Time for a Pizza Party the Likes of Which No One Has Ever Seen

After three exhausting years of seemingly endless research, it's finally over. The quest to uncover the funniest thing ever has been completed, and the results are in. My personal thanks go out to my staff at the Walburgh Psychiatric Clinic for their long hours and incredible dedication, to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation for their generous financial support, and as always, to my mentor, Dr. Lupisch Nipps of Oxford University, for his inexhaustible supply of constructive criticism. The detailed findings of our study will be published this August in the Journal of Investigatory Studies of Reflexive Laughter, Volume 9, Issue 13. Thanks also to the nine hundred and forty-eight test subjects who were kind enough to donate their time and energies to view almost twelve thousand hours of videotaped humorous phenomena, both real and staged, to isolate and define the funniest thing ever, which, we have now established within one and a half percentage points of absolute certainty, is a blind guy getting totally ripped on Heineken and then stealing some kid's bicycle and riding it through a busy intersection where he slams head-on into another blind guy who's just trying to walk home from work. Hopefully our 336-page article will completely obviate the obviously errant Dutch findings of 1998 that the funniest thing ever is two rival gangsters walking along in the rain and one gangster telling the other that he's going to send him straight to hell with a bullet to the eye if he doesn't get his money by noon tomorrow and at the exact moment he says this, a strong gust of wind causes his umbrella to spontaneously invert right in his face, and I believe that at the very least the statistics we accumulated will throw serious doubts on the results of several Croatian universities which purported to prove the so-called "ultimate humor quotient" of a small kitten leaping from one ping pong table to another only to find that ping pong table #2 has been thoroughly greased, resulting in frantic, pathetic skidding and an inevitable descent to the floor beyond, the animal falling just out of camera range before contact with the tile. I urge everyone to attend the Johns Hopkins Symposium on Giggle Theory in Easton, Maryland this weekend, where I will speak on our study at length. It is not yet known whether the symposium will feature snack fare, but free soda is almost certainly a given. (Note that I said almost, Dr. Rand.)