Q: What did the grape say when someone stepped on him? OK, so it's far from comedic gold, ... Think this is funny?...

OK, so it's far from comedic gold, but if you chuckled at that pitiful excuse for a joke above, take solace in the fact that you probably possess a cheerful and resilient personality. In fact, you practically bubble with confidence.

At least, there's a good chance you do according to the Antioch Humor Test, a landmark and long-running study in the 1980s that examined which people laughed at which types of jokes.

Sex jokes? Well, if they're just about the act, then most cackles come from those considered impulsive and able to laugh without the fear of social consequences, for better or worse.

The Antioch test, which gathers its results by examining both humor and personality, answers all sorts of questions about what tickles whose funny bone. However, it hasn't solved one puzzle that has perplexed scholars since at least the ancient Greeks: Is a sense of humor tied to intelligence?

"I've thought about that myself from time to time," said Harvey Mindess, the retired psychology professor who headed the test 25 years ago at what is now Antioch University Los Angeles.

Not so, said researchers at the beginning of the 20th Century, when modern humor scholarship first appeared. To those fledgling and optimistic investigators, the newly created IQ tests held the keys to answering such mysteries. All you had to do was give someone an intelligence test and observe how they responded to jokes or cartoons.

As early as 1925, academic journals printed these researchers' new -- and often contradictory -- findings: One study would say yes, humor and intelligence correlated. Another would report that intelligence and humor had nothing to do with each other.

"Intelligence consists of many different components," said Victor Raskin, who studies humor as a professor of English and linguistics at Purdue University.

This past weekend, American Mensa, whose members must score in the top 2 percent on various standardized intelligence tests to join, held its first colloquium on the "Art and Science of Laughter."

Friday night's headliner was Rubi Nicholas, a professional comedian who's also a Mensa member. She told the crowd she was thrilled to be able to perform jokes that probably would fall flat at most comedy events, such as making fun of her husband's pronunciation of "avuncular."

"Thank you," she said as the audience laughed at how her last name of Nicholas meant she was in the "Priory of Santa." (Think "The Da Vinci Code.") "Thank you for getting my joke!"

The crowd, which was mostly outfitted in pairings of L.L. Bean and loafers -- almost no one wore the red clown noses Mensa distributed -- also seemed to enjoy the amateurs who had gathered to try their hand at humor.

Gary Sudin, a self-described computer geek from St. Louis, played parody songs like "Network Wizard." Set to the tune of The Who's "Pinball Wizard," the song tells the tale of a "fat guy with a plastic pocket" who will kill for terabytes of computer memory.

In another room, a Mensa comedy troupe performed an "Audience-Participation History-Mystery-Comedy," as it was billed, about Richard III, 15th Century civil war and Chicago patronage.

"Of course there's a connection," said Conrad Pomykala, a Mensa proctor from Chicago. "When I go to the movies with a group of 10 of our [Mensa] people, our row laughs a half a second before everyone else."

Such statements muddle the distinction between complexity and intelligence, said Salvatore Attardo, editor in chief of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research.

"What you're going to get with Mensa is complex humor, which is more sophisticated but not necessarily more intelligent," said Attardo, who's also a professor of linguistics at Youngstown State University.

11+ years: Engages in abstract thought and mental reasoning, takes other people's point of view. Laughs at: original, good-natured humor, tongue-in-cheek humor, social satire.

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