What’s the funniest number? Yale physicist Emily Pottebaum proposed the Perceived Specificity Hypothesis, which states that “for nonnegative integers
The degree of specificity characterizes the distance between an integer and the nearest multiple of 5:
So 3, 7, 13, 17, etc. were judged to be funniest.
“I acknowledge my Ph.D. advisor, who I shall not name out of respect for her academic integrity, for her exasperation upon learning about this study. I thank her for putting up with my antics and plead that she continue to do so until I graduate.”
(E.G. Pottebaum, “What Is the Funniest Number? An Investigation of Numerical Humor,” arXiv preprint, arXiv:2503.24175 [2025].)
