Inherently funny word

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An inherently funny word is a word that is humorous without context, often more for its phonetic structure than for its meaning.

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Vaudeville tradition holds that words with the /k/ sound are funny. A 2015 study at the University of Alberta suggested that the humor of certain nonsense words can be explained by whether they seem rude, and by the property of entropy: the improbability of certain letters being used together in a word. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer posited that humor is a product of one's expectations being violated.

Funny words in English

Vaudeville words can be found in Neil Simon's 1972 play The Sunshine Boys , in which an aging comedian gives a lesson to his nephew on comedy, saying that words with k sounds are funny: [1]

Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny. You say 'Alka Seltzer' you get a laugh ... Words with 'k' in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny. Car keys. Cleveland ... Cleveland is funny. Maryland is not funny. Then, there's chicken. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. Cab is funny. Cockroach is funny – not if you get 'em, only if you say 'em. [2] [3]

Richard Wiseman, a professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, conducted a small experiment to determine whether words with a k sound were actually considered funnier than others for English speakers. [4] His LaughLab tested the degree of funniness among a family of jokes based on animal sounds; the joke rated the funniest was also the one with the most k sounds:

Two ducks were sitting in a pond. One of the ducks said: "Quack". The other duck said: "I was going to say that!" [5]

A 2019 study presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning showed Artificial Intelligence (AI) could predict human ratings of humorous words. After collecting humor ratings from multiple people on 120,000 individual words, they were able to analyze the data using AI algorithms to identify clusters of people with similar tastes in humor. The words with the highest mean humor ratings were identified as "asshattery", "clusterfuck", "douchebaggery", "poppycock", "craptacular", "cockamamie", "gobbledegook", "gabagool", "nincompoops", "wanker", and "kerfuffle". [6] This study not only found that AI could predict average humor ratings of individual words (and differences in mean ratings between women and men), but it could also predict differences in individual senses of humor. [7] [8]

Robert Beard, a professor emeritus of linguistics at Bucknell University, told an interviewer that "The first thing people always write in [to his website] about is funny words". [9] Beard's first book was The 100 Funniest Words in English, [9] and among his own selected words are "absquatulate", "bowyangs", "collywobbles", "fartlek", "filibuster", "gongoozle", "hemidemisemiquaver", and "snollygoster". [10]

Some words are humorous not necessarily because of their pronunciation, but because of the absurdity of their own meanings. One such example is "centicameral", which would refer to a legislature composed of 100 branches. Its humor derives from the conceptual ridiculousness of such a governmental institution.[ citation needed ]

Rudeness and entropy

A 2015 study published in the Journal of Memory and Language examined the humor of nonsense words. [11] [12] The study used a computer program to generate pronounceable nonsense words that followed typical English spelling conventions and tested them for their perceived comedic value to human test subjects. [13]

The funniest nonsense words tended to be those that reminded people of real words that are considered rude or offensive. [13] [14] This category included four of the top-six nonsense words that were rated the funniest in the experiment: "whong", "dongl", "shart" (now slang, not a nonsense word [15] ), and "focky". [13] To explain why these words seemed funny, the study's author said "The expectation that you've read or uttered a rude word is raised and then violated, because in fact it's harmless nonsense. There's a sense of relief of getting away with it." [14]

After removing from consideration the words that seemed rude, another factor was suggested to also be significant. The study's lead author, Chris Westbury from the University of Alberta, suggests that the humor of certain invented words can be explained by the property of entropy. [11] Entropy (specifically Shannon entropy) here expresses how unlikely the letter combinations in certain nonsense words are: the more unlikely the letters are to be used together in English, the more funny the combination is likely to be found. Nonsense words such as "rumbus", "skritz", and "yuzz-a-ma-tuzz", which were created by children's book author and illustrator Dr. Seuss, were found to have less probable letter combinations and to seem funnier than most ordinary English words. [16] [14] According to Westbury, "there's actually a consistent relationship between how funny [nonwords] are and how weird they are". [12]

The entropy explanation also supports the notion that words with a 'k' in them tend to be more funny, as the letter 'k' is one of the least frequently used letters in the English language. [13]

The idea that humor can be predicted by a word's entropy corresponds to the work of 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who posited that humor is a product of one's expectations being violated. [12] [14] According to Westbury, "One reason puns are funny is that they violate our expectation that a word has one meaning". [11] Violating expectations corresponds mathematically to having a low probability combination of letters, which also makes the word seem particularly funny, according to Westbury. [14]

To provide a possible evolutionary explanation of these phenomena, the authors of the study said that unusual occurrences may be experienced as indicating the presence of potential threats, and that humor may be a way of signalling to others that one has realized that a perceived threat is actually harmless. Westbury said "Strange as it may seem, that same mechanism may be activated when you see an unlikely looking word or a highly taboo one you experience relief as you recognize that it's completely harmless just a joke." [14]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joke</span> Display of humor using words

A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition:

A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry.

"The Funniest Joke in the World" is a Monty Python comedy sketch revolving around a joke that is so funny that anyone who reads or hears it promptly dies from laughter. Ernest Scribbler, a British "manufacturer of jokes", writes the joke on a piece of paper only to die laughing. His mother also immediately dies laughing after reading it, as do the first constables on the scene. Eventually the joke is contained, weaponized, and deployed against Germany during World War II.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pun</span> Form of word play

A pun, also known as a paronomasia in the context of linguistics, is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use of homophonic, homographic, metonymic, or figurative language. A pun differs from a malapropism in that a malapropism is an incorrect variation on a correct expression, while a pun involves expressions with multiple interpretations. Puns may be regarded as in-jokes or idiomatic constructions, especially as their usage and meaning are usually specific to a particular language or its culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Humour</span> Tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement

Humour or humor is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humours, controlled human health and emotion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Limerick (poetry)</span> Form of poetry

A limerick is a form of verse that appeared in England in the early years of the 18th century. In combination with a refrain, it forms a limerick song, a traditional humorous drinking song often with obscene verses. It is written in five-line, predominantly anapestic and amphibrach trimeter with a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA, in which the first, second and fifth line rhyme, while the third and fourth lines are shorter and share a different rhyme.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Word play</span> Form of wit in which words used become the main subject of the work

Word play or wordplay is a literary technique and a form of wit in which words used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement. Examples of word play include puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, double entendres, and telling character names.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nonsense verse</span> Form of nonsense literature

Nonsense verse is a form of nonsense literature usually employing strong prosodic elements like rhythm and rhyme. It is often whimsical and humorous in tone and employs some of the techniques of nonsense literature.

Nonsense is a form of communication, via speech, writing, or any other symbolic system, that lacks any coherent meaning. In ordinary usage, nonsense is sometimes synonymous with absurdity or the ridiculous. Many poets, novelists and songwriters have used nonsense in their works, often creating entire works using it for reasons ranging from pure comic amusement or satire, to illustrating a point about language or reasoning. In the philosophy of language and philosophy of science, nonsense is distinguished from sense or meaningfulness, and attempts have been made to come up with a coherent and consistent method of distinguishing sense from nonsense. It is also an important field of study in cryptography regarding separating a signal from noise.

Jesus H. Christ is an expletive interjection that refers to the Christian religious figure of Jesus Christ. It is typically uttered in anger, surprise, or frustration; although often with humorous intent.

"No soap radio" is a form of practical joke and an example of surreal comedy. The joke is a prank whereby the punch line has no relation to the body of the joke, but participants in the prank pretend otherwise. The effect is to either trick someone into laughing along as if they "get it" or to ridicule them for not understanding.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Surreal humour</span> Form of humour predicated on deliberate violations of causal reasoning

Surreal humour is a form of humour predicated on deliberate violations of causal reasoning, thus producing events and behaviors that are obviously illogical. Portrayals of surreal humour tend to involve bizarre juxtapositions, incongruity, non-sequiturs, irrational or absurd situations, and expressions of nonsense.

Witzelsucht is a set of rare neurological symptoms characterized by a tendency to make puns, or tell inappropriate jokes or pointless stories in socially inappropriate situations. It makes one unable to read sarcasm.

Comedic device refers to a kind of device used to make a statement more humorous. In layman's terms, it is what makes things funny.

Computational humor is a branch of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence which uses computers in humor research. It is a relatively new area, with the first dedicated conference organized in 1996.

Sigmund Freud noticed that humor, like dreams, can be related to unconscious content. In the 1905 book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, as well as in the 1928 journal article Humor, Freud distinguished contentious jokes from non-contentious or silly humor. In fact, he sorted humor into three categories that could be translated as: joke, comic, and mimetic.

Although humor is a phenomenon experienced by most humans, its exact cause is a topic of heavy debate. There are many theories of humor which attempt to explain what it is, what social functions it serves, and what would be considered humorous. Although various classical theories of humor and laughter may be found, in contemporary academic literature, three theories of humor appear repeatedly: relief theory, superiority theory, and incongruity theory. These theories are used as building blocks for the rest of the theories. Among current humor researchers, there has yet to be a consensus about which of these three theories of humor is most viable. Some proponents of each theory originally claimed that theirs, and theirs alone, explained all cases of humor. However, they now acknowledge that although each theory generally covers its area of focus, many instances of humor can be explained by more than one theory. Similarly, one view holds that theories have a combinative effect; Jeroen Vandaele claims that incongruity and superiority theories describe complementary mechanisms that together create humor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter McGraw</span>

Peter McGraw is an American professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder. As a behavioral scientist his research spans the fields of judgment and decision making, emotion, affect, mood, and behavioral economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dad joke</span> Type of short joke

A dad joke is a joke, typically a pun, often presented as a one-liner or a question and answer. Generally inoffensive, dad jokes are told with sincere humorous intent or to intentionally provoke a negative "groaning" reaction to their overly simplistic humor. Dad jokes are called dad jokes because they are stereotypically thought to be jokes a father or someone like a father would tell to a child.

The history of humor on the Internet begins together with the Internet itself. Initially, the internet and its precursors, LANs and WANs, were used merely as another medium to disseminate jokes and other kinds of humor, in addition to the traditional ones. In lockstep with the progress of electronic communication technologies, jokers took advantage of the ARPANET, e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, bulletin board systems, etc, and finally the Whole World Wide Web. Gradually, new forms of humor evolved, based on the new possibilities delivered by electronic means of communication. A popular form of internet humour is found in the form of 'internet memes'. Reaction videos, where amusement is expressed through a person's response to something, are another prevalent form of humor unique to the internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Bible and humor</span>

The Bible and humor is a topic of Biblical criticism concerned with the question of whether parts of the Bible were intended to convey humor in any style. Historically, this topic has not received much attention, but modern scholars generally agree that humor can be found in biblical texts.

References

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