Pinocchio is bullshitting.
Not wanting to reveal his friend’s location, but also not wanting to trigger the telltale sign that he’s lying, the Shrek the Third character talks in circles to avoid telling an angry Prince Charming where his rival, the ogre Shrek, is.
“Well, uh, I don’t know where he’s not,” the would-be boy begins.
Then he really begins to dazzle: “On the contrary, I’m possibly more or less not definitely rejecting the idea that in no way with any amount of uncertainty that I undeniably do or do not know where he should probably be, if that indeed wasn’t where he isn’t.”
The linguistic gymnastics continue until one of the Three Little Pigs gets so annoyed that he blurts out what Shrek is up to.
With this scene, projected on three screens at the front of a Harper Memorial Library classroom, Jason Riggle kicked off a lecture for their linguistics course “The Language of Deception and Humor.”
It turns out that humor and deception are two sides of the same coin, Riggle argued in the Autumn Quarter course, and both have a lot to tell us about how we make meaning and interact with others. Students explored how the two modes interact in literature, philosophy, popular culture, developmental science and more.
On one level, “almost all humor involves some kind of deception, involves some kind of trickery, some kind of misdirection,” said Riggle, an associate professor of linguistics who uses they/them pronouns. “So you might say humor is a flavor of deception, but that would be really reductive.”
To start with the obvious, humor is intensely prosocial.
“We delight in messing with each other, in being messed with by other brains,” they said. And when someone gets a joke, it shows shared understanding. “Humor is this sort of magic flash that reveals the insides of other people’s minds.”
Children develop the ability to tell jokes relatively young, Riggle explained in a class on cognitive development. By age 4, most children begin to move from a sense of humor that relies on deviations from expected norms, such as a caregiver making a funny face or using a common item in a silly way, to humor that takes into account shared knowledge and assumptions.
Riggle told students a joke they heard from their young child: “Why do sharks swim in salt water? Because pepper water makes them sneeze!”
It’s a fairly sophisticated joke, Riggle said, one that relies on a couple of analogical leaps. The joke teller must know that the audience thinks of salt and pepper as a pair, that the existence of salt water could imply pepper water exists, and that pepper makes you sneeze. As children gain this awareness of what other people know and how they think, they also learn how to lie.
Deception, too, can be prosocial, Riggle argued in another class session. Hence our wealth of terms for almost-lies. Since calling someone a liar is such a serious social judgment, we are careful to distinguish between kinds of deception that might not convey the same level of betrayal as a lie: white lie, innocent misunderstanding, noble lie, trolling, prank, bluff, ploy, dupe. We might not consider someone who engages in these a liar.
Riggle said some research has even shown that people tend to find those who lie for prosocial reasons—for example, telling white lies to avoid hurting others’ feelings—as more honest rather than less.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
And certainly not in the middle of a linguistics class. But there it was, the famous Monty Python sketch, serving as an example of how a tragic topic becomes fodder for a joke. Humor, like horror, Riggle said, can allow audiences to process fear or anxiety by twisting expectations in an entertaining way.
“It’s a good class to teach, because it gives you all the dopamine, getting to laugh,” Riggle said.
The Shrek the Third scene and the Monty Python sketch were among many short videos students were asked to consider. To tease apart nuances between humor and almost-humor, students analyzed jokes that could easily go sideways.
An example of this involved a contest organized by a restaurant manager in 2001: The server who sold the most beer in a month would win a Toyota.
The winner didn’t receive a car, but rather a “toy Yoda.” It turned out the contest had been announced on April Fools’ Day. Was this funny? Not for the winning waitress, who decided to sue—her case was settled out of court.
The course took a more sober tone in the final weeks of the quarter, diving into ways that humor feeds into persuasion, misinformation and contagious deception.
“Humor is the magic key that opens up people’s defenses and allows you to get at what they really think,” Riggle said, making it a potential tool for manipulation.
But Riggle was not above a little manipulation themself, it turned out. They revealed in one class session filled with comedy clips and memes that research has shown people absorb more from lectures that involve humor than those that don’t, even if slides used in a lecture are out of order.
This suggests that after experiencing humor, the mind is better able to draw connections. Students glanced around, amused that they might have been tricked into learning something.
—This article originally appeared in the Spring/26 University of Chicago Magazine.
