Science and society initiative shows Germans have best sense of humour
Laughlab, the world's largest experiment into the psychology of humour, which was undertaken as part of the UK government's 'Science year' initiative, has found that Germans found the jokes included in the experiment the funniest. The Science year initiative is designed to bring science closer to young people. The Laughlab experiment, which was devised by Dr Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire in collaboration with the British association for the advancement of science (BA), involved feedback from 100,000 people in more than 70 countries on over 10,000 jokes. A website has been monitoring feedback on jokes since September 2001 and Laughlab has published its first set of results. Sue Hordijenko of the BA claims that the experiment has important lessons. 'Laughlab looks to be the most far reaching psychology experiment ever. What we have seen over the last three months really demonstrates the increasing influence of the Internet as a powerful communication tool.' Laughlab aimed to find out what differences existed between men and women in humour, whether computers could tell jokes as well as humans and examine national differences between respondents, amongst other objectives The results show that men prefer jokes which involve aggression, putting women down and sexual innuendo. A good example cited by LaughLab is the following: A man comes home and shouts to his wife: 'Pack your bags sweetheart - I've just won the lottery. She replies: 'Wonderful. Should I pack for the beach or the mountains?' He says: 'I don't care - just pack your bags and shove off!' Not surprisingly, women disliked this type of joke. Instead, they showed a clear preference for jokes which involved a play on words. An example is the following: A man walks into a bar with a piece of tarmac under his arm. He says to the barman: 'A pint for me and one for the road.' Dr Wiseman claimed that the results gave important indicators. 'Males use humour to appear superior to others, while women are more linguistically skilled and prefer puns,' he said. In terms of nationality, the top 10 nations (those who found jokes the funniest) were the following: Germany, France, Belgium, Australia, Finland, Sweden, UK, Norway, New Zealand, USA and Canada - showing six out of the top seven countries being EU Member States. Germany came highest due to the fact that it had the highest number of respondents qualifying the jokes as 'very funny'. The funniest joke so far, which was found to be the funniest by 47 per cent of respondents, is the following. Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go camping. They pitch their tent under the stars and fall asleep. In the middle of the night, Holmes wakes Watson up. 'Watson,' he says 'look up at the stars and tell me what you deduce.' Watson replies: 'I see millions of stars, and there are millions of stars some of them may have planets and some of those planets may be like Earth, so there may be life out there.' Holmes replies: 'Watson, you idiot, someone has stolen our tent!'
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