There are countless types of humour, some of which we appreciate more than others, and rarely do we stop to ask why we find a particular joke funny. What if someone told you the reason you found a joke funny was because you had a high IQ?

“Humour is not about comedy; it is about a fundamental cognitive function,” says Alastair Clarke, author of The Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour. Here’s where the pattern recognition theme comes in. Recognising patterns enables us to quickly understand our environment and function effectively within it. Language, which is unique to humans, is based on patterns. And humour, conveniently enough, is based on language.

Alastair Clarke explains: “The development of pattern recognition as displayed in humour could form the basis of humankind’s instinctive linguistic ability. Syntax and grammar function in fundamental patterns for which a child has an innate facility. All that differs from one individual to the next is the content of those patterns in terms of vocabulary.”

And  a lot of times, the “funny one” also gets labeled as the “smart ass.”  Forty years ago, scientists were already asking this question. Hauck and Thomas, testing eighty elementary-level students, found a very high correlation between humour and intelligence (r = .91), but, of course, that was back in 1972.

So how has the picture evolved?

In 1990, biologist A. Michael Johnson published a study in Perceptual and Motor Skills that connected humour ability to problem-solving skills. Subjects rated 32 jokes for funniness and solved 14 visually-displayed mental rotation problems. Subjects with faster mental rotation times tended to rate the jokes as funnier, which suggests that the right hemisphere of the brain–often associated with problem solving ability–plays an important part in humour comprehension. Johnson’s findings were consistent with previous studies of patients with right-brain lesions, who struggle to distinguish between punchlines and non sequiturs when selecting joke endings in a multiple choice task.

There are several experiments administered after Johnson and in 2012, Greengross, Miller & Martin measured the intelligence of college students against that of stand-up comedians. 31 comedians and 400 college students were tested on humour production and verbal intelligence. Comedians scored higher than students not only on humour production but on verbal intelligence as well. According to a study conducted by Gil Greengross and Geoffrey Miller, there might be new – more literal – meaning behind the title.

In their experiment, titled “Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males,” subjects were administered a variety of different tests – including reasoning tasks, intelligence tasks, and also those on humor production ability. What they found was that “structural equation models showed that general and verbal intelligence both predict humor production ability” – and, moreover, this relationship goes onto predict mating success, as well.

These findings support their thesis that the human sense of humor evolved, at least in part, through “sexual selection as an intelligence indicator.” All of this is fine and good, and proves that intelligence often results in a more advanced sense of humour.