Matter of opinion?

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: “Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: “OK, now what?"

Funniest joke in the world? I think not. But this is not what laughlab (www.laughlab.co.uk) would have me believe. This joke was announced as the 'world's funniest joke' by majority vote.

Laughlab was established by some scientist (I think. I don't know, you read the web page) and finding the world's funniest joke was one of their 'experiments'(?) Now, I understand that it being an international, multi-cultural, multi-aged, mixed-religious study thing that there was never going to be any good jokes submitted. But then why bother with the study? It's not really applicable to the general population at all.

I was going to criticise this 'scientific' endeavour as bringing shame upon the scientific community and feeding the current attitude against science by misrepresenting the term "scientific", but then I realised that I was misunderstanding the meaning of scientific. Science being essentially the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, this project did fit in, in theory. It would have been nice to get some insight into the neural workings behind what we find humourous, but this study gives a poor representation at best.

Anyhow, I’d be interested to hear comments. In fact maybe we could make some attempt at it here; post any jokes that you think are classics and we could get some voting or something.