Ha Ha Ha!....Wait, I Don't Get It

Scientists have found Australia's funniest joke? Don't make me laugh :

The LaughLab experiment conducted by psychologist Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire, attracted more than 40,000 jokes and almost two million ratings.

Researchers found significant differences between nations in the types of jokes they found funny.

Apparently, Australians, like Brits, the Irish and New Zealanders, prefer jokes involving word play. Here's the winner :

PATIENT: "Doctor, I've got a strawberry stuck up my bum."

DOCTOR: "I've got some cream for that."

That's a bit of a granddad joke, isn't it?

Other results from the survey showed :

- Of the countries rating the highest number of jokes, Germans, perhaps surprisingly, laughed the most. Canadians laughed least.

- If you want to tell a funny animal joke, make it a duck.

- The most frequently submitted joke, at 300 times, was: "What's brown and sticky? A stick."

Scientists should know better than to be messing around trying to find the world's funniest joke. As the BBC news show Monty Python accurately reported in the late 60s, maximum mirth can not only be dangerous to your health, it can be very, very deadly indeed :



Note : Look, I know this story is from 2002, but I only just found it via @Tzarimas on Twitter, I'd already written most of the story, found the Monty Python video, embedded it, before I realised how old it was, and I'm not going to toss away a perfectly good piece of Saturday afternoon nonsense just because it's nine years old.

Crack A Joke, Break The Misery

I was wondering when we were going to see the return of the black-as Australian sense of humour amongst all the seriousness and tragedy of the Victorian fires. It sounds like it's back :

"The Catholic Church has burnt down, the United Church has burnt down, and I see the Buddhist temple is still standing," one survivor said.

"It sort of makes you realise who might have the real God. I think I'll change religion."

One woman says that when she took a TV crew to her house, they began walking over the rubble and she called out to them, "No, through here please," and proceeded to pick up what was left of the front door handle.

Great story.