Most Wanted Comedy?

     While hearing about the most and least wanted painting study I was reminded of another study conducted in a very similar way.  The study was centered around finding the world’s funniest joke.  The reason I bring this up is that I think the study on comedy illustrates some of the flaws in the study on paintings and some of the inherent difficulties in studying that which is a matter of taste.  You will find the link to the study’s website here:

http://www.richardwiseman.com/LaughLab/winner.html

     Basically the idea of the study was to have the general public submit jokes to the website.  These would then be posted and voted on by visitors to the website.  Some demographic data would be collected while rating the joke.  The world’s funniest joke could be found from the highest ratings.  Sounds simple enough, but there were some problems with this set up, one of which was the issue of crude humor.  To get around this each of the jokes was screened by the website staff.  This way only clean jokes made it onto the web site.  I personally do not like crude humor, but many do.  In filtering the jokes to be voted on the website staff have completely done away with objectivity.  You can see the result in the winning joke.  It really isn’t very funny, in the same way that the most wanted paintings were not particularly beautiful.  In an issue of taste, can we censor that which considered bad taste without sacrificing objectivity?

     The very structure of these studies set the research teams up for failure.  Paintings cannot be boiled down to checkbox elements.  The checkboxes do not account for the infinite variety of people’s personal tastes.  The checkboxes are the reason why all the paintings look the same.  I am not a visual artist but I do know a lot more goes into painting that simply combining different iconic elements.  There is gestalt to consider, and painting style.  There is that intangible transcendent quality that separates a masterwork from other works of lesser quality and skill.

     What are your opinions?  How could these studies be changed to provide better results?  I am reminded of Isaac Asimov’s Hari Seldon.  There is power in a large sample size, but one must ask the right questions to produce meaningful data.