Which is funnier: A long joke that builds to an involved play on words, or someone stepping on a rake and getting smacked in the nose by the handle? Do you prefer a sly double-entendre, or a cream pie smooshed in someone’s face and sloughed off with a squirt of seltzer water? A number of studies since 1999 have shown that the ability to recognize and appreciate a subtle punch line requires complex, higher brain functions such as abstract reasoning, mental agility, and functional memory that are associated with a healthy frontal lobe. These studies also show that, as we age, we lose some of that frontal lobe functionality. We can still appreciate a good joke as we grow older - so long as we can understand it.

I used to think slapstick was a “guy thing.” Hmmmm…now that I think about it, that makes sense. No - not because men are all brain-damaged by nature, but because their brains do function differently from women’s.

But back to comedy (the article does state that men and women achieve similar IQ scores and abilities using different areas of the brain - there’s no appreciable gender difference in intelligence, just in the way we process information).

Ibid.

Okay, guys - before you complain that we women laugh at you too much, consider this research out of London, that proposes laughter as a facet of “social dominance”:

Wren writes:

I considered sneaking out in the night and adding some graffiti to two signs I passed on the way to the grocery today. One is in front of some chemical tanks and says, "Tanks" "Tanks" "Tanks." I want to go paint, "You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome."

Marguerite writes:

"Chocolate soup" sounds better than "burnt, can't-get-it-off-the-pan" chocolate! One of my best friends and I tried to make fudge for Christmas presents one year when we were roommates in college. We did it on a day when we also made five different batches of cookies, and by the time we got to the fudge, we were dead tired. We followed the recipie exactly...but when we poured it in the pan, it wouldn't set and tasted weird, like burnt chocolate toast. We did finally give some of it away, but my boyfriend ate most of it!

Some of us just aren’t that picky about our chocolate. -- Jessiebelle

Katya the Poet writes:

What a delightful chicken soup/chocolate soup newsletter! I am a lousy cook, but I was inspired by the humor and simplicity of the whole-chicken soup recipe, and, frankly, the only way I can cook is to sing, so possibly I could do this. I even have a can of College Inn chicken broth in my cupboard. All I lack is the noodles and the whole chicken. And, surely, if I would ever attempt fudge, I would get soup! Thanks for the fun!

Alimohkon writes:

I got your chicken soup, but I just wonder why you had to discard the "inedibles" in the chicken. Here in the Philippines, we eat everything in the chicken. (Of course, not the feathers.)

“…not the feathers”? Hah… I know better. I read "Invalid Entry" ! -- Jessiebelle

Kenzie writes:

Another funny one, Jessiebelle™. Food and recipes can be quite comical. I do think sometimes our older relatives enjoy leaving out important things when they pass on recipes.

Nighala a.k.a. Doxie Do-Right writes:

Jessie,
Thank you for a great newsletter. You brought back memories of the Nancy Drew Cookbook my grandmother gave me and the intriguing results of a recipe for Peanut Butter Soup. Needless to say my mother was kind enough not to force me to finish my lunch that day. :)
Nighala

Melissa is fashionably late! writes:

I have tons of wayward cooking stories from my own lifetime. Thanks for sharing your mother's blunders with Writing.Com, Holly.

Maybe we should collaborate on a book! -- Jessiebelle

Vivian writes:

Jessie, I have a recipe for microwave fudge that is sooooo easy, and it tastes like the old fashioned kind. Ummm ummm good. Want me to pass it on to you?

By the way, catwoman ’s fudge really is worth the 70 dollars a baggie elizm446 paid for it at the Convention.

dogfreek21 writes:

I have the perfect recipe for fudge! It never fails.

1 car
some money
1 driver

Drive to Walmart.
Buy some fudge.
Come home.

Eat it. (sometimes 'come home' and 'eat it' change positions in the directions)

Ms Kimmie writes:

Jessiebelle™

I can only imagine how your mother and my sister could butcher a dinner party if given the chance. My sister tries hard, but she is the worst cook I've ever met. You know it's dinner at her house because the dinner bell summons us all to help clear the smoke from the room and get the bell to shut off. Either that or someone manages to get the battery out so we can eat her burnt offerings in peace - before they get stone cold.

Johnny66 writes:

Please God! The opening story isn't comedy! It's a slightly sentimental, vaguely amusing tale about someone reminiscing about his mother! This is comedy if you're senile, and a good laugh might possibly give you a heart-attack! Tell me where the comedy is there, please?! The fact that this sentimental drivel is obviously imoportant to someone (the writer and the demented) is not enough to warrant this verbal diarroeha appearing here!

Johnny66 writes:

If this should appear anywhere, it should be in a letter from a grandmother to a caring and slightly put upon daughter who puts up with this nonsense becuase of a familial obligation. All well and good in the right circumstances, but so far removed from comedy as to be comparable to an amoeba and an accountant. Where did you get this pestilencial wordplay from? An old people's home? But this in a family newsletter! Not comedy!

Johnny66 writes:

I therefore suggest a challenge to the comedy editor's - find something genuinely funny - maybe five pieces of work and e-mail them to as many people on this sight (whether they request them or not - deletion is only a key) as possible, and ask them if any of them are genuinely funny (not chucklingly funny becuase 'granny did that once back in the old days' lets tell the children and bore them bloody senseless - I mean actual laughter funny)!!!

If it comes back and it's granny humour, I shall admit my fault and not darken this letter with my writing again!

Otherwise don't burden us all with this misnamed dirge that is the antithesis of humour.

Sincerely,
Johnny66

Johnny66 writes:

And graffiti as an art form?! Has the Louvre been eradicated by a misplaced missile so that we're scrabbling around for crap (literally) from toilets to fill the vacuum left by the distruction of real art? Are you, indeed, mental? I don't think I've found any comedy in these comedy newsletters, this makes them more depressing than a day at Disneyland. With added Mickey Mouse.

Johnny66 writes:

Oh, by the *** **** way, a funny piece of intellectual graffiti is the classic,

God is dead
Nietzsche

and underneath was written:

Nietzsche is dead,
God.

Now that is funny and intellectual - But it isn't nothing!!!!!!!!!

Again,
Johnny66

karabu gets the last laugh: