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Date Posted: 17:02:05 10/03/02 Thu
Author: Mt. healthy mountaineer
Subject: News Story: World's Funniest Joke - a scientific study

I liked the one with the weasels.


IN A PROJECT described as the largest-ever scientific study into humor, the British Association for the Advancement of Science asked Internet users around the world to submit their favorite jokes and rate the funniness of other people’s offerings.
More than 40,000 jokes from 70 countries and 2 million critiques later, this is it:
“A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head.
“The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: ‘My friend is dead! What can I do?’
“The operator, in a calm, soothing voice, says: ’Just take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.’
“There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says: ‘OK, now what?”’

SERIOUS PURPOSE
The project sounds like a joke itself, reminiscent of a famous sketch by British comedy troupe Monty Python called “The Funniest Joke in the World”. But the principal researcher behind Laugh Lab, University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman, says the effort has a serious purpose.
“The ‘world’s funniest joke’ is just a hook to get people into this,” he told MSNBC.com.
The results could provide a more objective benchmark for what’s considered funny, to be used in studies of brain function. Wiseman said the top-rated jokes were read to experimental subjects while their brain activity was being monitored.
“You saw a lot of activation in the prefrontal cortex,” he said. “We know when there’s damage to that area, people lose their sense of humor, and they don’t understand why a joke is funny.”

Wiseman hopes that future experiments could analyze the scientific basis of humor more precisely — although other researchers say humor is such a complex phenomenon that it may never be possible to completely pinpoint what makes a joke funny.

NATIONAL DIFFERENCES
The LaughLab researchers found significant differences between nations in the types of jokes they found funny.
People from Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand preferred gags involving word play, such as:
Patient: “Doctor, I’ve got a strawberry stuck up my bum.”
Doctor: “I’ve got some cream for that.”
Americans and Canadians favored jokes where people were made to look stupid.
Texan: “Where are you from?”
Harvard grad: “I come from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions.”
Texan: “OK — where are you from, jackass?”

Meanwhile, many Europeans liked gags that were surreal or made light of serious subjects such as illness, death and marriage:
A patient says, “Doctor, last night I made a Freudian slip, I was having dinner with my mother-in-law and wanted to say: ‘Could you please pass the butter?’
“But instead I said: ‘You silly cow, you have completely ruined my life.”’
Marriage-mocking also featured in the top American joke:
“A man and a friend are playing golf one day. One of the guys is about to chip onto the green when he sees a long funeral procession on the road next to the course.
“He stops in midswing, takes off his golf cap, closes his eyes, and bows down in prayer. His friend says: ‘Wow, that is the most thoughtful and touching thing I have ever seen. You are truly a kind man.’
“The man then replies: ‘Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.’”
Death earned big laughs in Scotland:
“I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.”
And animals figured prominently. Take the No. 1 joke in England:
“Two weasels are sitting on a bar stool. One starts to insult the other one. He screams, ‘I slept with your mother!’
“The bar gets quiet as everyone listens to see what the other weasel will do.
“The first again yells, ‘I slept with your mother!’
“The other says: ‘Go home dad, you’re drunk.”’

JOKE-OLOGY
The survey revealed other fun facts:
Of the countries rating the highest number of jokes, Germans, perhaps surprisingly, laughed the most. Canadians laughed least.
If you want to tell a funny animal joke, make it a duck.
Jokes containing 103 words were thought to be especially funny. The winning joke is 102 words long.
The most frequently submitted joke, at 300 times, was: “What’s brown and sticky? A stick.”
Researchers said no one ever found it funny.

MSNBC’s Alan Boyle, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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