YOUR sense of humour has nothing to do with your genes, and everything to do
with your upbringing, say biologists in London. They were surprised to find that
whether you love or hate Gary Larson cartoons depends on the way you were raised
and that genes don鈥檛 seem to shape appreciation of this kind of humour at
all.
Most personality traits, such as being a shrinking violet or the life and
soul of the party, are at least partly determined by your genes, so researchers
suspected the same applies to our sense of humour. To find out, Tim Spector,
Lynn Cherkas and their colleagues at St Thomas鈥� Hospital in London tested the
humour of 71 pairs of identical twins and 56 pairs of fraternal twins. Each pair
had been raised together.
The team asked each pair of twins to go into separate rooms and rate five
cartoons from Gary Larson鈥檚 The Far Side on a scale of 0 to 10. A zero
deemed the cartoon 鈥渁 waste of paper鈥�, while 10 meant 鈥渙ne of the funniest
cartoons you have ever seen鈥�.
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The results showed that siblings do tend to have similar views on how funny a
cartoon is. But identical twins, who have exactly the same genes, were no more
likely to agree on this than fraternal twins, who share only half of their genes
on average, like ordinary siblings. That suggests it鈥檚 a shared environment,
rather than shared genes, that makes brothers and sisters laugh at the same
things.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a surprise, because most personality traits have genetic components,鈥�
says Spector. 鈥淭his implies that there鈥檚 a lot of cultural influence on humour.鈥�
That might explain why popular jokes vary so much between nations.
鈥淭his is interesting, because twin studies of personality traits almost
always show genetic effects,鈥� agrees Robert Plomin, a behavioural geneticist at
the Institute of Psychiatry in London. However, he would like to see a larger
study confirm the findings, and it may be that the results depend heavily on the
specific nature of the study.
Spector agrees his team has studied only one type of humour鈥攕o-called
cognitive humour, which involves a blending of contradictory ideas. They now
hope to tackle the task of testing other kinds of humour, such as sexual
innuendo, possibly using English saucy seaside postcards.
Source: Twin Research (vol 3, p 17)