(drum roll)
(audience clapping)
Carmen Lynch everybody.
(audience clapping and cheering)
My boyfriend snores.
What are you supposed to do when they snore?
I think you're supposed to like roll them...
Off the bed and
(audience laughing)
down the stairs and into traffic.
(audience laughing)
(festive music)
(bellowing laughter)
(baby laughing)
They say laughter is the best medicine.
It can reduce pain,
send more oxygen to your brain and heart.
And even strengthen your lungs.
(background laughter)
A good sense of humor is considered one of the most prized
qualities when looking for a romantic partner.
But for something so valuable little is known about humor.
Is it genetic?
What makes someone funny?
Can anyone learn to do it?
(monkey noises)
Hey welcome, guys, to class.
Thanks so much for coming.
Ed Malone thinks that answer is yes.
I'm really bad myself.
Okay, great.
(audience laughing)
He teaches a clown class
in New York City.
This is going to be a template for the evening
to see us duos who can be the funniest with the trashcan.
Yes I totally believe that anyone can be funny,
anyone can be hilarious.
(trashcan banging)
(audience laughing)
My class is a clown class and when I say clown,
just to be clear, I don't teach circus,
I don't teach magic tricks, I don't teach you know,
people how to do gymnastic type things.
What we do in the class is we just get people in touch
with their stupidity, their idiocy.
William, you're up.
Gobble gobble gobble.
[William] Gobble gobble gobble.
Left hand outstretched.
Gobble gobble gobble.
(audience laughing)
Gobble gobble gobble.
The clown's philosophy
is you can make anything funny.
Crystal.
Woof woof.
We don't want, like, intellectual humor,
we want beautiful stupidity.
Wow
Happy Thanksgiving.
(man laughing)
But on the flip side, you have to be very smart
in some ways to tap into that idiotic side
and it takes a lot of vulnerability and openness.
Maggie, the bliss.
(maggie bobbling)
(audience laughing)
It's good, embrace the bomb.
(Maggie laughing)
When you're bombing, just embrace it.
Surf the flop, ya know.
(audience laughing)
Yeah, very good.
(drums Beating)
(uptempo music)
Another term for a clown is a beautiful idiot.
You can have my baby.
And that's a compliment.
I know some people don't like to be called idiots but,
if you can show an audience your stupidity,
show that willingness to laugh at yourself.
(audience laughing)
Great job.
Then you're on the road to being a good clown.
(audience laughing)
I'm not married.
My boyfriend and I aren't married but we like it like this,
we're fine, we're cool with it.
Good standup comics make it look easy.
Do you know how you know dating
is more fun than being married?
People who date, don't have married night.
(audience laughing)
When I first went to a standup show,
I got really jealous because I was like,
"wow these people on stage are so naturally funny."
Like I thought that's what they were like 24 hours a day.
I didn't know that this was like a writing thing
and there was like a joke, you know that
you build a joke and a punchline and all that.
(upbeat music)
Carmen Lynch is a regular guest
on late night shows
and performs standup all other the world.
I hate those people who sleep all night,
they always show off, they're like
"I can sleep through anything."
(audience laughing)
You know what, you're gonna die in a fire.
(audience laughing)
And I'm gonna watch because I'll be up.
(audience laughing)
I mean some people out there are like, I am so funny
or I was told that I should do standup,
because I'm told I'm so funny.
For me, it's something internal.
Do you ever just want to kill a cat?
(audience laughing)
Just to see what life it's on?
(audience laughing)
No? Too dark, alright.
For me, the biggest thing was sharing my thoughts.
Cause I always had journals, I always wrote in diaries.
So I was like, what frustrates me?
Oh, that I am actress
or trying to be one and I'm so tall
and I can't get any roles.
I'm very tall. I'm 6 feet tall.
Oh you can't say tall anymore, it's offensive.
It's...
vertically obese.
(audience laughing)
So I just started taking all that material that I wrote
in my journals and trying it on stage.
And it would get laughs because everyone knows
your tragedy is other people's comedy.
(orchestra music)
Becoming an idiot, embracing tragedy,
there's a thin line between laughing and crying.
Charlie Chaplin encapsulated that idea saying,
"to truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain
and play with it."
Chaplin's signature character, the Tramp,
came from his own tragic childhood
sent to a London workhouse at the age of nine.
For something so central to the human experience
comedy hasn't been scientifically researched, until now.
So I'm going to tell you some neuroscience
jokes if that's okay.
(woman cheering)
Appropriately, by a scientist
who also performs standup.
So as you can tell by my accent,
I am a neuroscientist.
(audience laughing)
I'm Ori Amir and I study the brains of comedians.
(piano music)
I was interested in comedy since I was a kid,
since my father was a comedian.
What's the deal with the cerebellum?
I enjoy doing comedy and I'm also intellectually curious,
I wonder what is humor?
What is the magic sauce that makes things funny?
I like her sister Margaret better.
(audience laughing)
Unrelatedly, I was curious about the workings
of the brain.
So how is this lamp of interconnected neurons
give rise to thought?
Yeah my dream is to become a professional comedian
and am amateur neurosurgeon.
(audience laughing)
I decided to conduct a study
to see what goes on in the brains of comedians
when they come up with funny ideas.
(guitar playing)
Keep your shoes outside.
Shoes are bad too?
Ori conducted the first ever study
on comedians and brain activity.
So just get rid
of my personality as well?
(laughing)
By observing the creative process
in action.
To understand the neuro-basis of creativity,
you have to put people who create expertly inside this tube,
this fMRI machine and look into their brain activity
as they engage in their creative process.
Most creative processes
are very hard to do inside a tube lying down.
This is why comedy was an ideal topic to study
because it's relatively easy to have them
come up with a funny idea
and then see what it looks like.
Ori put three groups of people,
professional comedians, amateur comedians
and a control group in an MRI machine
and asked them to come up with captions
for a New Yorker cartoon.
Not ideal conditions for humor.
The machine is very noisy, they can't move much.
Some of them were a bit claustrophobic,
but nevertheless, they did well.
Looks pretty good, huh?
Yeah
It's a nice, solid brain.
Ori found that the brain scans
of the most experienced comedians looked very different
than the other two groups.
What we found was that there are certain regions
in the temporal cortex where professional comedians
show more activation than amateur comedians
and amateur comedians showed more activation than controls.
The temporal cortex is the place
where links from all over the brain converge,
sort of a central computer
where the brain makes it connections.
Temporal cortex is the source
of the funny ideas.
It's the engine of the creativity.
While the professional comedian's
temporal cortex's were lighting up,
another part of their brains were not.
You see actually less activity in the prefrontal
cortex where a region that is essentially the conductor
of the orchestra is controlling the cognitive process,
but is not the source of the ideas themselves.
So what does it mean?
What our results prove is that amateur comedians
and controls needed more top down control
of their creative process,
whereas professionals could more spontaneously
generate the funny ideas.
So I wasn't always a foreigner.
(audience laughing)
So for experienced comedians,
being funny is more reflexive.
It happens naturally in the part of the brain
that does things without really thinking about it.
That supports Ed Malone's beautiful idiot theory of comedy.
Oh well then, you're part of the clan?
(man laughing)
Are you part of the clan?
[Man With Green Jacket] I'm not part of the clan.
(laughter)
It's just about being willing
to let go of wanting control.
Just play, just play, just play.
Don't think so much, get out of your head,
and just be a goofball.
But I'm in therapy.
That's my religion, therapy.
And explains why, when Carmen
is having an off night, she can still do her job.
I'll go on auto-pilot and I'm like
"how are these jokes coming out of my mouth right now?"
And I'm thinking about something completely different.
You know, like why is that couple kissing,
they're in the front row, or you know,
why is that waitress talking so loud like,
you know or something or this mic sucks, it's too low.
But it takes a long time
to get to that point.
You see that most successful comedians
need at least 10 years to become successful
and it requires a lot of work,
a lot of honing of jokes and experimentation.
It's an acquired skill to a higher degree.
Like when I first started and I bombed
I was like I don't want to leave my apartment
for three weeks.
We should be eating no range chickens.
(audience laughing)
No range chickens are tramps and they want to die.
(audience laughing)
After awhile, it's not that you don't get nervous
I guess you get more confident
and you trust it more.
They should put it right on the packaging,
no range, suicidal chickens.
(audience laughing)
You learn what's funny by doing it.
You can't skip that.
You have to go on stage all the time.
Whether it's a pizza place or whatever.
Alright, that's it for me, thanks.
(audience clapping)
Play with your pain.
Get out of your head.
And do it for at least 10 years.
Oh, and maybe, Ed's clown class.
Are you like going wow, wow, wow.
That's inspiring me...
I pity the fool that doesn't want success.
(audience laughing)
I don't care how hopeless you are.
All you have to do is be a human being to be funny.
(whimsical music)