They weren’t looking for laughs, however.
Matthew Davis, an instructor at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice and a researcher on the study, and fellow researchers were looking at the popularity of the jokes as a way to study health and medicine.
“This is one of the first attempts to pull information from Facebook conversations and do something with it,” Davis tells USA Today. “It’s trying to learn something from human behavior and being able to compare and contrast that behavior in the virtual space and connect that with real life.”
Read the full story, published 3/2/14 by USA Today.