Drum roll, please — an online search for the world’s funniest joke has produced a winner.
In a year-long experiment called LaughLab, a British psychology professor asked thousands of people around the world to rate the humour value of a list of jokes; they could also add their own favourites.
In December, Richard Wiseman and his associates announced the front-runner, a hoary old gag involving fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick, Dr Watson.
But in the final tally of about 2 million votes for 40 000 jokes, announced on Thursday, a new joke emerged as a round-the-world rib-tickler:
”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 cellphone 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?”’
”Many of the jokes submitted received higher ratings from certain groups of people, but this one had real universal appeal,” said Wiseman, who has published a book based on the experiment.
Wiseman, who teaches at the University of Hertfordshire in southern England, said the research revealed that different countries preferred different types of jokes. Respondents were asked to rate jokes on a five-point scale from ”not very funny” to ”very funny”.
Germans were the most likely to find all types of jokes funny, while Canadians were the least amused of the 10 top responding nations.
The British, Irish, Australians and New Zealanders favoured jokes involving wordplay, while continental Europeans liked jokes with a surreal bent.
Americans and Canadians preferred jokes invoking a strong sense of superiority — either because a character looks stupid or is made to look stupid by someone else.
Computer analysis also threw up a number of arcane humour ”facts”.
Not all animal jokes, for example, are created equal — jokes mentioning ducks were rated as funnier than other jokes.
And length matters. Jokes containing 103 words were thought to be especially funny. The winning joke is 102 words long. – Sapa-AP