Stop Me If You’ve Heard This

3/13/07


What I love about tripping the light-fantastic which is the internet is that it’s impossible to know what kind of madness you’re going to run across at the next click of the mouse. Will it be urine-obsessed Europeans drinking forensic evidence out of martini glasses? Or perhaps, hiding in the backwater of ones and zeros we will discover a simultaneously awesome and deeply disturbing Hasselhoff video. Or maybe, like me yesterday, you’ll stumble into one of the oddest informal “scientific” research projects of all time.

Second only to finding weird crap online is my love for finding weird crap online that has kind of just been languishing out there for awhile; there’s nothing more stupendous than encountering somebody’s crazy-ass webpage from 1996. The science project I came into contact with, through a bizarre set of Google results I don’t even want to get into, isn’t quite that old, but it is from 2001, and I like to think it paints the last year I can really remember being really happy with my country in a very fitting light:

Scientists investigating laughter pick
the world's funniest joke.
Sydney Morning Herald ^ Thursday, December 20, 2001 Various
Posted on 12/19/2001 4:38:10 PM PST by aculeus

I’ll just let you all have a moment while you ponder the chain of events that must have transpired to create such a project. Clearly these boys have watched Monty Python entirely too many times. (See the skit here!) I would kill to see that grant proposal.

Scientist #1: What should we research, Scientist #2? I was thinking that cancer or AIDS looks promising. And they’re making fantastic progress
with that boner pill…

Scientist #2: What do you think is funny?

Scientist #1: Huh? Uhm, I was just thinking about our future, you know, helping
mankin—

Scientist #2: Knock-knock.

Scientist #1: What? Uh…who’s there?

Scientist #2: My ex-girlfriend.

Scientist #1: (Sigh) Not this again. My ex-girlfriend who?

Scientist #2: I don’t care what my bitch-ass ex-girlfriend says; I’m just as fucking funny as John Cleese, damnit. And I’m going to prove it!

Scientist #1: I want a new lab partner.

The project was nicknamed “Laughlab,” and it was devised by Dr. Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire in England. His team requested jokes from the public at large, and “the response has been enormous,” Wiseman said, “with over 10,000 jokes submitted and over 100,000 people in over 70 countries rating them.” The ratings were posted via a website, on a scale of 1-5 (“not very funny” to “very funny”) called a “Giggleometer.” That was just in the preliminary stages, it appears, as I located updates since that post, where Wiseman and his team announced the “World’s Funniest Joke” after a grand total of some 40,000 submissions and over 2 million ratings. And what was the overall winner? The following joke, submitted by the hilariously-named Gurpal* Gosall from Manchester, got the highest overall global rating:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to
be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and
calls the emergency services. He gasps: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The
operator says: "Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There
is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: "OK, now
what?"

That’s pretty funny, I must admit. This particular joke appealed to just about everyone, regardless of nationality, age or gender.

Here’s one of the runners-up from Sweden which I especially liked:

A guy phones the local hospital and yells: "You've gotta send help! My wife's in
labor!" The nurse says: "Calm down. Is this her first child?" He replies: "No!
This is her husband!"

The study, strange as it was, returned some very interesting if not seemingly useless data. Like the fact that different cultures find different things amusing. And, shock of all shocks, men and women have different senses of humor. I suppose Dr. Wiseman probably could have deduced that by watching any stand-up comedian ever.

Americans and Canadians seem to prefer jokes where one subject looks superior to another. We like to make others look stupid to feel better about ourselves, in other words. Britains, Australians and New Zealanders preferred word plays, which I find the absolute lowest form of humor, and can barely be called a joke. Puns are the dry-hump of joke telling. Other Europeans like the Danes and the French preferred more esoteric and surreal humor. Like this one:

A dog went to a telegram office, took out a blank form and wrote: "Woof. Woof.
Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof."
The clerk examined the paper and
politely told the dog: "There are only nine words here. You could send another
‘Woof’ for the same price."
The dog said, “But that would make no sense at
all."

One interesting finding was that the Germans seemed to find just about everything, no matter what type of joke, funny. I’ve never thought of the Teutonic people as possessing of a huge sense of humor, but apparently if you’re looking for an uproarious, undiscriminating audience, the Krauts are your best bet.

But by far the most fascinating of Wiseman’s findings is computer analysis that showed the closer a joke was to 103 words long, the funnier it was thought to be. The winning joke about the hunters contained 102 words.

If you want to read some more jokes, here’s a link to the top jokes by country. I think the jokes from Belgium, England and the UK especially amusing, and the German one at the bottom is just plain odd. Still not enough humor? There are a few more jokes listed in the original story I found here.



*Hanni, we totally have to name our first born “Gurpal!” It’s a Sikh name meaning “Protected by the Guru.” Gurpal Jett. I don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl, that’s gold.


Sources: icWales.com – World’s Funniest Joke No Laughing Matter!
Free Republic – Scientists investigating laughter