Pinocchio is bullshitting. Not wanting to reveal his friend’s location, but also not wanting to trigger the telltale sign that he’s lying, the Shrek the Third character talks in circles to avoid telling an angry Prince Charming where his rival, the ogre Shrek, is. “Well, uh, I don’t know where he’s not,” the would-be boy begins.

Then he really begins to dazzle: “On the contrary, I’m possibly more or less not definitely rejecting the idea that in no way with any amount of uncertainty that I undeniably do or do not know where he should probably be, if that indeed wasn’t where he isn’t.” The linguistic gymnastics continue until one of the three little pigs gets so annoyed that he blurts out what Shrek is up to.

With this scene, projected on three screens at the front of a Harper Memorial Library classroom, Jason Riggle kicked off a mid-October lecture for The Language of Deception and Humor. It turns out that humor and deception are two sides of the same coin, and both have a lot to tell us about how we make meaning and interact with others. Students explored how the two modes interact in literature, philosophy, popular culture, developmental science, and more.

On one level, “almost all humor involves some kind of deception, involves some kind of trickery, some kind of misdirection,” Riggle, an associate professor of linguistics who uses they/them pronouns, said in a Zoom interview. “So you might say humor is a flavor of deception, but that would be really reductive.”

To start with the obvious, humor is intensely prosocial. “We delight in messing with each other, in being messed with by other brains,” they said. And when someone gets a joke, it shows shared understanding. “Humor is this sort of magic flash that reveals the insides of other people’s minds.”

Children develop the ability to tell jokes relatively young, Riggle explained in an early November class on cognitive development. By age 4, most children begin to move from a sense of humor that relies on deviations from expected norms (like a caregiver making a funny face or acting as if they’re going to feed a child with the wrong end of a spoon) to humor that takes into account shared knowledge and assumptions.

Riggle told students a joke they heard from their young child: “Why do sharks swim in salt water? Because pepper water makes them sneeze!” It’s a fairly sophisticated joke, Riggle said, one that relies on a couple of analogistic leaps. The joke teller must know that the audience thinks of salt and pepper as a pair, that the existence of salt water could imply pepper water exists, and that pepper makes you sneeze. As children gain this awareness of what other people know and how they think, they also learn how to lie.

Deception, too, can be prosocial, Riggle argued in another class session. Hence our wealth of terms for almost-lies. Since calling someone a liar is such a serious social judgment, we are careful to distinguish between kinds of deception that might not convey the same level of betrayal as a lie: white lie, bullshit, innocent misunderstanding, noble lie, trolling, prank, bluff, ploy, dupe. We might not consider someone who engages in these a liar.

Riggle explained that research has even shown that people tend to find those who lie for prosocial reasons—for example, telling white lies to avoid hurting others’ feelings—as more honest rather than less honest.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! And certainly not in the middle of a linguistics class. But there it was, the famous Monty Python sketch, serving as an example of how a tragic topic becomes fodder for a joke. Humor, like horror, Riggle explained, can allow audiences to process fear or anxiety by twisting expectations in an entertaining way.

“It’s a good class to teach, because it gives you all the dopamine, getting to laugh,” Riggle said over Zoom. The Shrek the Third scene and the Monty Python sketch were among many short videos students were asked to consider. To tease apart nuances between humor and almost-humor, students analyzed jokes that could easily go sideways. A stand-up clip by Matthew Broussard about whether it’s OK to say the word Jew walks a fine line: “So long as it’s a noun,” the comedian quips. “It’s the adjectives and verbs that will get you into trouble,” he says, before giving an egregious example. Riggle asked the class why the joke works. “He’s not making fun of Jewish people for being the stereotype, he’s making fun of the fact that the stereotype exists,” suggested one student. “He in-groups the audience,” added another, pointing out how Broussard breaks character to tell the audience why the joke is so tricky.

Another example of almost-humor involved a contest organized by a bar manager in 2001: The server who sold the most beer in a month would win a Toyota. The winner didn’t receive a car, but rather a “toy Yoda.” It turned out the contest had been announced on April Fool’s Day. Was this funny? Not for the winning waitress, who decided to sue. Riggle asked the class if anyone knew what the judge decided. “If I remember right,” ventured one student, “they said that she did deserve an actual Toyota.” “Trick question!” replied Riggle. The case was settled out of court.

There was a lot to process, between these examples, a handful of mini cognitive tests, and the assortment of memes, gifs, and font colors Riggle uses on their slides. “People can absorb multiple channels of information simultaneously,” they later said. For Riggle, this means thinking about how to make the lecture, the words on the screen, and other visuals work together to help students pay attention and retain key points.

The course took a more sober tone in the final weeks of the quarter, diving into manipulation, persuasion, contagious deception, and moral panics. These topics have become increasingly relevant over the decade Riggle has taught the class, but the same dynamics of misinformation and collective panics have been with us for a long time. Humor and deception interact in interesting ways here.

“Humor is the magic key that opens up people’s defenses and allows you to get at what they really think, which can be used for evil to manipulate them, but it can also be used for good to free them from other manipulations,” said Riggle. To combat misinformation, humor can work “better than any kind of corrective information. Why? Because when we’re in that state of going along with the joke, we let all our defenses down. … Understanding how that works is important to all of us.”

But Riggle was not above a little manipulation themself, it turned out. They revealed in one class session filled with comedy clips and memes that research has shown people absorb more from lectures that involve humor than those that don’t, even if slides used in a lecture are out of order. This suggests that after experiencing humor, the mind is better able to draw connections. Students glanced around, amused that they might have been tricked into learning something.

Syllabus

Meeting twice a week, students in The Language of Deception and Humor covered topics including “Too many meanings,” “Why is language like this?,” “Contagion,” “Persuasion,” and “Wisdom.” Assigned readings stretched back to early 20th-century writings by René Magritte (“Les Mots et les Images,” 1929) and Jorge Luis Borges (“Funes the Memorious,” 1942). Students also read recent cognitive science papers with such seriously unfunny titles as “What Makes Things Funny? An Integrative Review of the Antecedents of Laughter and Amusement” (Warren et al. 2021); “Perceptual, Categorical, and Affective Processing of Ambiguous Smiling Facial Expressions” (Calvo et al. 2012); and “Contagious Yawning, Empathy, and Their Relation to Prosocial Behavior” (Franzen et al. 2018).