The patient delivers the test results to his or her doctor.
— So, doctor? Is this serious? Am I at risk of dying?
The doctor looks at the tests with a worried face.
— I'm sorry to break the news. But his condition is very serious.
I'll give you ten at most.
— Ten what, doctor? Ten years? Months? Weeks?!
Then the doctor looks at his watch.
—Ten…Nine…Eight…Seven…

The funniest joke in the world

The Magazine New Yorker This month, he republished an article from 2002, which is almost a treatise on humor. The article talks about a study conducted by Professor Richard Wiseman, a famous British psychologist, to find the funniest joke in the world.

The idea was actually put forward in 1969 by the British comedy group Monty Python. They made a skit about a guy who supposedly wrote the funniest joke in the world. It was so good, so good, that as soon as it was created, its author literally died laughing at his own joke.

His mother went to see what had happened, read the joke, and died too. The police officer who responded to the case did the same. They had to hide the paper in a safe. Since this was happening during World War II, the British military decided to use the joke as a weapon to kill German soldiers. The British soldiers repeated the joke over a loudspeaker in fake German. Hitler's soldiers burst out laughing and died in droves.

It was a mood board. But Dr. Richard Wiseman took the issue seriously. He really did search for the funniest joke in the world. He even created a website called LaughLab to collect user-submitted jokes. By 2002, he had collected 40,000 jokes, two-thirds of which he hadn’t had the courage to share with the public.

(The jokes here are translated from the LaughLab collection.)

***

A man meets another man with a very large dog. The first one asks:

— Does your dog bite?

— No, my dog ​​doesn't bite.

The first man confidently goes to pat the big dog and bites his hand.

— But you said your dog didn't bite!

— This is not my dog.

***

Debbie Gutierrez, who has become Dr. Weissman’s assistant, often reads these and other jokes to audiences of volunteers. The scientist notes the degree of enthusiasm that each story, sent in by people from dozens of countries, generates. They even invented a “reisameter” to measure audience reactions in a more scientific way.

Gutierrez recalls that the joke doesn’t always need to be told. One time she got on stage and said, “Two gays and a midget walk into a bar…” The audience nearly fell to the floor for four long seconds of laughter. (A four-second laugh is considered a gold medal for comedians. On average, it usually lasts two seconds.)

In that magical moment, every member of the audience imagined the scene described in just eight words and gave themselves the right to laugh. And without the presence of the patrolman I wake up In your mind. They were “a gay man and a midget,” but they could have been “two muscular men and a football referee,” or “two lesbians and a plumber.” Any strange combination of two identical people and one different person will fill our imagination with strange images.

***

Two cows are talking. The first one says:

— Moo.

The second one answers:

— I would have said the same thing.

***

sudden glory

Aristotle had already studied the mechanism of laughter in the 4th century BC. Unfortunately, his writings on the subject have been lost. Thomas Hobbes, author of the classics The tyrantLaughter was described in 1651 as a “sudden glory” of discovering one's own strength or “to understand something distorted in others.”

By the way, dwarves and hunchbacks were the stars of medieval comedies. If a dwarf had a hunchback, it would be more “funny”. This was considered normal. Quasimodo's tragedy, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, is based on this custom. The French philosopher and scientist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) defined humor as follows: “Nothing excites more laughter than the disproportion between what a person expects and what he sees.”

Sigmund Freud devoted an entire book to the study of humor (Joke and its relation to the subconsciousfrom 1905). According to Encyclopedia BritannicaIn his book, Freud explores the mechanisms of jokes and humor, comparing the process to dream work. He suggests that jokes have a dual nature, being both consciously formulated and unconsciously revealing. Freud sees the power of humor as being in releasing unconscious impulses, which may be aggressive or sexual in nature.

***

There are two hunters in the middle of the forest, one of them loses consciousness. The other takes out his cell phone and calls emergency services:

— My friend died! What should I do?

The companion answers:

— Stay calm, I can help you. First, make sure he's really dead.

The operator waits for a moment of silence and hears a shot. The other hunter speaks again:

— Well, what else?

“spastic skeletal muscle contractions”

Dr. Wiseman's study concluded that most of the jokes he received followed four typical patterns: “1) Someone tries to be clever and fails; 2) Unlovable husbands and wives; 3) Doctors are insensitive to impending death; and 4) God makes mistakes.”

Why are these topics so popular? Here we return to Dr. Sigmund Freud. We are in a mysterious and indecipherable area of ​​the human unconscious.

But, in the end, what makes us laugh? Article from New Yorker He explains that the way we process humor is still a mystery. By stimulating certain points in the brain, a person can be made to cry or smile. But it is practically impossible to make someone laugh in this way.

Puns are processed on the left side of the cerebral cortex. More complex jokes are processed on the right side and trigger electrical activity in other areas.

Laughter itself is scientifically described in the article as follows: “Laughter initiates the coordinated action of 15 facial muscles, beginning with the raising of the eyebrows and a series of eye and cheek muscle contractions known as the ‘startle response.’ What follows are spasmodic skeletal muscle contractions, rapid heartbeat and rapid breathing. The diaphragm contracts in clonic movements that grow and then shrink.

Laughter is an easy way to bring instant pleasure to others. It works like a mini orgasm for the mind.

***

A teacher and two assistants find Aladdin's lamp. They rub it, and a genie comes out of the lamp and says he will grant each of their wishes.

— I want to go to the Bahamas to fly one jet ski With a delicious woman topless On the back! – says the first mate.

And… faggot! The first assistant disappears. The second assistant hurries:

— I want to go to Hawaii to sun, drink beer and surf!

And a sodomite! The second one disappears. The genius asks the teacher:

— What do you want?

— I want these two back to work in the lab right after lunch.

***

sacred medicine

Laughter is an easy way to bring instant pleasure to others. It acts like a mini-orgasm for the mind. It's the moment when we ask permission to solve our problems and enjoy a few seconds of “spastic skeletal muscle contractions.”

If you walk into a bar or restaurant, you're likely to hear a lot of laughter. Some of it exaggerated. Laughing and making others laugh is the shortest and quickest form of social acceptance.

“Laughter is important for mental health, because it releases serotonin and endomorphins,” says Dr Sylvia Currie, director of the HCor Psychology Service. “These are substances that bring a sense of well-being, pleasure and joy, and reduce the risk of psychosomatic illnesses, such as depression, anxiety and stress.”

What's more: According to cardiologist Abrau Curry, “When you smile, your blood flow increases, which helps control your blood pressure and protect against heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems.”

***

Two women, friends for decades, are playing cards. One of them says, embarrassed:

— We've known each other for a long time… Don't be mad at me, but I've completely forgotten your name! Can you remind me what your name is?

The other lady puts the papers on the table and sighs:

— Are you in a hurry to find out?

***

Who's afraid of humor?

Tyrants.

Article by Srdja Popovic and Mladen Jokic for the magazine Foreign Policy He recounts an event that took place at the height of the Balkan civil war. Popovic and Joksic belonged to a good-hearted Serbian pro-democracy group called Otpor. They had placed an oil can in one of the busiest corners of Belgrade. On the brass they had hung a picture of the feared dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Next to the brass they had left a baseball bat. Then the group went for coffee and saw what had happened.

Soon there was a line of citizens waiting their turn to slap Milosevic's picture. Everyone wanted to have some fun after years of terror and death. Half an hour later the police arrived. And to end the joke perfectly, they arrested…the coppersmith.

“Revolution is a serious matter,” Popovic and Joksic wrote. Foreign Policy“Just remember the frowning faces of 20th century revolutionaries like Lenin, Mao, Fidel and Che.” A good example is the tyrannical Ayatollahs of Iran, who never seem to smile in their lives. And they have forbidden joy in their country.

In Vladimir Putin's highly repressive Russia, a group of mockers from Siberia decided to stage a protest using only dolls. Thumbnails of toy storyBarbies, teddy bears, all with anti-dictatorship stickers. Yes, the dolls were arrested, and future protests using the toys were banned. These days, Putin has to worry about memes in which he quacks like a duck.

Xi Jinping turned the meme into a state security issue. An innocent montage compared him to Pooh, known to Brazilians as Winnie the Pooh. For some reason, comparing the Chinese leader to the beloved bear left the dictator in shock.

The government called the meme “a serious effort to undermine the dignity of the presidential work and Xi himself.” An army of censors working for the Chinese Communist Party immediately began deleting the memes from across the country’s internet. The teddy bear became the most censored image ever in China. The ban made it a symbol of resistance to the regime.

But none of these stories seem more ridiculous than the case of the Brazilian judge who censored 22 million Brazilians with the stroke of a pen by suspending a national social network.

Once X/Twitter is returned to us, we can make good jokes about this fact.

Read also “30 Years. friends“