Abstract
A joke is defined as a short script designed to induce humorous or funny feelings in readers. In comparison to other emotional stimuli, jokes can quickly induce intense, positive emotions, making them effective as stimuli for emotional manipulations. Although corpora of humorous stimuli including jokes and cartoons are well-established in various languages, cultural differences may affect joke comprehension and appreciation, potentially rendering material in other languages inappropriate for Chinese-speaking subjects. In this study, we first gathered 160 Chinese jokes representative of various types, and invited 396 participants over the age of 15 to take an on-line questionnaire to evaluate the “comprehensibility,” “funniness,” and “aversiveness” of each joke using a 1 ~ 9 point scale. The results for “funniness” showed a normal distribution with a centered mean, for both funny and unfunny jokes. The results for ”comprehensibility” showed a strong negative skew, demonstrating that most jokes were comprehensible, while the results for “aversiveness” were positively skewed, indicating that aversive feelings were not commonly evoked by the jokes. Additionally, aversiveness, comprehensibility and funniness ratings showed high positive correlations, while funniness and aversiveness had a high negative correlation, and comprehensibility and aversiveness showed a low negative correlation. Finally, analysis revealed that the ratings for comprehensibility, funniness and aversiveness all differed significantly according to the gender of the reader. Therefore, results were established separately by gender. The corpus of jokes and joke-ratings can be utilized in future experiments using eye-tracking, biofeedback and brain imaging.