Science Vs: The Funniest Joke in the World

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Radiolab. From WNYC.
See? Yeah. Hey, I'm Latif Nasser.
This is Radiolab. A few months back, I got an email from the ever effervescent Wendy Zuckerman, who hosts the podcast Science Versus.
Some of you might know it. And she invited me on her show.
Now, if you don't know the show, every episode they take a subject could be, I don't know, like intermittent fasting or menopause, or I think they did one on ghosts. They'll just pick a topic and then they'll dig up all the science they can find on it.
And they'll kind of go over it and they'll poke and prod it. How do we know what we know? What are a bunch of myths about this topic that we can bust? And then just in general, they try to make some sort of deeper sense of the thing.
So, you know, whether to do it or not to do it or to avoid it or to be scared of it or not be scared of it or whatever, like it helps you live your life. That's kind of the end.
So anyway, when Wendy invited me, I was like, of course, I'm going to come on your show. She told me very little of what we were going to do in advance.
And so I just kind of showed up and I had a blast. It was strange and fun and funny.
And I was like, okay, I want to share this with all the radio lovers too.

So here it is, an episode of Science Versus featuring yours truly. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus.
Today on the show, we're pitting facts against funnies. Today, we are going on a ridiculous journey together.
Today, it's a quest. It's like we're going to be heroes on this epic adventure.
And at times, things might get a little rude, a little naughty, Just in case there's kids listening.

But before we go any further, like all heroes' journeys,

we're going to need a companion.

You know, like Robin to Batman, Samwise Gamgee to Frodo Baggins,

Buzz to Woody.

And our companion today is a man who has gone on a great many scientific quests. He's travelled the world, put one foot in front of the other.
I give you, co-host of Radiolab, Latif Nasser. Hello! Hi, thank you for having me.
I'm honored to be the Frodo to your Batman or whatever. I'm honored to be here.
So, do you want to know our mission? Yeah. Okay.
We're going to find the funniest joke in the world. Wow.
That sounds dangerous. I know.
I know. It sounds dangerous.
It sounds big, but I'm going to keep it safe. I'm going to keep it safe.
And you might be thinking, why? Why are we doing this? So I wanted to tell you the origin story to this hero's journey. Okay.
right. And it doesn't get much bigger than this.
So the other day, I was feeling a little bit sad. I wanted a little pick me up.
So I went to Google the world's funniest joke. Right.
And you know what I got? What? It was trash. It was absolute trash.
Sure. Like I'm, you know, did you hear about the rancher who had 97 cows in his field? When he rounded them up, he had 100.
Oh, that was not even... That's real bad.
Yeah. That's solemn.
Like, you could tell that at a funeral. I was like, this is making me feel worse.
So I kept trying different search terms and then I got crap like this. What has many keys but can't open a single lock? What has many keys but can't open a single lock? A piano.
Yeah. I mean, that to me, that's not a joke.
That's like a riddle or like it makes sense. That's a riddle.
It like belongs in Lord of the Rings, right? Like it's like that's not... It's not a joke.
It's not a joke. It's not even close to a joke.
And so I just thought we could do better, you know, using research and rigor. You and me, we could do better.
We could find the best joke in the world. You know, there are other things that could cheer you up.
Like, I mean, sugar, antidepressants, a hug.

That's true.

There's like a lot of other things that you could do.

But just not to, I'm not judging your life for anything.

No, no, that's, you think Googling the funniest joke

probably wasn't like a long-term solution.

Not a long-term solution to your problems.

Yeah, that's basically where I'm coming from.

But I thought. You thought it was.
It couldn't hurt. Okay, so to start us off, I wanted to know if it was even possible to find the funniest joke in the world.
Yes, right. So I asked a bunch of comedians this very question.
Okay, great. So here are their answers.
So this is what US comedian Tig Notaro... Brilliant comedian.
Yes, said. She was not optimistic.
Do you think we can find this joke? Sure. Over and over and over again.
Because it's going to be different opinions. Yeah.
You know. Yeah.
And Takashi Wakasugi, who's from Japan, agreed with Tig saying, you know, comedy is subjective. People have different opinions.
That's why being a comic is so hard. And he said, you know, in many ways, telling a joke, it's like having sex.
We wanna. We wanna make you feel better.
We do always do our best. Right.
But sometimes, we don't know what you want, what you like.

Right.

And some people make noise if you like it.

And some people don't make noise

even though if they enjoy it.

Yeah, this is hard.

This is hard.

Yeah, it's hard, right?

And then so I asked my very good friend

who's an award-winning comic in Australia,

Penny Greenhalgh.

And I just like really thought I'd get a supportive answer here. Do you think I can do it? No.
Penny! I don't know. I reckon you'll try your hardest.
Let's try again. That was good.
We'll get a second take. Okay, so do you think I can do it? Wendy, I'm your friend and as your friend, I'm going to be honest with you.
Yeah. I don't think you will.
With friends like that? Yeah. Latif, I could see your face dropping.
Yeah. You know, but I just want you to know that some comics were on team Batman and Frodo, team Wendy and Latif.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, here's what Malaysian comic Dr.
Jason Leong said. Uh-huh, Okay.
Wow. I suppose technically it's possible.
I suppose technically it's possible. That's a ringing endorsement.
He even had a strategy for us. He said, get a few jokes, get a big enough sample size voting system going across the world.
Thought we could do it. Emmy Award winner Lonnie Love, in fact, had so much optimism for us that she even gave us our first clue.
It's just something simple that people usually laugh at. And it's right there in front of your face.
You know, it's right there. And it's something that everybody can laugh at.
It's funny because like to the critique of the premise was this is too complicated right yes and then and then this solution for the quest like it's just go simple which i think is right yeah i think that's right because like even if there's no such thing as the perfect joke there is somewhere the joke that more of the 8 billion people on planet Earth will laugh at than any other joke. Do you know what I mean? I think so.
I think so. I think it.
Yeah, that's right. Even if everyone in the world doesn't find it funny, it's still it's still it's helping lots of people.
Yeah. a smile on their face, you know.
Yes, yes, yeah. There must be something.
There's gotta be. Okay, with this enthusiasm, with this mindset, our hunt for the funniest joke in the world begins.
Yeah. And it's coming up just after this break.
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Latif here with Wendy Zuckerman presenting Science Versus.

Welcome back.

Today on the show, our biggest challenge yet to find the funniest joke in the world. We're here with Latif Nasser.
How are you feeling about our chances at this point? You know, I wouldn't bet for us, but I wouldn't bet against us. That is very ambiguous.
That's great. Do you have a joke to enter into our funniest joke competition? It's okay.

So this is the thing that my two-year-old said.

This is like a few months ago.

And it alternately makes me laugh and kind of horrifies me.

Okay, so one day I was going out.

He was sitting.

He was playing just by the door.

And I was going out.

And I was like, okay, bud. i'm going to take out the garbage and he goes why don't you take your face that was it he like completely roasted me like no nothing nothing before it nothing that that like it just came out of nowhere why don't you take your face? It just came out of nowhere.
Why don't you take your face? With the garbage. Because your face is garbage is what he's saying to me.
My son. My own son.
My own flesh and blood. That's pretty good.
That's pretty good. Take your face.
Our first entry into the world's funniest joke competition. Okay.
But now we have our first scientific guest here, and she is going to set the stakes to tell us how important our quest is, our quest to find the funniest joke in the world. So meet Sophie Scott.
I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. This fancy person, as part of her work, researches laughter.
And she told me that there is a gaggle or giggle of research out there that shows why laughing matters. So what's curious is that we, as humans, we're not the only animals to laugh.
Rats do a kind of playful vocalisation. That is, if you tickle them just right.
What you need to do to tickle a rat is you need to tickle them on the nape of the neck. That's where they're really ticklish.
So just sort of between the shoulder blades. Primates like chimps do a laugh.
Chimpanzees laugh. It sounds very like our laughter.
It's like a kind of... This is an actual chimps laughing.
Isn't her impersonation very good? She did great. Yeah.
Yeah. That was spot on.
But even though there are other creatures out there that do a kind of laugh, there are things that are very special about our human laughter. And one of them is this.
Humans laugh loud. We laugh to be heard.
We broadcast our laughter. What a weird weird sort of obnoxious thing like for us humans like we're the loud laughers of the animal kingdom like what a weird thing like desperately trying to laugh quietly right now but like imagine like on noah's ark or whatever it's like we're the Everyone's laughing and else is like oh god like we get it like you're having fun we're all having fun just going that's right right we're just doing it breathy and over here and to ourselves and you just like really are rubbing it in yes yes but that I mean that is exactly what we think the evolutionary purpose of this is, is to show that we are laughing and possibly to get others laughing too, to bring joy because we're the only animals, as far as science knows, that have contagious laughter.
So if I start laughing, you're more likely to start laughing. We're way more likely to laugh when other people are around versus when we're alone.
Right. And Sophie has found that when it comes to jokes, the power of laughter is so strong that it can turn a terrible joke into a funnier joke.
So she actually did this study where she got some jokes. We took real stinkers like, what's the best day for cooking? Friday.
Oh, yeah. So she got these terrible, these stinkers, as she puts it, these terrible jokes.
And she found that just by adding a laugh, people would rate these stinkers as funnier. Huh.
And for Sophie, this like all shows that laughter is playing this like really important role in connecting people. So there really is something very basic about the ability of laughter to perhaps to jump the gaps between humans.
Atif, if we could find a joke to get the whole world laughing, I mean, we'd be Nobel Prize winners, or at least like Ig Nobel Prize winners. Yes.
Okay, so with that in mind, with the stakes truly set for this quest, now we've just got to find this joke. Okay.
But where to start? Where kept pottering around on the internets even though that did not give me the funniest joke but it did bring me to this fella richard wiseman a professor of psychology at the university at hertford shire in the uk notoriously funny university it's very well known and it's shire shire for our quest oh Oh, that's right. Okay, great.
Okay, I'm in. I'm in.
So in the early 2000s, Richard was asked to come up with this big science public project. It was for a fancy British science association.
And he cannot think of anything. But as he's walking through the doors of the meeting...
This idea just popped into my head, which was the search for the world's funniest joke. Twinsies.
Twinsies. And that was my pitch.
I simply sat down and said, we're going to search the world's funniest joke. And they went, that's a great idea.
Let's do that. Which I didn't expect them to say, to be honest.
Well, this is quite funny. So I explained our situation.
Our situation, of course. I pitched my editor that we're going to find the world's funniest joke, and I didn't know how to do this.
I mean, now all we have, I guess, is some crappy joke about pianos and keys. You know, but that's not funny.
No, that's not the funniest joke in the world. Wouldn't it be sad if that was the funniest joke in the world? If everyone went, oh my God, it's the piano joke.
We love that. Exactly.
So exactly. Well, the experience that you had pitching to your editor was the one that I had all those years ago.
Yes. So I go back to the team at the University of Hertfordshire.
I say, we're going to find the world's funniest joke. And they went, great.
How are we going to do that? And I said, I've got no idea. I didn't get that far in the pitch.
We've got nothing, basically. Okay, very relatable.
I like this guy a lot, although I have no idea what he's going to do next. Okay, well, then they come up with a plan, a radical plan.
Okay. Radical for the 2000s.
We decided people would come onto the internet, the newly formed internet, they would type in their favorite joke and submit it. And they would rate the joke submitted by others.
And nowadays you go, well, of course you could do that. You could do people all over the world.
But back then there wasn't a way of collecting data via the web. Right.
So Richard's team actually has to develop a website from scratch that could do all this, where people could come online, submit jokes, or they'd be given different jokes and then they would rate how funny they are. So they get this website done.
Now, they just need to get some publicity because this whole experiment is hinging on lots of people going onto the website like a big enough sample size to submit jokes and rate them. But it turns out getting publicity was not a problem because once news outlets around the world found out about this competition, they lapped it up.
And it goes viral. It goes all over the world that scientists are searching for the world's funniest joke.
What makes one person laugh could make the next person cringe. The search is now on to find the world's funniest joke.
There was a lot of pressure. There was a lot of pressure.
Mike and he's going to

find the world's funniest joke.

And so people rated the jokes on a gigalometer?

Yeah. We refer to it as a gigalometer.

A gigalometer.

Gigalometer.

Gigalometer. And it was very scientific.
It had five ratings on it from not very funny,

which would be the piano joke would be not very funny, through to moderately funny. And then on to absolutely hilarious.
Okay, so the ranking is one to five. Okay.
Totally working. People are coming onto the site in droves.
Great. Very early on, people start putting dirty jokes onto the website, of course.
But then Richard's like... And he has to be okay with that.
No? He's not? No. So in this experiment, they actually removed the dirty jokes because this was a big family experiment, unlike Science Versus.
Okay. Oh, got it.
So you're doing all the way, all the jokes. We could do all, yeah, but Richard removes the rude jokes.
Okay.

But then, as the competition is trucking along,

one day Richard checks in with the team

and he sees this joke that would send him

and now us on a rather interesting path.

Almost like the endless stairs to cross into Mordor.

Okay.

Okay, so here's the joke.

Two cows in a field.

One turns to the other and says moo,

and the other one says, I was going to say that.

Not bad.

Old, old joke.

Old joke.

That's probably a two or a three on the gigalometer.

Yeah, yeah, I would agree that's a two or three.

So clearly that's not going to be the winner

of either Richard's competition or ours,

but it did make Richard think, wait a sec, could we do an experiment within an experiment? Huh. So Richard wonders, like, what if we tried out different versions of this cow joke by switching up the animals? And could this tell us something deeper about why one joke is funny and one joke isn't? Oh, yeah.
So you could have two lions, one turns to the other in roars, and the other says, I was going to say that. Less funny.
That's less funny. Interesting, interesting.
Okay, okay. So other ones, they tried two birds going cheep-cheep, two ducks, one says quack, then there's two dogs.
Wuff, wuff. I was going to say that.
No, that's not funny. No, maybe that's funny.
Maybe that's funny, but not because of the noise, but because dogs are so relatable. Mmm, okay.
So, so Richard puts a bunch of these jokes into the database when people come on. They might be randomly given one of those jokes.
So, which do you think is the funniest? Quack, quack. Yes.
It was? That was the winner. Damn, okay.
Two ducks. One says quack and the other one says I was going to say that.
So the big question is why is duck quacking so funny? Okay. And why? And it turned out that ducks and quack are funny words.
Yeah. And so what is it about duck and quack? Why are they funny? And the answer lies in this fabulously named paper, Wrigley, Squiffy, Lummox, and Boobs, What Makes Some Words Funny? Nice.
And here's what they did. They used this survey data where hundreds of people had been asked to rate the funniness of thousands of English words.
And they used basically the equivalent of the gigalometer. So you want to play?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Definitely.

Juju?

Juju is funny.

Yeah.

Juju.

Chauffeur?

Chauffeur.

Chauffeur?

Not funny.

Orgy?

Orgy.

Not funny.

Holder?

Holder?

Holder.

Not funny.

Holder is the least funny word you've said. I don't know why that makes me laugh so much.
It's such a dumb thing to ask. No, because holder is so functional.
Yeah, it is. And you know, you basically pick the right order.
So of the words I gave you, juju was ranked as the highest, the funniest word, then orgy, which in this study, it was actually considered pretty funny. Chauffeur came after that and Holder, not funny at all.
Yeah. Okay.
So the researchers then poured over this data set to create an algorithm for funny words that they then applied to more than 45,000 English words. And I actually have the Excel spreadsheet right here if you want to throw out any words.
Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. I'm almost more curious, what are the words at the very bottom of the list? Okay, very interestingly, the least funny word, according to this study, is harassment.
Harassment. That makes me want to make a joke where the punchline is harassment.
I know, right? So the researchers really swam in that data to try and see patterns as to what is funny and what is not. And one thing that really came up is that certain sounds are funny.
Like K. Anything with a hard K.
So clown and duck and quack. Duck and quack.
Both of them have a K. Right? And it's funny because this comedy K,

so there's an episode of The Simpsons about it,

like comedians know about this.

There's a 30 Rock, has a joke about it.

Oh, really?

Last year, Jenna accused me of trying to destroy her because her lines didn't have any K sounds,

which she thinks is the funniest sound.

Oh, my God.

My cousin Carl crashed his car,

and now he's in a coma at the Kendall Clinic. That was good.
Now, as far as I could tell, no one has repeated this experiment in a non-English language. And because we're looking for the funniest joke in the world.
I wanted to ask comics about this in other languages.

So we're kind of stuck with anecdotes, unfortunately.

But I asked Egyptian comic Mohamed Magdi what is a funny word in Arabic.

And this is what he said. I think the word for shell, like the shell that you find on the beach is quite funny.

It's called kawka.

Kawka.

Yeah, yeah.

Two Ks.

Yeah, two Ks.

There you go.

Actually, you're right.

Oh, my God. Science does work What? So other sounds in English That are funny Yeah Are Ooh Ooh sounds So like Booby Whoop Booby Yeah, sure As well as words ending in Y And L.
So like giggle and waddle are also funny. As a general rule, letters and sounds that aren't very common tend to rate as funnier.
So cut sound is pretty rare. And also like if you have this like weird collection of sounds in a word, that tends to be funny.
So I talked about this with comedian Tig Notaro. So we were talking about funny words and she said a co-host on her podcast, Handsome, said this one day.
Bulbous frog. And I couldn't move on.
I said, I'm sorry, we have to go back. What do you mean a bulbous frog? Also, the delivery of this word, it kept like, yes, and the bulbous frog, and it was so bulbous.
And I was like, stop saying that word. Like, it made me sick to my stomach, but I also recognized it as a funny word.
Yes. And according to the Wrigley Squiffy paper, bulbous does rank pretty high.
Oh, right. Huh, yeah.
So I kept looking for clues in other languages as to what words might be funny. So smart.
So smart. So I talked to Indian comic Ruja Ashwak about this.
She won the Best Newcomer at Edinburgh last year. She speaks Hindi.
She's performed all over India. And she told me that there are a few words that often get a laugh.
There's this word called chinchpokli, which is, yeah. That's very funny.
It's really funny. It's a chinchpokli.
It's a place. It's a place.
Chinchpokli. Chinchpokli.
And every time someone says it. It does have a K, right? Chinchpokli.
Yes, you're right. But that's not why it's funny, right? I don't.
Maybe it's the chinch. Yes.
It's so thin.

And then the porkli is so wide.

And you're like, why did you put that together?

Chinch porkli.

Chinch porkli.

Chinch porkli.

Chinch porkli, right?

Oh, so good.

Satisfying.

It's a neighborhood in Mumbai.

Now, what makes words funny isn't just their sounds.

It's also their meanings.

So in English, the study found that rude words, words about body parts and bodily functions, insult words also rate as funny. Right.
So, this thing with insulting words being funny, it seems to track in India too. So, Ruj told me about one more.
Okay. And we're about to get a little bit rude here.
Great. Is u funny in India? U is funny.
I think u is funny. Oh my god, the word gu is so funny and gu basically means shit.
And so each shit in Hindi is gukha. And that usually gets a laugh.

So, after the break, we're going to hear the winner of Richard's experiment.

And will we find the funniest joke in the world? Who knows? Who knows? Could go either way. Could go either way here.
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We're back on our grand quest to find the funniest joke in the world i'm your dungeon master and my paladin is latif nasa hello hi so as we're on this journey for the funniest joke in the world one potential hiccup in our plan is if different countries and cultures have vastly different senses of humor. And this is something you hear talked about.
Like, even when I was living in New York, people would like to talk about how Australians have such a different sense of humor to Americans. And so I looked into the research on this.
Right. And one big study published a few years ago that had done surveys on 28 countries, you know, thousands and thousands of people.
And they did find like people from Indonesia and Japan tended to use self-disparaging humor, so making fun of themselves, while Russia and Estonia scored high on aggressive humor that might involve belittling or teasing others. So there are some differences.
Yeah. But the thing is, for all these, like, gulfs that scientific papers like to highlight, the research paper ultimately concluded that there are, quote, more similarities than differences across the countries.
Yeah. Yeah, I believe that.
I believe that. Yeah, I think that's right.
Yeah, yeah. And some of the comedians that I spoke to about, you know, finding the funniest joke in the world said that as long as we make sure our joke isn't, it doesn't have, like, very specific cultural references in it, like talking about the politics of a specific country or town or whatever.
As long as we stick to universal themes, sex, bodily fluids, family dynamics, like we're going to up our chances of finding this joke. Which is why bodies are so, yeah, bodies work.
Bodies, animals. Yeah, I like that.
I like that. So now let's fast forward to the end of Richard Wiseman's experiment.
A year has passed. He's gotten 40,000 jokes, hundreds of thousands of ratings from 70 countries.
And Richard told me that by the end of the experiment, it was really clear that this competition was over. You could see the same jokes coming in again and again.
If I read what's brown and sticky, a stick. Oh, yeah.
If I read that one more time, every morning, three or four people would put that in. How was it? Did it write well? No.
No, no, no. It was always down there with pianos.
It never did well. And funnily enough, 20 years later, we did a call out on social media and this brown and sticky joke came up over and over again.
Wow. Okay, so Latif, are you ready to hear the winner of Richard's competition? Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Do you want to do a little drum roll, by the way. Oh, sure.
Bing!

There are two hunters out in the woods.

One of them collapses.

He doesn't seem to be breathing.

His eyes are glazed.

His friend whips out his phone, calls the emergency services.

He says, my friend is dead.

What can I do?

The operator says, calm down.

I can help.

First, let's make certain he's dead.

There's a silence, then a gunshot, and then the guy's back on the phone. He says, okay, now what? That was good.
That was good. I liked it.
So I told it to a bunch of Alchemadians. Okay.
To rather mixed reviews. Okay, okay, okay.
Let's hear it. That's a great joke.
It's just dumb. Yeah.
That's the winner? Really? Really? If you had like A plus, funniest joke in the world, F, bad joke, what are you rating it? I will give it a passing grade. It passes as a joke.
Wow, it passes as a joke. Like, that's where it gets.
You were aware. It's a joke.
It's a joke. Well done.
But try harder, you know what I mean? That last harsh critique is comedian Jason Leong. I was on his side.
So when Richard first told me this hunter joke this was my reaction what how is that the funniest joke in the world oh wow what what did you you didn't mind it you don't mind it i didn't mind it i mean maybe i'm a cheap laugh it's kind of wholesome even even though it's about murder. It's like a wholesome murder joke, you know? It's funny.
I asked Richard what he thought about it. How did you feel when your colleagues came to you and were like, this is the winner, and you read that? What went through your mind? Horror, because I knew I would have to go on radio and television and tell that joke is the world's funniest joke and i knew it wasn't funny and it was just we must have done 50 interviews that yeah when that that came out and each time you sort of grind through it's a long joke as well it's not a short joke you this joke, knowing it's not funny.
Having just told everyone that he found the world's funniest joke, it was living hell. After a while, I just refused to tell it.
But what's funny is that even though it didn't make me laugh and Richard doesn't really like it, when you look at the scientific theories of humour, this hunter joke actually ticks a lot of boxes. Okay, so let's take a look at these scientific theories of humor.
Okay, great. One of the biggest theories of humor is that you need a surprise.
So perhaps something incongruous. So here's comedian Lonnie Love on this.
It's something that you didn't expect. That's what makes you laugh because your mind is thinking one way and you go a whole other corner or avenue.
That is what makes people laugh. And that's the science of the joke.
So Richard gave me an example of this, which I actually quite like as a joke. Okay.
Two fish in a tank. One turns to the other and says, do you know how to drive this? Love it.
Love it. So we have fish in a tank.
We think it's a fish tank. And then we find out they're in an army tank.
That's incongruous. It surprises us.
We laugh. So one paper called this conceptual bifurcation, which is that moment where you realize that something that you thought belonged to just one category, a tank is something that only a fish would hang out in, actually belongs to two categories, an army tank too, ha ha.
And so the hunter joke obviously has this as well. The moment you realize, first, let's make certain he's dead, actually has two meanings, and then it's a funny surprise.
Right. That's a funny joke.
Yeah. Also, conceptual bifurcation, I feel like both of those words would rank very low on your spreadsheet.
Yes. That's like a very unfunny, that's like the unfunniest phrase you could find to describe a joke.
Yeah. It's like barely above harassment.
Right. Yeah, yeah, completely.
Studies have actually put people into brain scanners and presented them with jokes and found that certain areas associated with language get really, really excited when we hear these kinds of jokes, which makes a lot of sense because there's a lot of brain work involved in putting these two concepts together for that beautiful aha moment. Adam Conover of most famously, Adam Ruins Everything.
He's also a stand-up. And he says that the surprise can come in different forms.
So it doesn't have to be that you were expecting a joke to go in one direction and then it goes somewhere else. It could be that someone explains something in a way that you never thought of before.
My own personal theory that I use to write jokes is that something is funny when a truth is combined with a surprise, when people have a shock of recognition that they did not expect. So, you know, the very classic joke is, you know, a piece of observational comedy, you know, have you ever noticed that airplane food is X? Whatever it is, right? And if you have, in fact, noticed that, but no one has ever said that to you before, then you will likely laugh, right? But surprise can't explain everything about comedy because things can be surprising and not funny at all.
And on the flip side, research has found that even when there is no surprise, like in some studies, people have been told a joke before, or even if they're asked, like, can you predict the punchline of this joke? People still find it funny and sometimes even funnier. And I told Tig Notaro the hunter joke, it was kind of funny because this was her reaction.
Saw it coming. Still found it amusing.
Oh, yeah. So if there's more to a zinger than surprise, what else have we got? Superiority theory.
So here's Richard on that. A laugh is a kind of cry of superiority.
You made somebody else look silly or put them down and that you're going, yes, I'm better than them. That's so depressing, actually.
That's like a very depressing... It is a very depressing form.
And it does explain some jokes because like in so many cultures, there are these jokes about what some researchers call like the fool towns. Yeah.
So, or fool places. Like so in Australia, if you start a joke with like two Tasmanians walking to a bar.
Got it. In Canada, it's Newfoundlanders.
Yeah, right. So in the UK, maybe they make fun of the Irish.
In Ireland, maybe they make fun of the Kerrymen. In France, the Belgians.
Right. And it goes beyond time.
So I was reading about this paper that said, in ancient Greece, it was Abdera, the town of Abdera. You know, the two Abderas.
Abdera. To walk into a park.
Yeah, sure. And when it comes to the hunter joke, you could argue we feel superior to the stupid hunter.
It just does make us feel so petty. Like, we're just like so petty and insecure.
Like, we need something to feel bigger than. Yeah.
I really don't think that's why I'm laughing at a lot of jokes. And it has been criticized a little bit recently.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm not petty and insecure. But I like to think there's more to me than that.
I think so, too. So then this last scientific theory of humor I want to walk through just quickly is that a lot of humor is triggered by these potentially threatening or bad situations, and then we laugh to release tension.
So the Hunter joke ticks that off. Yeah, it's like, oh, there's a little bubble of tension here.
Pop it. Like, okay, great.
We're good. We're good, right? Yes.
And even though there's not a lot of studies testing this theory of humor, Richard said that just from reading like thousands of jokes in his experiment, it seemed to sort of be at the heart of why a lot of them were funny. It's not chance that a lot of jokes involve people experiencing stuff that makes us worried.
Yeah. Right.
And then as like, as an interesting tidbit, more recently, researchers have kind of added to this saying that you can't just have tension, or what they call a violation. They say you ultimately need to feel safe.
So the violation in a joke has to be benign. It's called the benign violation theory.
And if you think of like a classic funniest home video show where someone falls on their face, that's like a violation, it's a bit dangerous. But then it's safe.
Like the person got up, was fine, and like for some reason sent their snafu to like a 90s TV channel. Right.
But if they didn't get up and they just like, we're dead. Yeah, right.
That's not funny. We're not laughing at that anymore.
So to go back to like the hunter joke just for a second. Right.
Even though it ticks these scientific boxes, about it's not funny and so i thought oh to me any odd i don't know it's it can't be the funniest it's not the funniest it's not the funniest and so i asked richard like like his experiment it you know it did the right thing they got the sample size they asked people you know many countries around the world like like, so what went wrong? And here's what he said.

It was the joke that most people didn't hate.

So you can look at any one group.

You can look at men or women or young or old or Canadians.

And there was always a joke that they thought was much, much funnier.

But when you pulled the data, you got the average.

And that's the average.

It's the average joke.

It's the kind of like, yes, right?

No, I think what I've learned from talking to to you nothing you've learned nothing is that yeah where you went wrong was asking thousands and thousands of people for their opinion where we If you went wrong, we're starting. That was a little downhill from there.
All right. So, Latif, of all of the jokes that you've heard today, have we found your favorite? I'm very happy with Take your face.

I still think that one is pretty good.

I'm going to take out the garbage.

Take your face.

The answer was hiding within us

all along.

We found your joke. We fulfilled our quest.

Yeah.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

For coming on the show. Thank you very much.
Thank you. For coming on the show.

Thank you.

I feel lighter.

This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Michelle Dang, Joel Werner, Rose Rimler and Meryl Horne. We're edited by Blythe Terrell.
Fact-checking by Sarah Bourne. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord.
Music written by Peter Leonard, Bumi Hidaka, Emma Munger, So Wiley and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to, including Dr.
Andrew Farkas, Professor Penny MacDonald, Dr. Maggie Pranger, and a huge thank you to Professor Chris Westbury for sharing your amazing spreadsheet of the funniest words.
Another big thanks to Lindsay Farber, Roland Carebos, Lauren Lodou-Duchet, Andrea Jones-Roy, and the other comics that we spoke to at the Joke Lab, and in fact, all of the comics that we spoke to and couldn't fit into this episode. We really, really appreciate you and your time.
Thanks to Ben Milam, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Stupid Old Studios, Paige Ransbury, the Zuckerman family, and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. On the Radiolab side, we just want to say a big thank you to Wendy Zuckerman and everyone at the Science Versus team, including former radio labber,

Aketi Foster-Keys.

Thank you for having me on.

Thank you for letting us share this episode.

We will be back next week.

And until then, my friends,

I wish you luck finding ways to keep laughing.

Have a good week. Hi, I'm David, and I'm from Baltimore, Maryland.
Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler.

Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Simon Ad checkers are Diane Kelly. Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Sarah Sandback, Ariane Wack,

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and Molly Webster.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly,

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and Natalie Middleton.

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