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Aryan Shukla
Writing 2
29 January 2023

Psychology to Comedy: A Translation of a Study on Humor

The translation assignment was unlike any I have done in a writing class in the last

decade. I’ve always had a distaste for English classes because I consider myself a poor writer

and don’t quite enjoy reading either. So, for all those years in elementary, middle, and high

school, I forced myself to churn out the assigned readings and occasional essays. Essay writing

always felt forced; I had no passion for the prompts I was assigned and I quickly grew tired of

the same old structure: 5-Paragraph Essay, MLA Format, Introduction, Three Body Paragraphs,

Conclusion, Thesis, Topic Sentence, Evidence, Analysis, Repeat. It’s funny because going

through old report cards, I can see teachers’ comments on my writing skills and they seem so out

of place now. “Aryan has a great imagination and excels on creative writing assignments”. I

think the keyword that has been missing since those first and second-grade days is “creative”.

Argumentative essays were all I knew from age nine until college applications when all of a

sudden my future was dependent on my ability to articulate myself in a three-hundred-word

narrative essay. I was furious. I spent all those years learning to write argumentative essays, but

never once utilizing the skills I had developed outside the classroom. I figured we always stuck

to that one style for a reason, that one day it would come in handy and it would all make sense.

But no. While writing those college application essays, it felt as if the last eight years of English

classes had no practical application. This genre translation assignment has been a breath of fresh

air. It has been ages since I was tasked with a creative writing endeavor, and boy did I enjoy it.

But before I could get started with this assignment, I had to redefine the word genre in my mind.
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Before Winter Quarter of 2023, the word genre was synonymous with the word category

to me. It only came to mind when looking at books, movies, or songs. Different genres meant

Horror, Non-Fiction, or Pop. I had never really considered that genres could be applied to

writing, until I read “Genre is a word we use when we want to classify things, to note the

similarities and differences between kinds of writing” (Bickmore, 2-3). It made sense though. An

autopsy is different from a newspaper. A lab report is different from a speech. Writing has genres

too. With this new knowledge in my head, I had the tools to start thinking of different genres I

might want to translate my academic journal into. But before I could do that, I had to find an

academic journal that interested me.

I embarked on my search using one of the library databases and began firing away words

that might bring up an article I would enjoy. Superheroes. Comic books. Football. Finally, I

struck gold with the words “Standup Comedy”. There was an academic journal focused on

studying humor in standup comedians. The study aimed to be the first quantitative study on

Humor, a field that the researchers felt was understudied by the psychology world. Their

research included gathering a handful of standup comedians from the local comedy clubs and a

bunch of college students from the nearby university, then having everyone take a Humor Syles

test, a Personality Traits test, a Vocabulary Test (as a mark of intelligence), and testing humor

production. They tracked humor production by giving every participant 10 minutes to come up

with as many captions as they could for an assortment of three blank cartoons. They then

collected all the captions and presented them anonymously to a panel of judges who voted on

each caption on a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being not funny at all and 7 being extremely funny. After

collecting all of their data, the researchers looked for correlations between humor styles, humor

production, personality traits, and intelligence. This article was perfect for me. Not only do I
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have a long-running interest in standup comedy, but I also love reading data as a Statistics and

Data Science major. All that was left to do was translate this article into a new genre.

Picking a new genre wasn’t as easy as I originally thought it would be. It felt like I had

suddenly forgotten every type of writing that has ever existed outside of newspapers. Early on, I

was leaning towards translating the journal into a newspaper because I knew it would be easy to

present statistical information in a manner that made sense for the genre, but I was a bit reluctant.

I knew there was a more fun and engaging option out there for me, but I was having trouble

finding what it was. Thankfully, while I was sitting in class, I saw one of the options for the

translation was a Standup Routine. Bingo. A Standup Routine about Standup Comedian Humor;

it was too good not to pursue.

There were a few key differences between the two genres that I had to make note of

before I got down to the actual translating. First was the audience. The audience for an academic

journal such as the one I found is typically psychologists. These journals are written by

psychologists, who run their experiments and collect their findings to present to other

psychologists in the industry. A standup routine, on the other hand, is intended for anyone who

has an interest in laughing or having a good time. They are far more casual and they typically

take place in front of a live audience that is giving reaction in real-time, rather than a journal that

is written, revised, and published. Another area in which they differ is purpose. Standup routines

are meant to entertain. They are not trusty sources of information nor a place to pick up new

knowledge. Their sole purpose is to get you laughing. Academic journals are quite the opposite.

They use formal language, conduct strict experiments, and their whole gimmick is to use existing

information to find or establish new information.

Keeping the contrasting conventions in mind, I got to work on writing the standup

routine. My strategy for getting the ball rolling was to use First Order thinking, which is

“intuitive and creative and does not strive for conscious direction or control” (Elbow, 37). I

simply talked about the article and the task that lay ahead of me, incorporating jokes into each

piece of the study that I saw fit. Introducing the article wasn’t bad. I found it rather easy to relate

the early pieces of the article to stories of myself, so it was easy to mold the stories into jokes. I

was able to bring up anecdotes from when I was young, make book references that I thought

most people would understand, and even poke fun at some UCSB students. Sadly, the difficulty

turned up a notch when it came to the official findings of the research. Writing jokes about

correlations between humor styles and personality traits proved to be quite the challenge. I ended

up having to cut out some of the findings so that the routine wouldn’t end up sounding like a

report. I honed in on the correlations I was able to joke about the best and decided to leave out

the rest. The material still felt weaker than the first couple of paragraphs of the routine, so it took

a few dry runs and edits to get a solid finished product.

All in all, I had fun translating my journal into a standup routine. This has been my

favorite writing assignment in a long time and I hope I get to explore more forms of creative

writing over the quarter.

Works Cited

Bickmore, Lisa. “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems.”

Pressbooks, Open English @ SLCC, 1 Aug. 2016,

https://pressbooks.pub/openenglishatslcc/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-

within-rhetorical-ecosystems/.

Elbow, Peter. “Teaching Thinking by Teaching Writing.” Change: The Magazine of Higher

Learning, Sept. 1983, pp. 37–40.

Greengross, Gil, Rod A. Martin, and Geoffrey Miller. "Personality Traits, Intelligence, Humor

Styles, and Humor Production Ability of Professional Stand-Up Comedians Compared to

College Students." Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol. 6, no. 1, 2012,

pp. 74-82. ProQuest,

https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/personality-traits-intelligence-humor-styles/

docview/896398950/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025774.