This doesn’t have anything to do with politics, but...According to this HuffPo news story, researchers at Washington University tested a sampling of 40 individuals 65 or over and 40 undergraduate students in an effort to examine cognitive flexibility, abstract reasoning and short-term memory, as well as humor comprehension, among older adults.
The results of this study can be accessed from here (I just read the abstract; I have no desire to pay for a copy of the results).
As the story notes, the research was conducted by graduate student Wingyun Mak and psychology professor Brian Carpenter, and they used a verbal joke test from 1983, which I think is the first problem. The second is that a nonverbal component was introduced, namely, excerpts from the Ferd’nand comic strip (as Wikipedia notes, Ferd’nand is a series of pantomime comic panels without words, which is bound to appeal to a younger audience).
I’m definitely not an academic, but I cannot imagine how one’s capacity for humor can be properly evaluated with dated verbal tests that don’t account for the thought processes of adults which are bound to acquire more sophistication with age (discounting physical impairment, of course). Part of that sophistication is the appreciation for subtlety of language and layers of meaning, taking into account what I guess you might call current cultural sensibilities that are highly subjective (such as math professor and comedian Tom Lehrer’s famous observation that a fellow college student “majored in animal husbandry, until they caught him at it one day”).
I will acknowledge one point for researchers Mak and Carpenter, though, and that is the fact that people who consume what I would call the traditional, corporate media in this country (magazines and newspapers especially) tend to be older. And given the relentless torrent of bad news primarily over the last seven years, that would be enough to fracture anyone’s funny bone.
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