Abstract

The present study investigated schizophrenics' and college students' preference for and judgment of humor samples written by schizophrenics and normals. Twenty male hospitalized schizophrenics and 20 male undergraduate college students ranked from most to least funny two sets of captions that had been previously written by an independent group of 10 college students and 10 schizophrenics. In addition, all subjects identified which captions they thought were written by college students and which by schizophrenics. The schizophrenic judges ranked the schizophrenic captions significantly more humorous than the student judges did. Student judges found the student captions significantly more humorous than the schizophrenic judges found them. When presented with both schizophrenic and student captions, however, all 40 subjects found the student captions significantly more humorous than the schizophrenic captions. Schizophrenic judges were not significantly better than student judges in the identification of schizophrenic captions. Student judges, however, were significantly better judges of "normal" humor than schizophrenic judges were.