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.[1] Purposes of the research included discovering the joke that had the widest appeal and understanding among different cultures, demographics and countries.
The History Channel eventually hosted a special on the subject.[2]
The winning joke, which was later found to be based on a 1951 Goon Show sketch by Spike Milligan,[3] was submitted by Gurpal Gosal of Manchester:
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:[4]
The joke that was submitted to LaughLab the most times was:[5]