He said 97 percent of the population thinks they have a good sense of humor.
"It's not true," he said. "It's a common psychological phenomenon - people thinking they're better than average."
So, Greengross designed a study he gives to comedians who perform at Laffs Comedy Club and also to UNM students.
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"Why did they become stand-up comedians?" he said. "Why are people willing to pay money to see comedians to get laughs when they can virtually get it in other places as well? Everything that people are willing to pay for, it must be valuable in some way to them. There are almost no studies on stand-up comedians - but one of the things about humor is that it's a very hard term to define. When you try to think about it, what is humor in general?"
He said men and women look for physical and mental cues in potential mates that will ensure they're healthy in all aspects and worth a long-term relationship.
"Because women are choosier, males are competing harder over females in general, and they're trying to demonstrate their abilities and that they're worth dating," Greengross said. "Humor is related to intelligence. There are studies that show that both males and females look for a mate with a sense of humor."
He said women tend to value humor more than men, and males tend to be thought of as funnier than women in general.
"If you look at dating sites, most women are searching for a guy with a sense of humor, but for males, it's much less important," he said. "But men want actually women who'll laugh at their humor, and women are looking for men who'll make them laugh, and that's what derives from the sexual-relation theory."
His study looks to see how comedians are different from ordinary people.
"I want to see if stand-up comedians have higher intelligence than regular people - if they're more creative - because one of my own hypotheses is comedians choose humor as a way to gain status," he said. "In formal interlude I've had with comedians here, I've found a lot of them were sort of screwed up or messed up during childhood or weren't very popular. They showed humor to maybe overcome that, or gain some respect."
He said he is especially interested in self-deprecating humor.
"If you think about it, in school or among your friends, if some low-status guy or girl uses self-deprecating humor, it looks kind of pathetic, and it actually lowers their status even more," he said. "If a high-status person uses self-deprecating humor, he looks more approachable and people like him. So that's why, for example, politicians use self-deprecation to bridge some of the gaps between them and the voters. 'We're the same. I'm not afraid to laugh at myself. I'm like you.'"
He has comedians fill in captions for single-panel cartoons, and he has people rate how funny they are.
He said successful humor shows the person has social intelligence.
"To say the right thing at the right time, it requires some knowledge of the people in the room," he said. "Someone can tell a thousand jokes, but it won't give him a sense of humor. If he's telling one joke after another, it can become tiresome. So, usually the thing that makes other people laugh is just to say the right thing at the right time. That would be funny."
