Jokester Profs Match Wits

English department heavyweights James Wood and Leo Damrosch are recognized pros at analyzing other people’s humor. But do they have any comedic muscle of their own?

Damrosch, whose course Wit and Humor tries to explain what makes a good joke funny, is a little bit more established in the department than his newly arrived colleague, Wood, author of The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. But that didn’t stop either one from agreeing to an FM-orchestrated humor smackdown.

To find out whether all the humor they’ve studied has rubbed off, we asked them to hit us with their best jokes. Then we asked them to analyze each other’s efforts.

Wood threw a right hook with something Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal spotted on a sign in his Prague dry-cleaner’s: “Some stains can be removed only by the destruction of the material itself.”

Damrosch wasn’t impressed. He says the line is too much like that infamous American general in Vietnam’s remark: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Rather than echoing an imperialist, Damrosch takes a good-hearted jab at his colleagues over in Jefferson Hall with this offering:

A physics graduate student comes into a bar every Friday night, sits down at the end of the bar next to an empty chair, and seems to be engaging the chair in animated conversation. After a few weeks the bartender comes over and asks what he’s doing. The guy explains, “There’s a theoretical possibility that while I’m talking to that chair, all of the atoms that make up a beautiful woman will assemble right at this spot, so I’m keeping up my side of the conversation in case it happens. The bartender says, “You know, this place is full of attractive women every Friday; why don’t you just sit down next to one of them and strike up a conversation? She might turn out to like you.” The graduate student says, “What are the chances of that!”

Woods, however, prefers the Prague dry-cleaner joke to Damrosch’s—his is funnier, he writes in an e-mail, because “it is not hypothetical, like the joke you ask me to comment on from Leo Damrosch[.]”

Damrosch contends that what makes his joke amusing is the physics student’s ability to laugh at himself. Self-demeaning humor, says Damrosch, is “a way of diffusing the sense that you take yourself too seriously,” a fact he hopes most Harvard students understand.

What are the chances of that!