What do you get when you cross scholarly research and dick jokes? Nothing to laugh at, normally. But science writer Jim Holt defies the Heisenberg principle of humor — you can't study it without killing it — in his book Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. We caught up with him walking into a bar.
Wired: One question you tackle is who invented the joke. Weren't we cracking wise back in the caves?
Holt: No, the classic joke form — setup with incongruity, punch line that resolves the incongruity —seems to have come out of Greece and Rome. There's this guy in Greek -mythology called Palamedes who invented practically everything — numbers, currency, lighthouses, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He also supposedly invented the joke. And, of course, he was stoned to death.
Wired: So where do new jokes come from?
Holt: It used to be that all the jokes I got came from Wall Street. Now, with the Internet, they're sort of everywhere and nowhere at once. But the ideas for jokes are cultural — concepts that keep reappearing in different guises over the centuries.
Wired: There are lots of theories about why we joke. Which do you find most plausible?
Holt: Well, there's the superiority theory, that jokes express scorn for your inferiors — cripples and cuckolds and foreigners and the like. Plato said we laugh at vice. Then there's the Freudian interpretation, that it's all about sexual repression. Finally, there's the seduction theory, based on the observation that men do most of the joking while women do most of the laughing. Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece in Vanity Fair arguing that the only way most guys can impress women is to make them laugh.
Wired: But your favorite explanation is a mashup of Kant and evolutionary biology, right?
Holt: V. S. Ramachandran, the brain researcher, has a theory about the origin of laughter — that when you're in the jungle and there's an apparent threat, the first member of the kinship group to notice that it's not a real threat emits this stereotyped vocalization. And it's contagious, so everyone starts laughing. That's also the basis of the relief theory of humor, that there's a release of the energy you had summoned up to solve some puzzle. Kant said that the essence of humor is a strained expectation dissolving into nothing.
Wired: Did you find any candidates for the perfect joke?
Holt: I did find what might be the shortest possible joke: "Pretentious? Moi?"
Ethoxydiglycol Back in the '50s, home hair dyes were laced with toxic chemicals that turned a simple touch-up into a haz-mat operation. Luckily, dye makers found substitutes like EDG, a fume- free organic solvent that keeps the ingredients in a thin, pourable consistency.
Oleyl Alcohol, Vegetable Fatty Acid That thin, pourable consistency would be problematic during application. Mixing the base with the separate bottle of "color developer" causes these two fatty organic thickeners to kick in, making the product cling to your hair like shampoo.
Ethanolamine In last month's episode of What's Inside, this ingredient starred as a solvent in Easy-Off oven cleaner. Here it's an alkalizer that boosts the pH toward bleachlike levels and swells the hair's outer layer so the color can penetrate more fully.
Erythorbic Acid If you take ascorbic acid — aka vitamin C — and rearrange the atoms just so (isomerization!), you get erythorbic acid. It's a cheaper antioxidant that protects the dye from sun and oxygen damage.
Trisodium EDTA With its ability to bind heavy metals, EDTA is used to clean up after radioactive spills. That same talent is enlisted here to suck up copper in tap water, which might otherwise react with the product to create damaging radicals. Dyed hair is messed up enough already.
Polyquaterium-22 Sounds like a comic- book invention, but this common polymer coats each strand, smoothing the shaft's outer layer and improving lubricity — a fancy way of saying it's a hair conditioner.
p-Aminophenol, p-Phenylenediamine These so-called intermediates react inside the hair fiber to produce the appropriate color when oxidized. This combination turns dark brown. Other chemicals (or different proportions of these) can make any shade — from Sandy Blond to Jet Black.
Resorcinol Is there anything this stuff can't do? It's used as a chemical skin peel, a biological glue for aortic surgery, a sunscreen, a treatment for whooping cough, and — when mixed with the right acids — a TNT-like explosive. In Just for Men, it's a coupler, an additive that reacts with the oxidized intermediates to dial in the target color.
Hydrogen Peroxide When combined with the other ingredients, this ubiquitous denizen of the medicine cabinet provides a superabundance of highly reactive oxygen, which turns those intermediates and couplers into luxurious dark coloring that will surely fool everyone into thinking that this is your natural look.
