"I Don't Get The Joke:" New Study Links Aging, Poorer Humor Comprehension

Can you figure out which final panel to this cartoon is supposed to be funny?

Here are your choices:

And can you complete this joke?

A business man is riding the subway after a hard day at the office. A young man sits down next to him and says, “Call me a doctor . . . call me a doctor.” The businessman asks, “What’s the matter, are you sick?” ...

1. The young man says, “I just graduated from medical school.”

2. The young man says, “Yes I feel a little weak. Please help me.”

3. The young man says, “My sister is a nurse.”

4. The young man pulls out a water gun and squirts the businessman.

If you picked the top right picture and the first punch line to the joke, you're doing better than some older adults. Those questions were some of those asked in a study of humor comprehension and aging conducted at Washington University in St. Louis. Researchers found that older adults made more mistakes choosing the "funny" answer. For the cartoon test, only 18% of younger adults chose incorrect endings, but 33% of older adults did.

The researchers, led by graduate student Wingyun Mak and Psychology professor Brian Carpenter, say that it's not so much that older adults have lost their sense of humor, but that understanding humor involves significant cognitive effort, especially in cognitive flexibility, abstract reasoning, and short term memory. Those are capabilities that decline with age. So there's a greater chance that older adults just won't "get" humor.

Older adults leaned away from the correct, "funny" answer and toward ones the researchers considered "straightforward." In the cartoon, that's the bottom left panel, where, after the man whistles, the dog comes to him. On the joke, it was #2, where in response to the question "are you sick?," the young man says that he is.

The work extended an 2003 study that found that measures of cognitive function were directly correlated to comprehending humor.

While older people as a group fared worse than younger ones, that doesn't mean that every person within the group was equal. Mak wrote LifeTwo that:

... in our sample, we actually didn't find a significant relationship between humor comprehension and age within the older adult group. This would suggest that humor comprehension decline is not linear, but of course it's hard to know for sure without follow-up studies.

In other words, the cluster of young people tested well, the cluster of older people didn't do as well, but it's unknown what happens in between, and what happens to individuals over the course of their lives.

This and earlier research presents a conundrum. Humor has been found time and again to have psychological benefits, but its use may be constrained for older adults if they have difficulty processing the joke. But perhaps the ability to understand humor can be recovered. Other research has found a link between humor comprehension and problem-solving, which likely means they utilize the same brain processes. Perhaps doing a morning sudoku will make the world seem funnier.

(It's a good thing this research wasn't available in 1985 or the geriatric comedy The Golden Girls never would have made it on the air!)

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In case you're wondering, the comic is Ferd'nand, which has been in print since 1937. More here.

Other links:

Washington U. press release; study abstract