Students and bosses laugh the most, while pensioners and people who have not completed high school find little to chuckle about, according to a recent poll.
Students, despite their often demanding academic schedules, are the population group most likely to laugh, with 78 percent of them typically being in a good mood, according to the poll by the Levada Center.
Their high spirits were followed by those of bosses, whose full pockets certainly give them something to smile about. Sixty-six percent of them are usually in a good mood.
Housewives and highly educated individuals were next on the list, with 46 and 43 percent, respectively.
Those who tend to be relatively happy are those with a high consumer status (50 percent) and, interestingly enough, supporters of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the firebrand leader of the Liberal Democratic Party. At least 54 percent of his supporters confessed to laughing often.
According to the survey, those least inclined to laugh are pensioners (only 30 percent said they laugh), people over 55 years old (26 percent), and those who did not complete high school (23 percent).
Meanwhile, 37 percent of Russians get upset by jokes made by their family, friends and colleagues, while 35 percent are upset very rarely. Only 6 percent said they might be offended by joke-tellers.
In the office, the most popular pranks involve telling a colleague that the boss wants to see him in his office, and telling a colleague to perform a task that the boss has supposedly assigned. Some people confessed to playing jokes with office equipment (10 percent) or petty tricks involving the victim's personal belongings (10 percent).
The mid-March poll was conducted among 1,633 people across the country, Levada said. The margin of error was 3.4 percentage points.
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