The funniest joke ever told

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zz from the guardian

What's the funniest joke ever told? Richard Wiseman took a scientific
approach to answering some age-old questions

In 2001 I started to think about the possibility of really searching for
the world's funniest joke. I knew that there would be a firm scientific
underpinning for the project, because some of the world's greatest
thinkers, including Freud, Plato and Aristotle, had written extensively
about humour.

I got the green light from the British Association for the Advancement of
Science (BAAS) for my plan for an international internet-based project
called \"LaughLab\". I would set up a website that had two sections. In one
part, people could input their favourite joke. In the second section,
people could answer a few simple questions about themselves (such as their
sex, age and nationality), and then rate how funny they found various jokes
randomly selected from the archive. During the course of the year, we would
be able to discover scientifically what makes different groups of people
laugh, and which joke made the whole world smile.

The success of the project hinged on being able to persuade thousands of
people worldwide to participate. To help spread the word, we launched
LaughLab with an eye-catching photograph based on perhaps the most famous
(and, as we would go on to prove scientifically, least funny) joke in the
world: \"Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.\"

Within a few hours of opening the website, we received more than 500 jokes
and 10,000 ratings. Then we hit a major problem. Many of the jokes were
rude; absolutely filthy, in fact. Other jokes cropped up again and again
(\"What is brown and sticky?\" \"A stick\" was submitted more than 300 times).

Participants were asked to rate each joke on a five-point scale ranging
from \"not very funny\" to \"very funny\". Initially most of the material was
pretty poor, and so tended to obtain low percentages. Around 25-35% of
participants found the following jokes funny, and at that point they came
towards the top of the list:

Did you hear about the man who was proud when he completed a jigsaw within
30 minutes, because it said 'five to six years' on the box?

Texan: Where are you from?

Harvard graduate: I come from a place where we do not end our sentences
with prepositions.

Texan: OK - where are you from, jackass?

The top jokes had one thing in common - they create a sense of superiority
in the reader. The feeling arises because the person in the joke appears
stupid (like the man with the jigsaw), or pricks the pomposity of another
(like the Texan answering the Harvard graduate).

We were not the first to notice that people laugh when they feel superior.
The theory was described by Plato in The Republic. Plato was not a fan of
laughter. He thought it was wrong to laugh at the misfortune of others, and
that hearty laughter involved a loss of control that resulted in people
appearing to be less than fully human. In the middle ages, dwarves and
hunchbacks caused much merriment. In Victorian times, people laughed at the
mentally ill in psychiatric institutions.

Very early in LaughLab, we could see the superiority theory appearing in
the age-old battle of the sexes. This joke was rated as being funny by 25%
of women, but just 10% of men:

A husband stepped on to one of those penny scales that tell you your
fortune and weight, and dropped in a coin.

'Listen to this,' he said to his wife, showing her a small white card. 'It
says I'm energetic, bright, resourceful and a great person.'

'Yeah,' his wife nodded, 'and it has your weight wrong, too.'

One obvious possibility for the difference in ratings between the sexes is
that the butt of the joke is a man, and so appeals more to women. Or it
could be that women generally find jokes funnier than men. A year-long
study of 1,200 examples of laughing in everyday conversation revealed that
71% of women laugh when a man tells a joke, but only 39% of men laugh when
a woman tells a joke. To help try to tease apart these competing
interpretations, we studied the LaughLab archive to find jokes that put
down women, such as:

A man driving on a highway is pulled over by a police officer. The officer
asks: 'Did you know your wife and children fell out of your car a mile
back?' A smile creeps on to the man's face and he exclaims: 'Thank God! I
thought I was going deaf!'

On average, 15% of women rated as funny jokes putting down women, compared
with 50% of men.

Research suggests that men tell a lot more jokes than women. People with
high social status tend to tell more jokes than those lower down the
pecking order. Traditionally, women have had a lower social status than
men, and thus may have learned to laugh at jokes, rather than tell them.
Interestingly, the only exception to this status/joke-telling relationship
concerns self-disparaging humour, with people who have low social status
telling more self-disparaging jokes than those with high status.
Researchers examining self-disparaging humour produced by male and female
professional comedians found that 12% of male scripts contained
self-disparaging humour, compared with 63% of female scripts.

Quite quickly we downloaded 10,000 jokes, and the ratings from 100,000
people. The top joke at that early stage had been rated as funny by 46% of
participants. It involved the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes
and his long-suffering sidekick Dr Watson:

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson were going camping. They pitched their tent
under the stars and went to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night
Holmes woke Watson up and said: 'Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me
what you see.'

Watson replied: 'I see millions and millions of stars.'

Holmes said: 'And what do you deduce from that?'

Watson replied: 'Well, if there are millions of stars, and if even a few of
those have planets, it's quite likely there are some planets like earth out
there. And if there are a few planets like earth out there, there might
also be life.'

And Holmes said: 'Watson, you idiot, it means that somebody stole our tent.'

It is a classic example of two-tiered superiority theory. We laugh at
Watson for missing the absence of the tent, and also at the pompous way in
which Holmes delivered the news to Watson.

According to Freud, jokes act as a kind of psychological release valve that
helps prevent the pressure of repression from becoming too great. Many of
the jokes submitted to LaughLab supported Freud's ideas. Time and again, we
would get jokes about the stresses and strains of loveless marriage,
inadequate sexual performance and, of course, death:

I've been in love with the same woman for 40 years. If my wife finds out,
she'll kill me.

A patient says to his psychiatrist: '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've
completely ruined my life.\"'

We also examined another source of humour - computers. LaughLab attracted
lots of jokes about this topic (\"The software said it needed Windows 98 or
better, so I bought a Mac.\"). However, it also contained a few jokes
actually written by a computer.

We were keen to discover whether computers were funnier than humans, and so
entered into LaughLab several of the computer-composed jokes. The majority
of them received some of the lowest ratings in the archive. One example of
computer comedy, however, was surprisingly successful, and beat about 250
human jokes:

What kind of murderer has fibre? A cereal killer.

The results from another mini-experiment we conducted during LaughLab
supported the widely held theory that some words and sounds are funnier
than others, notably the mysterious comedy potential of the letter \"K\".
Early on in the experiment, we received the following submission:

There were two cows in a field. One said: 'Moo.' The other one said: 'I was
going to say that!'

We decided to use the joke to test the words/sounds theory. We re-entered
the joke into the archive several times, using a different animal and
noise: two tigers going \"Gruurrr\", two birds going \"Cheep\", two mice going
\"Eeek\", two dogs going \"Woof\" and so on. At the end of the study, we
examined what effect the different animals had on how funny people found
the joke. In third place came the original cow joke, second were two cats
going \"Meow\", but the winning animal-noise joke was:

Two ducks were sitting in a pond. One of the ducks said: 'Quack.' The other
duck said: 'I was going to say that!'

By the end of the project we had received 40,000 jokes, and had them rated
by more than 350,000 people from 70 countries. We identified our top joke.
It had been rated as funny by 55% of the people who had taken part in the
experiment:

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 silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says,
'OK, now what?'

The year-long search for the world's funniest joke concluded. Did we really
manage to find it? In fact, I don't believe such a thing exists. If our
research into humour tells us anything, it is that people find different
things funny. Women laugh at jokes in which men look stupid. The elderly
laugh at jokes involving memory loss and hearing difficulties. Those who
are powerless laugh at those in power. There is no one joke that will make
everyone guffaw. Perhaps we uncovered the world's blandest joke - the gag
that makes everyone smile but very few laugh out loud.

Five years after the study, I received a telephone call from a friend. He
explained that he had just seen a television documentary film about Spike
Milligan, comedian and co-founder of the Goons, and that the programme
contained a very early version of our winning joke. The documentary
contained a brief clip from a 1951 BBC programme called London Entertains
with the following early Goon sketch:

Michael Bentine: I just came in and found him lying on the carpet there.

Peter Sellers: Oh, is he dead?

Michael Bentine: I think so.

Peter Sellers: Hadn't you better make sure?

Michael Bentine: All right. Just a minute.

(Sound of two gunshots.)

Michael Bentine: He's dead.

Spike Milligan died in 2002, but with the help of the documentary-makers, I
contacted his daughter Sile, and she confirmed that it was highly likely
that her father would have written the material. We announced that we
believed we had identified the author of the world's funniest joke.

I am often asked what was my favourite joke from the thousands that flooded
in through the year. I always give the same reply:

A dog goes into a telegraph office, takes a blank form and writes: 'Woof,
Woof, Woof, Woof, Woof, Woof, Woof, Woof, Woof.'

The clerk examines the paper and politely tells the dog: 'There are only
nine words here. You could send another \"Woof\" for the same price.'

The dog looks confused and replies, 'But that would make no sense at all.'

Richard Wiseman, 2007.