You ever notice how someone who speaks English as a second language often tends to get louder, more genuine laughs when they make a joke?
I was watching Nassim Taleb give a lecture about his book, The Black Swan. Taleb is a Lebanese American - his English is quite good but not perfect. Sometimes he still struggles to find words or idioms in English. He still struggles to produce rhythm and deliver punch lines.
But when he did make a joke, the audience laughed heartily. Even if it wasn't an outstanding joke. It even felt at times that the laughter was out of proportion with the humor being offered. And this is a pattern I have noticed over and over in life - from watching comedians, lecturers, or just normal social situations.
Are people offering more laughs because they feel bad? Or because there's some obscure human emotion at play in regards to foreigners? Is this a tribal thing, welcoming the stranger into the tribe?
I don't think so. I don't think it's because of a sympathy mechanism. I don't think it's that we're "welcoming the foreigner warmly by offering him some laughs."
I think it instead has something to do with patience, and maybe also with the mechanical interchange between seriousness and humor in our minds.
I think that when we are listening to someone who moves more slowly and deliberately through their speech, it puts us in a more patient place mentally. We are slowed down in a way that is uncommon when listening to native English speakers. And I think, as a side effect, it makes us feel friendlier. Possibly because of the "welcome the foreigner" effect, but also because we are more focused, with genuine interest, on interpreting what is being said. We feel more human because we are listening more intently and with more deliberate effort. We’re giving our time more freely and patiently than we’re accustomed to doing in an ever more fast-paced culture. Maybe we feel more connected, without even realizing it.
People often aren’t willing to put in the time to listen to anything that isn’t super dense. Myself included. When I listen to a podcast, I want to be learning something every few minutes or else I get bored. When I read a book, I want to know within 10 pages if this book is going to teach me something useful. And in normal conversation, or when listening to lectures, we often get bored if whoever’s speaking is slow and careful and demands patience of us. We are a culture of density.
In our hyper-modern world, attention is a primary asset. Not only for tech companies and marketers, but for us as individuals. Not only economically, but physiologically. As attention is an asset (and a liability), density is what we require in order to collect more and more of it from us. That’s the trade. We are becoming more and more capitalist with our attention, requiring thicker and juicier material as a trade for our non-fungible attentiveness. Which is both a good and bad thing, as most things are. This gives us the capacity to learn more than ever, but also chips away at our willingness to sit quietly through dullness.
But with a foreigner or non-native speaker, we are, for whatever reason, trying harder to understand the nuances and idiosyncrasies of their speech and their delivery. We are looking harder for details. We are listening harder for not only first-order meaning but maybe second-order meaning as well. As in, we are following along with what Taleb is saying but we are also trying to understand more about his character and why he's saying what he's saying the way he's saying it. Looking for clues as to his understanding of English, and our culture and our communication, and using that to inform our interpretation of him. We may even be taking the conversation more seriously and with more open-mindedness than we'd ordinarily display. This is a luxury we do not always afford to people who we already assume should be using English in a sophisticated and meaningful way.
And then, when humor comes along, it yanks us harder than normal out of our focus. It hits just a little bit harder, makes us feel just a little lighter than normal. Maybe even catches us off guard, particularly if the person is really struggling to make a serious point. It can make the interchange between seriousness and humor more sudden and jarring.
And I think it also makes that interchange more genuine and organic. I think, in our patient mood, in our friendly mental state, we actually find more humor in what is being said. Some simple joke like Taleb's reference to the lottery can suddenly take on a hilariously poignant character. He was describing how the lottery is a non-event, pointless, without the presence of a winner. What good is a lottery if no one wins. In his inability to come up with something more sophisticated, he makes a joke about something painfully obvious and absurd... and it hits us that much harder. Because it's so simple and so direct. So innocent.
Taleb didn't even have to finish his joke - he was still struggling to deliver the punch line. But the audience quickly began to get what he was saying and fell into good-natured laughter. Genuine laughter. And of course Taleb smiled, pleased that the audience appreciated what he was getting at. In that moment, the audience completely understood what he was trying to say. And that is after all the goal of humor. Or of any good communication.
And of course someone like Chris Rock or George Carlin will always make us laugh. Even when we expect them to. Because they are master communicators who have honed their craft. There are few comedians who actually catch us completely off guard (though one great example, not for the faint of heart, is Anthony Jeselnik).
So at the opposite end of the spectrum from mastery is innocence. The innocence of someone trying to communicate in their non-native language. The innocence of someone working with rudimentary tools. And it seems that we laugh hardest at the ends of the spectrum.
Drink some water,
JDR
“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb