Science is something we rely on as an excuse an awful lot. Lemonade bottle fizzed up when you tried to open it? Science. Got too close to a balloon and messed up your hair? Science. Dinner looks a bit blacker than you intended? Science. Sunburn? Science.
Even so, there are things I’d prefer to explain in other ways. Like humour.
Researchers at Oxford University have tried to find the science behind comedy and what makes something funny. They put 65 of the ‘101 funniest jokes of all time’ to some unwitting subjects to see how much they giggled. The results of this have been published in a journal called Human Nature, which is probably the best place for it.
I don’t personally think there’s any water-tight scientific formula for creating a joke that everyone will laugh at. We all have a subtly different sense of humour. Case in point: people who laugh at roadkill. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why anyone thinks that’s funny. But there you go.
One of the professors from the uni’s department of Experimental Psychology said: “The task of comics is to elicit laughs as directly and as fast as possible.”
Yet, strangely, the jokes most people found funny had up to five bits of back-and-forth conversation in them. Not one of the top five gags was a one-liner.
The funniest jokes involve ‘intentionality’, the unspoken understanding of a situation or pattern of behaviour. That intentionality is built up within the joke, and twisted at the end to create the punchline. You laugh at it because you identify with it, basically. Wasn’t that already obvious?
Jokes that are too complicated tend to lose the audience partway through. That’s also a given. If you see someone yawn before you’ve made it to the end, yes your joke is too long. Maybe you can salvage the laughs by making fun of the person who snores, but really by that point it’s too late.
So if you want to be funny, what can you do? Trust in science? I tell you what – have a look at our tips and tricks instead. Like I say, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution, but it should nudge you in the right direction to find your own style of funny.
