The "world's funniest joke" is a term used by Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire in 2002 to summarize one of the results of his research. For his experiment, named LaughLab, he created a website where people could rate and submit jokes.LaughLab official site Purposes of the research included discovering the joke that had the widest appeal and understanding among different cultures, demographics and countries.
The History Channel eventually hosted a special on the subject.
Winning joke The winning joke, which was later found to be based on a 1951 Goon Show sketch by Spike Milligan,BBC: Spike 'wrote world's best joke' was submitted by Gurpal Gosal of Manchester:
Other findings Researchers also included five computer-generated jokes, four of which fared rather poorly, but one was rated higher than one third of the human jokes:"Computer crack funnier than many human jokes", December 20, 2001, New Scientist
The joke that was submitted to LaughLab the most times was:
During a Science Vs podcast episode, Richard Wiseman said this about whether it's actually the world's funniest joke:
References
Further reading
External links LaughLab official site