New study finds Rhode Island has no sense of humor

A study published in the Journal of Human Communication has found that Rhode Island is the lone state without a well-developed sense of humor. 

The study's author, Dr. Maury Morse, said he and his colleagues found the result surprising. "Rhode Island got off to one of the best starts when it was named since, ha, ha, it's not even surrounded by water! We found that's where the humor level peaked and has steadily dropped with Americans' decreasing knowledge of geography and land mass terms."

Dr. Morse was asked about the study's methods and how the group concluded that Rhode Island has humor's equivalent to Mississippi's literacy rate. "Well, there are a number of complex factors, including Colbert Report and Conan O'Brien viewership, which, interestingly, has a significant draw of RI residents. However, we attribute this to people falling asleep during Conan's predecessor, Leno (The Tonight Show), who has a very suspect sense of humor. Most importantly, though, we looked at the number of hits on The Spotted Bass dot com. Would you believe that zero hits have originated from RI? That stat is simply too much to overcome," said Dr. Morse.

Internationally, RI also falls behind many humor-deprived countries, such as Qatar, American Samoa, and Hungary, which all have a greater appetite for good humor than the non-island island.