as we all sit and wait for the election results to beginning sweeping in, roughly east to west, let’s take a breath and see if we laugh at some jokes. up right now on the Psychology Today blog is a post by Elisabeth Malin and Dan Ariely about a study they did: Who Enjoys Humor More: Conservatives or Liberals? (all jokes used in the study are reprinted there.) they asked 285 participants to rank a series of jokes, each on a scale of 1 to 9 (9 being utter hilarity). here’s how they open:

Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by. He stops in mid swing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”

Who do you think will find this joke more funny liberals or conservatives?

it’s an interesting read. but, rather than focus on what the study told us about liberal vs. conservative humor preferences, let’s just look at what’s interesting about the funny stuff: how jokes are broken down.

the joke above is an example of a more traditional function of a punch line: it make for an effective left hook because it contrasts sharply with the rest of the joke, but in a way that ties things up neatly, and often reinforces a widely held stereotype (like above, with middle-aged dudes and golf). here’s another one.

Husband: When I get mad at you, you never fight back. How do you control your anger?
Wife: I clean the toilet bowl.
Husband: How does that help?
Wife: I use your toothbrush.

on the other end, you have what can loosely be called abstract jokes—ones in which the punchline doesn’t contrast so neatly with the setup, instead tangenting off a skewed angle, or just sitting there. the Malin and Areily study uses a handful of Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey jokes to represent the abstract end of the joke spectrum—the title to this post is one of Handey’s Thoughts—and they could hardly do better. SNL’s Deep Thoughts was dear to many people for a long time, for a good reason. i mean, look—

If you’re being chased by an angry bull, and you notice you’re also being chased by a swarm of bees, it doesn’t really change things. Just keep on running.

we’ll get back to the future of online education and the finer points of the MBA experience and politics and the fate of the nation tomorrow. or later tonight, for many of us. meantime, jokes are a way to keep the air moving in and out of your lungs at a good clip.

If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone.