What's So Funny?- A scientific attempt to discover why we laugh.

A scientific attempt to discover why we laugh. How the brain processes humor remains a mystery. It’s easy to make someone smile or cry by electronically stimulating a single region of the brain, but it’s astonishingly difficult to make someone laugh. The “laughter circuit” is complex and various. Puns are processed on the left side of the brain by gyri, bumpy areas on the surface of the cerebral cortex; more complex, non-wordplay jokes are routed through gyri on the right side of the brain and also trigger electronic activity in many other parts of the brain.

- By Tad Friend - Illustration by Jules Feifer

One Saturday evening in late June, the master of ceremonies at the Ice House, a comedy club in Pasadena, California, told the audience that they were in for a special treat: Dr. Richard Wiseman, a British scientist who was on a quest to determine the world’s funniest joke, was going to come out and enlist the audience’s help. The m.c., Debi Gutierrez, would tell jokes that particularly appealed to Americans who had visited Wiseman’s humor Web site, and he would tell jokes favored by the British.

Wiseman bounded up and perched on a stool facing Gutierrez, a brassy woman in her early forties. “May I call you Richard?” she asked.

“You can call me what you want,” Wiseman said.

“Dr. Dick! ” she said. The audience whooped, and Wiseman offered a game smile. In a navy-blue T-shirt, khakis, and tortoise-rimmed glasses, with a Vandyke beard balancing his baldness, he looked like a particularly helpful store manager at the Gap. In fact, at the age of thirty-five, Wiseman—a professor at the University of Hertfordshire and the director of its Perrott-Warrick Research Unit—is Britain’s most recognizable psychologist, famous for such mass-participation experiments as determining whether people can most easily detect lies told on television, on the radio, or in print. (It’s on the radio.) Since last fall, he has been conducting a global humor study at, a Web site where visitors submit jokes and rate other people’s jokes on a five-point scale called, somewhat unrigorously, the Giggleometer. When the experiment began, Wiseman posed for publicity photographs wearing a lab coat and holding a clipboard as he scrutinized a student wearing a chicken suit who was crossing a road. One photographer shouted, “Could the guy playing the scientist move to the left?,” and Wiseman cried, “I am a scientist.”