Appliance of Science: What's the funniest joke you've ever heard?

...and what's the formula for humour?

According to a year-long survey, including more than 1.5 million people, the duck is considered the funniest animal.

Dad jokes, bad jokes and side-splittingly funny jokes. What defines the good from the bad? What is the best joke you ever heard and would science agree with you?

The funny side of sadness

When it comes to finding something funny, it seems we favour tragic comedy as it is often the recounting of sad or harrowing events that make us laugh. As Mark Twain pointed out…

The secret source of humour itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.

Sadness on its own is not enough though; there are a number of theories that have been developed from research into humour, many building on one particular theory, the Benign Violation Theory (BVT).

Some funny rules

According to the BVT, humour requires three components: (1) a situation that is a violation, (2) the situation is perceived as benign, and (3) both perceptions happen simultaneously. 

Sound confusing more than funny? Well, consider the acts of tickling or play fighting as they good examples of this theory; they are physically threatening but we perceive them as harmless attacks and so we laugh.

Time not timing

Of course there is more to humour than those three elements. Telling a good joke may be more about time than timing, according to a study carried out in 2010. The data suggested that both time and distance can make a good situation out of a bad one, with a formula that says humour = tragedy + time or distance.

What exactly does that mean? Essentially it suggests that a tragic incident (or violation) can become the subject of a good joke if either enough time has passed since the tragedy occurred, or there is enough of a distance between the person telling the joke and the person that was affected by the tragedy.

For example, if you slip and fall (unharmed) then the event may be perceived as humorous by those watching or hearing about it soon after but will likely lose its humour if told a week later. So, when the tragedy is small, the time between incident and telling can be too.

On the flip side, the tragedy is a major accident, very scary and distressing but ultimately, everyone survives. This type of event may only be considered joke fodder long after the event has occurred and everyone has recovered.

Distancing yourself

What about the distance part? If the ‘tragedy’ happened to someone close to you it might sound more stressing than funny when recounted to an audience. However, creating a bit of distance by changing the event to link more in a ‘friend-of-a-friend’ kind of way, creates enough distance to allow the audience see the humour.

The funniest joke

A survey including 1.5 million participants was carried out to determine the joke that could be classified as the funniest. The data crunching led to the following revelations: the most effective joke length is 103 letters long; the time of day that people best respond to a joke is 6.03pm and statistically, the funniest joke is…

…Two hunters are out in the wood when one collapses; his friends calls emergency services reporting that he thinks his friend just died; they tell him to stay calm and first check if his friend is really dead. There is a brief silence, followed by a gunshot and he returns to the phone asking “OK, now what?”

Personally I wouldn’t say that was the best joke ever, but then, I was never very good at statistics.