From today's edition of The Times...
Why the last laugh isn't always funny
Graham Keeley Barcelona
The British may pride themselves on their sense of humour but they are really an oversensitive, paranoid nation prone to gelotophobia - a condition in which sufferers always believe the joke is on them.
That, at least, is the punchline to one of the ideas presented at the International Symposium on Humour and Laughter; a six day "humour summer school" hosted in Granada by a US-based group of psychologists, sociologists and linguists.
A typical gelotophobe hears a stranger's laugh and believes he or she is the butt of the joke. In extreme cases this can induce sweating, palpitations, trembling or simply freezing up.
Willibald Ruch, of the University of Zurich, said that Britain had the highest number of gelotophobes in Europe - although, funnily enough, he didn't explain how he had arrived at this conclusion. "Within Europe, Britain is on the top - absolutely on the top", said Professor Ruch.
British academics responded with a few deadpan presentations of their own. Christie Davies, an emeritus professor at the University of Reading, said that the fall of many totalitarian regimes had proved lethal for humour. "Jokes are a way of getting around restrictions on what you can say. That was a very important factor in Eastern Europe", Professor Davies said.
Researchers found that, among friends, rival joke-tellers often try to outdo each other - leaving those unable to compete feeling mildly depressed, Beatrice Priego-Valverde, of the University of Provence, France, said: "Making jokes is very competitive and can generate isolation."
The academics also debated the thorny issues of how punchlines are time in Chinese jokes, and a Japanese technique that measures humour via the electrical currents in the diaphragm during a belly laugh.
Another study subjected a group of volunteers to 33 hours of one-liners, and concluded, perhaps unsurprisingly, that sustained exposure to jokes can wear them very thin.
