STUDY: CLASS CLOWNS ARE SMARTER

A new study published in the International Journal of Humor Research says that class clowns actually tend to be more intelligent. (* Than all those other students who get A’s?). The study, from Anadolu University in Turkey, took 217 middle-school-aged kids in Turkey and gave them a standardized test to assess their intellectual aptitude. They then took a Humor Ability Assessment test, which involved ten cartoons with some or all dialogue missing. The children were instructed to fill in the empty dialogue boxes with their own jokes. Seven experts, including five cartoonists and two “humor education” instructors, rated the captions, giving points for relevance and comprehension as well as a score based on how funny the experts found the cartoon. These ratings showed that students with better verbal reasoning skills and higher general intelligence scores also tended to write the funniest captions. The researchers say, “Parents and teachers should be aware that if their children or students frequently make good quality humor, it is highly likely that they have extraordinary intelligence.”
(note: study is here, scroll way down to see the cartoons used: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/humor-2021-0054/html)
* Or else they read old copies of Mad magazine.
* You live in a country called Turkey, you can’t help but be funny.
* Students who make good humor likely have extraordinary intelligence. Just one problem – nobody likes a wiseguy.
* Of course, Albert Einstein was famous for his jokes in school. All the classics: “He worked it out with a pencil.” “Because 7 ate 9.” “I just got back from a pleasure trip. I took my relativities to the airport.”
* So if your 8th grader makes a lot of jokes, there’s definitely a future for him, as a writer on a CBS sitcom.