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- [00:02]
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Today's episode is a little different from a normal episode of Nudge.
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So I walk in and it's a one line pitch. I think I had like 20 seconds. I said, we're gonna search for the world's funniest joke. And they went, perfect.
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This is the story about one professor's quest to find the world's funniest joke. He and his team reviewed 40,000 jokes and had them rated by more than 350,000 people from 70 countries. He found a winning Jo, but it wasn't what he expected. Find out why in today's episode of Nudge, when someone asks AI for a solution, a product, a service like yours, does your business come up? Does AI suggest you? Well, most companies have no idea and by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal or the sale to someone who did. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click and before the first form is filled out. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. I'm delighted to be joined today again on Nudge by the brilliant Professor Richard Wiseman.
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I am a psychologist. I started my working life as a magician, went to University, University College London and then to University of Edinburgh. And now where I've been for the last 32 years, which is University of Hertfordshire, professor of psychology. And I try and do stuff which is meaningful.
- [01:43]
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Richard has written one of my favourite books. It's about the surprising power of small interventions. The book is called 59 seconds.
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I mean, now this idea of small change, big impact is everywhere. When I did 59 seconds quite a few years ago, that was a kind of radical thought and it came about by chance. I went for a cup of coffee with a CEO friend of mine, runs a big organization and about halfway through she said, I'm not very happy, you know, about happiness. What can I do to make myself happier? And I said, well, how long have you got? And she said, about a minute. And it really, it was one of those moments I had this throughout my life that opportunities come our way and often we don't recognize them. We just sort of bulldoze our way through. And I sort of paused and thought, that's interesting. What can I tell you about psychology of happiness in a minute? And I thought, actually quite a lot. And then when I was walking back home, I thought, you know, you can do that with lots of different Areas you can do it with persuasion and motivation and personality and so on. And that was the birth of the book 59 seconds. 59 seconds was a much better title than the original working title, which was 60 seconds because it had the sort of lesser, less than a minute promise to it. And that's where it came from. And so in the book I work through all various topics really talking about other people's research a lot of the time and then my own research some of the time.
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Richard's research is fascinating. Before on previous episodes of Nudge that he's appeared on, he has talked through his research into the world's number one chat up line, the scientifically proven ways to spot a liar, how attractive people avoid jail time, and how he digitally altered the size of a woman's pupil to sell more books. But perhaps the research Richard is most well known for is his quest in 1999 to find the world's funniest joke.
- [03:37]
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That came about because the British association for the Advancement of Science, now the British Science Association, I think, said we want a year long experiment and throughout that year we need to be able to dip into it and see what the results are. We need it family friendly, we need it media friendly. Anyone got any ideas? And I didn't have any ideas, but I went along to the pitch meeting because like a fool, I've done this a few times over the years. I thought, I think by the time I've got on the train, walk to where they are and walk through the door, I'll probably get an idea. It's like death concentrates the mind. So and that happened, I mean there's been several times I've walked into rooms, picture rooms with nothing. But on this occasion that didn't happen. So I walk in and it's a one line pitch. I think I had like 20 seconds. I said, we're going to search for the world's funniest joke. And they went, perfect. Can see that it works for media, works for families. We dip in and out of it. There's different experiments you can do. That's what we want to do. Thank you, Richard. Walk out, go back to the lab, there's a group of us, I go, I've got this pitch, we got it. World's funniest joke. And they said, how are we going to do that? And I said, I've got no idea. I have no. And you're right, nowadays I might be a little bit nervous about over promising, should we say? And I said we were just going to solve the problem. And we came up with what was then shows you when this was, because it must have been 1999, 2000, a radical idea of collecting data on the Internet, which nowadays doesn't sound very radical, but then it hadn't been done, and so we had to build very special servers and so on. And then the idea was that people would come on one side of the website, they could submit their favorite joke, another side, rate jokes submitted by others, tell us whether they're male or female, what country they're from, and so on. And we set this thing up, day one. We look at the jokes that have been submitted. We realize some of them a little bit rude, to say the least. So I had to employ somebody full time to look at the jokes each day to weed out the really rude ones.
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Richard writes that many of the jokes were absolutely filthy. He says, and I quote, one especially memorable submission involved two nuns, a large bunch of bananas, an elephant and Yoko Ono. He goes on to write, we couldn't allow these submissions into the archive because we had no control over who would visit the site to rate the jokes. With a backlog of more than 300 jokes from the first day alone, we needed someone to work full time to vet them. Richard's research assistant, Emma Greening, came to the rescue. Every day for the next few months, Emma carefully looked at every joke and excluded those that were not suitable for family viewing. Emma was apparently often frustrated about seeing the same jokes again and again. The joke, what is brown and sticky? A stick. That awful joke was submitted more than 300 times. But on the upside, Emma now owns one of the largest collections of dirty jokes in the world.
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And then after a year, yeah, we could, we could look at our data.
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This data is very interesting. Richard was able to look for themes in some of the top rated jokes. Was there some element, some trait that made some jokes funnier than others? Richard thought there was to explain. I'll share a joke which was rated very highly in the Laugh Lab. Here it is. A teacher decided to take her bad mood out on her class of children and so said, can everybody who thinks they're stupid stand up? After a few seconds, just one child slowly stood up. The teacher turned to the child and said, do you think you're stupid? No, the child replied, but I hate to see you standing there all by yourself. It's a good one. Here's another. Did you hear about the man who was proud when he completed a jigsaw within 30 minutes because it said on the box five to six years. Ahem, and I'm really enjoying this. I hope you are. And there's one more. An idiot was walking alongside a river when she spied another idiot on the other side of the river. The first idiot yelled to the second idiot, how do I get to the other side? The second idiot responded immediately, you're already on the other side. Richard noted something interesting about all three of these jokes and many of the other top rated jokes. These jokes, they make the reader feel superior. The superiority arises because the person in the joke appears stupid, like the man with the jigsaw. They misunderstand an obvious situation, like the idiots on the riverbank. Or they make someone in a position of power look foolish, like the teacher and the child. In his book, Richard explains how back in 1934, Harold Wolf and his colleagues from Harvard University published the first experimental study into the superiority theory. The researchers asked groups of Jews and Gentiles to rate how funny they found various jokes. To ensure the presentation of the jokes was as controlled as possible for both groups, the researchers printed the jokes on strips of cloth at 140ft long and 4 inches wide. And they would pass these strips behind an aperture in the laboratory wall at a constant speed, all to ensure the participants saw the jokes in exactly the same way, one joke at a time. So the delivery of the joke couldn't just be better when you were saying them to the Gentiles or the Jews, for instance. Anyway, when participants saw the symbol of a star that had been printed at the end of each strip, they were then asked to shout out how funny they thought the joke was, on a scale between -2 very annoying and -4 very funny. The gentil Gentiles, it was found, tended to laugh far more at the jokes disparaging Jews, and the Jews preferred jokes far more that put down the Gentiles. We like jokes that make us or our group or our identity feel superior. Richard Wiseman also wrote that a lot of the top jokes were about situations that cause great anxiety. We fear anxiety, so to feel superior over it, we make jokes about it. Richard writes that time and time again they would get jokes about the stresses and strains of a loveless marriage, inadequate sexual performance, and of course, death. The joke I've been in love with the same woman for 40 years. If my wife finds out, she'll kill me. Well, that joke appeared hundreds of times and was always highly rated. A slightly more pleasant theme, and pleasant jokes as well were jokes about incongruity. These are jokes that surprise the reader with something they didn't Expect, for example, what kind of murderer has fibre? A serial killer. Richard writes that this is an example of the most basic form of joke, the simple pun. The most popular theory about why we find these sorts of jokes funny revolves around the concept of incongruity. It's the idea that we laugh at things that surprise us because they seem out of place. For example, and this, really, I'm ashamed to say, is one of my favourite jokes in the book. Two fish in a tank. One turns to the other and says, do you know how to drive this? Look, why is this good? Or why is it okay? Why did I find it funny, at least? Well, the setup line leads us to think about two fish in a fish tank, of course, but the punchline, it surprises us. Why should the fish be able to drive a fish tank? And then a split second later, we suddenly realise that the word tank has two meanings and that the fish are actually in an army tank. And wow. Describing a joke does not make it any funnier. Scientists refer to this as the Incongruity Resolution Theory. We resolve the incongruity caused by the punchline, and the accompanying feeling of sudden surprise makes us laugh. Anyway, none of the jokes I've just shared reached the top of Richard's list. And it was around this stage of the experiment where Richard realised he had a problem. Even the very top rated joke on Laugh Lab was only rated as being funny by 55% of people. 45% of people who read that joke didn't think it was funny at all. So will you find the joke funny? Here is Richard Wiseman revealing the joke to the American comedian Lewis Black on the History Channel.
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So this is a giant chicken, which we used to reveal the world's funniest joke at the end of our project. I'll tell you the joke. It's the two hunters in the woods. One of them falls over, lays motionless on the ground. The other one panics, whips out his cell phone, phones. Emergency services says, my goodness, my friend's laying there motionless. What am I going to do? The person says, look, calm down. We're here to help. First of all, we have to make certain he's dead. And then she hears a silence on the phone, then a gunshot. The hunter comes back and says, okay, now what? That was the joke?
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Yeah, just sit down. You gotta sit down. I can't do this anymore.
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That was the world's funniest jokes.
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It's not the world's funniest joke. It's not even close to the world's Funniest joke. It's not even a good joke.
- [12:33]
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It did not go down very well with the comedian Lewis Black. Now, I think it's a funny joke. I don't think Richard was telling it in the best possible way in that clip. But the point still remains. Only 55% of people in the world found that joke funny.
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We found the world's funniest joke is actually one of the world's most blandest jokes. I think I might try and push back from telling it is all over the web. It involves two hunters and a mobile phone. You can go and Look. I spent 20 years not getting a laugh from that joke and also I can face it again. So we did that and then as part of the results, it turned out that Germans thought the jokes were funniest and right at the bottom of the league table in terms of finding the jokes not at all funny were Canadians and that rather upset the Canadians. And I had some Canadians asked to see the raw data and we sent it over and they said these jokes are terrible. What kind of people would find these funny? And then because of that, Canada commissioned a documentary going all over the world looking at humor. And I went with the team and we went all over the world and told jokes and got people to tell us jokes and it was amazing. And so many people got involved in different ways throughout the year. But the catalyst for that was walking into a room saying one line over promising and then figuring out how on earth we're going to deliver on this thing.
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Richard summarises the quest for the world's funniest joke nicely in his book. He writes, I don't believe the world's funniest joke exists. If our research tells us anything, it's that people find different things funny. Women like laugh at jokes in which men look stupid. The elderly laugh at jokes involving memory loss and hearing difficulties. Those who are powerless laugh at those in power. There is no joke that will make everyone laugh. Our brains just don't work like that. He finishes by writing, in many ways, I believe that we uncovered the world's blandest joke. The gag that makes everyone smile, but very few laugh out loud. But yet, in his quest, Richard learnt a lot about human psychology. He learned how we envy those in power, that we like to feel that power ourselves and that we're pattern seeking creatures that laugh. When something breaks the pattern, we expect it's a cracking story. But Richard wasn't done there for a real laugh. He decided to give a bunch of 20 something boozers, non alcoholic beer and wine and monitor whether or not they acted drunk. Find out what happened after the break. The podcast I'd like to recommend today after you listen to Nudge is Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings and is brought to you of course by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Listen and you will hear Sarah ask the hard questions and uncover these triumphs, failures and lessons from the top business leaders. Also, you can make your own billion dollar moves in venture, business and life. It's a wonderful podcast. So go and listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. And next up, Professor Richard Wiseman had another one of his eye opening experiments to share with me.
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We had two groups of people in a bar. We gave half of them a red badge, the other half a blue badge whenever they went up to the bar. If they got a red badge they were given genuine alcohol. If they're given a blue badge, they were given they didn't realize it, but given alcohol with no alcohol in it, as were alcohol free wine or beer.
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This experiment is very similar to a follow up experiment run by Bill Nye in his famous Bill Nye the Science Guy TV show. Here's the clip.
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We're going to have these people drink what they think is beer, but there's no alcohol. Correct. And so what do we expect to happen? Well, we're going to see if we get a sort of a placebo effect in the sense that people, if they think they're drinking alcohol and they're in a bar setting and they're with other people, how much of the effects are due to alcohol and how much a of due to the setting and the expectancy and the contact high.
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And that is what Professor Wiseman wanted to find out too. Except in his experiment some of the people in the room with red badges would be drinking real alcohol, whereas only those with blue badges would be served the non alcoholic booze.
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And then throughout the evening we looked at reaction time, whether they could walk along a straight line and also memory, memory, serial position memory, which is where you give people had a series of single digits and asked them to remember what came after number six or whatever it is. And what we could see was that after a couple of hours the people who had been given the non alcoholic drinks that they thought got alcohol in showed a decline in performance on all
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of those things, which is also exactly what Bill Nye discovered in his experiment.
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Dr. George and I are now Observing behind a mirror. While Dr. Marlon plays bartender. I'm looking for the usual types of changes that you see in people after they have a drink. Which are getting a little more relaxed. Being a little more sociable, perhaps a little giggly, being a little looser.
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That's what they found. The volume of all the groups rose. The amount of laughter increased. More people started spilling drinks. And many groups began playing drinking games. Something I can't say I've ever seen people do With Coca Cola and other non alcoholic drinks.
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It's a placebo effect, if you like, an expectation effect, but. But still, with actual alcohol. You get a genuine physiological effect as well. But yes, that. That was the. The concept. Now, I think when I did that, I was surprised at how there wasn't really very much research into it. I thought it'd be a well researched area. But I don't think I could find very much about it. Maybe that's changed over the years. The one that actually related to it. That caused more mayhem than any other was wine tasting. We went to various science festivals. With either a very cheap bottle of red wine. Or a very expensive bottle of red wine. Poured it into a very small sort of glass. Had people taste it and had to say whether they thought it was cheap or expensive. They couldn't tell the difference. And we even found professional wine tasters. And they couldn't tell the difference either. And we published that. And oh my goodness, the wine industry really were not happy about that at all. And started shouting at us and all sorts of things.
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Richard writes that exactly the same type of effect has emerged in medical experiments on the placebo effect. For example, when people are exposed to fake poison ivy, they developed genuine rashes. Those given caffeine free coffee become more alert. And patients who underwent a fake knee operation. Reported reduced pain from their supposedly healed tendons. In fact, experiments cited in Krumm and Langer's 2007 paper. Comparing the effects of genuine drugs as compared to those of sugar pills. Shows that between 60 and 90% of the drug's potency. Depends on some extent to the placebo effect. Now, over the three episodes I've created with Professor Wiseman. He has shared dozens of successful studies. That have proven quirks in human behavior. But he was really keen to stress to me and to you, the listeners. That behind all of these successful studies. There were dozens of studies that did not work. Including one study that really surprised me. Because it's a study I've cited several times on the show.
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If you look back at Solomon Ash's work, which is where you have three lines and then a fourth line, and I mean physical lines on paper. And the question is, with that fourth line, which of the other three does it match? And it's obvious which one it is. And then you have everyone around the table. Everyone's a stooge except the participant. The stooge will go for the wrong line. And the question is, does the participant go, oh, my goodness, I'll comply with the group?
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There's some great footage from these studies.
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The Asch experiment is one of psychology's oldest and most popular pieces of research. A volunteer is told that he's taking part in a visual perception test. What he doesn't know is that the other participants are actors, and he's the only person taking part in the real test.
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The experiment you will be taking part in today involves the perception of line length. Your task will be simply to look at the line here on the left and indicate which of the three lines
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on the right is equal to it in length.
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So, for example, the actors have been told to match the wrong lines. The volunteer will be monitored to see if he gives the correct answer or if he goes along with the opinion of the group and gives the wrong answer. In the first test, the correct answer is 2, 1.
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1.
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1. The real volunteer pauses here. He looks pained, and then he says, 2, 1. The volunteer managed to defy here. He showed his independence, but would he continue to do so?
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Once again, the correct answer is 2, 3.
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3, 3.
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Again the volunteer pauses. He looks pained. He looks around the room and he eventually says, 3, 3.
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The ASCH experiment has been repeated many times and the results have been supported again and again.
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Or has it? Because Richard tried to replicate the Asch experiment and he didn't find the same results.
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Well, that stuff used to work in the 50s. It doesn't work now. I can tell you that's one of the ones which is really hard to replicate. We tried it again and again. People are not compliant now in the way they were. I suspect off the back of the Second World War.
- [22:19]
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You have been listening to the fantastic professor Richard Wiseman on nudge. Back in 1999, he set out to find the funniest joke in the world. He succeeded. He found a joke that most people found funny. And yet still, it's a joke that probably did not make you laugh. Wiseman's laugh lab studies did not find a universally funny joke. It found that universal jokes aren't really funny at all, like the cracker jokes at Christmas or the stuffy one liners from Corporate compares jokes that appeal to all really appeal to none. And yet, in his research, he's uncovered some fascinating quirks of human behavior. We all want to feel superior. We will laugh at jokes that make us feel superior. And if a joke about our superiority breaks our expectations, we find it even funnier. Here's one more joke to leave you with A man walking down a street sees another man with a very big dog. The man says, does your dog bite? The other man replies, no, my dog doesn't bite. The first man then pats the dog and has his hand bitten off. He shouts, I thought you said your dog didn't bite. The other man replies, that's not my dog. If you enjoyed Richard's appearances on Nudge, you will love his books. His books are well worth a read. I've dropped links to them both in the show notes. I'll be back next Monday with a new episode of the show, but if you need more behavioural science before then, then please do check out my Friday newsletter. Every week I spend 18 hours digging through journals and books to surface one genuinely useful behavioural science tip, which I share with you in an easy to read Friday newsletter. To sign up, head to nudgepodcast.com that is nudgepod podcast.com and hit newsletter in the menu. I've been your host, Phil Agnew. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back next Monday. Cheers.