Some words are funnier than others. I’ve always thought this.
Titter if funny. So is lollygag.
There is an old movie with two old guys who are comedians. I can’t remember the name of the movie. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, the one guy tells the other that if he wants to get a laugh, use the “k” sound. For instance, Cleveland and Kalamazoo are funny, but Maryland is not. Or cupcake is funny. Apple is not funny. Chicken. Pickle.
Now, I don’t know if the “k” sound is a truism or not, but there is this: Kronenberger is funny. Smith is not.
But what is it that makes some words funnier than others? Is it merely the sound of them?
Well, a guy, a psychology professor named Chris Westbury, has come up with a theory of this. He works at the University of Alberta, by the way. In case you were wondering what they do up there in Alberta.
Anyway, his theory is this: statistical probability.
Westbury published a paper in October 2018 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology with the eye-catching title, “Wriggly, squiffy, lummox, and boobs: What makes some words funny?”
In it, he started with a list of the 5,000 English words. These words were rated funniest by real humans. He took that little list and constructed a working mathematical model for predicting the laugh factor of nearly every word in the dictionary.
Okay. Are you reading this and thinking, “This guy has too much time on his hands up there in Alberta. They must get a lot of snow.” That’s what I was thinking.
But I’ll continue with his experiment.
When Westbury applied his model to a dataset of 45,516 English words, it decided that these ten words were the funniest of all.
And here they are: “upchuck, bubby, boff, wriggly, yaps, giggle, cooch, guffaw, puffball, and jiggly.”
Runners-up included “squiffy, flappy, and Bucko” and the perennial favorites of every 8-year-old on the planet: “poop, puke, and boobs.”
On the other end of the spectrum, the word found to be the absolute least funny was “harassment.”
In his paper, Westbury explains that philosophers have been trying to unravel the mystery of humor for millennia.
Like, Plato and Aristotle were not big fans of humor. They saw it mostly as a way of feeling superior to others. And then there was Cicero. He gave it all the “incongruity theory.” This happens when we expect one thing and another is said.
Westbury says these things are not a true scientific “theory.” He explains that some events are funnier than others. Like when someone has a random coughing fit in a crowded movie theater. That isn’t nearly as comical as a random farting fit. Even saying the phrase “random farting fit” is kind of funny.
So, the goal of Westbury’s modeling experiments was to go beyond philosophical theorizing and come up with a truly quantifiable scale of funny.
I’ve reprinted the mathematics of his experiment below, but I can assure you, it is pretty boring. Basically, he analyzed the words by two measures: Meaning and Form. He then gave the words different categories to be measured by. Blah, blah, blah.
Now, this is where things get really interesting. The human brain, it seems, is running all of these complex mathematical models all the time without any of us knowing it.
Whatever it is we are doing, our brains are constantly parsing language for cross-connections and statistical probabilities among words. And as a result, this is what we call humor. At least when judging one word at a time, according to this guy. In other words, our brains are always judging things, like, which is funnier “poopy” or “mayhem”?
All I know is that some words are funnier than others.
Snot is pretty funny. Booger is funny.
Scab is not funny.
Neither is phlegm. Even the spelling isn’t funny.
Today, smile a little. And if you do it in someone else’s direction? All the better, puffball.
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The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
— e. e. cummings
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Humor is one of the best ingredients of survival.
— Aung San Suu Kyi
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Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies of it.
— E. B. White
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Westbury’s process, reprinted directly from the article, from Feedspot.
The Math of Humor
To do it, Westbury analyzed words in two different ways: by their meaning and by their form. For the first analysis, the researchers looked at “semantic predictors” that group words with similar meanings. Using a free tool developed by Google that identifies words that are commonly used for one another (co-occurrence), Westbury mapped out the semantic relationships between 234 of the funniest human-picked words. From this “correlation plot,” the researchers identified six different clusters or categories of funny words: insult, sex, party, animal, bodily function and expletive.
Now, this is where things get dangerously mathematical. Since many of the words on the human-rated funny list fell into more than one category, the researchers needed a more precise measurement of how a word’s meaning translated into comedy. Using the Google tool, they came up with lists of words most closely related to each of the six categories. Then, they came up with average values for each of those word categories using something called linear regression analysis. Those average values for each category — insult, sex, expletive, etc. — became known as “category-defining vectors.”
When looking specifically at meaning, it turns out that the funniest words don’t necessarily fall cleanly into the most categories, but are the words whose mathematical values are the closest, on average, to those six category-defining vectors. Confused? Here’s how Westbury summed it up in a press brief: “The average similarity of a word’s meaning to these six categories is itself the best measure we found of a word’s funniness, especially if the word also has strongly positive emotional connotations.”
But meaning is only one type of measurement. Westbury and his team looked at the form of funny words, things like word length or the individual sounds (phonemes) that make up each word. In this second analysis, the data fit nicely with the incongruity theory of humor. It turns out that the fewer times a word or its phonemes appear, the funnier we think they are. That helps explain why there are so many “k” and “oo” sounds in the funny word lists. They’re statistically improbable. Words ending in “le” (like waddle” and “wriggle”) were another source of fun, suggesting as the study puts it, “repetition, usually with a diminutive aspect.”
So, Why Are We Laughing?
Now, this is where things get really interesting. The human brain, it seems, is running all of these complex mathematical models all the time without any of us knowing it. As we watch TV and read and talk to people, our brains are constantly parsing language for subtle semantic cross-connections and statistical probabilities. And the result — at least on this basic, one-word level — is what we call humor.
“If I asked, ‘Which letter is more common, ‘p’ or ‘b’?’ I think the average person would have no clue consciously. But unconsciously, they are sensitive to that,” says Westbury. “And we know that, because their funniness judgments are reflecting exactly that kind of fine-tuned calculation.”
In other words, says Westbury, “People are using emotions to do math.”
Westbury argues that all of this makes perfect sense evolutionarily. Our brains have been hard-wired over millions of years to identify anything that’s out of the ordinary as a potential threat. And human emotions, including humor, likely developed as ways of responding to improbable events and environments.
“People laugh based on how improbable the world is,” says Westbury.
Bucko and poop are funny. Accurate is not funny.
