If you have ever caught yourself wondering where jokes come from, you are not alone. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t altogether clear. Some cultures have long standing, rich joke-telling traditions where lay folk routinely engage in some sort of comic creativity. Other cultures, particularly in the West, tend to favor a more imitative approach — allowing professional comedians to seed the content and then take it from there.

In the US, there is a popular tradition that the majority of jokes come from prisons and stockbrokers. Alan Dundes, a University of California at Berkeley professor, once expanded upon this theory saying that “…stockbrokers have time on their hands between sales and a communications network to send jokes around. Prisoners have a lot of spare time and a captive audience.”

“Lately,” Dundes added, “these two theories have merged.”

The jokes that circulate on the Internet today, commonly known as “street” jokes, tend to be knock-offs of popular comic routines. However, the relationship between the comedic source material and the resulting street joke is not always clear. Street joke evolution seems to be analogous to the children’s game of “Telephone.” In it’s final form, fundamental aspects of the joke’s structure, rhythm, even basic themes may be altered substantially.

In 2003, Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire conducted his Laugh Lab experiment, an exhaustive research project designed to find the world’s funniest joke. Wiseman collected over 40,000 jokes from 60 different countries. The jokes were then voted on by 300,000 participants online. The declared winner was a joke about two hunters from New Jersey who go into the woods.

Recently, Wisemen announced that he was able to trace the origin of the joke back to a famous British comedian from the 1950s, Terence Alan Milligan (”Spike”). Although Spike’s version of the joke took place in a house in England, the punch line was essentially untouched.

Unfortunately, Wiseman’s success in tracking down the origin of Laugh Lab’s winning joke will likely remain an anomaly. As Wiseman explains, “Tracking down the origin of jokes is almost impossible. Of all the thousands of jokes that were submitted, the chances of knowing who wrote them, with one of two exceptions, is vanishingly small.”