Bad Jokes Cause Hard Negative Reactions

In a new scientific study, researchers from the Washington State University have used a really bad joke – "What did the big chimney say to the little chimney? (Nothing. Chimneys can’t talk.)" – to assess how people in social networks respond to bad humor, even if the individuals telling the gags want to be funny. Their conclusion has been staggering – bad humor does more harm than good, and the worst reaction is to be expected from friends and the family, and not necessarily from strangers.

Nancy Bell, an applied linguist at WSU, told LiveScience that "I found it on the internlauet by Googling 'bad jokes'. We piloted this joke to make sure it was really bad." She then asked 186 volunteers to participate in the experiment, and had subjects hear this joke either from a friend or a member of the family, or from a complete stranger. Although the intentions of the person telling the gag were good, the reactions to poor humor were unexpected.

"I thought, well, everybody’s had the experience of trying to be funny and having it not be funny. I wouldn’t expect that people would twist the knife and make you feel even worse," she said.

People reacted with insults, sarcasm, fake laughter, snappy comeback, or even downright profanity and curses. The most severe reaction came from friends or family members, who proved more likely to make their acquaintances feel bad about themselves after telling a really bad joke.

"It's offensive to them. It means, you think I’m an idiot, huh?" the researcher explained. People are likely to react negatively to poor jokes because they take them as a personal affront to their sense of humor.

Another explanation would be that telling funny things is a disruption of the normal flow of the conversation, an occurrence that would usually annoy everyone, but, in the case of jokes, has its rewards, as in laughter. When the reward is not there, participants in a conversation are likely to snap at the wasted time.

Bell said that friends and family reacted poorly to jests made by those around them as a defense mechanism for the future. Basically, no one would want a person they spent a lot of time with cracking bad jokes on a regular basis. "You have a long term investment in that relationship, so you want to shut that down," she added.

"You can't have a complete theory of humor without understanding how it fails also. The study of humor in general was neglected for a long time – it wasn't thought of as serious academic work. But it's another important part of interaction," Bell, the author of a new study to be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Pragmatics, concluded.