The College Fix

CU Boulder professor explains how long to wait before joking about tragedy

Don’t joke about the recent death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Not yet, at least. It’s too soon.

That isn’t just common sense and courtesy – it’s a scientific fact.

Science has a formula on how not to sound like an insensitive jerk, and it’s all about timing: too soon after the tragedy and the joke is deemed insensitive – but wait too long, and it falls flat.

That according to Dr. Peter McGraw, a marketing and psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who directs its Humor Research Lab. McGraw told The College Fix in an interview that the bigger the tragedy is, the longer a person should wait before making a joke about it.

While most people view that as common sense, McGraw said he learned from his research that the “average person is not funny enough to be able to be successful” at finding the correct time after a tragedy to joke about it.

It’s a common social mishap to make a joke about a tragedy “too soon” after it happens, he said.

But on the other hand, waiting too long after a tragedy will doom your joke to social ridicule, and your joke will be judged as “not funny,” he added.

According to McGraw, it’s about finding the right balance. It depends on the nature of the tragedy, the type of audience, and the skill of the joke-teller. There’s no algorithm, it depends on too many factors for that.

For several years, the Human Research Lab has studied the idea of “psychological distance” from a tragedy.

“Intuition and any humor theories out there suggest that time should help when you’re faced with a strategy,” McGraw said.

But time only helps to a certain point, until it can start to backfire. According to McGraw, time plays a psychological role.

“Time benefits humans from a standpoint that it helps remove the threat of the bad things that we face,” he said.

For example, nobody makes Civil War jokes anymore, because the Civil War doesn’t emotionally affect people anymore.

Another important factor is the predictability of a tragedy.

Hoffman’s death was sudden and unexpected, but an event like Hurricane Sandy was foreseen and predicted. This is another important factor in determining when to joke about a tragedy.

“A longitudinal study reveals that humorous responses to Sandy’s destruction rose, peaked, and eventually fell over the course of 100 days.  Time creates a comedic sweet spot that occurs when the psychological distance from a tragedy is large enough to buffer people from threat (creating a benign violation) but not so large that the event becomes a purely benign, nonthreatening situation,” according to McGraw.

He said he believes his research benefits the general public because it highlights “the importance of humor in our lives in general” and gives us a “glimpse into how humor may provide a way to cope with the pain, stresses, and adversity that we all face in our day-to-day lives.”

He has co-authored a forthcoming book, “The Humor Code,” set to be published in April.

College Fix contributor Andrew Desiderio is a student at The George Washington University.

IMAGE: Jeff Hall 2069 / Flickr

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