The Dark Psychology of Being a Good Comedian

New research shows that the best humor is both a little bit wrong and a little bit right. Is there something about comedians that makes them better at subversion?

Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, 02/27/14

Immediately after 9/11, comedy ground to a halt. The Daily Show went off the air for nine days. Saturday Night Live, whose 27th season started 18 days later, featured a somber cold-open with Lorne Michaels asking New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, "Can we be funny?"

The staffers of The Onion, the satirical paper that had just relocated to New York, weren’t sure how to answer to that question. Even three weeks after the attack, the comedian Gilbert Gottfried was publicly hissed at for joking that he was taking a flight that would make a stop at the Empire State Building.

The Onion staffers agonized, but they eventually settled on publishing an entire paper devoted to 9/11 on September 26. As described by psychologist Peter McGraw and journalist Joel Warner in their upcoming book, The Humor Code, the issue was smash hit. The Onion writers aimed their bile at the hijackers, whom they depicted being tortured by “tusked, asp-tongued demons” in Hell. One headline read, “God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule.”

The paper was deluged with fan mail from readers who seemed to find catharsis in the terrorists' derisive rendering.

The Onion’s triumph reflects McGraw’s long-held theory that comedy is equal parts darkness and light. The best jokes, he believes, take something awful and make it silly. Go purely light-hearted and you risk being toothless. Too edgy, and like Gottfried, you’ll make people uncomfortable.

This “benign violation” theory of humor is central to The Humor Code, which Warner and McGraw, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, researched by digging into comedy trends around the world. The book comes out on April 1 (obviously).

McGraw’s thinking expands on the work of Stanford psychologist Thomas Veatch, which in turn builds on past explanations about why we laugh. Great thinkers have been trying for centuries to figure out the evolutionary purpose of comedy. The theories that have emerged are all very different, but one thing they share is a tendency to hint at the art form's shadowy side.

Hobbes and Plato took the playground perspective, suggesting that making fun helps us feel superior to others. Kant and later psychologists though it was about a cognitive shift that moves a serious situation into playful territory. In 1905, Freud suggested that humor was the fun-loving id making itself known despite the protestations of the conformist superego.

A few years ago, psychologist Daniela S. Hugelshofer suggested that humor acts as a buffer against depression and hopelessness. And evolutionary psychologists have suggested that humor is a way to subtly outshine our competitors for mates. Nothing says “pick me” like having an entire office/bar/dorm double over at your imitation of Shosh from Girls.

These approaches have a lot in common, though: You can’t make a joke without inserting a wicked twist, and you can’t be a comedian without holding a small amount of power, for even a short period of time, over the audience.

And if that’s the case, is there something about the psychology of comedians that makes them better able to tap into these “violations”? Do they enjoy wielding that kind of power? Or do funny people just know something the rest of us don’t?

***

One of McGraw’s favorite quotes is from Mark Twain: “The secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.”

It’s this juxtaposition of injury and cheer that McGraw has studied in depth, both in his book and at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Humor Research Lab (acronym: HURL).

“Humor is something people inherently enjoy,” he told me. “But there also needs to be something wrong, unsettling, and threatening in some way. We call those violations.”

Our caveman ancestors lived in a world rife with physical threats. There was relief in discovering that a rustling in the darkness was a mouse rather than a saber-toothed tiger.

“Before people could speak, laughter served as a signaling function,” McGraw explained. “As if to say, ‘this is a false alarm, this is a benign violation.’”

Tickling, the basic form of humor that even non-verbal primates use, is a perfect example:

“There's a threat there, but it's safe,” McGraw said.

“It's not too aggressive and it's done by someone you trust.”

Today, our threats are less likely to be four-legged, but humor still serves as a way to overcome them. Jokes ease tension; they help us deal with life’s injustices, both minor and large. But like the Onion staffers after 9/11, jokes have to air these wrongs before making them right.

When jokes are too gentle or anodyne, like this picture of a cat, we don’t laugh; there’s no violation. (“You can’t tickle yourself,” McGraw explains.) Meanwhile, something that’s too offensive, like, say, this, is purely a violation. (“Like if a creepy guy in a trench coat tried to tickle you,” he said. “That’s terrifying!”)

Some cultures avoid these types of blatant transgressions by restricting the topics that can be fodder for jokes. But Warner, McGraw’s co-author, noticed that while some cultures compartmentalize humor by subject matter, others do so by geography. When they were in Japan, for example, they noticed that the comedy in clubs was as raunchy as it gets, but certain settings were entirely off-limits to joking:

“In the office or at school, that's not okay,” Warner said. “It was not okay to laugh in the office of the humor researchers, even. But in bars and karaoke theaters, anything goes.”

In the HURL lab, McGraw has been trying determine what exactly flips a joke from offensive to funny. Or in research terms, what puts the “benign” in “benign violation?”

Through clinical studies, the lab has found that tragedies -- think earthquakes, deaths, and the like -- are funnier when they’re either physically or socially distant. “Mishaps” meanwhile, are funnier when we’re closer to them, which is why Anthony Weiner’s Twitter misadventures featured prominently on American late-night shows, but comparable foibles by, say, an Indonesian politician would not have. Likewise, participants found a picture of a man with a frozen beard (mishap) funnier than a man with his finger stuck through his own eye socket (tragedy.)

The lab has also identified that jokes can, indeed, be “too soon,” as my colleague Julie Beck described: One study by McGraw and researchers at Texas A&M University found tweets about Hurricane Sandy to be least funny 15 days after it struck, most funny 36 days after the fact, and once again not funny 99 days later.

The passage of about a month, they wrote, creates a “sweet spot” in which poking fun at sadness is neither too neutered nor too sharp: “A tragic event is difficult to joke about at first, but the passage of time initially increases humor as the event becomes less threatening. Eventually, however, distance decreases humor by making the event seem completely benign.”

It's even better if the comedy can put the audience physically on edge, which is why most comedy clubs cram people into a tiny room and force them to sit on hard stools, he said -- it’s best if the audience doesn’t get too comfortable.

***

Last year, the comedian Stephen Fry publicly discussed his bipolar disorder and suicide attempt. In describing his quiz show, QI, Fry has said, “There are times when I’m doing QI and I’m going ‘ha ha, yeah, yeah,’ and inside I’m going ‘I want to fucking die. I ... want ... to ... fucking ... die’”

“I’ve seen a lot of miserable guys do pretty amazing stand-up,” Marc Maron once told a fellow comedian.

There’s always been an anecdotal link between comedy and inner turmoil, but the empirical evidence has started to back it up. In the 1920s, the psychologist Lewis Terman found that children rated as having a good sense of humor by their parents and teachers died younger as adults. A longitudinal study of Finnish police officers found that the funniest among them were more likely to be obese and to smoke. And an analysis of New York Times obituaries found that performers died nearly eight years younger than members of the military did.

Is there something unusually taxing about the process of dreaming up violations and deploying them to crack people up?

Last month, a group of British scientists found that comedians are more likely than regular people to exhibit psychotic traits, or the characteristics associated with people who have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Writing in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the authors describe how they administered a questionnaire to 523 comedians, 364 actors, and 831 people with non-performance jobs. The survey asked about experiences with magical thinking, antisocial behavior, distractibility, and “introverted anhedonia,” or not deriving pleasure from others.

Comedians and actors alike scored higher than the non-performers across almost all of the traits. The only difference was that comedians were more likely to experience a reduced ability to feel social and physical pleasure, but the same wasn’t true of actors. Comedians, more so than the regular folk or even actors, were more likely to have a mild distaste for humanity.

“Comedians had an introverted set of traits, which is rather counterintuitive,” Oxford psychologist Gordon Claridge, one of the authors, told me. “Actors were outgoing in a consistent way.”

It’s important to note, Claridge said, that this doesn’t mean comedians are mentally ill. In fact, few of the subjects actually experienced psychotic symptoms; they just shared some traits with people who suffer from psychotic ailments.

These characteristics might help comedians “tap into some sort of out-of-the-box thinking,” he said. “Together, they underpin a creative cognitive style.”

McGraw is skeptical, though. He thinks the study supports a certain “crazy comedian” stereotype but isn’t definitive.

“People think comedians are kind of screwed-up people, but that they have developed a sense of humor to cope with it,” he said. “That's a compelling idea, but there's not great evidence for that.”

He points to the fact that the comedians scored roughly on par with the actors. Comedians, he says, are just actors starring in their own play.

“It's more about the kind of person who is drawn to a world of theater more than comedy specifically,” he argues. “Gilbert Gottfried doesn't talk like that all the time. Lewis Black doesn't walk around outraged at the bus stop.”

Besides, no one gets ahead in comedy by being “an asshole,” as McGraw puts it. Such a competitive field demands attentiveness to showtimes, hours spent perfecting jokes, and being cordial to club owners.

The HURL lab once studied 600 novices and experts in the Upright Citizen’s Brigade, an improv comedy troupe, and found that the only difference was that the experts were more conscientious, McGraw said.

“The really screwed up people aren't comedians, they're criminals. They're in jails, and they're not funny. They're sad and angry," he said.

“No, there's something else that predicts success in comedy.”

***

Gil Greengross, a University of Mexico anthropologist, thinks the secret to being funny is being smart. In fact, he’s written that humor itself is an “intelligence indicator.”

For a 2011 study published in the journal Intelligence, Greengross gave 400 undergrads a series of verbal and abstract-reasoning intelligence tests, and then measured them against history’s greatest yardstick of hilarity: writing captions for New Yorker cartoons.

The captions were then rated by the judges, who were blind to any of the participants’ identifiable information.

As he expected, the students who scored higher on the intelligence measures also created the funniest captions. This makes sense. According to all of the theories of humor, wit involves putting discordant ideas together quickly, all while being perceptive enough to offend your audience a little, but not too much.

“You need to be clever to see the things that are wrong in the world and to make them okay,” McGraw said. “Smart people are better-read and they know more about the world. They can connect these dots.”

“Men are trying harder than women to make others laugh. They tend to produce or try to produce more humor in the presence of women."

Greengross said that when he’s run the same tests with professional stand-up comedians, they produced much higher vocabulary scores than the students did.

And of course, the professionals “were able to produce caption after caption that were really funny.”

But -- prepare to cringe, fellow feminists -- Greengross found that the male students wrote more and funnier captions than the female students did, even though the men had only slightly larger vocabularies on average.

Of course, it could be that writing New Yorker captions isn’t how women best express humor. Or it could be that women don’t feel as comfortable spouting a bunch of violations, however benign, in a clinical setting.

The evolutionary explanation, though, is that women use humor as a proxy to select the cleverest mates from a crowd. It’s apparently how we determine mental fitness without forcing men to tattoo their SAT scores on their foreheads.

One key part of the experiment, though, was that the men were actually attempting more jokes. They wrote more captions overall, so they had more total successes.

“Men are trying harder than women to make others laugh. They tend to produce or try to produce more humor in the presence of women,” Greengross said. “On the other hand, women tend to laugh more than men in general, and especially when men are present.”

But humor can function as a mate-luring strategy for women, too: The authors found that the female participants who had started having sex earlier or had a greater number of sexual partners were also the ones who produced the funnier captions.

And of all of the different purposes of comedy, this might be the most subversive of all. It could be that office-cooler witticisms, stand-up routines, and sitcoms are just part of one big pickup line you never saw coming.

Olga Khazan is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where she covers health.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/the-dark-psychology-of-being-a-good-comedian/284104/

Why Moammar Gadhafi Was So Strange

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience.com, 10/22/11

In the aftermath of Moammar Gadhafi's death, obituaries have been quick to mention the Libyan dictator's strange ways. He traveled with a retinue of attractive all-female bodyguards, dressed in military uniforms and make-up. He sported colorful, attention-grabbing outfits. He preferred to receive visitors in a full Bedouin tent, even erecting one in Bedford, N.Y., in 2009 on property rented from Donald Trump.

Plenty of dictators have indulged in strange behavior, but Gadhafi's quirks were unique, according to Jerrold Post, a political psychologist at George Washington University. One thing he did have in common with other dictators, Post told LiveScience, was a narcissistic personality.

"His language was extremely narcissistic, 'My people, they all love me, they all love me, they will protect me," Post said. "He found it inconceivable that his people did not all love him."

Weird dictators

Many dictators are known for odd behavior. Mao Zedong, the Chinese communist leader, allegedly refused to brush his teeth, according to "The Private Life of Chairman Mao," (Random House, 1996), a memoir by Li Zhisui, Mao's physician. Mao's disinterest in dental hygiene may have heralded back to his peasant roots.

In other dictator-dental news, late Turkmenistan "president for life" Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov, who ruled until his death in 2006, suggested that his subjects chew on bones to strengthen their teeth, drawing the lesson from dogs. Niyazov also took to renaming months after members of his own family.

Some leaders' eccentricities seem designed to cement their power. Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who ruled Haiti from 1957 until 1971, once ordered all black dogs in Haiti put to death after being told that a political rival had transformed into one. Duvalier built a cult of personality around himself, reviving voodoo traditions and declaring himself God's chosen one.

But quirkiness is by no means a universal trait among dictators, Post cautioned. Saddam Hussein, for example, was not known for weirdness, nor was Joseph Stalin. [Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

Beyond quirky

What many dictators do have in common, Post said, is a trait called "malignant narcissism."  Malignant narcissists are extremely self-absorbed, and see themselves as saviors of their people. They have a paranoid attitude, blaming outside forces when things go wrong. Gadhafi, for example, blamed both the West and Al Qaeda for the Libyan uprising, even claiming that someone had slipped hallucinogens into the rebels' Nescafe.

Malignant narcissists also lack a conscience, and are willing to use whatever aggression is necessary to get their way, Post said. And because they are in total control, there are few societal checks on their personalities.

"As dictators, as opposed to democratic leaders, they are able to shape their country to fit their own psychology," Post said.

Gadhafi, however, may have gone beyond typical malignant narcissism, Post said. Some of Gadhafi's behavior was reminiscent of borderline personality disorder, he said, a disorder marked by unstable mood and behavior.

"He could get really high when he was succeeding, and act as if he felt he was totally invulnerable," Post said. When things weren't going well, Gadhafi could be just as unstable, as in his insistence during the Libyan uprising that his people loved him.

Bizarre behaviors

Some of Gadhafi's seemingly bizarre behaviors make more sense when viewed in the light of borderline personality and malignant narcissism. In the 1970s, for example, Gadhafi funded and supported the American religious movement The Children of God, which held among its more controversial beliefs that sex was an acceptable recruitment and conversion tool.

The leader of The Children of God, David Brandt Berg, was possibly himself a malignant narcissist, said Stephen Kent, a University of Alberta sociologist who has studied the group.

"Especially in the early days, Berg was virulently anti-American, and that anti-American virulence fit very well with Gadhafi," Kent told LiveScience. "Each thought the other legitimized himself."

Thanks to The Children of God's free love tendencies — they called proselytizing with sex "flirty fishing" — at least one child was born from a union between a woman in the group and a high-ranking official in Gadhafi's regime, Kent said.

Beneath the grandiosity

Underlying the delusions of grandeur of a malignant narcissist, however, is a sense of deep insecurity and low self-esteem, Post said.

Sometimes this insecurity has tragic consequences. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was insecure about his lack of education, Post said, and he took out that sense of insecurity in deadly purges against intellectuals in his country.

As for Gadhafi, his sense of narcissism likely stayed with him until the end, Post said.

"He was not so psychotic that he could deny what was happening or that he'd lost his power," he said. "Having said that, I think he found it difficult to believe that it was his own people rising against him."

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

l   Top 10 Controversial Psychiatric Disorders

l   Top 10 Crazy Cults

l   Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind

http://news.yahoo.com/why-moammar-gadhafi-strange-125205040.html

Delving Into the Mind of a Dictator

Stephanie Pappas, , LiveScience Senior Writer

The real thoughts and motivations of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who stepped down one day after refusing to cede power, may never be truly known. Even so, psychologists and political scientists who have studied past dictators and authoritarian figures think they have a read on a man who held desperately to power for 30 years.

Turns out, Mubarak may have less in common than one might expect with brutal dictators. And his loathing to give up power may have to do with an underlying identity crisis of sorts in which he came to see himself as Egypt, scientists say.

Now that Mubarak has left a pedestal he held for so long, fleeing Cairo for the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, his physical and mental health will likely take a hit as the shock sinks in. [Read: Could You Become a Dictator? ]

Malignant narcissism

Dictators tend to share certain traits, researchers say, including a willingness to shut down opposition with brutality. Consider Joseph Stalin, who ruled Russia with an iron fist from 1924 to 1953. Official Russian counts from the time suggest that Stalin was responsible for three million executions and deaths in gulags alone. Some scholars place his body count as high as 60 million.

This disregard for life might seem to be the mark of a madman, said Paul Gregory, an economist at the University of Houston and the author of "Politics, Murder and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nicolai Bukharin and Anna Larina" (Hoover Institution Press, 2010). But in a study published online Dec. 7, 2010, in the Journal of Comparative Economics, Gregory contends that Stalin's actions were chillingly rational. By analyzing Soviet records, Gregory found that Stalin killed more innocent citizens when information about true political enemies was foggy. In other words, when he knew his enemies, he took them out. When he didn't, he cast a wider net.

"If your true enemies are concealing themselves, it makes sense to overkill," Gregory told LiveScience. "The cost of killing an innocent person is low or zero as far as the dictator is concerned."

Stalin's behavior is typical of the "malignant narcissism" of many dictators, said Jerrold Post, the director of the political psychology program at George Washington University and author of "Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World" (Cornell University Press, 2004).

Malignant narcissists share grandiose dreams of glory, little empathy for others, paranoia and the willingness to use whatever aggression is necessary to meet their goals, Jerrold told LiveScience. And although Mubarak's regime allowed torture and repression, the former Egyptian president lacked the sadism of a Stalin or a Saddam Hussein, both of whom were known for sending close advisers home in body bags.

"I think he's really more of an authoritarian personality," Jerrold said of Mubarak.

Old and out of touch

Jerrold blames Mubarak's out-of-touch reaction to the protests in part on his age. When a nation revolts against an aging dictator, Jerrold said, the leader's response is usually to dig in. Longstanding dictators rarely realize that what worked in the past may no longer help them hold onto power, he said.

"People call on past repertories to look at present problems, and in doing so, may not really be able to respond creatively to the moment," Jerrold said.

Mubarak's speech the night before he stepped down suggests he also had trouble differentiating his own well-being from Egypt's, said Georgi Derlugian, a sociologist at Northwestern University who studies revolutions.

"Dictators that have been in power for a long time identify themselves more and more with their own country," Derlugian told LiveScience. Mubarak, like many dictators, likely viewed repression and torture of his people as a way to protect himself and, by extension, Egypt, Derlugian said.

As far as the dictator is concerned, "that's what service to the nation requires," Derlugian said. "There's no contradiction in their mind."

Where deposed dictators go

It's not yet clear why Mubarak gave a defiant speech yesterday (Feb. 10) only to hand over power today (Feb. 11). But voluntarily handing over power is all but impossible for entrenched dictators, Derlugian said.

"Mubarak remained in power decade after decade, seeing presidents of other countries come and go, seeing governments of Israel come and go and hearing year after year that he was responsible for keeping peace and stability in the most dangerous region in the world," Derlugian said. "By the time you're 70 or 80 years old, your personal identity has completely merged with this historical role."

Without his power, Derlugian said, Mubarak is likely to "spend a lot of time in shock and puzzlement." He may be unable to understand what went wrong. The shock of loss may even affect his health, Derlugian said.  

"A lot of dictators who pass from power in this way develop severe coronary or other illness," Derlugian said. "It's like this shocking divorce, or the loss of a loved one."

You can follow LiveScience Senior Writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110215/sc_livescience/delvingintothemindofadictator

Could You Become a Dictator?

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

Famously sadistic dictators like Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin share a personality profile marked by narcissism and paranoia, political psychologists say. But what of authoritarian-style dictators like Hosni Mubarak? Could an ordinary, well-meaning person turn into a repressive despot?

Perhaps not overnight, but power does have an effect on the psyche, according to psychological research. The most famous example is the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students were randomly assigned to be either "prisoners" or "guards" in a makeshift "prison." The guards became so abusive, and the prisoners so passive, that the experiment was shut down after less than a week.

Extremes aside, more mundane sorts of power can also influence behavior. A 2010 study published in the journal Psychological Science found that people primed to think of themselves as well-off were worse at reading other people's emotions than people primed to think of themselves as poor. The reason, said study co-author Dacher Keltner of the University of California-Berkeley, may be that people without much power need to build alliances with one another to get by. People in charge, on the other hand, can do what they please.

When you get power, "you really stop carefully attending to your social environment," Keltner told LiveScience. "You don't read the emotions of other people well. You don't have a clear understanding of important social conditions like poverty."

On top of that, Keltner said, "power just makes you more impulsive and self-serving and inappropriate in how you behave."

It may also isolate you from others. A 2006 study, also published in Psychological Science, used an unusual method to demonstrate this phenomenon: The researchers had participants draw a letter "E" on their foreheads. First, though, the volunteers were primed to think of themselves as either more or less powerful. The more powerful group was three times more likely to draw the "E" on their forehead so that it would be backwards to others. The implication, the researchers reported, is that powerful people become more self-oriented and care less about the perspectives of others.

A third study, this one published in 2009 in Psychological Science, found that people trained to think of themselves as powerful were more likely to believe they had control over a situation – even when they were participating in a random activity such as rolling dice.

"The illusion of personal control might be one of the ways in which power often leads to its own demise," the researchers wrote.

Put it all together and you have a perfect recipe for tyranny: Get a taste of power, stop noticing or listening to others, and finally begin to believe you're in charge of random events. But power isn't all good or all bad, noted Ohio State University psychologist Richard Petty. His research suggests that power gives people confidence in the beliefs they already hold.

In one study, published in 2007 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Petty and his co-authors asked participants to write down positive or negative thoughts and then prompted them to feel more powerful. Those who wrote positive thoughts became more positive, while those who had dark thoughts in mind became more negative.

"Power magnifies whatever is in your head," Petty told LiveScience. "We think it kind of explains why powerful people do more good and do more bad."

You can follow LiveScience Senior Writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110212/sc_livescience/couldyoubecomeadictator

Egypt and Iran; Different looks at people power

Robert H. Reid, Associated Press

CAIRO – No sooner had the announcement come than the streets of Cairo exploded in joyful celebration. The hated autocrat was gone. A new era was ushered in with cheers, tears and the cacophony of car horns.

And so it was in Tehran — 32 years before to the day.

On Feb. 11, 1979, the commander of the Iranian air force announced on national radio that the armed forces were withdrawing from the fight to save the American-backed regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who had already fled the country three weeks before in the face of burgeoning street protests against his autocratic rule.

With the military gone, the Iranian monarchy collapsed and with it any chance that the shah would return from what had been spun as a vacation — ironically to Anwar Sadat's Egypt.

As the troops returned to barracks, Tehran erupted into wild celebrations — punctuated by the deafening din of thousands of horns.

The popular revolt against the shah raised alarm bells in the West, which saw the shah as a trusted ally and counterweight to hard-line Arab regimes and Palestinian radicals. The face of the revolution was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose demeanor, vehemently anti-American rhetoric and stern interpretation of Islam challenged not only Western interests but also Western values.

Egypt's revolutionaries of today represent a broad spectrum of Internet-savvy youth, mainstream politicians and Islamists — bound together by hatred of President Hosni Mubarak and a desire for a more open, democratic system. The closest thing to a symbol of Egypt's uprising was a 30-year-old Google executive, whose passionate, tearful remarks made on a private television station after his release from detention drove many modern-thinking, middle-class Egyptians into the streets.

Nevertheless, the images from Tehran a generation ago and from Cairo on Friday's "Night of Liberation" were uncannily familiar. The palpable sense of relief. The euphoria among the government's opponents. The carnival-like atmosphere. The explosion of national pride. And the blind faith that the new regime would be more just, more equitable and more democratic than the old.

Iran's masses were no less hungry for democracy than the Egyptians who crowded into Cairo's central Tahrir Square to demand an end to Mubarak's rule. Where the Iranians put their trust in Muslim clerics to bring about a just and equitable society, the Egyptians turned to the secular-minded army to give the Mubarak regime a final push.

Egypt's young revolutionaries used the tools of the 21st century — the Internet, Facebook and Twitter — to organize the first protests in late January. After the government unplugged the Internet and shut down mobile phones, Egyptians turned to Arabic language television stations — Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and Alhurra — for word of what was happening on the streets.

No such technological wonders were available to the Iranian opposition. Messages and sermons from Ayatollah Khomeini, who was in exile in Paris until the final days of the uprising, were spread by cassette tapes that were smuggled into the country, copied and distributed to mosques throughout the country.

From the mosques, information spread by word of mouth through a nationwide network of clerics and intellectuals who grew ever bolder as the shah's security services began to disintegrate.

Instead of turning to the likes of Al-Jazeera for news, Iranians relied on crackling shortwave broadcasts by the British Broadcasting Corp.'s Persian language service, which the shah's government tried repeatedly to jam. At one time or another, nearly every Western journalist in Iran pretended to be from the BBC when confronted by protesters who were sometimes hostile to Americans. Every Khomeini supporter seemed to know how to say in English: "Ah, you BBC? BBC very good."

Tehran University was transformed into a giant speaker's corner, where people could come every day to listen to anti-regime clerics rail against the shah and his American backers.

It took Egypt's demonstrators only 18 days to force out Mubarak, who had ruled the country for nearly three decades. Although arson and looting broke out briefly in late January — presumably instigated by state security to frighten the public and discredit the protests — the anti-Mubarak movement was remarkably peaceful and disciplined. Most of the violence appeared instigated by the police and thugs believed paid by the ruling party, who ran wild for a few days until the army reined them in.

Banks closed and ATMs ran out of cash. Groceries began running short on supplies. By and large, however, life in much of the capital continued as it had before — even as crowds in Tahrir Square grew ever larger.

Not so the Iranian uprising. It began in January 1978 with street demonstrations against the shah. By the end of the year, the country was paralyzed by strikes and demonstrations. Government ministries all but ceased functioning. Airlines stopped flying to Tehran. With a daily 9 p.m. curfew, which was brutally enforced in the capital, Iranians huddled in their dark and heat-less homes, listening to the periodic bursts of gunfire which punctuated the night.

Protesters grew ever more violent. The shah's Imperial Guard would not hesitate fire on unarmed demonstrators, some of whom were willing — sometimes even eager — for martyrdom. Comrades were cheer and shout "martyr" as their fellow protesters fell to gunfire.

Violence was not limited to government forces. Young demonstrators hurled firebombs — gasoline poured into soft drink bottles and lit with a rag — at the Guardsmen. A police colonel was dragged from his car and beaten into a fatal coma as protesters ripped off parts of his uniform and threw them into the trees.

Food supplies, electricity and cooking gas were scarce.

As chaos engulfed Tehran, the shah left on Jan. 16, 1979, leaving the government in the hands of his appointed prime minister. Khomeini returned two weeks later to a massive reception by millions of people.

Less than two weeks after Khomeini returned, air force technicians at a base in Tehran mutinied, setting off a day and night of street fighting. A monarchial system that had lasted for more than 2,000 years crumbled.

Egypt's revolt achieved its main goal — Mubarak's ouster — before the conflict had torn apart the fabric of Egyptian society.

After Mubarak resigned Friday, Egyptians partied in the streets, waved huge flags, set off fireworks and sang patriotic songs until dawn.

Three decades before, the collapse of the shah's regime triggered three terrifying days of looting, arson and street fighting. Pro-Khomeini groups stormed prisons and police stations, looting weapons and hunting down Imperial Guardsmen and other members of the old regime. The yearlong revolution had polarized society and built up tensions that exploded as the Khomeini loyalists struggled to restore order.

A fanatical mullah broadcast a call on state radio to hunt down and punish foreigners, prompting Khomeini's staff to issue a counter order to protect non-Iranians. Rival militias seized the Intercontinental Hotel, home to most foreign journalists, until Khomeini loyalists arrived and ran them off.

The shah's regime resisted the demands of the street and collapsed, setting in motion social and political forces that still trouble the country and the region a generation later. Mubarak stepped down, and the world now waits to see if the fallout will be different.

Robert H. Reid, Middle East Regional Editor for The Associated Press, has covered the region since 1978.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110212/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_mideast_two_revolutions