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Subconsciously Thinking About Death Might Make You Funnier

A study finds the key to writing a good New Yorker caption lies in your own demise.
Screen grab from Love and Death

Oscar Wilde died as he lived, wittily quipping, “Either this wallpaper goes or I do.” Karl Marx died as he lived, not being very much fun; his last words were, “Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.” But what if Marx’s potential for humor was cut short by focusing on his coming demise, while Wilde’s focus on hotel decor allowed the playwright to go out on a high note?

A study published in the journal HUMOR states that researchers have discovered that subconsciously inducing thoughts of death makes people funnier than inducing thoughts of pain. Consciously focusing on death, however, doesn’t.

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The study took 117 students and divided them into four groups. Two groups were exposed to either the word “death” or the word “pain” in 33 millisecond flashes on a computer screen while they worked on other tasks. Then they wrote captions for New Yorker cartoons.

And the death group killed it. An independent jury who knew nothing about the experiment voted for the subconsciously death-primed captions by clear margins. The effectiveness of subliminal messaging is still being explored, but this is further proof that we can demonstrate the impact of something without being aware of it.

Before you start detouring your trips to the Laugh Factory through the cemetery, there’s a catch: the other two groups. They were each given a writing task about either their own inevitable demise, or an especially painful trip to the dentist. In this group, those ruminating on their own death weren’t demonstrably funnier, leaving open the possibility that going to the dentist also makes you funny–which might explain British humor.

Christopher Long, psychology professor at Ouachita Baptist University and author of the study, said that there was still a lot to explore in the difference between the consciously and subconsciously death primed humor, and why one makes you funnier.

“Our guess is that there is something about the source of the anxiety a person is experiencing and the way a person was reminded of that source, which influences his or her ability to be funny in the moment,” Long said in an email. “It may be that thinking about one's own death confronts a person with a more overt sort of discomfort that is either not as conducive or motivating to be funny, relative to a more subtle exposure to death reminders.”

Depending on how you go, a good zinger might not be possible, like how Emo Philips’s grandfather’s last words were simply, “a truck!” A more subtle, even subliminal connection might have to be made.

The study linked the boost in humor to terror management theory—which states that human beings are bound to being aware of our lives’ finitude and thus create culture as distraction and also to grant those short lives meaning. It also points to humor’s role as a stress-reliever in times of trouble and trauma, but noted that there’s much more research to be done.

Long’s reaction to running the study was mixed. “We were given access to the New Yorker's cartoon collection, which was really fun,” he said, “but when I was programming and debugging the subliminal death messaging task, I had the realization that I had been exposing myself to subliminal death messages for hours, which felt kind of ominous at the time.”

Actually, the idea of accidentally bombarding yourself with "subliminal death messages" has some real potential for humor right there.