Carleton is probably the only college in the nation to reference a sense of humor in its mission statement.  It’s certainly the only college to offer the Humor Quotient Test to returning grads.

Paul and I were overwhelmed by the enthusiastic participation of the class of ‘69 and of other Carls in our humor testing, both at the Find Your Humor Quotient session and later in Nourse Lounge.

THANK YOU to all of you!  And please know that your participation is indeed advancing discoveries about humor and may even be helpful in suggesting directions for nursing home research.

We promised to post results of our analysis on this web site, so here they are, in a nutshell. More in-depth discussions of the tests themselves can be found in our e-newsletter, the Humor Quotient Newsletter, at  http://www.itchs.org/.

Thank you, all of you who participated and took an interest!                                                                 

Robin Grawe, 1969

Find Your Humor Quotient:  The Humor Quotient Test (HQT)

At a Friday afternoon reunion session entitled Find Your Humor Quotient, 47 returning Carls and spouses took the cartoon portion of the Humor Quotient Test as well as a side test of appreciation for various Simon and Garfunkel songs (Simon and Garfunkel having vaulted to musical acclaim during the time the class of 1969 attended Carleton). We were happy to have 40 useable responses. 

The HQT was also administered at the 2006  Carleton Reunion.  Respondents this year created a profile somewhat less Crusader (Gotcha +Incongruity) than the 2006 group, but the combined results still show Carls as Crusaders and not as Consolers (Sympathetic Pain+ Word Play).

The side test of appreciation for Simon and Garfunkel songs yielded interesting high-confidence correlations with mental humor:

Appreciation for “I am a Rock” was positively correlated to Gotcha humor.

Appreciation for “Mrs. Robinson” was also positively correlated to Gotcha humor and negatively correlated to Word Play humor. Curiously, “Mrs. Robinson” is filled with oft-said phrases, notably religious, being treated at clichés. Perhaps people who appreciate Word Play sensed that “Mrs. Robinson” was not playing but scathing in its verbal clashes.

Appreciation for “Sounds of Silence” was also negatively correlated to Word Play but positively related to Incongruity humor. These results suggests that people who like “Sounds” perceive it as getting at the incongruous realties of life (for example, that silence has a sound) rather than, perhaps, for its crafted rhetorical structure, poetic devices, and the like, which would be consistent with the value of fittingness underlying Word Play.

Appreciation for “Scarborough Fair” was positively related to Word Play. This result should be considered in light of the fact that the Simon and Garfunkel rendition interweaves that song with a canticle on war.  There is thus a very intricate word play back and forth between the two songs.

There were two medial high confidence results as well.  This may speak to the tense, highly crafted nature of Simon and Garfunkel lyrics. Sometimes appreciating these lyrics reflects a balanced sense of humor in the respondent.

Vitalist Humor:  The Expanded Langerian/Bergsonian Vitalist Humor Test (ELBVHT)

Outside of the scheduled humor session, Paul and I ran, on an experimental basis, a new humor test in a side nook of Nourse Lounge, the gathering site for the Class of 1969.  We were very gratified with the number of my classmates willing to take time out from great conversation to participate in this test.

The Vitalist Test, using both affirmational (Langerian) and defiant (Bergsonian) vitalist humor, was taken by 19 members (and spouses) of the Class of ’69.  Many near-high-confidence results could be reported, but suffice it to say that the many strong results have led to our scheduling other Vitalist experiments that will hopefully push some results even higher while excluding false results that are possible with a sample size of less than 30.

Two side tests were given with the ELBVHT.  The first pitted sayings by sages of five nations against one another. The most interesting result of this experiment was that there was a strong Langerian leaning for the Solomon and Franklin quotes and a strong Bergsonian leaning for the von Logau and Shakespeare quotes.  This result is strongly in line with theory and therefore was a one-tailed test to begin with.  The Franklin quote affirms the possibility of secular success through a success formula (‘early to bed . . .”), and the Solomon quote recognizes that the highest successes (‘a prudent wife”) are trans-secular gifts of the Lord.  The Shakespeare quote was MacBeth’s despairing assessment of life (“a tale told by an idiot”) while von Logau’s summation of sleep and death as the natural coterminals of human effort (“Sleep is a shorter death”) are both sobering critiques of human happiness.  And the Shakespeare and von Logau quotes are the two that lean heavily toward Bergsonian humor—laughing at death and the “mechanical encrusted on the living.”

The second side test concerned projected post-retirement  hobbies.  Fourteen of the choices given had enough responses for more careful inspection.   There are a great many ways of analyzing this part of the data set, but here are a few of the more important:

1. There were more high confidence results for sub-forms of Vitalism compared to hobbies chosen than for a compound summation of the four Vitalist types vs. hobbies.  This is an important verification of the reality of the sub-forms.
2. Among the sub-forms, Creativity had the highest Langerian sum of slope coefficients, suggesting that creativity in some basic sense is where Carls live and dream.
3. The data suggest not only that some hobbies are preferred more with Bergsonian inclination and some with Langerian inclination, but also that there is perhaps an equally impressive group of hobbies that are medial, that is, either preference for certain hobbies is concentrated at middle levels of Langer-Bergson disposition or that avoidance of certain hobbies is similarly concentrated near the center of the Langer-Bergson spectrum.
4. High-confidence results between hobbies and Vitalist sub-forms were often intriguing: for example, making nature a retirement hobby is correlated to a preference for Langerian over Bergsonian Performance humor; making fitness a retirement hobby is high for middlish levels of preference for Langerian over Bergsonian Creativity.
5. he most Bergsonian-inclined hobbies were Grandchildren and Marital Relations.
6. The most Langerian-inclined hobbies were Travel, Walking, Cooking, and Fitness, in that order.
7. Hobbies with high scores at the middle of the Langer-Bergson continuum were Gardening, Golf, Crafts, Environment, and Social Justice.
8. Medial low scores were Health, Volunteering, and Friends.

We intend to be discussing soon results from both the Carleton HQT and ELBVHT experiments in the Humor Quotient Newsletter (HQN) which is archived at http://www.ITCHS.org/.  Back issues include discussions of the design of both tests and the humor theories and discoveries related to them.