With Dad Jokes, a Little Laugh Track Goes a Long Way

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/laugh-track-jokes-humor.html

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Humor, it has been said, “can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process.” Well, get out the scalpels: We have dad jokes to analyze.

According to a new study, people find even the most groan-inducing one-liners funnier when they are paired with a laugh track. And the type of laughter matters, too: A joke seems even funnier when accompanied by laughter that seems genuine rather than forced.

“If there’s a laugh there, you can’t ignore it,” said Prof. Sophie Scott, the incoming director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University College London and one of the authors of the study.

Take this zinger: “What does a dinosaur use to pay bills? Tyrannosaurus checks.”

Participants in the study, published on Monday in the journal Current Biology, gave that joke an average rating of about two on a seven-point scale, with higher scores awarded to funnier jokes. The average rating increased to more than two and a half when paired with forced laughter, and to more than three with genuine laughter.

The pattern held for dozens of other one-liners, too.

To test the perceived humor of the jokes, researchers at University College London hired a professional comedian to create recordings of 40 jokes, selected for mediocrity to leave room for the possibility that laughter could improve their ratings. Separately, they recorded six adults laughing on command as well as in response to something that each found genuinely funny.

The researchers first established a baseline by asking 20 college students to score each joke without any laughter present. (For reference, “What is the best day to cook? Fry‐day” earned a rating of just under two and a half, and “What state has the smallest drinks? Mini‐soda” earned just under three.)

Then, the researchers presented more than 70 adults with the same jokes, accompanied by recordings of either forced or genuine laughter.

The researchers included about two dozen adults with autism in the second group, offering an opportunity to measure whether there were any differences in how people with autism process laughter, as previous studies have suggested. Laughter had the same effect on joke ratings among all participants, the study found, although those with autism did find the one-liners funnier over all.

One thing is clear: Perceptions of humor are not objective. As the study’s authors acknowledged, others have found that the perceived funniness of a joke can be affected by factors like delivery and cultural context. Their own findings on Monday shed light on the social influences.

“It takes us from people’s emotional lives directly into their social interactions and how those two things can be working,” Professor Scott said.

While the study did not seek to answer how laughter influenced joke ratings, the researchers suggested that the laughter could have been contagious or could have acted as a signal of approval of the joke.

And one last zinger — a word we use lightly — from the study: “What did the duck do when he read all these jokes? He quacked up.”