Scientists from Northern Illinois University have discovered that people prefer wordplay over all jokes, even if they don’t respond with laughter. business results published In Elsevier magazine.
Such puns include jokes such as “elevators scare me, I take steps to avoid them” or “I was so broke in college that I couldn’t pay my electric bills, these were the darkest days of my life”.
Often the audience does not respond to such jokes with laughter, but with a groan, which can be confused with an expression of annoyance. But the researchers are actually expressing their approval. They reached this conclusion by interviewing 300 people. Volunteers joked about their preferences and also took a personality test. As it turned out, word games are one of the most popular humorous genres, people like to listen to such jokes and make jokes about themselves.
“We knew that many viewed wordplays as “language geeks” that hindered communication, and we thought that puns should offend people in the same way as Internet trolls. We were shocked to see that people love wordplays. Most chose them from the other 10 options. Scientists only “Funny stories based on observations of the outside world can compete with them,” he said.