NOT long after the physicist Werner Heisenberg (not the guy from “Breaking Bad”) identified the uncertainty principle in the early 20th century, E. B. White — in a somewhat similar vein — warned against meddling with what defines funny.

“Humor,” White wrote, “can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

Which may explain why it took a team of experts from the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado a full nine months to devise a provocative “humor algorithm” to identify the funniest cities among America’s 50 largest. Moreover, White’s warning may have been doubly prescient. When residents in what was determined to be the nation’s funniest city — Chicago — were surveyed about their favorite joke, they couldn’t think of a single one.

Still, Peter McGraw, the University of Colorado professor who compiled the rankings and, with Joel Warner, just released a book, “The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny,” insisted that the findings were no joke. “Chicago and Boston made sense,” he said. “Atlanta and Washington were surprisingly high, New York and Los Angeles were a little bit low.