The puzzle is, how people do develop their sense of what is funny and what is not funny? And how does that vary. For example, stuff like the kind of confusion that sometimes crops up in the Mudcat, when jokes get taken as serious, and irony gets misinterpreted, or the iother way round.

That sort of thing applies between different countries, different sexes, different age groups, and also just between different people. I wonder if anyone has ever done one of those separated-at-birth-twins type of studies, to help find out how far it's cultural and how far it's wired into us.