Well, I can tell you how Dunning and Kruger did it--they borrowed a bunch of jokes from various sources (famous comedians, joke books, &#38;c.), then had some professional comedians rate the quality of the jokes. The assumption was that making a living in comedy probably requires being able to recognize when something is or isn't funny.<p><i>We created a 30-item questionnaire made up of jokes we felt were of varying comedic value. (...) To assess joke quality, we contacted several professional comedians via electronic mail and asked them to rate each joke on a scale ranging from 1 ( not at all funny ) to 11 ( very funny ). (...) Although the ratings provided by the eight comedians were moderately reliable ( a = .72), an analysis of interrater correlations found that one (and only one) comedian's ratings failed to correlate positively with the others (mean r = - .09). We thus excluded this comedian's ratings in our calculation of the humor value of each joke, yielding a final a of .76. Expert ratings revealed that jokes ranged from the not so funny (e.g., "Question: What is big as a man, but weighs nothing? Answer: His shadow." Mean expert rating = 1.3) to the very funny (e.g., "If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is 'God is crying.' And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is 'probably because of something you did.'" Mean expert rating = 9.6).</i><p><a href="http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/unskilled.html" rel="nofollow">http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/unskilled.html</a>