Random Jokes

What this joke generator gives you

Short jokes. The kind you can remember after hearing once and repeat at a dinner table without anybody having to be quiet for you.

A sample:

• Why don't skeletons fight each other? They don't have the guts.
• Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field.
• What did one ocean say to the other ocean? Nothing, they just waved.
• Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything.

You groaned. That is not a failure of the joke. That is the joke working exactly as designed, and there is a decent scientific account of why, which is what the rest of this page is about.

Getting a joke out of it

1. Press Generate for one, and again if it did not land.
2. Ask for a few if you are hunting for one to actually use, since most jokes fail against most audiences.
3. Type into Contains to search for a subject, which is how you find the animal jokes or the science ones.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where these jokes come from

Short jokes and puns gathered and checked by hand, the kind that circulate without an author, the way folk songs do. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

Why a pun makes you groan

The best account we have of why anything is funny goes like this. A joke sets up a situation and quietly leads you to interpret it one way. The punchline then turns out to be incompatible with that reading, and you experience a jolt of incongruity. In the same instant, you find the second reading that makes the whole thing cohere. Resolve the incongruity and you laugh.

So a joke is a tiny puzzle you were not told you were solving, and the laugh is the sound of solving it.

Now think about the scarecrow. Outstanding in his field means distinguished, obviously, that is the reading you arrived with. Then it means standing out in a field, which he literally is, because he is a scarecrow. The two meanings sit inside one phrase and you get to hold both of them at once.

Here is why you groan rather than laugh. The pun makes the puzzle far too easy. You see the second meaning the moment the punchline lands, with no work at all, and there is a whiff of the joke having been forced into existence around the wordplay rather than arriving at it. The groan is not a rejection. It is an acknowledgement. It says: I got it, I got it instantly, and I resent that you made me.

Which is why the person who groans loudest usually repeats the joke to somebody else within a week.

The year they went looking for the funniest joke on Earth

In 2001, the psychologist Richard Wiseman set up a website with the British Science Association, and asked the internet a simple question. What is the funniest joke in the world?

The site did two things. You could submit your favourite joke. And you could rate five randomly chosen jokes on a five point scale that Wiseman called the Giggleometer. He also collected your age, sex and nationality, which is what turned a stunt into an experiment.

It ran for about a year. Forty thousand jokes were submitted. Three hundred and fifty thousand people from seventy countries took part, and close to two million ratings were cast. It went into the record books as the largest internet joke vote ever conducted.

The winner was a joke about two hunters, one of whom collapses. His friend telephones the emergency services in a panic, and the operator calmly tells him that the first thing to do is make sure the man is really dead. There is a pause. There is a gunshot. The hunter comes back to the phone and asks what to do next.

Wiseman later discovered that the joke was not new. It traces back to a 1951 sketch written by Spike Milligan for the radio show that would become the Goon Show. The funniest joke on the internet was fifty years old and somebody else's.

What that experiment actually found

This is the part that gets left out, and it is the best part.

Wiseman has since said plainly that the hunters joke was not the funniest joke in the world. It was the joke that the fewest people hated. Pull the data apart by group, and every single group had a joke they found much, much funnier. Men, women, young, old, Canadians. Each had a favourite, and each favourite was a joke that some other group actively disliked.

What survived the averaging was the joke nobody minded. The world's funniest joke turned out to be the world's most average joke, which is a finding about statistics rather than about comedy, and it is a much more interesting result than the one the newspapers printed.

The national differences were sharp. The British, the Irish, Australians and New Zealanders went for wordplay. The French, Danes and Belgians preferred the surreal. Americans and Canadians laughed hardest at jokes where somebody is made to look stupid. The Germans came top for finding everything funny, and Wiseman's explanation was not that Germans are especially cheerful. It was that they had no strong national preference, so nothing was ruled out.

And the winning joke, Wiseman noted, quietly did three things at once. You feel superior to the man with the gun. You register the incongruity of his misunderstanding. And underneath it all sits a joke about death, which is the thing everybody is anxious about.

Ducks, timing, and the length of a joke

Because they had forty thousand jokes and two million ratings, the team could count things nobody had ever counted.

Jokes of around a hundred and three words scored highest. The winning joke was a hundred and two. A joke can be too short to build the misdirection and too long to hold you, and there is apparently an optimum, which no comedian has ever needed to be told and every comedian already obeys.

Jokes with animals in them did well, and jokes with ducks in them did better than jokes with other animals. There is no theory for this. Ducks are simply funnier, and the data says so.

They also timestamped every rating from the United Kingdom. People found the jokes funniest on the seventh of October at three minutes past six in the evening. That is either the funniest moment of the year or a good demonstration of what happens when you slice data finely enough, and Wiseman had the grace to present it as a joke about statistics.

One last thing. The team fed in jokes generated by a computer program written to make puns. Nearly all of them were rated among the worst in the entire archive. One beat about two hundred and fifty human jokes: What kind of murderer has fibre? A cereal killer. Which tells you that a machine can do the mechanism of a joke, the collision of two meanings, and that the mechanism is most of it.

Questions people ask

Why are they called dad jokes?

Because the delivery matters more than the joke. A dad joke is told by somebody who is not trying to make you laugh, who knows it is bad, and who is enjoying your reaction rather than your laughter. Take away the pleasure in the groan and it is just a pun.

Does explaining a joke ruin it?

Yes, and the theory explains why. The pleasure is in resolving the incongruity yourself. If somebody resolves it for you, there is nothing left to do, and no laugh is produced. You can enjoy having a joke explained, but you will not laugh at it.

Why do some people never find puns funny?

Because a pun rewards a particular pleasure, catching the ambiguity in a word, and not everyone is playing that game. People who like puns tend to enjoy the mechanism itself. People who dislike them want the joke to be about something.

Why can I never remember jokes?

Because a joke is a precise structure, and remembering it means remembering the wording, not the story. People who tell jokes well remember far fewer of them than they let on. They know four and they use them for thirty years.

References

1. Wiseman, R., and the British Association for the Advancement of Science (2002). LaughLab: The Scientific Search for the World's Funniest Joke, final report. https://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/ll-final-report.pdf
2. Wiseman, R. The Psychology of Humour, on LaughLab's early findings and the computer generated jokes. https://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/psychology-of-humour/
3. World's funniest joke, including the Milligan origin and Wiseman's later comments on the result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_funniest_joke