Somehow I missed this back in 2002. Researchers in England collected more than 40,000 jokes and put them on the internet for some testing. How did they do that? Well, people from all over the world rated these jokes with a “Giggleometer,” with five-point scale ranging from “not very funny” to “very funny”. The data was collected and those scientists determined the funniest joke in the world. Ahem.

During the course of their research, they “discovered” that people from different nationalities have different ideas of what is funny. Well, duh! I could have told them that, if they had just asked me! I’ve tried to watch “humorous” British sit coms before. I wonder how much they spent for all this research?

They discovered that Germans will laugh at anything. People from the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand seem to prefer “wordplay.” In France, Belgium, and Denmark they like “surreal humor.” Unfortunately, their research showed that Americans and Canadians “preferred jokes where there was a strong sense of superiority — either because a character looks stupid or is made to look stupid by someone else.”

The head psychologist in the project was Dr. Richard Wiseman. Who wouldn’t trust a man with that name? He said, “we find jokes funny for lots of different reasons. They sometimes make us feel superior to others, reduce the emotional impact of anxiety-provoking situations or surprise us because of some kind of incongruity.”

The following joke had elements of all three. Though some jokes were considered funnier by certain groups, this joke appealed to all ages and nationalities and to both men and women.

Here is “The World’s Funniest Joke.”

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services.

Back on the phone, the guy says: “OK, now what?”