Take Ben Carson, one of the current front-runners. His solid performance in the Fox News debate owed much to his amusing responses to difficult questions. According to research I carried out with my students Austin Eubanks and Jason Miller on speaking time and audience response at the first two Republican debates, we found that when speaking time was taken into account, the audience laughed at Mr. Carson’s quips comparatively more than they did at Donald J. Trump’s. In other words, not only did Mr. Carson outdo the front-runner at the time by using his speaking time effectively, but he often did so by responding to even difficult, gotcha-style questions.

Similarly, when he said of Mr. Trump, “He’s an O.K. doctor,” after the latter expressed his views on vaccines and autism, Mr. Carson revealed his calm personality and appeal. He’s a likable man who is not so eager to confront other candidates.

Mr. Carson has also benefited from partisan audience reaction after a tough question. When he was pressed on his relationship with Mannatech, a supplement company that paid millions to settle a lawsuit for deceptively marketing its ability to cure illnesses like cancer, Mr. Carson referred to the challenge as “total propaganda” twice during his response, suggesting a lack of preparation on his part, but the audience came to his rescue when it booed the CNBC moderator Carl Quintanilla into commercials.

Of course, the huge debate audiences — the Fox News debate drew almost 27 million viewers, and the CNN debate 24 million — are in large part a result of the presence of Mr. Trump, a reality star, and the conflict he brings with him wherever he goes. From the start, he was the target of the so-called gotcha questions: Consider the discussion when the moderator Megyn Kelly, in the Fox debate, challenged Mr. Trump with his own words: “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.’ ”

Mr. Trump’s response — “Only Rosie O’Donnell” — won that particular partisan audience to his side, at least briefly. To deflect criticism, he often uses humor, provoking audience laughter, and laughter is actually a reliable indicator of how unified a party is behind a candidate. From our analysis, we found that Mr. Trump has been far and away the greatest provocateur of audience laughter, responsible for nearly 40 percent of it in the Fox and CNN debates.