Study Reveals Younger Siblings Are The FUNNIEST, And There

Siblings are a true blessing indeed. It is always fun fighting with them, sharing your secrets and even taking one for the team when one of you inevitably screws up. It is a blood relationship that more often than not, lasts forever. Humor is something that is really subjective. However, in my humble opinion, as the oldest child, I’m really funny and even my younger brother is quite funny.

But in most families, the younger sibling is given the leeway, a sort of thing where parents ask the older brother to behave, only because the younger one is just, let’s say young? “Hey, leave your brother alone, he’s just a kid’ is something I’m sure you would have heard countless times. But this could also explain their bolder, more confident sense of humor. Or the mere self-imposed assumption that they are the funniest.

Meanwhile, it is also said that birth order shapes a child’s personality. And one particular theory has found something that will definitely make your little brother extremely pleased. A study has found out that the younger siblings tend to be funnier, more relaxed and more favored by the parents. This comes from the British pollster YouGov who did a survey on 1,783 adult siblings and based on their personality and birth order revealed some really interesting findings.

Among those siblings who were polled, most of them agreed that the younger ones thought they were funnier than their older brothers and sisters. Nearly 46 percent of them agreed on being the funniest among the siblings while only 36 percent believed that the older sibling was the funniest. If you need more evidence about the younger sibling being the funniest, we’ve got it! Tina Fey, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Jim Carrey, and Ellen DeGeneres are all younger or youngest siblings in their families!

Other revelations from the poll included that the youngest child was more easy-going, but the older sibling felt a greater sense of responsibility. This was very evident considering that the older sibling accounted for nearly 54 percent when it comes to the feeling of responsibility. The poll also revealed that the oldest siblings (54%) felt more organized than their younger siblings (43%). Meanwhile, younger siblings, are more likely to see themselves as easygoing compared to older siblings.

There was another study on birth order that pretty much confirmed what most parents agreed upon — younger sibling children can be harder and gets into more trouble than their older siblings. The research was conducted by Joseph Doyle, an MIT economist, who studied thousands of children from Denmark and Florida.

He wanted to find out if the birth order had any effect on how a person got into trouble and committed crimes among several other factors. The study revealed that the second-born boys were 20-40% more likely to face disciplinary issues at school than first-born children. So now you know, who is the real troublemaker! Doyle told NPR: “The firstborn has role models, who are adults. And the second, later-born children have role models who are slightly irrational 2-year-olds, you know, their older siblings.”

“Both the parental investments are different, and the sibling influences probably contribute to these differences we see in the labor market and what we find in delinquency. It’s just very difficult to separate those two things because they happen at the same time,” he added. So next time, you are with your family and notice they are laughing at your younger sibling’s joke rather than yours — well, remember even science agrees with it and there’s pretty much nothing we (older sibling here!) can do about it!