On Aging and Humor: Comedians vs. Acadamicians on the Topic

Beware of Specious Correlations

If you still have grandparents or even parents in your life, you’ve probably noticed from time-to-time a difference from you in what they find funny or not funny.

Not surprising, according to a new study by graduate student Wingyun Mak and psychology professor Brian Carpenter of St. Louis’s Washington University. The study reports that people have a harder time getting jokes as they age.

Depressing, isn’t it? I mean the very idea of life becoming less funny as we descend ever deeper into a dreary old age is a pretty sorry state to contemplate.

Well, thankfully, according to all evidence I have, the sources of those dour images of a humorless old age are wrong.

The researchers said, “Because older adults may have greater difficulty with cognitive flexibility, abstract reasoning and short-term memory, they also have greater difficulty with tests of humor comprehension.”

Sounds like a specious correlation, I’d say. My co-author of Ageless Marketing, Robert Snyder,  is famous in our circles for dismissing flawed reasoning based on specious correlations. Something like the guying standing on a street corner snapping his fingers for hours until a passerby asks him what he’s doing.

“Keeping tigers away,” answered the finger snapper.

“There are no tigers around here.”

“Aren’t you glad I’m keeping them away?”

Yes, cognitive operations do change with age (though not necessarily in an altogether negative sense). However, this does not automatically correlate with declining HQ – humor quotient.

According to many studies, including some referenced in Humor and Aging, edited by Lucille Nahemow et al, responsiveness to humor has a strong developmental component. In other words, you don’t always laugh at the same things at 50 that you did at 25.

A study in which comedians were surveyed about age and humor bears that out. Young audiences overwhelmingly prefer nonsense humor (a sitcom, anyone?”) The young also like aggressive humor. However, the study found that “The use of aggressive humor decreases abruptly when the audience becomes old.”

Old people tend to not like jokes that demean or otherwise put down a character in a story. Put down jokes are young people’s favorite style of humor (another sitcom, anyone?), while they were the least attractive style of joke to older people.

The performers (and who should know better about people’s joke preferences?) indicated that they expect puns and stories to be most appreciated by older people, next by the middle-aged, and least by the young.”

Nahemow writes, “The structure of humor is incongruity – the discrepancy between the expected and that which transpires accounts for the humorous experience.” Young people, simply by virtue of their lack of experience, are subject to more disconnect between expectations and how a joke ends.

Another way of stating that is that life experience can changes what is funny. It seems to me that the honorable researchers into humor and aging who hail from Washington University needed to do a great deal more background study on their subject before designing their research.

For my money, the comedians in the aforementioned study about age and humor are more credible sources of insight into old folk’s sense of humor: comedians who don’t make an audience laugh don’t get invited back.

_____________

Thanks to Tom Mann,Senior Vice President of Advertising, Erickson Communities, and Publisher of The Erickson Tribune for bringing the Washington University study on humor and aging to my attention.

 

Comments

[joared]

I would certainly agree that life experiences greatly influence the types of humor that are appreciated. This WU research has all the earmarks of another one of those pop studies to which we're subjected in pop magazines.

[Tom Asacker]

We've simply heard them all before. :)

[Teofilo Calle]

Your blog is informative and helpful keep the good job. thanks

[Bonnie]

In my twenties, I read every humorist I could find in the library and bought a lot of books that were "humorous". Forty years later, I don't find them nearly as funny. Is it experience or cultural style? Yes, I've heard it before. However, I still love to find a good humorist, and I still think Dorothy Parker is funny.

[David Wolfe]

Bonnie,
I agree with you about Dorothy Parker -- because her humor is timeless -- like, "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker." Fits every generation. Most of the humor thrown up in our face today has been done countless times and grows old, especially when on each cycle it is presented more crudely. Many of us do come to value sensibilities a bit more as we grow older.

Thanks for your comments.

DBW

[Adenundenty]

If you didn't have to work so hard, you'd have more time to be depressed.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://ebloggy.com/elliotparkgm

[Tommy Moore]

Older audiences can be the best ones in that they have a greater attention span, and greater life experience. Coming from a "different generation" they will probably "get" (appreciate) Bob Hope over Conan O'Brian, just like they "get" Gershwin over Rap... "Funny" - like "beauty" - is always in the eye of the beholder.
Tell the same joke to five different people: One will smile, one will chuckle, one will laugh, one won't get it, and one will be offended by it. Even the same person might respond differently to the same joke, depending on the mood they are in that day. People are of different minds. If they could ever agree world peace might break out!