One college professor dared to launch a scientific experiment in search of the world’s funniest whoopee cushion sound. Here’s what he found out.
Every two years, the charity Comic Relief runs the Red Nose Day telethon. It also sells merchandise, and in 2009 this included whoopee cushions. As my contribution to the comic fundraising that year, I ran a psychoacoustic experiment to find the funniest whoopee cushion sound. I’m having to retire the website that hosted the experiment because the web technologies I used have become obsolete. The idea of this blog is to archive the vital scientific discoveries I made, for posterity.
Who took part
Over six years, the experiment collected 400,000 ratings of whoopee cushion sounds from about 68,000 participants. The analysis below is for the first 200,000 ratings. What participants had to do was to listen to a whoopee cushion sound and rate it on a scale from 1 to 6 for how funny they found it. Each participant rated up to six sounds.
Smiley scale
What was found
Longer Whoopee Cushion Sounds Are funnier
The funniest sound was…
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