An experiment conducted in Britain?
I though the British were renowned for an unusual sense of humor.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/10/03/joke.funniest/index.html
That hunter joke is not the funniest, and I can prove it.
Replace the hunters with pirates. Replace the gun with a cannon. Have the first guy say “Yarrrr!” at some point.
The result? A funnier joke.
Example two: replace the hunters with monkeys. Funnier joke.
QED.
Stupid stupid stupid
Oop! Sorry—I started a thread on the same topic over in MPSIMS. The Mods can close mine, if they want.
Shouldn’t we make sure your thread is dead first, Eve?
Arrrrr, Sawbones, what happens now?
Yeah, Pirates would be funnier.
But they did do some kind of poll to determine which of the jokes were funniest. If the poll was fair . . . then it is the funniest joke, isn’t it? Or it’s the joke that most people can get that’s funny?
Seems like there’s a tongue-in-cheek aspect to this, as well. “The World’s Funniest Joke” reminds one of the Monty Python routine where the joke that can kill is used as a weapon.
Finally, on a serious note . . . no. . . on a silly note . . . If I were at a party where everyone was telling their funniest jokes, I wouldn’t expect to hear that one. But then, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition . . . .
The funniest joke in the world is of course burried in the Berkshire countryside, never to be told again.
And I started one in Cafe Society. Sheesh.
Didn’t they announce this already? I could swear I heard all sorts of news on this a year or so ago. Complete with the joke. Does anyone else remember this, or have I gone completely bonkers? (not that that’s a bad thing, of course.)
I don’t get it.
So, what happened to this joke?
Yeah. Maybe it’s a yearly thing, and they’re measuring the evolution of humour. The end result will be that in 100 years time, the world’s funniest joke will be:
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Idunnop
Idunnop who
Arf Arf.
And what do you replace the phone with: tin cans and a wire? 
Signal flags and a semaphore station, Matey, AAARRRRRR!!!
AlbertRose: It’s not uncommon in hunting to bring down one’s quarry, and think it’s dead, only to have it suddenly jump up or thrash
about, having been wounded and stunned rather than killed. So when hunters approach their downed quarry, they often shoot the beast in the head to make sure it’s then dead.
Floater: Apparently this funniest joke study wasn’t complete when they announced the Holmes/Watson joke last year. Now it is in the number two postion.
Degrance, the link gave me this:
I wonder if they consider this to be a news site…
You’re not doing it scientifically. First; note the last 2 paragraphs of the article.
Using the two facts (ducks and 103 words) I can create a jole that is mathematically provably funnier than the original hunter joke. Replace the first sentence of the joke
with the sentence
The resulting joke contains 103 words and mentions ducks. The pretender to the title has neither attribute. Since I have shown that it is possible to create a funnier joke it then follows that the original joke cannot be “the world’s funniest joke”. Whether or not the new joke qualifies for the title is open to question and further research is required to determine whether or not it can be improved upon even further. It may even be the case that, like prime numbers, there is no such thing as a funniest joke but that there is instead an infinity of funnier and funnier jokes. These questions may remain unanswered until a practical general purpose quantum computer is available to study the problem.
"…the duck looks down at Davidm and back at the bartender. ‘Doesn’t everybody have one?’ "
iIf that was the funiest, there are a lot of lame jokes.