How Hard is it to Get Others to Laugh?

Superiority.

Those who tell us funny stories about their own foibles—or those of others—help listeners feel momentarily superior to the jokester or to the people who’ve been made the butt of the joke.

The Pattern of Three Joke: “My favorite books are Moby-Dick, Great Expectations, and Rock Hard Abs in 30 days.”

Comedians have long believed that jokes work best in a pattern of three parts.  Offer two straightforward examples, then a third one to shatter the pattern.

Wiseman, that scientist we mentioned at the top of the column, is a professor at the University of Hertfordshire and the director of its Perrott-Warrick Research Unit.  He is probably Britain’s most well-known psychologist—at least since last year when he took his humor research to the world via the Internet.

His mass-participation experiments cover emotions, from lying to laughter.  For example, he asked participants to detect who was lying after being exposed to accounts offered on television, the radio or in print. (Of those options, people are most likely to detect lying they hear on the radio).

In the Fall of 2002, Wiseman decided to learn about global differences in humor and opened a web site (LaughLab.co.us). The server for the site broke down when Wiseman got three million hits in the first five days after the site opened.Among other studies, he asked visitors to contribute their favorite jokes and rather others’ jokes, on a one to five rating scale. He’s received over 40,000 jokes. About two-thirds of the submissions are so off-color, violent or otherwise offensive that he chooses not to post them for site visitors.

With Wiseman’s permission, here’s a description of one of the mass participation experiments.  Wiseman and his colleagues asked people who took part in LaughLab to answer questions that involve making various estimates, such as: “How many words are there on one page of a typical paperback novel?

A) Under 500

B) 500 to 600

C) 600 to 700

D)700 to 800

E) Over 800”

They found that people who are good at this type of question (the correct answer is under 500) “tend to have good frontal lobe activation. Those who had wildly inaccurate estimates have very bad flexible-thinking skills.”