We are not all equally gifted at jokes. Many, from the outset, declare themselves insolvent in this field, and they are surely right. And then there is that embarrassing silence after telling the alleged grace: “Don’t you get it?” We ask incredulously. We just giggled, nervously, we. What makes a joke good or makes some people tell better jokes than others?
Since its inception, modern psychology has studied the mechanisms of that little humorous story, probably as old as humanity: Paul McDonald, from the University of Wolverhampton, assures that the first is this Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC: “Something that has never happened since time immemorial: a young woman farting on her husband’s knees . ” Sigmund Freud has already deeply addressed the subject and, in the 1960s, the expert Edward de Bono believed that laughter occurred because our brain, always looking for patterns to order information, suddenly finds an unexpected connection.
So is surprise the secret of a good joke? Up to a point… Research just published by the cognitive psychologist Sascha Topolinski, from the University of Würzburg (Germany), apparently shows that sometimes the fluency with which you narrate them is even more important . In his experiments, he presented subjects with important words from the finishing blow, the funny punchline, minutes before telling it, and many volunteers rated it higher on the “funny” scale. When words were anticipated from the beginning, it had no effect. Topolinski’s conclusion is that contrary to common sense, spoiling sometimes increases the effectiveness of the gag, because listeners understand it better. As we all know, Eugenio, Chiquito de la Calzada, that hideous brother-in-law and other humorous artists win over the audience for their way of telling the joke, even if we know the ending beforehand or have heard it a thousand times.
