From tomorrow's Times:

At this moment, give or take a coffee break, researchers at the University of Michigan are working against time, or at least budget, to figure out how and why that most delightful of adaptive responses, laughter, took its place in the evolutionary pantheon alongside the appendix, opposable thumbs and lip gloss.

And if you think splitting the atom was hard, try cracking a joke and then isolating it into discrete psycholinguistic components. After all, levity, not gravity, holds it together, a reality Robert Mankoff is only too aware of. Mr. Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker (its annual cartoon issue is on the newsstands now), fled a doctoral program in psychology in 1977 to become a cartoonist. Now he is an adviser to the Michigan study, which is scrutinizing minute facets of people's reactions to the magazine's cartoons from the last 79 years.

As befits his profoundly comic, comically profound mind-set, Mr. Mankoff has on his desk a statue of comedic inspiration. It is not a plaster bust of Groucho Marx or Shecky Greene but a plastic 12-inch likeness of that evergreen king of comedy, Godzilla. "He reminds me that I'm silly," Mr. Mankoff said.

"The essence of humor is incongruity," he said. That explains why Godzilla looks funny rampaging over the papers on his desk; and why Godzilla is so funny rampaging through a pitifully modeled Tokyo in myriad English-dubbed Japanese films with special effects that are barely a patch on the first monster movie: the 1925 dino-epic "The Lost World." Even the fleeing hordes look like they are laughing.

"Sometimes I put him down on the street just to see how he looks," Mr. Mankoff said. "Right now I am looking at a Harvard personality test to give to the cartoonists, but I was giving it to Godzilla. Like, No. 25: I have a clear set of goals and work toward them in an orderly fashion. Would he strongly agree or disagree? I think he'd agree. Or No. 36: I often get angry at the way people treat me. I'd say yes." Continued.