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World's funniest joke revealed
« on: 2002-10-03 17:28:02 » |
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World's funniest joke revealed
Source: New Scientist
Author: Emma Young
Dated: 2002-10-02
A year-long online search for the world's funniest joke is over. The winning rib-tickler emerged from two million ratings of 40,000 entries, submitted by people from more than 70 countries.
The LaughLab experiment was run by psychologist Richard Wiseman and colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. The data showed clear national differences in humour, Wiseman says.
People from the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand preferred jokes involving word plays. American and Canadians found gags involving someone else looking stupid most entertaining. And many European countries preferred the surreal entries.
Overall, Germans gave the LaughLab jokes the highest ratings. But they did not express a strong preference for any type of joke. Wiseman's team travelled widely to examine global humour. They found that verbal jokes are common around the world, except in one country. "It is very, very difficult to find joke-telling in Japan," he says.
The results suggest that people from different parts of the world have fundamentally different senses of humour. "Humour is vital to communication and the more we understand about how people's culture and background affect their sense of humour, the more we will be able to communicate effectively," says Wiseman.
Quack quip
The LaughLab results might also help scientists attempting to get computers to create truly entertaining jokes, he says. And they should also provide tips for people. The team's analysis has also revealed the world's "funniest animal" - the duck. "If you're going to tell a joke involving an animal, make it a duck," Wiseman says.
Visitors to the site were asked to rate jokes on a five-point scale. Of ratings for the world's second funniest joke, 64 per cent were a four or five. But an entry submitted by a psychiatrist in Manchester, England, triumphed, with 65 per cent:
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?"
This joke won because it appeals to people in many countries, to men and women, and young and old alike, the data analysis shows. "This one had real universal appeal," Wiseman says.
However, about one third of jokes submitted to LaughLab were rejected by the moderators for being offensive or rude. Acceptable jokes had to be deemed suitable for a 10-year-old to repeat.
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rhinoceros
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Getting the joke
« Reply #1 on: 2002-10-03 17:33:36 » |
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Getting the joke
Source: New Scientist
Author: Alison Motluk
Dated: 2001-02-26
Different kinds of jokes are processed in different parts of the brain - but the amusement they cause is experienced in a single place.
Jokes are funny partly because they lead you along one line of thought, only to take you in an unexpected direction. Vinod Goel at York University in Toronto and Raymond Dolan of the Institute of Neurology in London were interested in knowing where in the brain this mental shift takes place.
The researchers used functional MRI to scan 14 healthy people while they listened to two types of jokes. Half the jokes were "semantic", for instance, "Why don't sharks bite lawyers? Professional courtesy". The other half were puns, such as "Why did the golfer wear two pairs of pants? He had a hole in one." Control jokes were set-ups with punchless punchlines.
To their surprise, the researchers found that the different jokes were processed in completely different brain areas. "We did find the shift," says Goel, but where it occurred depended on the joke type. "There was no central area."
Semantic jokes used a bilateral network in the temporal lobes, whereas the puns used areas near those for speech production, on the left side.
Laughing out loud
The jokes were intentionally lame, admits Goel, because they didn't want the volunteers to laugh out loud and move their heads inside the scanner. Nonetheless, volunteers were asked to rate them according to how funny they found them.
Intriguingly, when the volunteers found either kind of joke genuinely funny, they always activated another part of their brain, known as the medial ventral prefrontal cortex.
This "funny spot" only responded when the joke was amusing - "not if it was stupid, old or offensive," says Goel. And the more they liked a joke, the more the area lit up, the researchers report in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience (vol 4, p 237).
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rhinoceros
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Ridicule
« Reply #2 on: 2002-10-05 14:21:02 » |
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Talking about jokes and nationalities, I just remembered a funny French movie by Patrice Leconte, called "Ridicule".
It was a farce, where people were gathering to the court of Louis XVI for a chance to talk to him, but he would accept only the ones who displayed the highest "wit". Comic situations were arising as the contenders were trying to sabotage each other's attempts at displaying "wit".
At some point, there was a discussion about the British who had no "wit" at all, but only a strange mannerism called "humour".
A funny incident occured at the end of the movie, where one of the characters had just escaped the French Revolution and fled to England. At some point, the wind blew his hat off his head. The Frenchman said "I lost my hat!". A British replied "Well, at least, you didn't lose your head". He turned around and looked at the British man with a puzzled expression and after a while he exclaimed "Oh, I see. Humour!"
Here are a couple of reviews, a positive one and a negative one.
http://www.canoe.ca/JamMoviesReviewsR/ridicule.html
http://www.salon.com/dec96/ridicule961209.html
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