Scientist seeks world's funniest joke
By Ed Cropley
  

GLASGOW (Reuters) - A British scientist has launched a quest for the
world's funniest joke.


Richard Wiseman, a psychologist from Hertfordshire University, said on
Wednesday that the year-long, Internet-based search should throw light on
whether men and women, the young and old, and specific nationalities find
different jokes funny.


"It is an attempt to delve into the psychology of humour," he told a
science conference in Glasgow in Scotland.


"Are there certain types of joke being submitted by a certain country and
are there some which are found funny across the world -- a kind of
universal joke?"


People can log on to the experiment's Website at www.laughlab.co.uk to
submit jokes and enter a few personal details before giving their verdict
on a sample of other jokes.


All submissions must be in English.


After six months, jokes deemed to be the funniest will be recorded by a
professional comedian with a variety of punchline timings to arrive at
what -- theoretically -- should be the killer comic formula.


The site's database is already stocked with a variety of starter jokes:
What kind of murderer has fibre? A serial killer; What sort of pig should
you avoid at a party? A wild boar.


But Wiseman hopes these will be overtaken by a flood of 1,000 or more
wisecracks in the first 24 hours of the experiment.


Smutty and offensive jokes, however funny, will not make it to the final
reckoning.


"A student will come in every morning and edit out the rude ones," Wiseman
said. "But it will also be interesting to see what sort of people submit
those sort of jokes."


Volunteers will listen to the final jokes while undergoing a scan, to see
how their brains react.


The results should help studies into brain damage and thought processes
since "getting" a joke requires a number of complex cognitive processes,
Wiseman told a conference of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science.


For instance, people with damage to the right-hand frontal cortex find it
difficult to understand many jokes or often laugh at the wrong punchline. 

Copyright 2001 Reuters Limited.