HOW YOUR WORLD WORKS↓GREAT
UNKNOWNSBig questions.
Answers you can‘t find on the internet.I
20 May 2019 _ PopularMechanics.comDo you have unusual questions about how things work and why stuff happens? This is the place to ask them.
Don’t be afraid. Nobody will laugh at you here. Email [email protected].T SURE WOULD be a time-saver if it did. Imagine how much more
productive you’d be if you had someone else to laugh at your own
jokes for you. That would free up at least an hour a week for the
typical middle-aged dad, who, despite his invariably generous
self-appraisal, is deemed by his wife and children to be roughly
as humorous as Lenin’s funeral. Ask us how we know.
If we may recast your question slightly, what’s actually at
issue here is whether a person’s sense of humor is wholly innate,
or whether its development is influenced by external factors. Pre-
vailing scientific thinking suggests that, like most personality
traits, sense of humor is the product of both nature and nurture.
“There’s almost nothing in the emotion space I can think of that
isn’t deeply the result of an interaction between genes and envi-
ronments,” says Rober t W.
Levenson, a psychology
professor at UC Berkeley
who studies emotions and
their genetic basis.
While there is no sin-
gle region of the brain that
produces humor, Leven-
son says, in order to be
funny—or to perceive
things as funny—your
brain has to process infor-
mation quickly. “You need
to be able to step outside
of yourself and take in the
context,” he says—an abil-
ity that he believes partly
depends on the genetic
characteristics that shape
our brains. Then again,
what we find humorous is also a function of the experiences we’ve
had. “The clone might have that brain, but might not have the
experiences that provided the material that brain would process
to produce humorous observations,” Levenson says.
Consider that, contrar y to what the entire science-fiction indus-
try would have you believe, clones aren’t guaranteed even to look
the same. Take nature’s clones—identical twins—who likewise
share 100 percent of their DNA. If one twin grows up jogging lapsaround an organic farm in the warm California sun, but his way-
ward brother tends to a basement cockfighting ring with a tallboy
in his hand and a Tiparillo in his teeth, they likely won’t share
height, weight, or muscle mass—let alone an affinity for suspect
individuals who introduce themselves as “Bozo.”
Willibald Ruch, a personality researcher at the University
of Zurich, coauthored a 2014 study explicitly investigating the
nature versus nurture humor divide. By comparing the consis-
tency with which identical twins reacted to jokes to the responses
of fraternal twins (who share only half of their DNA), they hoped
to determine which comedic predilections—if any—are likely to
be heritable.
Ruch’s team found the strongest genetic predisposition
to “incongruity resolu-
tion” humor. “This would
be like a dumb blond joke
or an ethnic joke, where
you know the stereotype,
and there is something
unexpected,” Ruch says.
He suspects, though,
that this has less to do
with sense of humor per
se, and more to do with a
personality trait called
conservatism. “The idea
is this appears in people
who avoid complexity,” he
says. “They prefer redun-
dancy, they prefer what
they know, and they dis-
like what is different.” So
tired old jokes will find a
home with dull people, which may help explain the nettlesome
persistence of Adam Sandler.
Finally, while you and your clone may or may not share a pref-
erence for any particular genre of jest, Ruch suggests that the way
you react to humor is more apt to be identical. So whether you’re a
b el ly-laug her, ca ck ler, chuck ler, chor t ler, g ig g ler, g u ffawer, k nee -
slapper, or merely an eyebrow-raiser, your clone likely will be too.
Just not necessarily at the same time.If you were cloned, would
the clone have the same
sense of humor as you?