Punchline science: What we accidentally learned from a study on humor

The funniest thing about studying the science of humor is that you’re essentially watching a bunch of nerds try to explain a joke. Then people get to watch you, as a writer, awkwardly trying to explain how those nerds are explaining the joke. As you know, this is how every truly great comedian in the history of the universe has ever won at “being funny.” You may recall the great George Carlin (rest his soul) who, in humble self-reflection, always held marathon question-and-answer sessions in public schools where he performed his famously family-friendly stand-up routines — which, of course, concluded with a group prayer and Pledge of Allegiance led by the pope.* 

If you still want to see a joke being smothered to death (and this column somehow doesn’t get the job done), you can always do a speed-run through the methodology section of any scholarly research on the psychology of humor. I suggest starting with a recent Oxford University-led study which gauged 3,380 museum visitors’ reactions to 38 yellowed, hardly legible political cartoons, drawn as long ago as 1930 and in some cases offering such esoteric commentary on long-forgotten events that researchers had to include little captions explaining the jokes. 

“A commentary on the expulsion of the Greek banks from Egypt in 1961,” reads one note beneath the image of a gold prospector tunneling into a bank. 

“​​Purely verbal pun on well known TV programme (bird is there simply to contextualize joke),” reads another accompanying a doodle of a bird watching a show titled “Ready, Steady, Cuckoo.” 

After running what I’m sure were some very important tests and excluding any participant under age 18, scientists determined with great confidence that neither the participants’ nor cartoons’ ages had significant impact on laugh counts. A down-page caveat, however, politely adds the “age of viewer had an effect, but not always in a simple way and there was often a strong interaction with gender.” 

The researchers then categorize, with labels like “domestic dynamics” and “social comment,” all the cartoons — wherein, notably, the punchline of those that feature female characters is almost invariably some version of “woman bad.” Then they tallied up the self-reported chortles, sorting men’s from women’s, and reached this startling conclusion: men find visual jokes and slapstick funnier than women do, women like verbal jokes about relationships and politics more than men. 

“Women’s friendships are created and maintained principally through conversation, where the focus is often on intimacies and the discussion of social and emotional issues,” researchers mused. “Whereas men’s are more activity-based, where conversation is used more to trigger laughter than discuss emotional issues.”  

Surely, Carlin himself, noted for his anti-abortion stance, would offer a chauvinistic nod of approval at the study’s choice of material. Both the cartoons and methodology, he would undoubtedly assure us, are bound to yield empirically accurate results on the gendered psychology of modern comedic taste. 

All sarcasm aside (and with apologies to George for tarnishing his proudly foul-mouthed, pro-choice reputation), the Oxford study’s authors probably wouldn’t have shot so wide of the epistemological mark if they would have just gone to a few comedy clubs first. Or, remaining in the realm of 2D chuckles, at least gathered some comparative data from literally anywhere other than a museum. 

It’s harder to overlook these limitations in the study given the Brits’ undeniable history of lethal hilarity. Consider the 15th century parchment set-list of a lackwit minstrel named Richard Heege, who was gigging among the gentry during the War of the Roses on material about hunting down killer rabbits, centuries before the first Monty Python boy donned a codpiece: "Jack Wade was never so sad / As when the hare trod on his head / In case she would have ripped out his throat."

I know, I know — Heege’s proto-Holy Hand Grenade routine may not be a banger by modern standards. But he had some brilliantly unhinged bits about pigs getting insanely zooted and bumblebees getting into street-brawls that I’d kill to hear today. In the same manuscript, Heege even succumbs to an early form of what 21st-century right-wingers like to call the Woke Mind Virus, as when he pretends to be a slutty priest, preaching sermons urging the audience to bring him another beer. 

“People back then partied a lot more than we do today,” the study authors wrote. 

Amen. Heege finally hits rock bottom with a bit about violent incontinence that ends in a tale of bowel explosion among 24 aristocrats, which is so mortally buck-nasty I can’t even bring myself to tell you the manuscript can be read online in full, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. 10 out of 10.

As for the wokeness problem, it’s only gotten worse according to the conservatives at the Media Research Center. Last week, after learning to count all by themselves, the organization reported that among late-night show jokes, conservatives were butts 81% of the time in 2023. To no one’s surprise, Jimmy Kimmel was the high (or low) scorer at 88%.  

This ideological disability is nothing new. The humorlessness of the right-wing has a well-documented history that may even underlie the lonely contingent of sexually frustrated Trump supporters recently noted in the panicked columns of the Washington Post. Worse yet, a growing number of studies indicate straight women get hotter for guys who are funny than for khaki-wearing beef-necks who can’t pronounce mifepristone. The editorial board’s prescription for lefty ladies is, of course, to lie back and think of America. That strategy may not get unruly, Women’s March types into bed with clinic-closing bro’s, but now that conservatives have taken over Twitter, they could start a viral hashtag campaign to raise awareness. I’m no comedian, but what about #LaughForTheCure? Maybe #TheyTookOurJokes? 

With no answer in sight, it seems conservatives’ only hope is to seek out the same guru of hilarity the Oxford study authors should have consulted from the start — the man who considers himself the funniest human on Earth, a one-man army fighting the woke mind virus, and the savior of both free speech and right-wing comedy. I refer to Elon Musk, of course. Without him around, how do we know when to laugh?

*For those unfamiliar with Carlin’s comedic work, see “By George: A Totally Real Biography of America’s Cleanest Comic Who Never Once Criticized the Catholic Church and Who Definitely Did Not Get Arrested in 1972 for Performing a Filthy Monologue Called ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’” by Rae Hodge (Fandom House, 2024).

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Science & Health team.