Scientists isolate funniest joke (no joking)

After a year of research involving 70 countries and 2 million public responses, British scientists have unveiled what they believe is the world's funniest joke.

In the most exciting development since the cloning of Dolly the Sheep, the British Association for the Advancement of Science isolated the successful gag from 40,000 samples submitted and then rated by Internet users.

It goes as follows:

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 man pulls out his phone and calls emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead. What can I do?"

The operator, in a calm, soothing voice replies: "Take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, and then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the hunter says: "OK. Now what?"

If the joke doesn't appear funny to you, it may be a matter of taste. But it could also be because of damage to your prefrontal cortex, "a very precise area of the brain involved in understanding why a joke is funny," according to the researchers.

In a more obvious finding, they conclude that different nationalities have different senses of humour. Irish, British, and Australian respondents prefer jokes involving a play on words. Americans and Canadians prefer ones that make someone look stupid. France, Denmark and Belgium have a taste for the surreal.

Only Germany has no particular preference. This may explain why, controversially, Germans finished top of the researchers' international laughter league, based on how funny they rated all the jokes in the survey. Ireland finished mid-table, just ahead of Belgium.

The report's findings were being studied last night by Irish comedians, a number of whom said it was too early to comment.

However, Dara O'Briain, who played to rave reviews at the recent Edinburgh Festival, said a universal rule of humour was that audiences liked to laugh at the stupidity of people other than them: "In Barcelona, they dub Fawlty Towers and Manuel is from Portugal."

His own most internationally successful joke, he added, was a routine based on the hurricane season in the southern states of the US. In this he starts by sympathising with the owners of the wooden-frame homes that invariably feature in the destruction, and then suggests that maybe they should have learned from the experiences of the Three Little Pigs and gone with brick.

"That's worked on five continents," he says. "Everywhere except the southern states of America."

Veteran comic Noel V. Ginnity, who has been playing to international tourists "six nights a week for the past 25 years", thinks the scientifically-approved joke is all right, but prefers one written more than 50 years ago by the Scottish stand-up, Chic Murray.

"I'm driving down the road and I come across this woman in a red car and she won't let me overtake. I'm blowing the horn at her, and she's blowing the horn at me. I pull alongside and she shouts: "Pig! Pig! Pig!" So I shout back at her: "Cow! Cow! Cow!" Then I overtake her and crash into the pig."

Complete details of the joke study can be found at www.laughlab.co.uk.