“Laughter and mirth are not the same thing. I can elicit laughter by electrically stimulating parts of the brain,” the neurologist Richard Restak said the other night, onstage at the Rubin Museum.

Staring at a computer screen in his Abita Springs home office, Bunny Matthews cast a critical eye on a recent depiction of his famous “Nint’ Ward” cartoon couple, Vic and Nat’ly Broussard. “I never ...