Joking

Joking

Transcript for Joking (full episode)

Welcome to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Lora Kelley.

The summer before my freshman year of high school, I went water skiing on a family vacation in Oregon.

I was having fun skiing in the wake of the boat until I went over a big wave and lost my balance.

Long story short, one of my skis flew off and smacked me in the face.

It broke my nose.

My mom drove me to the ER.

In the back seat, I held a towel to my face to stop the bleeding and cried.

I was in pain.

But what really upset me was the idea of starting high school with a scarred, crooked nose.

I pictured myself in the lunchroom trying to make new friends with stitches on my face.

That is, until my mom did something.

From the front seat of the car, she said, well, there goes your future in modeling.

Guess you'll have to be a foot model now.

I laughed through my bleeding nose.

It was not much, but with that little joke, things changed.

I was still in pain, and I would still start school with a crooked nose.

But now, instead, I pictured myself walking down the halls bragging about my battle scars.

This is something mundane, but it's also pretty amazing.

Because with 15 silly words and the little jolts of laughter they induced, I was taken out of that high school lunchroom and into the bigger picture of my life.

That joke made me realize that this broken nose wasn't as big a deal as I was making it to be.

And that's because joking is about much more than making people laugh.

I don't think many jokes are innocent.

When people say they're just kidding or they're just joking, they're not.

This is Marvin Diogenes.

He teaches rhetoric at Stanford, and he thinks about joking a lot.

He thinks about whether a joke is funny and how it works, but he also thinks about jokes in terms of what they do beyond making us laugh.

And usually, when somebody says they're just kidding, it's just that they don't want to own up to the real reason that they said what they said.

And usually, the real reason has to do with, I want something to change.

According to Marvin, joking is one of the best tools we have to change someone's mind.

At first, this seemed like a strange idea to me.

Joking as a mode of persuasion, but slowly it began to make sense.

After all, we've all used a joke to tease someone out of a bad behavior.

Like when my parents told me if I ate too much ice cream, I would turn into an ice cream cone.

That worked because jokes, Marvin says, affect us differently than arguments.

They require more of our imagination, and they draw us in and make us think.

A joke, in almost every case, demands more of the audience than an assertion.

And not only does it demand more of the audience, but it lets the audience participate in the argument differently than straight argument does.

The difference between traditional arguments and jokes is that, with jokes, there is a payoff.

Decoding a joke gives us pleasure.

When we laugh, part of it is patting ourselves on the back.

I got the joke.

How smart am I?

And I think that happens very quickly.

I don't even think it's always conscious.

I think sometimes it's just the synapse firing gives us this little jolt of joy that we're smart enough to get the joke.

And for Marvin, jokes and comedians can give that jolt of joy to the audience in two ways.

The audience gets some pleasure out of the comic as a performer pointing to something that they already understand.

So mother-in-law jokes or jokes about, you know, the Christmas insanity and all those kinds of things are usually going to be observational humor, and they don't ask the audience to think of the world in a different way.

They reinforce the world that the audience knows.

This is the kind of comedy most of us are pretty familiar with.

Think Jerry Seinfeld, Mindy Kaling and Ellen DeGeneres.

In contrast to that would be humor or jokes or comedy that creates a new world, that takes the raw materials of the world that people know, but puts those elements into a new relationship with each other.

It's sort of a kind of alchemy.

And that kind of comic is sort of saying to the audience, sure, we have a world in common, but that's not what I'm going to do.

What I'm going to offer you is a new version of the world that you know, something that you haven't thought of before.

I think the movie Borat is a good example of that.

Borat, the character played by Sacha Baron Cohen, creates impossible situations in the real world, situations that go further than anything we can imagine.

And when he does that, he tests the limits of our preconceptions and stereotypes.

We laugh, we cringe, and we are changed a little.

It's not the way you're commonly used to thinking about your reality.

And when you laugh, you're going to laugh out of the recognition that I've given you something new.

And that laughter will be different than the laughter that comes from an observational joke, which is a kind of more comfortable laughter because it's laughter based on a familiar world as opposed to laughter based on the surprise of a new world.

Creating new worlds is something comedians do, but it is also something we do in our everyday lives.

In our show, we're gonna take a good look at how people use joking to create new realities for themselves and for the people around them.

In our first story, we'll hear how a stand-up comedian uses jokes to get back on her feet.

In our second story, we'll discover how an innocent joke can make you become who you are.

In our third story, we'll see how jokes can make us fall in love and question everything we know.

In our fourth story, we'll hear how even the most groan-worthy puns can give us superpowers.

In our fifth story, we'll fly on Air Force One through the stormy skies of presidential humor to discover if joking can make us human.

And in our final story, we'll investigate the healing power of joking.

Well, kind of.

It's all in the next hour on State of the Human.

First, we bring you a famous stand-up comedian to share how joking changed her life.

Hi, I was wondering if you could say your name into the mic.

Sure, my name is Rosie O'Donnell, and yeah, just an honor to be here.

Hey, wait, wait.

My name's really Tig Notaro.

This is Tig Notaro.

She's a standup comedian, and on August 3rd, 2012, she put the power of joking to the test.

She'd had a terrible year.

In the space of four months, she was struck by a life-threatening illness, went through a breakup, lost her mother, and then after all that, she was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer.

Just after the diagnosis, and against the advice of friends and colleagues, she decided to go on stage and do what comedians do, turn this life into material, joking material.

I took a shower before the show, and that's how I prepare.

I clean my body and I wash my hair, and in the shower, I had a thought, well, I have all this material to get into, and what I really need to do is find a way to get into the material.

My cancer diagnosis was the final horrible thing that had happened to me in four months, and so I knew I needed to get into it, and I thought in the shower, the funniest, best way and craziest way would be to walk out on stage and say, hello, I have cancer, how's everyone doing?

And then I put the set list together minutes before I go on stage, and that night I went out and said, hello, I have cancer.

So that night in Largo, California, Tig Notaro took the stage and started with her darkest material.

When I said I had cancer, they thought it was a joke, and then they were realizing, oh wait, she really does have cancer, and then they listened, and then I made jokes about it, and they laughed, and then I'm like, oh, but my mother just died too, and people were crying.

People were shocked, and holding their mouths, and shaking their heads, and I was trying to make light of it, and some of them hit, and some of them didn't.

The material, and I remember there was a moment when I was standing on stage in the middle of it, and thought, hmm, this is actually going well.

I think this might be a special moment in time.

And it was going well.

People laughed, and that performance soon became legendary.

Comedians including Louis CK were in the audience, and he tweeted about it.

Quote, in 27 years doing this, I've seen a handful of truly great, masterful stand-up sets.

One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo, unquote.

And soon, Tig Notaro's career took off.

But more importantly, that night changed something for Tig.

The events in her life had left her powerless.

But to be able to stand on stage and turn her pain into jokes had its own power.

Just to be able to laugh with a group of people about stuff I was in fetal position crying about.

I mean, the whole thing was healing.

Just to be able to have a room come to understand and be able to laugh at it with me, it felt, it was very empowering.

This story was produced by Justine Beed.

She is a freshman at Stanford.

For stand-up comedian Tig Notaro, the act of joking created a space to move forward with her life, but the power of jokes isn't always something we consciously seek out.

Sometimes jokes have a way to sneak up on us and embed themselves in our inner circuits.

And for better or for worse, make us who we are.

In our next story, Jackson Roach investigates the profound impact one joke had on his brother, Sam.

Do your best robot voice.

Welcome to your new computer.

Activating hard drive.

Hard drive activated.

Will you teach me to love?

This is my brother, Sam.

I am Sam Roach.

I am 15 years old, yeah.

You're my brother?

Yeah, I'm Jackson Roach's brother.

When I went home to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving this year, I noticed something strange, something that had been going on in my family for years and years, but that I had never really paid any attention to before.

It's a running joke that my dad has been telling Sam since he was eight, and it kind of bothered me.

I asked Sam about it in the kitchen of the house where we grew up.

The story starts with a question.

I said, hey, dad, where do babies come from?

I said, where do I come from?

And he, instead of saying the stork or giving me the talk, he started listing all these car companies and factories.

And I was a little confused.

I said, what do you mean?

He said, cause we ordered you to be built and delivered to us.

He said what?

He said that instead of being born in a normal hospital with all the other babies, I was built in a factory and then delivered to their home.

And I am basically an Android built to make their lives easier.

So, did you think it was funny, or did it not feel like a joke?

Well, I thought it was funny, but then afterwards, it went deeper than just that.

Than just funny.

I went upstairs, and I looked in the mirror for like 30 minutes, and I was like, whoa, what if I am an android?

The idea sunk in, and it freaked me out.

My dad told this joke every opportunity he got.

I'll give him this, he finds the best ways to slip them into the conversation.

Like what?

Like, I'll be talking about a family history project I had to do in history class.

He'll talk about all the different famous robots in history, and I'll be like, oh god, this again?

Of course, this was all a joke, and my brother kind of knew he wasn't an android.

Kind of.

Common sense says that 14 years ago, or 15 years ago, excuse me, technology had not progressed enough to build such a complicated machine that I would be, or any human would be.

It also would be very unlikely for me to be the only one they built, and for my parents to buy me instead of just having another child.

And also I've seen my birth certificate before, and it's not like a receipt.

The Android joke was supposed to be ridiculous, but there was something in it that felt real to him, real and scary.

What if I actually was built in a factory and all of my emotions were programmed into my head?

Did you ask dad to stop making those jokes?

Yes, plenty of times, but I don't think it ever clicked.

He still makes them.

He made one today.

Sam could brush most of the jokes off, but every once in a while, they tapped into some deep anxieties and fears.

When my dad put Sam to bed, he would say things like, Great, switch yourself on to sleep mode.

This was funny to Sam for a second, but then it was not so funny.

And then he closed the door and my room was completely dark and I couldn't see anything at all.

And for three seconds, I was like, oh, so this is what being powered off feels like.

Okay.

What do you think it was about that feeling that freaked you out so much?

That my life was a lie, and that instead of being born into the world to be like a human and to experience all human experiences, I wasn't instead built to make someone else's life easier and was only there to, I don't know, do laboring tasks and just jobs that a toaster could do or like a servant could do, I don't know.

Were you doing a lot of menial tasks as a child?

No, but I don't know, maybe I was in the setup stage where they're like pressing all the different options they wanted, like setting all the personality stuff by raising me.

Yeah.

Why would my dad do that to Sam?

Did he have any idea how much pain he was causing?

I decided to ask him.

My name is Jay Roach, I'm the father of Jackson Roach and Sam Roach, wife of, no, wait, I'm not the, let me start again.

I'm not the wife.

I am Jay Roach, father of Jackson Roach and Sam Roach.

I interviewed my dad in the same kitchen where I'd interviewed Sam a few hours before.

This is the kitchen where my dad used to work and he used to cook egg breakfast for us on the weekend.

He was talking about some of the really dark stuff that it brought up for him, sort of the existential crises.

Really?

Did you ever realize it?

No, no, tell, what was some of the things he was saying?

He was saying that he felt like his emotions weren't real and that he was considering what it would feel like to be turned off.

Oh no, that's sad.

If I had known that I never would have taken it as far as I did.

I mean, we would always say, oh, Sam, we're just kidding.

Of course, that's what you would say if you were trying to tell a child that they really weren't an Android when they really were.

All kidding aside, my dad was totally surprised that Sam took the Android joke so seriously.

He never expressed that level of existential crisis to me, so I feel bad.

My dad was never trying to hurt or scare Sam.

He just wanted to make him laugh, to make him happy.

I wanted to raise my kids in a happy place, in a place of laughter.

I would make faces or do little goofy dances or make stupid sounds and voices just to get you guys to laugh.

And one of my favorite things was to take you to funny movies and laugh with you.

Joking was how my dad was a dad.

In a way, comedy for me is a coping strategy or a bonding process.

If two people get the same joke that has some idiosyncrasies to it, then they are sharing a language and a culture that might be specific just to them, and it makes them feel closer.

My dad figures that laughing is healthy, that kids who grow up laughing end up being happier grownups.

And that kind of made me curious.

Did my brother feel like the Android joke made him a happier person?

Over Christmas break, I got my brother and my dad together on the couch in our living room to talk.

Both of them had colds, and our dog Zelda was antsy waiting for someone to walk her.

The thing is, the Android jokes were hilarious and very clever, and I appreciated them, but they still made me think about things I don't think a child at my age should have thought about.

Yes, and I realize I'm hearing you talk about it as something that you wish you hadn't gone through, although you did say if you had a choice, you'd rather have the joke than not have the joke.

Yes, because it's made me into, I feel like, into a more mature person now.

Oh, in what way?

Just because it made me think about humanity and how it worked.

Maybe younger than I should have, but.

I wasn't, that wasn't one of my objectives to make you value being human.

At this point, my dad said something that I had never heard before.

So some of this stuff might have been connected to my own sense of being slightly a misfit of my own family.

And when I was a kid, I always thought I was dropped off at birth by someone else and didn't quite fit in.

So I would try to joke with myself about that.

About being the weird kid who was possibly from urban Jewish parents dropped off in Albuquerque, New Mexico with parents who never really, I was just the odd kid in their world.

So I always wondered is why am I so different from them?

Why do they look at me as so weird?

Sam, do you ever feel like that?

I feel I fit really well, but I guess maybe I was programmed to fit in really well.

And that this is just how it was supposed to be built.

And in a weird way, that's actually true.

My dad used joking to deal with some of his anxiety, but the Android joke uncovered anxiety in Sam.

And I think dealing with that made Sam into the person he is now.

The weird, mature, funny, wise little brother that I have.

So Sam's brain was programmed to be the way he is now by this bizarre running joke that my dad keeps telling to this day.

And now that Sam is 15, the Android joke isn't scary.

It's just a joke to both of them.

Would you tell these kind of jokes to your kids?

Probably, yeah, I'd probably take after my dad.

I think they're funny now because I know most likely it's not for real, but who knows?

I might be an Android and this is like, they've been really good at covering everything up and like made a fake birth certificate and all that.

Jackson Roach is a freshman at Stanford.

For this story, he interviewed his father, Jay, and his younger brother, Sam.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

This week's episode is called Joking.

We're investigating the revolutionary power hidden underneath jokes.

I'm Lora Kelley.

A good joke, like love, can reinvent your world, give you that dizzy, heady feeling of connection.

But then you have to decide whether this new world is a fling or something more serious.

In our next story, Nina Foushee shares how she fell hard for a standup comedian and had to learn that those who joke alike do not think alike.

At the beginning of spring quarter last year, I met a guy.

I remember the first time I saw him.

He wore a hideous sweater from the 70s and batted a perfect afro halo from side to side.

His pants didn't really fit.

He looked like he had just emerged from playing video games in his parents' basement.

And then...

he spoke.

Innovation is an innovation unto itself.

At one point, innovation didn't exist.

Someone had to create some kind of a word that created the feeling that it feels like to hear the word that we hear when we hear innovation.

The guy rambling about innovation is Reggie Watts.

I didn't actually meet Reggie in person.

He's a comedian and we were introduced on YouTube.

That clip came from a final performance that Reggie gave at a Silicon Valley-esque conference called PopTech.

When I first heard Reggie's words ridiculing innovation, I thought, this is precisely what I need.

I go to Stanford.

Stanford is a buzzword cesspool.

We love the word innovation.

My classmates read Tim Ferriss to get better at sex and want to change the world by making an app for finding frozen yogurt.

In our dining hall, people pull yolks out of their eggs as they talk about designing a market strategy for a messaging app.

I imagine Reggie dropping by.

He's wearing a Dropbox t-shirt, and for a moment, he fits right in.

Then I see him leaning over a stranger's shoulder to say, At some point during any human's lifetime, they will use the word design, and that's a big deal.

Aside from the and the A and the N in various languages, design is the fourth most popular word used.

Reggie was my garlic to ward off the vampire that is Silicon Valley.

That alone made me fall for Reggie.

For the first month of spring quarter, I did the YouTube equivalent of digging through someone's trash can.

I watched every performance of Reggie's I could find.

In just a few weeks of long YouTube sessions late at night, Reggie did something no person had done for me before.

It started one morning with my breakfast cereal.

As I poured it into the bowl, I thought, this is that crunchy thing you deposit in your basin with the white sauce in it at the mouth hour.

That morning marked the start of Reggie and my honeymoon phase.

I had started experiencing my daily life through Reggie's language.

About a month after Reggie came into my life, I wanted to introduce him to my friends and explain to them what made him so special.

At the dinner table, someone would ask, who is this Reggie guy you're always talking about?

And I would get flustered.

I found that, like many of life's gifts, the object of my affection can only be described with the words of a Russian art theorist, Viktor Shklovsky.

Shklovsky says art makes objects unfamiliar so that they won't be, in his words, devoured by habitualization.

But I couldn't tell that to my friends.

They would need to meet Reggie to understand.

So one day, I brought him to the table with a clip like this.

But as a race of androids, we know better than...

than to simply call ourselves what it is that we read about in textbooks, what we hear about, on the heary things that we hear things from.

For a moment together, my friends and I thought of our ears as heary things we hear things from.

Of course, I was swept off my feet.

That month was heaven.

But then, during a nighttime reggie session under the covers, I heard something.

Buried in a ramble about innovation, one phrase stood out to me.

Now we all know that poverty is super easy to fix.

And then later, in a different bit, the same gesture at darkness.

You know how men be like always like that might be sitting down or something like that, you know what I'm saying?

They might like open something, you know, at some point during the day, you know what I'm saying?

And that's great.

That's why we have so many problems with Rwanda, so many, you know, Mogadishu, all that stuff.

Lots of problems in the world, Kashmir.

The idea of someone thinking they figured out the cause of world problems and proudly explaining that it all comes down to people opening things and sitting down, that killed me.

I kept imagining various people in little plastic chairs wielding can openers.

First I thought, Jesus, this is brilliant.

Then I thought, wait, Mogadishu?

Kashmir?

Reggie is making reference to actual suffering, and that bothered me.

Before, Reggie had been able to resurrect words by defamiliarizing them so I could think about and feel the things my friends and I were saying.

He had always done this with words whose loss of meaning didn't have any ethical stakes, but then he made those references to genocide.

I started wanting to know Reggie's larger worldview.

Now the question plagued me.

Were Reggie and I really well matched?

Being a product of Silicon Valley, my first thought was, collect data.

I needed to read every interview Reggie had ever done.

As I read, I kept thinking, he has to be political.

He has to be a liberal.

He has to be paying attention to the right issues.

I kept expecting to find something about some fundraising show he'd done for anything along the lines of Planned Parenthood or the American Civil Liberties Union.

Instead, I found comments like, for me, being political in that way, describing yourself as either liberal or conservative, is counterproductive to being a human being.

It's just pointless.

Being political is not pointless to me.

I believe that politics do create social change.

Now, Reggie was talking about topics that require political action, and suddenly his stance felt detached from reality.

Was Reggie just someone who wanted to take refuge in absurdity and not deal with the real world?

At that point, Reggie's own testimony didn't actually matter that much to me.

All I paid attention to was evidence that he shared my ethical and political opinions, so I kept reading and watching interviews.

But Reggie said over and over that he just was not political.

And so Reggie and I took a break for a while.

I needed time to think.

At first, Reggie's jokes had given me something I really needed, a cure for Silicon Valley.

But I responded to Reggie the way I did any time a boy in high school played piano well.

I replaced a part of the person with the whole.

Automatically, I would think, what piano player isn't loyal, funny, thoughtful?

The list goes on.

Those piano players were heartbreakers.

But Reggie was the worst.

Reggie played Chopin, then spit on the piano keys.

And when I gave him a chance to explain, Reggie just moved on to drumming on my grandmother's urn.

But somehow, I decided I'm okay with that.

Because Reggie's jokes are making me look at dirt.

Not dirt on the ground, but what anthropologist Mary Douglas called dirt.

Mary Douglas studied how people categorize things.

She says that what we can't categorize, we call dirt or dirty.

This allows us to get rid of the unknown before it threatens the categories that it defies.

But loving Reggie's humor means choosing to look closely at what I can't categorize.

Reggie's jokes allow me to pay attention to what I would normally sweep away.

The reason why I'm not political is because I don't really think, I think the most effective way to, or the best way to influence society is to encourage people's imagination.

So I let him hold the brown, sweepy flux in front of my face, and I convinced my seeing orbs to pay attention.

This story was produced by Nina Foushee.

She's a junior at Stanford.

The story included clips from Reggie Watts' performances.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

This week, we're investigating one of the most powerful tools we humans wield, jokes.

In our exploration of the power jokes have to remake the world, the last place we might think to look is the lowest form of joking, the pun.

After all, can you think of a pun that did more than make you chuckle or groan?

How about a pun that changed you in some way?

Well, Rosie La Puma can.

In our next story, we hear what the lowliest of puns can do to your mind.

Okay, this is a bad joke.

Puns, they're the fearless underdog of the joking world.

What do you call a cow with three legs?

What?

Tri-tip.

They're perhaps the only jokes that can simultaneously be good.

What do you call a cow with two legs?

What?

Lean beef.

And truly terrible.

What do you call a cow with one leg?

Steak.

I'm Rosie La Puma, and I am a pun lover.

And believe me, it's not always easy rooting for the joke almost universally acknowledged as bad.

So I recently went on a quest to discover some actually good puns.

But what I ended up finding was the true power of pun making.

It involves telepathy.

But let's start at the beginning.

Are you smarter than a cheese grater?

This is my sister Julia.

Hello, I'm Julia.

I'm Rosie's sister.

She also loves puns.

Everyone in my family does.

I heard that you had a pun that I was hoping you could tell me.

Yes, okay.

So one weather reporter asked the other one, is it gonna hail today?

And the other reporter says, hail?

No.

Oh, hail no.

This may seem like a friendly exchange, but it's actually a competition in my family.

Once you get going, you really wanna be that person to come up with the wittiest reply.

Pun making is a very mental game.

Once a pun battle begins, my brain starts to play this giant connect the dots game, scouring through my mind's word bank, or rather, nerd bank, if you will, to see if I can make any connections.

If I make a witty link, my family will laugh and hold me a little higher in their regard.

For that moment, I am the pun master, respected by all.

But if my nerd bank fails, then that's it.

It becomes a dork bank, which is like a nerd bank, but without the implied intelligence.

That's why, when I found the repository of wit in Green Library, I felt it was the pun maker's jackpot.

The repository is this book.

It's dark red and embossed with a gold binding.

The cover wasn't what interested me so much as its condition.

This thing had clearly been abandoned for years, hidden in plain sight.

When I opened it to check the publishing date, my suspicions were confirmed.

This was no ordinary joke book.

This came from the golden age of witty discourse, the 19th century, 1852 to be exact.

The author, a Dr.

M.

Lafayette Byrne, writes on the first page, nothing is sought after more earnestly at the present day than gems of wit and humor.

Dr.

Byrne certainly seemed to recognize puns potential.

If I knew one thing for certain, it was that the garter-socked jokesters and petticoated punsters of the 1800s probably knew a lot more about wit than I.

Their plays on words would be so old, they would appear new in the modern context.

With the repository of wit, I could be pun master for life.

My family wouldn't know what hit them.

Before I brought new material to a family pun battle though, I wanted to have a few trial runs.

I needed to weed through the hundreds of puns the repository has, until I found the ones that were really good.

My friends Sheila and Karen were my first test subjects.

I cornered them in a library room and asked if I could distract them from their problem set with some one room school house humor.

A school master who was charged using the birch rather too violently declared that it was the only way to make a dumb boy smart.

Okay, so there seemed to be a language barrier.

I should have said ruler or whip instead of birch, but maybe I just needed a different pun.

The repository of wit has over a thousand puns, so at least one of them had to be good, right?

Let me see which of my first one be.

I tried another one out in the car with a few friends of mine.

I modified the language to make it easier to understand.

Oh, well, if you didn't know, all priests make really good candidates for the military because they've been trained in canon law.

Not even sure what that is.

That was the best I got.

Even the people who seemed to understand the joke didn't think it was funny.

Were they really that bad?

I hope the third time would be the charm.

I tried one out on my roommate, Bianca.

An ordinary domestic clock, having unfortunately run down, it was observed that it had come to an untimely end.

Okay.

Get it?

Did you hear that pause there?

It's pity.

Bianca actually pitied me for attempting to make such a terrible joke funny.

I needed backup.

Someone who knew why we bothered punning in the first place.

I called my papa Phil.

Hello, I'm grandpa Phil La Puma, and I'm happy to be the grandfather of Rosie La Puma.

And how are you involved in joking?

That's my grandma, Mama Cindy, in the background.

She sat in for the Skype session.

My papa Phil is kind of the family patron of bad pun making.

He drops jokes all the time, at parties, in speeches, at bars.

Anywhere where there's people and a microphone.

I tried to ask him why our family liked puns, but he sort of evaded the question.

Finally, I just decided to go all in.

I pulled out the repository.

So there's this little boy who's known for being really smart, and this old man comes up to him and he says, you know, kids who are really smart when they're young always turn out stupid when they're older.

So the little kid says, well, you must have been really smart when you were young, sir.

Then you can say things like, yeah, you have a comedian that you like?

Jay Leno.

Jay Leno.

I read this joke.

It was written in 1890, and it was written by Jay Leno.

Something like that, you know, way out of third base of field.

My papa really didn't care about the reposited puns.

All the fun for him came in making them up.

But I had to admit, these jokes we were coming up with weren't good either.

I began to wonder why we enjoyed punning in the first place.

And then my mama Cindy joined in the fray.

She started looking up puns on the internet.

Grambling for another egg joke, but I can't seem to whip one up.

Guess I'm a bit fried.

As she threw them out one after another, something caught my attention.

I was struggling to figure out how lightning works.

Then it struck me.

Wait, what?

Uh-oh!

Oh!

There, did you hear that?

Their laugh and sigh is perfectly in sync.

Their voices rise and fall together, like a timed musical cadence.

My grandparents were solving the same arbitrary mental puzzle, and it somehow connected them.

That little pun was like one of those tin can telephones, the ones you build in your elementary school science class with the two cans connected by a string.

It's a toy, silly, inconsequential, but when you put that tin can to your ear, you can hear the other person a little bit clearer.

After my conversation with my papa Phil, I closed the repository of wit for good.

I didn't need a repository.

I didn't even need a nerd bank.

I just needed someone who knew that making a pointless connection between two words can make a meaningful connection between two people.

I wasn't about to give up on my friends yet, but for the meantime, I returned to my tried and tested punning companions, my family.

Last weekend, I flew home for a big anniversary party.

That evening, my family and I spent about an hour talking in our hotel room.

We were all exhausted from the day, but 20 minutes into the discussion, we had our first pun battle.

I couldn't remember the name of America's namesake.

Biscucci.

The inventor of the squeegee.

Amerigo Biscucci created the greatest clothing line.

Gucci clothing.

With that lame Puma joke, my sister got the last laugh, but I didn't mind.

Now, after having spent so many weeks, months even, trying to search through historical humor to find a really good pun, I knew that's not the point.

Julia's pun was bad, but it didn't matter.

We were all victorious.

Pun masters.

Fuscucci over Dr.

M Lafayette Byrne.

We hold the true gems of wit and humor.

That story was produced by Rosie La Puma, who is a freshman at Stanford, and it featured her family members, Julia, Cece, Deborah, Chris, Phil, and Cindy La Puma, and her friends, Sheila, Karen, Addison, Tynan, Gerardo, Bianca, Jackson, and Connor.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

This week's episode is called Joking.

We're investigating what joking does beyond making us laugh.

In our next story, we'll explore how a joke can humanize that most inhuman of creatures, the politician.

Miles S, a producer for State of the Human, sits with the former White House Communications Director who worked for the 40th president of the United States.

Together, they discuss how presidents use jokes and speech writers to make you like them.

What could possibly go wrong?

I have a friend named David, and he was responsible for everything said by the president of the United States.

My name is David Demarest, and well, probably 20 years ago, I was the White House Communications Director for four years under the first President Bush.

David and his team wrote all of the presidents prepared remarks.

I think 1,400 speeches, something like that.

In every single speech, from the State of the Union to a speech at a fundraising dinner, had to sound presidential.

It had to be compelling and it had to be accurate.

As White House Communications Director, David was acutely aware of the public's perception of the president.

Before becoming president, President Bush had spent eight years in the White House as vice president.

Critics argued that all that time on Pennsylvania Avenue made it hard for him to relate with the average American.

David explained that humor was sometimes used in his speeches to connect with his audience.

And so what I did was I got my funniest friends together.

And we would sit around and we would come up with probably 50 jokes, 49 of them that were totally inappropriate for the president to use.

I wasn't convinced that a scripted joke could help the president relate.

But David said that it usually works.

Except for one time on a plane, a special plane.

The food's spectacular.

And no, it's not airplane food.

It is Air Force One food.

David and the president are on route to an event in Kansas City for the future farmers of America.

The president is scheduled to deliver an opening speech 15 minutes after they land.

Fortunately for David, the speech is ready to go.

Everything is fact checked, so David's just sitting back and relaxing, just enjoying the ride.

About 15 minutes before the speech, one of the stewards came and said that the president wanted to see me.

The president summons David to talk about the speech, the one that the president is giving in 30 minutes.

David quickly hustles to the front of the plane and finds the president sitting at his desk in the presidential suite.

And so I sat down and he said, Dave, speech is good, speech is fine.

I said, well, that's great.

What do you want?

He said, well, I want a joke.

That's not a happy moment, because to try to sit in front of the president of the United States and think of a joke that is appropriate to the setting, that has the right nuance to it, that's actually funny, to do that right in front of the president is not an easy thing to do.

And I certainly can't do it.

And so I said to the president, I think that I have to leave your office in order to go towards the back of the plane where I'll do my best to be funny, and then I'll come back to you with a joke.

And he kind of looked at me like I had three heads, but he said, okay, do what you need to do, but I need a joke.

So I went back to the back of the plane and I gathered a couple of people around, kicked around a couple of ideas, came up with this rather, oh, I would say mediocre attempt at humor.

So the joke that I came up with was a sports joke.

The joke is in three parts.

Part one, reference local football team.

The opener of the joke was how about those chiefs, meaning the Kansas City Chiefs football team.

People would clap because it's Kansas City local and so forth.

Part two, continue football joke.

Allow the audience to applaud and then say, of course, I'm getting back on the plane in a few minutes to go to St.

Louis and I'll probably say the same thing about the Cardinals.

Part three, bring the house down.

And then when the laughter dies down from that, he'd say, and of course, when I go back to Washington, I'll probably say the same thing about the Redskins.

So does it satisfy the president?

He was like, yeah, that works.

Okay, fine.

Okay, if you're like me, you might be a little bothered that this joke isn't actually funny.

You don't need guffaws.

So I'm kind of proud of myself that, okay, that's one little problem solved.

He's got his joke.

We land, we go to the event, I'm sitting in the audience and I happen to be sitting with one of my staff who was a young woman, early 20s, knows nothing about sports, nothing.

And so the president opens with this joke, talks about the Kansas City Chiefs, then he says he's gonna say the same thing about the Cardinals when he goes to St.

Louis.

Immediately she turns to me and she says, didn't the Cardinals move to Phoenix?

They did, and David should have known this.

Children knew this, people without TVs knew this.

In 1987, the St.

Louis Cardinals football team became the Arizona Cardinals.

The fact checkers, that team of five full-time researchers, all working to make sure the president never makes a mistake, they had all failed.

Worse, David had failed.

He'd been trying to show how in touch the president was, but because of David's botched joke, President Bush ran the risk of coming across as way, way out of touch, like someone who'd been frozen in ice for 10 years, woken up and stumbled in front of a bunch of farmers to make a speech.

It was bad.

I felt sort of like the walking dead.

And so now I'm just kind of in a fog and he finishes the speech.

I don't remember hearing anything of the speech after that.

And I go to the motorcade and I get in the motorcade.

As soon as he enters the car, he notices the Secret Service walkie talkies blaring nonstop.

Most of them are saying things like, hey, Dave, how about them Cardinals?

Are they still in St.

Louis?

David is mocked for the entire ride back to the airplane.

But what he's really concerned about is how the president is gonna react the next time he sees him.

Well, the motorcade pulls up to Air Force One and you can enter either the front or the back of Air Force One.

If you enter the front, you walk by the president's office.

I decided I wasn't gonna do that because I was hoping that maybe of all the people that knew, maybe the president was the one that still didn't know.

It was not my finest moment.

David is hiding.

He has one hope that maybe, possibly, perhaps, the president didn't realize his mistake.

Plane hasn't even taken off yet and Howie the steward comes and taps me on the shoulder and says, president wants to see you.

So much for hoping.

I assumed it was not going to be pretty.

And so I walk up into his office and the president is there with Brent Scowcroft, who is the national security advisor and the president's brother, Bucky, Bucky Bush.

Bucky from St.

Louis Bush.

So I walk in totally deadpan, yes sir.

And the president's also totally deadpan.

And he says, oh Dave, glad you could join us.

We're just talking about the speech.

And he turns to Brent, General Scowcroft, and he says, so Brent, what'd you think of the speech?

And Brent says, oh I thought the speech was really good, Mr.

President, very good.

But there was something about that speech that just didn't ring true.

And then the president turns to his brother, Bucky.

Buck, what'd you think of the speech?

I'm with Brent, Mr.

President.

I thought the speech was pretty good, but like Brent, there was just something not right about that speech, just something not right about it.

And at that point, the president turns to me and he says, Dave, did you not know that the Cardinals had moved to Phoenix?

At that moment, I had a choice to make.

I had to decide whether I was gonna cop to this or did I have any other possibility of getting out of it?

As David stood there in front of the president, pondering what to do next, he remembered something.

He remembered that there is a team in St.

Louis called the Cardinals, the St.

Louis Cardinals baseball team.

And so I responded by saying, Mr.

President, you didn't think I was talking about the football Cardinals, did you?

And that stopped him for a second.

And then he kind of shook his finger and he said, no, and I skedaddled.

The club didn't make any headlines.

David got away with his mistake and so did the president.

But what I find most interesting about all this is not the failed football joke.

It's how the president treated David after realizing his mistake.

President Bush responded to the faulty joke by staging another joke.

He summoned David into the presidential suite, 40,000 feet in the air, with some of the most intimidating people in the country, just to tease him.

After hearing about this, it kinda does something to me.

I wasn't even born when President Bush, senior, left the White House.

I don't know much about the man.

But after hearing about how he handled David's mistake, I start to like him and respect him.

His actions make him seem human in a way that no scripted joke could.

Because to a normal person like me, who doesn't have a nine to five communications director, life is unscripted.

Imperfect phrasing and jokes that fall flat are just part of everyday normal life.

I take a chance when I tell a joke.

Sometimes it'll succeed and I'll get a few laughs, but sometimes I don't.

And that's what makes joking real.

My funniest friends know when to take the big gambles with humor, and know when to keep their mouth shut.

Using a speechwriter is like playing poker with a loaded deck.

And it's only when David didn't load the deck quite right that I could finally see President Bush's true nature.

I mean, the good thing about working for somebody like the first President Bush was he had a sense of humor.

Miles S is a senior at Stanford University.

David Demarest is vice president for public affairs for Stanford University and senior lecturer of political communications in the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project on KZSU Stanford.

This week's episode is called Joking.

We're investigating what joking does beyond making us laugh.

I'm Lora Kelley.

In our next story, State of the Human producer Charlie Mintz explores the harming and the healing power of jokes.

This story comes to us from Fremont, California.

It's about Jessica Forshner, born in Elko, Nevada, 28 years old.

She's lived most of her adult life in the East Bay.

No kids, no pets, no problems.

Until a couple of years ago.

Life was really good.

Chris and I were really happy.

I went to a step aerobic.

Jessica was married to Chris, her college sweetheart, for five years when she was diagnosed with a serious illness.

And I just doubled over in pain.

The doctors found a cyst on one of my kidneys.

It was too dangerous to operate and it hurt all the time.

Couldn't you, like, take something for it?

No, any pain drugs would damage the kidney.

I was in constant pain.

She had to quit her job.

Jessica's husband, Chris, did everything he could to comfort her.

He learned massage, he cooked her gourmet meals.

He even researched holistic cures.

None of that worked.

Well, I think the massage was helpful.

Jessica spent every waking moment in pain.

She slept maybe a few hours a night and the cyst kept growing.

We felt helpless.

Those were hard days.

But sometimes the most unlikely action, the most unexpected moment, even an accident can change everything.

For Jessica and Chris, it happened in the kitchen.

So you may have noticed.

Okay, well, this is where it happened, by the sink.

Yeah, I was making her a salad and I slipped on a red pepper.

I just pitched forward and cracked my head right there on the stove.

See that net?

I hit it so hard, it blacked out for like 20 seconds and when I came to, that's when I heard it.

What he heard was his wife standing over him and laughing for the first time in months.

It literally was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.

I could not stop.

So funny!

But here's the thing, my cyst stopped hurting.

We went to the doctor, he said that her cyst had shrunk like 10%.

When we asked why, he couldn't tell us.

No one could.

Jessica's mysterious medical miracle didn't last, however.

Before long, her cyst started to hurt again.

They came back just as bad.

But a few weeks later, we were at that farmer's market downtown.

I don't like to think about it.

Chris was carrying six full grocery bags when the dogs attacked.

Onlookers said the dogs belonged to a local homeless woman.

I think they smelled the pork loin.

Jessica watched as the dogs lunged for Chris and tore at his bags.

Chris tried to run and slipped on rotten bok choy.

His legs literally flew into the air.

I had to get treated for a fractured tailbone and rabies.

I cracked up for days, and I felt great.

They had to put down the dogs.

That's when Jessica and Chris realized what was happening.

Each time Jessica laughed, really laughed, her cyst started to heal.

So they experimented.

Chris read books on slapstick comedy, Jessica rented all the Jackass movies, and they started their own version of comedy therapy.

They kept a bag of ball bearings in the car at all times.

Chris never went outside without a cream pie in one hand.

Whatever happened, happened.

Can I just ask, so there was no other way to make her laugh, other than you getting hurt?

Well, no, she laughs when anybody gets hurt.

But we couldn't count on other people for that, you know.

It had to be Chris.

What Chris and Jessica discovered is that anyone can send flowers or visit you in the hospital.

But taking a runaway tricycle to the crotch?

That's love.

There's one I videotaped.

I told Chris, there was a leak in the roof.

That's why he's carrying the ladder, and...

I didn't even see the skateboards.

I bought five.

Wait, you were helping him get hurt?

Well, yeah.

It was funnier when he was surprised.

Like I would cover the shower floor in olive oil, or leave my roller skates on the basement steps.

Oh, and there was one time when I bought all these rusty forks from thrift stores.

And then I put them in his favorite...

I could sense that Jessica was making Chris uncomfortable, so I took him outside to interview him privately.

Chris, this is going to be a tough question.

Did you like getting hurt?

What?

No.

I mean, sometimes getting the laugh felt pretty good, but then I'd have to get an eye patch or physical therapy, and it just wasn't worth it, you know?

Didn't you ever want to stop?

Sure, but when I did, she started getting sick again.

I was losing sleep over it.

Hmm, you felt guilty.

No, when I fell asleep, she put crazy glue in my hand and then tickled my nose.

Oh my god, I forgot about that.

He had to get skin grafts.

What?

Can't a woman sit in her own bushes?

After two years of inflicting intentional pain on her husband, the last straw came, in the form of a bowling ball.

This is the closet, here.

So funny.

He was getting his rain jacket.

Yeah, so I could go out and buy a case of thumbtacks at Costco.

The bowling ball rolls off the top shelf, and bam!

It put me into a coma.

I got the idea from a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

A month later, Chris woke up from his coma to find that his wife had healed completely.

But it wasn't because of the laughter.

Jessica's doctors had made a discovery.

Tess came back showing her cyst was caused by an acute allergy to margarita salt.

Chris divorced her soon after, but eventually he realized something was lacking in his own life.

Well, I didn't miss Jessica, hell no.

Getting laughed, that's what I missed, you know?

Even after all the lacerations and broken bones, it was that laugh, that hideous cackle of Jessica's.

It made me feel better than all the Vicodin I had to take.

Also, like Vicodin, it's really, really addictive.

Chris and Jessica remain bitten by the comedy bug, each in their own way.

Jessica currently dates a stand-up comedian whenever he comes to town, and Chris plans to apply to clown schools just as soon as they take out his ankle pins.

Just joking, none of that's true.

We made it up, and maybe some of you suspected that.

What tipped you off?

Was it when you heard that Chris never left the house without a cream pie in each hand, or when he went into a coma to make his wife laugh?

That parody was produced by Charlie Mintz, and it featured the voices of Claire Slattery and Nathaniel Nelson, as well as the writing and sound design of San Francisco humorist, Ken Grobe.

To end this show, we gave you a parody of the kind of stories we tell, and of the way that we tell them.

The twists, the emotional arc, the crescendos of increasing stakes until, well, the final insight.

We were poking a little bit of fun at ourselves, but also we wanted to take a closer look at this double-edged sword that is joking.

In this story, Chris and Jessica tow the line between what is healing and what is painful until they go too far.

As humans, we do that.

We use jokes to test the boundaries of our relationships.

Jokes are tools to set levels for what we are comfortable with, for what we can demand, and what we can accept of each other.

With jokes, we draw the line in the sand between pain and pleasure, between love and, well, everything else.

This is it for today's episode of State of the Human.

We hope we made you laugh.

We hope that after all this teasing, all these pranks, these puns, these jokes, and that one parody, we synchronized our mental circuits and showed you ways to create new worlds.

So the next time someone says knock knock, try to find out who's there.

This week's show was produced by Natacha Ruck and Nina Foushee, with help from Rachel Hamburg, Charlie Mintz, Will Rogers, Kristi Hartman, and Jonah Willengans.

It contains stories created by Justine Beed, Jackson Roach, Nina Foushee, Rosie La Puma, Miles S, and me, Lora Kelley.

Special thanks to the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and to Bruce Braden for his generous financial support.

If you want to find links to all the music that was used in this episode, or if you want to find any more information about the Stanford Storytelling Project, go to storytelling.stanford.edu.

Thanks for listening.