BALTIMORE — Numbers that are really large or have extended decimal places are not implicitly funny, said a report issued yesterday by the President’s Council on Giggling (PCOG).

“In fact, there are no funny numbers whatsoever,” read the report. “They do not exist. Don’t even go looking for them because you’ll waste your time and feel like a failure and won’t even get to laugh along the way. You really should get some sleep.”

Ever since the creation of Mad-Libs, scientists have been looking for funny responses to the “number” category. “Most people tend to go really either really high of really low,” explains Jeffy-Jeffy Coke, PCOG Czar. “The end result is usually something like, ‘Then we ate 7 zillion donuts’ or ‘My .0041 friends arrived.’ But those aren’t funny.”

PCOG researchers took Mad-Libs and plugged in suspected funny numbers like 4672302, 7.42, pi, and a googolplex. To ensure accurate results, they also created some using a control group of proven unfunny numbers like 2, 7, and 5. The resulting Mad-Libs were read to the UPN studio audience, who are reputed to laugh at just about anything.

The results were astonishing: no numbers induced laughs, except when a fat man read off the number 19.2 while slipping on a banana peel. “The googolplex made us giggle, too, but that’s more a funny word than a number,” explained one audience member. “Googolplex — tee hee!”

PCOG’s report even discredited the long-held view that negative numbers create prolonged chuckles. “We found that a majority of negative number laughs involved a feather being passed along the bottom of the foot simultaneously,” said Coke. “Feathers make people laugh even if the Mad-Libs line is ‘Suddenly -801 people flatulently burst into the room.’ Actually, flatulence is very funny. But -801? I see no humor in that.”

Members of the math community are outraged. Xavier Hoggleboggle, secretary general of Denomi-NATO, ascribed the skewed results to a lack of proper mathematical training. “I wouldn’t expect PCOG to find the truly funny numbers,” he said over the phone even though we were together in my car. “You can’t just find a funny number without much effort. Like 777,777,777.1 — that’s funny.”

“No it isn’t,” replied Coke when presented with Hoggleboggle’s remarks.

“Sure it is,” maintained Hoggleboggle beforehand, predicting in advance Coke’s response. “It’s not as funny as some of the adverbs the Germans have developed in the lab, but it’s pretty good.”

When questioned, a spokesman for the Mad-Libs Corporation said, “We at Mad-Libs find this situation very (adjective). Several of our (plural noun) were up all night (verb)-ing to solve this (noun). At first I thought, ‘(Exclamation),’ but (number) percent of Mad-Libs readers are (adverb) running to buy more products.”

(Person in the room) could not be reached for comment.