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Benjamin Errett collects sweet nothings and savoury somethings in a weekly newsletter at getwitquick.com.
Love, according to the hard-drinking actor John Barrymore, is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.
Eventually, we’ll all resemble fish to our significant others. To forestall this piscine inevitability, the research suggests, it’s absolutely necessary to maintain and develop a sense of humour. Also, ease up on the hard drinking.
On dating apps, in long-term relationships and across cultures, sociological studies and conventional wisdom consistently link a sense of humour with romantic success. But time and time again, humans don’t really get the joke: The punchlines are not how we get lucky, but rather how we stay lucky.
The problem originates with armchair Darwinians trying to follow the order of advice so often seen on throw pillows: live, laugh, love. They do so with the “fitness indicator hypothesis,” which suggests that a witty display is a shorthand for genetic quality. If a man’s jokes can make a woman laugh, goes the heteronormative thinking, she’ll be more likely to select him to father her children. The intelligence, verbal skill and abstract thinking required to elicit a laugh are, per one study, “a hard-to-fake signal of heritable psychological fitness.”
How hard to fake? Just consider the all-time top pickup line on the Reddit page devoted to the topic: “My mom told me that life was a deck of cards, so I guess you must be the queen of hearts.” Nearly 9,000 votes of approval for that opening gambit suggest that no one remembers the name of the bossy villain from Alice in Wonderland.
The rest of the best are just as bad. A line like “A hug without u is Hg and that’s toxic” could only work in a chemistry lab, and the odds of “The only thing I know about the universe is that it starts with U-N-I” getting a laugh are astronomically small.
Furthermore, peer-reviewed research has proven that “you must be tired because you’ve been running through my mind all day” gives prospective mates the second wind they need to run in the opposite direction; a 2010 experiment found flippant lines like these “conveyed lower trustworthiness and intelligence.”
The problem is that the fitness indicator hypothesis overlooks the obvious: A good-looking person is assumed to have good genes before they even open their pretty little mouth. In a singles bar or on Tinder, the lines are irrelevant. Is a joke about your high cheekbones anything more than an invitation to gaze upon said cheekbones? Or, as the psychologists put it, women “favored him for a short-term relationship if he was attractive instead of unattractive, regardless of his pick-up line, presumably because attractiveness signals heritable fitness.”
The good news is that there is a place for the pithy pitching of woo, and it’s much more important than a pickup line. The interest indicator model of humour, first proposed in 2009, suggests that wit and wordplay rarely start relationships, but they often keep them going. Does this person make jokes for me? Are the jokes laughed at? This is how we monitor and maintain romantic connection, forever extending Barrymore’s delightful interval between infatuation and haddocksimity.
Another bonus of the interest indicator model is that it extends beyond gender stereotypes and traditional relationships. Do women really choose a father for their children based on repartee? Maybe in addition to a bunch of other factors and then only when you squint reductively from across the room. Do all humans continually assess their relationship health based on shared laughter? Absolutely.
And the history of courtly love backs this idea. Consider Cyrano de Bergerac, the famously ugly French wit who must hide behind a handsome doofus to deliver heartfelt words to his beloved Roxanne. Once they pass the hurdle of his looks, his cleverness allows them to build lasting love.
It’s also a new way to listen to love songs, the majority of which can be heard as old-fashioned fitness indicators. Writing in Vanity Fair in 1917, P.G. Wodehouse argued that these songs are continually “taunted with triteness of phrase” for the simple reason that nothing good rhymes with love.
“When the board of directors, or whoever it was, was arranging the language,” he wrote, “you would have thought that, if they had had a spark of pity in their systems, they would have tacked on to that emotion to thoughts of which the young man’s fancy lightly turns in spring, some word ending in an open vowel.”
There’s only so many times you can reference “skies above” and “turtle doves,” Wodehouse writes, “and ‘glove’ is one of those aloof words which are not good mixers.”
But once the right lyricist makes the song about interest instead of fitness, it all clicks into place.
“Touch me with your naked hand, touch me with your glove,” Leonard Cohen sings in Dance Me To The End of Love, proving that a glove can in fact be a good mixer in mixed company. You can’t attend a decent Canadian wedding without hearing this song, and for good reason: It’s all about cleverly indicating interest very tenderly and very long.
Love, according to George Bernard Shaw, is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else. A regular exchange of wit, built up over time, maintains that difference. Sadly, you can’t report your significant other to Spotify for being one of the hottest singles of the week. But you can share a laugh over the fact that both theory and practice show a pickup line like that has never, ever worked.