“One joke used during the study was: “A businessman is riding the subway after a hard day at the office. A young man sits down next to him and says, ‘Call me a doctor, call me a doctor’. The businessman asks, ‘What’s the matter, are you sick?’.”
The participants were expected to correctly identify the punchline as: “The young man says, ‘I just graduated from medical school’.””
This is not even a joke, it is syntactically crippled.
We could fault this writer, for if he had told us at this point that the testee was to select from multiple choices, one of these two or more responses, the we might conclude that the person answering had no sense of humor.
Had the businessman said, “This ain’t no phone booth, pal” that would have been funny.
(Come to think of it, testee is kind of funny, itself)
Sounds like was outsourced to India.
Which reminds me of the Albert Brooks film I saw where he went to investigate what makes Middle Easterners laugh.
The participants were expected to correctly identify the punchline as: “The young man says, ‘I just graduated from medical school’.””
This is not even a joke, it is syntactically crippled.
Exactly. I knew if I read down the thread long enough, someone would get to the meat of it. The correct answer for the question of which was fnnnier is "none of the above."
Humor is not just content and premise, it's execution and art. You can't separate the set up from the punchline like that--or use unnaturally stilted language. That "joke" was DOA. If anything, this study proved (aside from the idiocy of such studies) only that younger people are more willing to be compliant about giving the "expected" answer. Just one or two participants deliberately choosing "wrong" answers as protest over the flawed syntax and methodology could produce the 6% differential in the "get-it" factor the study purports to prove. For all we know, participants DID write in "none of the above" and it was counted as wrong.