What people think if funny depends on earlier experiences, associations and culture. I would guess that there is no joke that is universally funny in the whole world.
Unfortunately I have no choose but to describe the idea in examples:
I have a friend that I met few years ago, and we don't have a lot in common, we come from different cultures with different values, and it happens very often that he tells a joke that is not funny at all for me and when he sees that I don't laugh he says something like “it sounded funny in my head” or he thinks it is so funny that if I don't laugh it must be because I didn't understand it and he start to explain it, and in a way he is right in the assumption that I don't understand it, but it is not what he said that I don't understand, it's that I can't relate to the joke since I have very different experiences, memories and relations. Same things happens to me, sometimes I tell jokes that I think are hilarious but he don't laugh.
This show how different experience, memories, relations condition us to think that certain things are funny lets look at this example; in a culture/family/group of friends where mother-in-law is generally considered evil and especially if you had a mother-in-law that hated you, a joke like:
Q: What is the ideal weight for a mother-in-law?
A: About 2.3lbs, including the urn.
can be very funny, while for a person that have a very loving mother-in-law that only wishes the best for you and her son/daughter that joke will probably be seen as evil and not funny at all.
This kind of differences of associations are of course greatest between different cultures from different countries, but those differences go all the way to individual level, since every person have its own unique set of associations he or she acquired while growing up.
For example two friends X and Y that know each other from kindergarten are conditioned the same way, they have shared experiences and associations and thus will laugh at each others jokes for example about their teacher, but let say X and Y grew up and went to different schools, and X says that he put a nail on teachers chair and it was very funny, Y will not think it is funny unless Y can relate to that, that is imagine another teacher on which chair Y would like to put a nail.
There are of course jokes that are funny country wide or even across neighboring countries that relate to common shared experience of humans, a very common thing is to portray someone else as stupid, for example in Sweden there are jokes about stupidity of people from Norway, and a person from Denmark or Finland might think that some of those jokes are funny because those jokes are based on national pride, that we are better then them, which majority of people can relate to regardless of if the joke is about Norway, USA, India or China, as long as its not about your country.
In the same way there are jokes that are funny only for a small group of people, this might have happened to you; one person does or says something that is not funny at all or perhaps even very serious and you remember an old friend that did that or a funny situation where something similar happened and start laughing alone in a room full of people, or the opposite that you are in a group of very close friends and some one tells a joke that everyone laugh about but not you.
This is also why people put so much weight on the fact that your partner make you laugh, because that means that you two are conditioned in the same way, and have similar relations to things, in simple terms have a lot in common. There is other ways to find out if you and your future partner have things in common, like filling out a paper e.t.c. but I guess making another person laugh is a more fun way to do that.
I hope I managed with this example about humor to give a basic understanding of how every persons experiences, memories and relations condition us in certain way and humor is one way to find out if two people are conditioned in the same way.
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