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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
One Saturday evening in late June, the master of ceremonies at the Ice House, a comedy club in Pasadena, California, told the audience that they were in for a special treat: Dr. Richard Wiseman, a British scientist who was on a quest to determine the world's funniest joke, was going to come out and enlist the audience's help. The m.c., Debi Gutierrez, would tell jokes that particularly appealed to Americans who had visited Wiseman's humor Web site, and he would tell jokes favored by the British.
Wiseman bounded up and perched on a stool facing Gutierrez, a brassy woman in her early forties. "May I call you Richard?" she asked.
"You can call me what you want," Wiseman said.
"Dr. Dick!" she said. The audience whooped, and Wiseman offered a game smile. In a navy-blue T-shirt, khakis, and tortoise-rimmed glasses, with a Vandyke beard balancing his baldness, he looked like a particularly helpful store manager at the Gap. In fact, at the age of thirty-five, Wiseman--a professor at the University of Hertfordshire and the director of its Perrott-Warrick Research Unit--is Britain's most recognizable psychologist, famous for such mass-participation experiments as determining whether people can most easily detect lies told on television, on the radio, or in print. (It's on the radio.) Since last fall, he has been conducting a global humor study at LaughLab.co.uk, a Web site where visitors submit jokes and rate other people's jokes on a five-point scale called, somewhat unrigorously, the Giggleometer. When the experiment began, Wiseman posed for publicity photographs wearing a lab coat and holding a clipboard as he scrutinized a student wearing a chicken suit who was crossing a road. One photographer shouted, "Could the guy playing the scientist move to the left?," and Wiseman cried, "I am a scientist."
The experiment was so popular--the LaughLab site got three million hits in the first five days--that Wiseman's server blew out. He now has a repository of forty thousand jokes, some two-thirds of which are so racist, violent, or dirty that he can't post them for the site's visitors, a good number of whom, judging by their submissions ("What's brown and sticky? A stick!" cropped up three hundred and fifty-three times), won't be eligible for membership in the Friars Club for some years to come.
At the Ice House, Gutierrez read a Viagra joke and botched the punch line. Then it was Wiseman's turn. He is not a joke-teller by nature, and his recital was almost apologetic: "Guy goes to the doctor, who gives him a checkup. 'How long have I got to live, doc?' 'Ten.' 'Ten what? Weeks? Months?' 'Ten, nine, eight . . .' "
There are many ways that people laugh in a comedy club. There's what you might call the Anticipator ("He just mentioned Monica Lewinsky! This'll be great!"), the Clapper ("It's about time someone called bin Laden a terrorist!"), the Aficionados' Simper, the Coerced Snicker, the You-Crossed-the-Line "Ooh" (reserved for a Kennedy joke), the Gut Buster, and so forth. But there's only one kind of silence.
Gutierrez, referring to her notes, tried a feeble sally about a preacher. Gloom settled over the room. So she put her script aside and barked, "Two faggots and a midget walk into a bar--" The audience cracked upfor four long, joyous seconds. Comedians relish a two-second laugh; four seconds is standup gold.
Why, after a string of failed jokes, such a big laugh? It's hard to say. Comedy theorists--philosophers, psychologists, comedy writers, and, most recently, neurologists--have yet to resolve even such seemingly simple questions as where knock-knock jokes come from, why you can't tickle yourself, and whether any woman anywhere, ever, has appreciated the Three Stooges. Technically, Gutierrez's remark wasn't a joke but a setup to a joke, and a hostile, slurring setup at that. In 1993, Robert R. Provine, a behavioral neuroscientist, conducted a study of laughter in social settings--basically, he eavesdropped at cocktail parties--and discovered that the biggest laugh-getters were not punch lines or bons mots but such you-had-to-be-there remarks as "I'll see you guys later" and "Must be nice!" and "You just farted!"
In other words, something's being "funny" is not an adequate explanation of laughter. Is humor a temperament or a talent? Is it innate and individual and evolutionarily adaptive, or learned and cultural and gloriously pointless? "What does laughter mean?" the French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote in 1901. "The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation." Unfortunately, Aristotle's treatise on laughter, which might have settled the whole matter, was lost to history.
Richard Wiseman told me that his own efforts to advance humor theory had begun almost in jest. "I was asked if I had any ideas for the government's Science Year," Wiseman said, "and I instantly thought, World's funniest joke! With one sentence, you've sold the project.Of course, the idea of scientifically determining the world's funniest joke is completely ridiculous. People thought we'd have a computer that would tell you 'Why did the chicken cross the road?' is objectively a 4 on a scale of 5. And the point is that you can't get a computer to do it--humor is a thoroughly human activity, and very, very hard to explain."
And yet as Wiseman began combing through his site's top two thousand jokes, preparing...
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