"I’ve done work with the University of Michigan that tracks eye movement as people look at cartoons. The interesting thing is..."

"... that at that 'get it' moment, when someone understands, the pupil sort of pops like it does for a flashbulb," says Robert Mankoff, the New Yorker cartoon editor.

I also collaborated on research in which we used The New Yorker cartoon caption contest. One of the ideas about humor is that it’s our way of coping with negative feelings. In a control study we found people who were primed with negative emotions, through images of illness and death at a subliminal level, create more and funnier captions than those who were not.

I'm interested in this connection between negative emotions and humor skill, but I hate the New Yorker caption contests so much. I should process my negativity into a funnier closing line for this blog post.