They began by testing the reactions of a group of control subjects to a series of verbal and nonverbal jokes. They then took the jokes that most subjects had rated as “unambiguously humorous” and showed them to 21 patients, each of whom, as an adult, had suffered damage in a different part of their frontal lobes. The results, published in the journal Brain in 1999, were as unambiguous as the jokes: Patients who had damaged right frontal lobes had the worst senses of humor. “There was no problem in simple logic,” the psychologists wrote. “When required to provide a logical conclusion to a non-humorous story, they correctly selected the logical ending.” But when asked to finish a funny story, these patients tended to choose surprise, slapstick punch lines —— even if the story required something quite different. Humor, they assumed, was all about the element of surprise.
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