MIKE PESCA:

What's funny? K’s are funny. W’s, meh! Pants are funny. Sarongs are a little funny. Jodhpurs are trying too hard, Overcoats, not funny. Meh is funnier than eh, Manimal is funnier than punky Brewster. Okay, we get all that. But what about cartoon captions?

Every week The New Yorker magazine holds a contest where they print a cartoon and ask readers to come up with a caption, and every week several thousand people do. This outpouring of submissions has been a rich data set for humor researchers at the University of Colorado. Yes, humor researchers who try to answer the question, what makes a joke funny. Their findings? Keep it short and avoid excessive punctuation.

Bob Mankoff is the cartoon editor for The New Yorker. He runs the contest and he collaborated on the research, but he has his own thoughts on what makes for funny. For instance, this is funny:

BOB MANKOFF:

There’s a knife, one of those gadget knives that has all those little things. And it all has corkscrews. You’re left with a mental picture that is sort of humorous in a way, but if I complete it and tell you it's a French Army knife, that’s the joke. And I'm doing more research with these guys, Peter McGraw who’s, who’s a really good psychologist.

MIKE PESCA:

You were gonna say a Colorado researcher, yeah.

BOB MANKOFF:

Yes, Colorado. You know, and I think we both agree, when you’re looking at the caption contest, you’re looking at something incongruous.

MIKE PESCA:

And what else did he find?

BOB MANKOFF:

He found also that sort of the abstract nature was better, so that if I have a, a contest -  for example, the incongruous picture is a guy who’s sitting at a desk but his chair and the thing coming over his head looks like the cap that you get electrocuted with. And he's saying, “Cancel my 12:01.”

Look, my view is a lot of it can be explained. There’s always going to be a part that is not going to be explained.

MIKE PESCA:

This leads me to a question. I know humor is supposed to be subjective, but at least in a couple of the cartoons you describe, like French Army knife, we could see that was the right caption.

BOB MANKOFF:

It is subjective, and I’m gonna show you how.

Here is this image of those two cowboys on horses, except one of them is just in a saddle with no horse at all. So the captions were fairly equally divided between, It’s a vanishing breed, which was like a pun, and in the end - and all of us are carried along by our delusion.

[MIKE LAUGHS]

One of the big things that divides people, not absolutely, is how weird do they like the humor.  Like, a lot of people need a lot of closure. I get it. See, vanishing breed, the horse isn’t there. You got it? Versus, I don't understand, delusions and, you know, whatever.

MIKE PESCA:

Right.

BOB MANKOFF:

A – an example would be from another caption contest in which there’s parrots on everybody’s shoulder in a boardroom and there’s – the boss is looking at them. And one guy is turning to the other. Now you got to figure out something like why a parrot’s there.

So one solution is one guy turns to the other and says, “We've got to think of a better way to record our meetings.” We understand that joke. Oh, parrots, they repeat.

MIKE PESCA:

That's one of the qualities of parrots, yes.

BOB MANKOFF:

So that’s one of the – one of the things. Okay. But then there's another one. This one actually won, although it was fairly evenly divided, which is, “Shut up, Bob. Everybody knows your parrot’s a clip-on.”

[MIKE LAUGHS]

Now, that's much harder to explain.

MIKE PESCA:

You get how many submissions a week?

BOB MANKOFF:

A thousand.

MIKE PESCA:

A thousand.

BOB MANKOFF:

This is for the regular cartoon.

MIKE PESCA:

The regular cartooning. You do not revisit it and th – and stew on it and then say, finally after hours, you know what, that was funny?

BOB MANKOFF:

For The New Yorker it's more than about funny. We look at it as not only an actual art form but a conceptual art form. And, therefore, you value things like originality.

And see, to me also, and I want to make this point, the caption contest cartoons are not real cartoons. They’re a game. They’re dependent on a four-week delay, on a lot of people submitting. We, we love them but they almost never make a point.

MIKE PESCA:

And I guess the reason why they're not making a point is it’s - doesn't come from one artistic vision.

BOB MANKOFF:

Right.

MIKE PESCA:

A cartoon is of a whole. It's one artist's vision. And the ability to tack on a caption that may or may not be funny, I don't know if you agree with this, I bet you a lot of the cartoonists who do this for a living are a little resentful of the cartoon contest.

BOB MANKOFF:

I think some of them are, and that's why I take pains to explain how different they are. The contest is a game in which we exaggerate incongruity. We make it a real puzzle. So it's very hard to make any other statement.

So it is a game and it's an interesting game because one of the things it shows is the changing face of humor on the Internet.

MIKE PESCA:

Mm-hmm.

BOB MANKOFF:

People want to participate. They like this idea of community that does this. It also shows that I think more than ever humor is becoming a type of lingua franca, a way that we communicate with each other, almost a necessary way.

MIKE PESCA:

Do you think that the skill that you bring to the job as the guy who can select through 4,000 cartoons, you still have the ability to find them funny or that you can recognize what is funny about them or what your audience will think is funny?

BOB MANKOFF:

I can recognize what is a good cartoon. Believe me, when David Letterman is looking through all the jokes, they are not laughing at the jokes.  You know what I mean?

MIKE PESCA:

Right.

BOB MANKOFF:

And what will make them laugh is something so weird and strange, is that no one would find funny. But –

[OVERTALK]

MIKE PESCA:

Right. That's why when there's a — when you say someone’s a comic’s comic, he’s usually really dark and really bizarre.

BOB MANKOFF:

Right, really dark and really bizarre. You know, a skeleton walks into a bar and says, “Barkeep, a beer and a mop.” So that takes a little while.

MIKE PESCA:

Right.

BOB MANKOFF:

Most people will say, what? And then if they get it, they’ll get it too late; they can’t possibly laugh at it.

MIKE PESCA:

So some baseball pitchers love these advance stats and some say, I don't wanna know anything, except what's the target and I want to throw the ball.

BOB MANKOFF:

Yeah.

MIKE PESCA:

Just like some comedians love picking it over –

BOB MANKOFF:

Right, right, right –

MIKE PESCA:

- and would love to hear this, and some are like, I don't want to over-think it. Do you think the reason that you're drawn to analyzing it and working with these researchers is that -not just that you're a funny guy, but that you have the job of having to evaluate thousands of supposedly funny pieces a day?

BOB MANKOFF:

I think there's two reasons. That's one of them. And also because before I was this, I was an experimental psychologist.

Does it help you become funnier? Absolutely not. Is reading Master’s & Johnson gonna help you better in bed? I don't think so. [LAUGHING] But it might help you better as a cartoonist.

MIKE PESCA:

Bob Mankoff is the cartoon editor for The New Yorker.