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“I've looked at the studies being done in humor. It seems to me, as an outsider, they're not sufficiently experimental; it seems they're mostly theoretical.”
“Lost your wheel?”
“Fall off, Granddad!”
These were just a few of the many taunts Sam Shuster endured as he rode his unicycle around town. But the comments didn’t upset him. As a lifelong medical researcher, Shuster knew exactly what to do. He’d catalog them, analyze them, and write a paper.
His findings? Girls and women generally gave neutral to positive and admiring responses, while comments from boys and men were mostly snide, combative, or an attempt at humor. And as the males got older, their responses evolved, from minor physical and verbal aggression by younger boys of 11 to 13, to verbally aggressive mockery by teenage boys, to sarcastic jokes by adult men, to more neutral or amicable responses by elderly men. Such a progression, Shuster asserts, corresponds to hormone levels. Humor, he concludes, “evolves from androgen-primed aggression.”
No joke. His peer-reviewed conclusions were published in December 2007 in the renowned British journal BMJ.
Shuster, 80, decided to take up unicycling after retiring as a professor of dermatology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. The responses he got to his new hobby were so “stereotyped and predictable,” he wrote, that he reasoned there must be a biological explanation. And so he set about collecting data. Dressed in a bland blue tracksuit and maintaining a neutral expression (neither smiling nor frowning), he unicycled around Newcastle upon Tyne, a city of about 260,000 in northern England. Over the course of a year in 1995-96, he recorded responses from 400 people.
Children generally reacted with curiosity (“Was it hard to learn?” “Why do you use only one wheel?”), while 95 percent of women showed encouragement or concern (“God that must be difficult.” “I wish I could do that”). However, 75 percent of men and boys tried to be funny, often in a derisive way. His favorite reaction, however, was a serious one from a young man: “Does it hurt your bollocks?”
Reflecting on his findings, Shuster saw a Darwinian connection: just as male peacocks have ornate plumages and male deer elaborate antlers, male humans use humor in the cutthroat competition called sexual selection. Woody Allen is walking proof of the theory. “Darwin’s second book [on sexual selection] was never as popular as his first [on natural selection],” Shuster says. “Now it has resurfaced, and some people think it’s more important than his natural selection one.”
In the article, Shuster further mused: “The existence of an overwhelming sex difference inevitably raises the possibility of biological advantage, in particular whether male humor enhances female sexual preference. … The present finding that humor may reflect androgen-induced aggression could provide a Darwinian explanation both of its attraction and its continued use as a sexually useful tool.”
Although the popular response to his study has been overwhelming, with widespread news coverage in Europe, so far no academics in the field of humor have contacted him. “But they’ve got a serious job to do,” he notes. Still, he hopes his study will influence the field. “I’ve looked at the studies being done in humor. It seems to me, as an outsider, they’re not sufficiently experimental; it seems they’re mostly theoretical. That’s what I hope will carry on from this, that people will see this is another approach to humor.”
Shuster is already busy with follow-up studies that will expand the variables, such as unicyclists who are female, or of different ages and races, and in different settings. He believes the new studies will confirm his original findings but refuses to reveal more: “You must never talk about unpublished stuff. It’s academic heresy.”
