A few days ago I was watching a documentary on LaughLab. One of the things they did in their experiments was ask people to rate how funny each joke was, and then they ranked this by country. Germany ranked the most jokes as funnier, while Canada was a distant tenth. The people at LaughLab said this means Germans have the best sense of humour, but I'm not sure if thinking everything is funny constitutes a sense of humour.

Then today I read about an experiment where they asked people of various ages to pick the punchlines for some jokes from a multiple choice list. Younger people got all the punchlines correct, while older people missed a few. They concluded that this means older people lose their sense of humour.

I think they're missing a factor that can explain the findings of both these experiments: the internet. There are a lot of jokes on the internet, possibly every joke in the world. Jokes get posted onlines as quickly as they get thought up. I know that since I got online, hearing a joke I have never heard before has become an extremely rare occurence. And the vast majority of these rare occurences happen online.

Canada is one of the most wired nations in the world. While everyone in the laughlab experiment must be online, it is more likely that Canadians have been online longer than some other nationalities, and therefore have heard more jokes. Canadians rate the jokes lower simply because they've heard them before. I love the joke about the two hunters that won the title of funniest joke in the world, but I know it already so I might not laugh when you tell me it. Meanwhile, I might laugh at a not-as-good joke that I've heard before.

Similarly, young people are much likelier to be online than old people. Since being online increases the likelihood that they've heard the jokes used in the experiment, they are able to complete the punchline not because of a better sense of humour, but because they already know the joke.