Your Ability To Be Funny May Not Be Inherited After All, And That's Really Unexpected

There’s a lot you can inherit: a tall stature; genetic disorders; a hatred of hitting the gym; a spooky mansion being terrorized by a pair of ne’er-do-well lawyers – but one thing that doesn’t seem to be passed down genetically is a good sense of humor.

At least, that’s the finding of a new study from researchers at the UK’s Aberystwyth University. “Telling a joke may seem simple,” said Gil Greengross, a lecturer in Aberystwyth’s Psychology Department and lead author of the study, in a statement this week, “but having a good sense of humour is a complex and unique trait influenced by numerous psychological attributes and personality characteristics.”

“That these talents are not inherited is surprising, as it contradicts most research on the heritability of cognitive abilities such as creativity and mathematical skills,” he explained. “So, it is really fascinating.”

Objectively funny?

How do you measure humor? On the face of it, it seems impossible, right? What is or is not funny is famously subjective: what one person may find entirely beyond the pale may be a hilarious joke to another; what someone thinks is a comedic masterpiece may be passé or bland for somebody else.

Yeah, we hear you. But have you considered: no, it’s actually fine? 

Okay, maybe that’s a bit flippant – but this is far from the first study into humor, so researchers have long had to come up with a way of measuring it as objectively as possible. One of the most widely used metrics, it turns out, is creating a caption for a New Yorker cartoon – so that’s exactly what the researchers in this project did. 

“[W]e used two cartoons from previous cartoon contests,” the study reports. “In the first, a restaurant customer places an order before a wet bear acting as a waiter. In the second, a real estate agent shows a couple a house located in space, with planets visible through the window.” 

“Twins were asked to write one funny caption for each cartoon,” the researchers explain. “There was no time limit, but twins were encouraged to spend some time considering their responses.”

Once completed and submitted, the team would employ the so-called Many-Facet Rasch Model to these captions. From that, they would then be able to “derive an IRT-based humor ability score for each twin,” explains the study. Talk about dissecting the frog, hey?

But that was only one stage of the process. The twins – all 1,300-plus of them – were also asked to rate how funny they considered themselves; then, how funny they considered their twin. Participants’ health and cognitive ability were also measured for the study, and correlations would be calculated between literally every set of data available.

So, what did they find? 

Your twin’s got your back

After a long and arduous period spent reading jokes – it’s a hard job, but that’s why scientists get the big bucks – the results were in. It was, it seems, good news for inter-twin relationships – but maybe not for any budding comedians’ egos.

“Overall, the strongest correlation [was] between how twins rate themselves and how they rate their co-twin,” the paper reports. In contrast, the correlation between how funny participants thought they were, and how funny they actually were, was barely more than one-quarter the strength – in essence, your own perception of your humor ability has little-to-no bearing on how hilarious everyone else thinks you are.

But those two facts together imply something more interesting than just “your twin gets your jokes, even if nobody else does.” It means that a sense of humor – at least as measured via New Yorker cartoons – is potentially not inherited.

That… is surprising, actually. The ability to make people laugh is highly correlated with intelligence – verbal ability in particular, as well as a healthy dose of creativity – and those are traits which do seem to be inheritable, at least in part. That humor is not, therefore, implies something more complicated is going on: “it [raises] the question: if our sense of humor is not handed down from our parents but comes from our environment, what is it precisely that makes us funny?” asks Greengross.

Even worse: if correct, the findings of this study might upend everything we thought we knew about the development of humor in the first place.

“The widely accepted […] basis of humor” is “evolutionary,” Greengross explained. “A great sense of humor can help ease tension in dangerous situations, foster cooperation, break down interpersonal barriers, and attract mates – all of which enhance survival and reproduction.”

If a trait survives because it’s evolutionarily beneficial, then – pretty much by definition – it should be inheritable. That humor is not would be a major challenge to what most scientists have long taken for granted: that humor developed to help further the species.

But here’s the thing: maybe we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.

Rewriting the joke book… or maybe not

The results are fascinating, but let’s not get carried away. There are many caveats to the study: caption writing is a very specific and contrived form of humor; the participants were also older on average, both than the general population and the judges – meaning there may have been issues around cognitive stress or even simple inter-generational humor differences.

Overall, it’s less a conclusion that “humor isn’t heritable”, and more a call for further research. “Our study's finding that HPA [humor production ability] lacks heritability is surprising, as it contradicts most research on the heritability of cognitive abilities,” the team conclude. 

“Humor ability is a multifaceted phenomenon involving various cognitive processes that are difficult to assess. It is a complex and unique trait influenced by numerous psychological attributes and personality characteristics and varies across different social contexts,” they write. “These factors, along with the unique characteristics of our sample, may explain the lack of heritability in HPA.”

Nevertheless, “since this is the first study to examine the heritability of HPA, these results should be interpreted with caution,” they warn. “The current results may indicate that we are missing something fundamental in our understanding of humor ability.” 

“Future studies with different twin demographics and perhaps alternative methods to assess HPA will provide a clearer picture of how heritable HPA is, if at all.”

The study is published in the journal Twin Research and Human Genetics.