The Humour Gland

(Dangerfield BSc, Registered Scientician #3. 2008)


Why is it that some people are constantly funny, while others are mind-numbingly dull? (Peter Hilbert, Anderson’s Bay)

Well Peter, the answer lies in a little-known body part known as the humour gland. The humour gland is located snugly between the gall bladder and the pancreas and is responsible for releasing a chemical compound known as hilarium into the bloodstream. Hilarium allows us to do such humorous things as tell jokes, make witty observations and invent crude limericks. The average humour gland holds around 20ml of hilarium when full. To give you an idea of how much this is, a wry observation about a coworker’s dress sense will expend about 9ml of hilarium, while a standard ‘yo’ momma’ joke will use only 3ml. A so-called ‘humour column’ for a student magazine generally requires about 0.5ml of hilarium.

The humour gland can take quite a long time to refill – up to four days in some cases. Thus, if you need to be funny for a specific occasion, make sure that you lay off doing or saying anything funny in the days leading up to it. There’s nothing worse than being on a hot date and trying to make a witty one-liner about the sub-par wine list, only to find that the best you can come up with is a crude remark about your date’s vagina. I should point out, though, that hilarium is only used when a joke is created for the first time. This is why you can tell that joke of yours about the two homeless Bulgarian nuns over and over again until your friends beg you to stop.

Conversely, if your humour gland stays full for too long, the hilarium within will begin to leak into your bloodstream of its own accord. This may result in jokes slipping out at inappropriate occasions, such as at funerals or during muggings. Trust me: no matter how many times you explain that it was an accident, your friend won’t like it if you tell her that her dead grandmother has a fly booty. To avoid having too little or too much hilarium in your humour gland, it is recommended that you make a few bland, barely funny remarks every day. Good examples of these kind of ‘jokes’ can be found on most car bumper stickers.

So, to answer your question Peter, the reason why people vary in funniness lies in the size of the humour gland. Some people have unusually large glands and are able to crack jokes almost constantly. On the other hand, some humour glands can hold barely any hilarium at all. An unlucky few are even born without humour glands – these people are known as ‘accountants’. Bless their poor souls.