Everything Science Says About the Perfect Joke

We like to think that jokes are gently placed, fully formed, in our brains by some divine entity that looks suspiciously like Andy Kaufman, so to call a joke formulaic is usually an insult. For most of us, an equation is the most exhausting thing we can do, and comedy is all about effortlessness. 

In fact, the funnier you are, the less activity you show in your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning and direction, while you’re telling a joke, which means you’re physically not trying very hard. But according to the same science that tells us that, there are formulas that can be plugged in to devise the perfect joke.

The formula that you’ve probably heard most often applied to humor is “comedy equals tragedy plus time,” and it’s sort of true, and not just in terms of how long you have to wait to joke about 9/11. For example, a 2012 study found that people were more willing to laugh about a car accident from which everyone involved had recovered the longer ago that it happened, but it’s not because the passage of time itself is a hoot. It’s because it creates a temporal distance that makes it feel less personal, which can be accomplished just as well with physical or even metaphysical distance. It’s why you can laugh at an obvious Photoshop of a gnarly injury but probably won’t if you know that it’s real. It’s also why a nut shot is funny if the victim is a stranger and not, say, your son (and therefore you and your hopes for grandchildren).

But why is something funnier if it’s not real (or at least not real to us)? That’s the more interesting equation developed by the same researchers at University of Colorado, Boulder: comedy equals transgression minus harm. It’s the “minus harm” part that shock comedians and 13-year-olds often fail to grasp. Returning to the nut shot, it violates several legal and moral boundaries, but most people recover from nut shots just fine, so it’s a lot funnier than, say, castration. To use an example cited by the researchers, more than 60 percent of subjects thought a scenario in which a man rubs his genitals on a cat was funny if the cat responded positively versus only 28 percent if the cat didn’t like it. The real question is probably what’s wrong with that 28 percent, but that’s a different study.

There’s an even more direct formula for calculating the funniness of a joke, created by the Comedy Research Project at London’s Science Museum, if you really want to get technical. It’s c=(m+nO)/p, but it’s even more complicated than that, because the “comic moment” (“m”) is calculated by the length of the setup multiplied by the funniness of the punchline. 

In other words, a short joke needs a better punchline. Add that to the number (“n”) of pratfalls times the social and physical “ouch” (“O”) of them, and divide the whole thing by the number of puns, because puns only hurt a joke. 

You heard it here, folks. Don’t make us say it again.