The 1969 pilot of the now-iconic British comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus ended in a sketch called “The funniest joke in the world”. In it, a man invents a joke so funny that he literally dies laughing. During the Second World War, the joke is used by the British military as a deadly weapon. It proves extremely effective, even in translation, wiping out scores of Nazis while Allied forces protect themselves by covering their ears.

A Revolutionary Act

Laughter is usually thought to be beneficial to our health. Laughing can be a coping strategy at times of crisis, while laughter therapy and laughter yoga are both based on the belief that humour has physiological and psychological benefits. What makes us laugh is subjective, however. Finding one joke that everyone laughs at is surely impossible.

LAUGH LAB

In 2001, best-selling British writer and psychologist Richard Wiseman hoped to prove that such a joke did exist. He teamed up with the British Science Association for a study named LaughLab — the scientific search for the world’s funniest joke. By the end of the project, forty thousand jokes had been submitted, including some generated by artificial intelligence. The jokes were rated on a scale of 1 (bad) to 5 (hilarious) by more than 350,000 people from seventy countries. 

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COUCH HUMOUR

The winning joke came from a British psychiatrist called Gurpal Gosall. He appeared to prove Wiseman right; the joke, Gosall said, was one he told his patients to help them gain perspective on their problems. It went like this: “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 whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?”. The operator says “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says “OK, now what?”

CULTURE CLASH

While the world has become more globalised (if arguably more absurd) since, recent research has shown that there are still significant cultural differences when it comes to humour. In a 2019 study by psychologists in Hong Kong, a country with close ties to both Britain and China, they found that while in the West humour is taken seriously as something that enhances well-being, in the East it is viewed as trivial, and as such less likely to be effective as a coping strategy or as therapy.

PUBLIC REACTIONS

Even in the West the same joke can be received very differently, depending on where you’re from. Monty Python were four Englishmen (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle and Michael Palin), one Welshman (Terry Jones) and one American (Terry Gilliam). The four-series show, which ended in 1974, was a mas - sive hit in both the UK and the US and was also highly rated in the Netherlands and in Japan. Yet as research into public reactions revealed, audiences in the UK and in the US, for example, laughed at different parts of the exact same sketch.

THE GOONS

Some years after LaughLab had concluded, Wiseman made a discovery. That winning joke by Gosall was actually a version of one written by Irish comedian Spike Milligan back in 1951. Milligan was a member of a comedy trio called the Goons, with British actors Michael Bentine and Peter Sellers. The joke was a dialogue between the latter two men. It went like this:

Michael Bentine: I just came in and found him lying on the carpet there.

Peter Sellers: Oh, is he dead? 

Michael Bentine: I think so. 

Peter Sellers: Hadn’t you better make sure? 

Michael Bentine: Alright. Just a minute. Sound of two gun shots. 

Michael Bentine: He’s dead.

Wiseman was stunned. Milligan was by then a controversial figure: a comic genius for some, he was also prone to making unpleasant and even racist remarks. Nevertheless, this one morbid joke by Milligan is still considered to be the closest thing we have to a ‘humour pill’: the funniest and most therapeutic joke in the world.