Abstract
<p>Humor production—the intentional generation of funny ideas—is an interesting instance of creative thought, but methods for studying humor are relatively underdeveloped compared to other areas of creative cognition. The present research develops and evaluates the quirky questions task, a text-only creative humor production task that was designed to be intuitive for participants and suitable for the field’s growing interest in automated response coding and item generation. A sample of adults (n = 320) completed six quirky question prompts (e.g., What is an unusual thing to bring to a classroom show-and-tell?) along with measures of personality and other individual differences. Their responses were judged for funniness by five human raters. Latent variable models showed that funniness was associated with higher openness to experience, spending more time creating the responses, and writing longer responses, all findings that replicate past work with other creative humor production tasks. Demographic differences were minor at most. Overall, this task appears to be a promising addition to the humor assessment toolbox.</p>