Still, there was no disputing her success. Everyone in the room, including me, was laughing. But my own laugh, I now feel qualified to say, can be explained quite well by “superiority theory,” a way of looking at humor that goes back to those two classical cutups, Plato and Aristotle. Because I was in this company of humor experts, I had adopted a snobbish detachment and was more judicious in my laugh allocations. When everyone laughed with Smith, I laughed at them for taking the easy bait.

To do so in such distinguished company seemed blasphemous. In the interest of fairness, I should point out that it was clearly not a premeditated joke; she saw the opportunity and seized it. I’m sure she’s otherwise hilarious. Still, my initial, uncharitable reaction was to chide her for taking the easy way out. Why not, oh, I don’t know: “My name is Moira Smith and I’m a jokeaholic.”

What happened way back in July is that I cashed in an innocence, a virginity I didn’t know I had. It started right away with Smith’s joke. I laughed, for sure, but I wasn’t laughing at the joke. I was laughing at everyone in the room for laughing at the joke. I mean, really? She’d taken the most obvious premise that presents itself when standing at a microphone and introducing oneself — it’s one of the two reasons you don’t let teenagers near microphones — and then did very little with it.

At least, it wasn’t funny in the traditional way, not that I even remember what that would be, because this conference screwed with my sense of humor.

They’ve been holding these conferences since 1976. When this year’s big event came to Boston University over the summer, I was sent there by an editor who thought it would be funny. It was not.

In the audience are 30 or so of the world’s leading thinkers on the subject of humor. And in that moment, those analysts of amusement, those great comic intellectuals, did something I did not: They roared with genuine laughter.

“My name is Moira Smith,” she says. And then she does this. It’s just sitting there for the taking. “And I’m not an alcoholic.”

THE FIRST SPEAKER in the first lecture on my first and only day in the academic humor world is a small woman from Indiana University.

IN MANY WAYS, Peter McGraw comes across as pretty benign himself, which I guess is fitting. In person, he’s funny and not afraid to work blue, but in that harmless, nice-frat-guy sort of way. This is unlike most of the people at the conference, including many who asked me not to point out how unfunny they were, because reporters who butt in on their conferences always point this out. Anyway, McGraw is 6-5, comes from a background in the psychology of consumer decision making, and now runs a lab at the business school of the University of Colorado at Boulder. He calls it the Humor Research Lab, or HuRL for short. Get it? McGraw is the kind of guy who finds stuff like that funny.

“Is it too soon to start making tsunami jokes?” he asked. At that moment, it had been about four months since the devastation in Japan. Then he showed a photo on the screen from an “Offensive T-Shirt Party” he’d hosted back home in Colorado.

Other than my editor’s vague promise that it would be funny, McGraw was the chief reason I was attending the conference. He had recently claimed to have discovered the Holy Grail of humor. Building on the work of a professor named Tom Veatch, he had developed the grand unifying theory that explained it all — why we laugh and why we do not. McGraw calls it “benign violation theory.”

I took some hope, though, from the one man in the crowd who laughed the loudest. Comedians like to say there are many different types of laughter, but only one type of silence. Moira Smith’s joke had elicited what I would describe as a honking, gummy-toothed, full-face seizure from a psychology PhD named Peter McGraw.

A sense of humor, I thought, was as internal and involuntary as any of our other senses. But as I sat there overanalyzing Smith’s joke, I realized I was making a natural experience unnatural. I didn’t like it. It was like that feeling you get when you’re a kid and you start paying too much attention to your own heartbeat, then feel as if it’s going to up and stop on you.

I should have trusted White, for, as I was quickly finding out, studying humor as an academic discipline has nothing to do with being a student of comedy, which I have long been. No, analyzing humor is a box that can’t be unchecked. The frog does not come back to life.

Let me back up a minute and say that prior to stepping into this world, the only thing I knew about humor analysis came from E.B. White, the great surgeon of the English language: “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can,” he wrote in 1941, “but the thing dies i n the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

A short time after he finishes his talk, he’s waiting in line at a Chipotle for a chicken burrito. “Laughter,” he says, “is an imperfect predictor that people find something funny. Sometimes we hide it if we find something funny, and the reverse is often used to smooth a social interaction.”

When I thought about this later, I wondered if that was what happened when the room exploded over Moira Smith’s quip. Or maybe that was just the standard protocol in the academic humor world; everyone laughs at everyone else’s jokes, the same way everyone politely claps whether they actually liked the talk or not. Or maybe my brain was now just doing an impression of Woody Allen’s neuroses.

Regardless, in my time in the academic humor world I was constantly learning what I didn’t know, then constantly realizing that I was happy to have not known it to begin with. Here’s a brief history of those things:

Aristotle and Plato were big proponents of the “superiority theory,” which says that we find humor in the misfortune of others; Thomas Hobbes would later describe that amusement as a feeling of “sudden glory.” They probably would have liked looking at those “fail” photos on Failblog.org. The other main doctrine, “incongruity theory,” which has been attributed to everyone from Blaise Pascal to Immanuel Kant, argues that humor occurs at the moment you realize there is an incongruity between your expectations and the payoff, as when a street performer says: “Don’t try this at home, kids. Try it at school.” And then there was Sigmund Freud, whose “relief theory” claims that humor was a way to safely release suppressed thoughts and emotions, because he liked to take all the fun out of everything.

Those are the biggies. They all sound plausible to me, which is lousy. But within the canon, there have long been things that resist explanation, which I like. Take being tickled, for instance. Most people do not like it, and yet they laugh — except for when they don’t. My 2-year-old son laughs when I tickle him, but recently, when a waiter at an Italian restaurant kept trying to, he was met again and again by a dirty look. Tickling has long been an enigma to scholars looking for the grand theory about what makes people laugh. Why can’t you tickle yourself? Why wouldn’t you laugh if the guy next to you on the subway started to tickle you?

But within McGraw’s benign violation theory, there is an explanation for the tickling conundrum. For unlike most of the predominant theories, McGraw’s addresses not just why something is funny, but also why something is not.