Note: I’ll record the audio version of this post in a few days once my voice is as recovered as the rest of me.
In an earlier post, I wondered whether there was such a thing as a “Midwestern sense of humor.” People from the middle of the country make me laugh, and I wanted to know why.
Also, I got into improv comedy in my thirties, and I’ve always been curious about whether I had a facility for it because I grew up where improv was born. Here’s what I found out:
There is such a thing as a Midwestern sense of humor—but it’s not necessarily better than other regions’.
Laughter isn’t just fun; it’s a survival mechanism because it signals social affinity.
The reason that improv thrives in the Midwest is a double-edged sword.
The bloggy part: Where I’ve been recently (skip if you came for the research)
First of all, thank you all for being so incredibly patient. I’ve been dealing with some health issues, so I haven’t been posting regularly.
At first, I got Big Mad at myself for this. Who did I think I was, having a physical body with needs, not just being an incorporeal nimbus of willpower and creativity? Gross. How dare I.
But then I realized:
When our bodies are out of whack it’s hard to have the mental energy for anything else. This makes sense: survival instincts place pain mitigation over whatever artistic project you’re working on, and that’s OK. So, thank you, Brain, for keeping me focused on what matters. You the real MVP.
The fact that I was resistant to letting some things go temporarily while I recovered–this blog, for example–is kind of an object lesson in Midwesternness. As anti-capitalist as I am, apparently part of me still believes that my worth is tied to my productivity.
Anyway. On to the serious business of comedy.
Midwestern humor
Jason Geis, the Artistic Director of ComedySportz Theater Chicago, spoke to me about improv in Chicago. A longtime marketing professional and native Midwesterner, he has an almost spooky ability to pinpoint someone’s birthplace in the first few minutes of talking to them. “I think you can walk into a room,” he says, “And after about five minutes, be able to tell based on how someone tells a story, how they tell jokes, and how they try to relate to you, where they’re from.”
Geis’s assessment of how to tell people from various places apart is reflected in scientific research. A recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looked at the Big Five personality traits—openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—and found that generally speaking, the United States has three distinct regional personalities. Here’s how the American Psychological Association broke it down.
Cluster 1, Midwest: Friendly & Conventional. “Less affluent, less educated, more politically conservative, more likely to be Protestant and less healthy.”
Cluster 2, West Coast: Relaxed & Creative. “More culturally and ethnically diverse, more liberal, wealthier, more educated, comparatively healthy and less likely to be Protestant.”
Cluster 3, East Coast: Temperamental & Uninhibited. “Larger proportion of women and older adults who are more affluent, politically liberal and unlikely to be Protestant.”
From “U.S. Regions Exhibit Distinct Personalities, Research Reveals,” The American Psychological Association
Why would location shape your sense of humor?
Rats laugh, apes laugh, babies laugh almost before they can do anything else. Think about that: we evolved to laugh before we can walk, talk, or feed ourselves. Why?
It’s because laughter signals affinity, a lack of threat. It’s social glue, and some scientists theorize that, along with singing and dancing, it fulfills the same function as grooming did when we were all monkeys in trees. From Sabrina Stierwalt's article “Why Do We Laugh?” in Scientific American, “Upon meeting a stranger, we want to know: What are your intentions with me? And who else are you aligned with?”
It’s also why memes go viral, why they’re so sticky. Think about your favorite memes. Are they just funny? Or are they about an outgroup—the outgroup you don’t like—and how ridiculous their beliefs are? Do you laugh at certain memes because they make you feel better about yourself? I do.
Memes, even the apolitical ones, are funny because they affirm group membership. They just happen to have the side effect of slowly eroding democracy.
So if laughter is based on and signals affinity, it makes sense that people from the same regions would have similar senses of humor.
Improv & Midwestern culture
The question I originally set out to answer about humor in this post was whether I’m pretty good at improv because I’m from the region where it started. And honestly, I think the answer is:
Yeah. Not completely, but it does help.
That’s not to say you have to be from Kansas or Iowa or something to be a good improvisor, but Midwestern ways of relating form the basis of how improv actually works.
While it may seem like improv has “no rules,” the reality is that there are a few very important ones that everyone follows. If you’ve ever seen really bad improv—and I’m sure you have, because a lot of improv is terrible—it was probably because someone onstage wasn’t keeping these in mind.
“Yes, and”: This one is the most well-known. It’s the imperative to accept the offers, or “gifts,” your scene partner provides and build off of them, rather than waiting your turn to say something funny.
Have each other’s backs: Your goal as an improvisor is to support your scene partners, not to make yourself look good. You do this by providing plenty of information (that’s the “and” part of “yes, and”) and authentic emotional responses (react as honestly as possible to whatever your scene partner says or does).
Listen. This one is probably the hardest. Collaboration is what makes improv work, and your scene partner will give you the info you need to continue in a logical way. The problem is, most of us suck at listening, and we particularly suck at listening when we’re nervous—say, when we’re onstage. If you just pay attention to the other actors, though, they’ll give you your next move.
You may notice that all of these have something in common: they all require cooperation.
The double-edged sword of community
For better or worse, Midwesterners—“Friendly & Conventional,” remember—tend to place a lot of importance on community. Dr. Jim Ansaldo, a research scientist with the Center on Education and Lifelong Learning (CELL) at the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community at Indiana University, has been teaching improv for almost 30 years. He grew up in Connecticut, and he sees a connection between Midwestern communalism and improv comedy.
“It doesn't surprise me that improv would come out of the Midwest,” he says, “Because it’s a ‘for everyone’ kind of thing. And even though we've become more conservative and more individualistic as a culture, I still think there is a basic idea that the community should belong to everybody.”
Of course, this experience of belonging doesn’t resonate with everyone. The Midwest isn’t known for its diversity, and deviation from the narrowly-defined “norm” often has negative consequences. “As a Midwesterner and a gay man, I like to play with how we're tolerant to a point,” Geis says. “Like the Midwest mom who says, ‘Oh, it's just his friend, not his boyfriend.’ That's where the Midwest shifts into, if you're not a straight white man, this isn't the most ‘nice’ place to be.”
Ansaldo also had an interesting theory on how Midwesterners’ self-perception of communalism inhibits our ability to talk about difficult topics, like systemic racism. “Because we take pride in our identity as ‘communal,’ I think there's some resistance to the idea that people are excluded,” he says. “We don’t like to talk about something like white privilege because it’s so hurtful to a Midwesterner to think that our society is structured in a way that's not for everyone.”
Truth in comedy
That stereotype of Midwesterners that Geis mentioned—that we’re “nice”—exists for a reason. We don’t like to make anyone uncomfortable. Dar Williams put it this way in “Iowa”:
“But way back where I come from, we never mean to bother,
We don't like to make our passions other people’s concern,
And we walk in the world of safe people, and at night we walk into our houses and burn.”
But prioritizing harmony can sometimes make us dishonest. We lie in the service of keeping the peace, which is good for the collective but corrosive to our souls.
I think, though, that’s exactly why improv flourishes here. It has to do with another rule of improv, one I haven’t mentioned yet, from the book every improvisor has but none of us have read:
The truth is funny.
Improv gives players an excuse to go towards the truth, to talk about the fact that it sucks that Mom refuses to see how much I love this man who is definitely not just my friend, or how saying “everyone is welcome here” doesn’t magically make it so. It’s OK to bring up the crushing costs of sameness, like loneliness, alienation, or self-loathing—all currents you can sense beneath the surface of a lot of Midwestern interactions, and burdens I struggle with to this day.
Midwesterners are champions at avoiding hard topics, but comedy gives us a safe approach. We love improv here because it’s a style of comedy with communalism baked in, which frees us up to say what's really on our minds (or watch other people do it, which is equally cathartic).
It’s OK to bring up the crushing costs of sameness, like loneliness, alienation, or self-loathing.
Successful comedy also requires the sensitivity to others’ comfort that’s prized in this region of the country. “I think if you're a good comedian, whether you do stand up or improv, you're sort of a social scientist,” Geis says. “So much of what we do as comedians is working a room. And in order to work a room, you have to relate to the room.”
This ability to read the comfort of a group of people and adjust your delivery accordingly is exactly what Midwesterners do all day long, and it’s part of what makes a good comedian, Geis says. “I think there's an awareness that you have to have. If you can relate to the audience in a way that invites them into the comedy, then that's where you really see success.”
This ability to read the comfort of a group of people and adjust your delivery accordingly is exactly what Midwesterners do all day long.
What makes us laugh is hard to define. If it were easy, Groucho Marx or Jack Benny or Stephen Colbert would have done it a long time ago.
But in general, humor lets us find common ground in a world that can feel more frightening every day. It brings us together by signaling affinity, and if we find that affinity stifling, it can give us an outlet to speak our truth.