The New Yorker Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff's takeaway from the International Humor Conference.
Cartoon: Alex Gregory

In Wired magazine’s May 2011 issue, Joel Warner detailed Colorado professor Peter McGraw’s attempt to scientifically explain what exactly makes things funny. Since the story made clear that McGraw had a lot to learn about comedy in the real world — an in-person attempt to get Louis C.K. to sign on to his theory devolved into an incoherent question about the comedian’s penis size — McGraw and Warner are teaming up to explore the science of comedy around the world.

Their occasional Wired.com column, The Humor Code, will chronicle their adventures, their scientific experiments and the unintentional comedy they encounter along the way.

BOSTON — Do you shun social situations to avoid ridicule? Do you struggle to engage in natural, easygoing conversations? When you hear others laughing, do you tense up and flail about in awkward, stilted mannerisms, practically popping and locking like a break dancer?

If so, you might be suffering from gelotophobia, the fear of being laughed at.

If you’ve never heard of gelotophobia, that’s because the term is only a few years old. The concept and its counterparts — gelotophilia (the joy of being laughed at) and katagelasticism (the joy of laughing at others) — are just now being developed by some of the top minds associated with the International Society for Humor Studies, a global organization of humor scholars.

Many of those minds came together in Boston last week for the society’s annual International Humor Conference to probe the intricacies of gelotophobia and many other unusual subjects related to the cutting-edge science of funny.

To be clear, the conference, held in a drab five-story building at Boston University, was far from sidesplitting. No whoopee cushions going off midseminar, no banana cream pies sailing through the hallways. That’s exactly the point: In the eyes of the society, it’s high time for humor to be taken seriously.

‘Philosophers and intellectuals have long looked down on humor.’

“Humor has traditionally gotten a negative connotation throughout most of Western history,” says John Morrell, a religious studies professor at the College of William and Mary who helped found the society. “Philosophers and intellectuals have long looked down on humor.”

That’s why, since the mid-1970s, academics from disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience to linguistics — many of whom were shunned by colleagues in their own fields — have come together annually in recognition of their shared fascination with humor.

The results last week were a colorful hodgepodge of humor scholarship. In one session, John Rucynski Jr., of Okayama University in Japan, detailed screening for his students “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo,” an episode of The Simpsons that has never been shown in Japan because of its coarse cultural stereotypes.

In another, Christian Hempelmann of Purdue University reported on how computers are being taught to understand size differences, in hopes that sooner or later they will get the joke, “How do you fit six elephants into a car?” (Answer: three in the front seat and three in the back.)

Then there was Gil Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist and anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who is investigating the effect of ovulatory cycles on humor appreciation. Research is ongoing, but Greengross postulates that women are more sensitive to comedy during peak fertility.

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