Template:Short description Template:Pp-semi-indefTemplate:About
The "world's funniest joke" is a term used by Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire in 2002 to summarize one of the results of his research. For his experiment, named LaughLab, he created a website where people could rate and submit jokes.<ref>LaughLab official site</ref> Purposes of the research included discovering the joke that had the widest appeal and understanding among different cultures, demographics and countries.Template:Fact
The History Channel eventually hosted a special on the subject.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Winning jokeEdit
The winning joke, which was later found to be based on a 1951 Goon Show sketch by Spike Milligan,<ref>BBC: Spike 'wrote world's best joke'</ref> was submitted by Gurpal Gosal of Manchester:
Other findingsEdit
Researchers also included five computer-generated jokes, four of which fared rather poorly, but one was rated higher than one third of the human jokes:<ref>"Computer crack funnier than many human jokes", December 20, 2001, New Scientist</ref>
The joke that was submitted to LaughLab the most times was:<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />
What's brown and sticky? A stick.{{#if:|{{#if:|}}
— {{#if:|, in }}Template:Comma separated entries}}
{{#invoke:Check for unknown parameters|check|unknown=Template:Main other|preview=Page using Template:Blockquote with unknown parameter "_VALUE_"|ignoreblank=y| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | author | by | char | character | cite | class | content | multiline | personquoted | publication | quote | quotesource | quotetext | sign | source | style | text | title | ts }}
During a Science Vs podcast episode,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Richard Wiseman said this about whether it's actually the world's funniest joke: