In the 1975 movie " The Sunshine Boys , " an agingvaudevillecomedian explain a classical truism of drollery to his nephew : The " k " sound is always funny .
" Fifty - seven years in this byplay , you get wind a few things . You know whatwords are funnyand which words are not comic , " says the comedian , wager by Walter Matthau . " Alka - Seltzer is funny . You say ' Alka - Seltzer , ' you get a laugh … Casey Stengel , that ’s a risible name . Robert Taylor is not funny . Cupcake is risible . Tomato is not funny … Cleveland is mirthful . Maryland is not funny . Then there ’s chicken . Chicken is funny . Pickle is funny . "
And it ’s dead on target ! If you need a place name for a punchline , you ’re guarantee to kill with Kalamazoo , Schenectady or Rancho Cucamonga . But why ? Psychology professor Chris Westbury at the University of Alberta has a fascinating theory , and it ’s based on perhaps the two unfunniest tidings in the English language : statistical probability .
Westbury published a paper in October 2018 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology with the first - rate deed of conveyance , " Wriggly , squiffy , lummox , and pinhead : What makes some Son funny ? " In it , he started with a list of the 5,000 English word rat funniest by real human and construct a working mathematical model for predicting the jape cistron of nearly every parole in the lexicon .
When Westbury applied his framework to a dataset of 45,516 English lyric , it decided that these 10 words were the funniest of all : " upchuck , bubby , boff , wriggly , yaps , giggle , cooch , guffaw , puffball , and jiggly . " runner - up included " pixilated , flappy and bucko " and the recurrent favorites of every 8 - year - old on the satellite : " poop , puke and boobs . " On the other end of the spectrum , the countersign find to be the absolute least funny was " harassment . "
In his composition , Westbury explains that philosopher have been trying to execute the whodunit of wit for millennium . Plato and Aristotle were n’t crowing fans of humor , see it mostly as a way of smirch and feeling superior to others . Tully inaugurate " incongruousness theory , " writing that " the most common kind of joke [ is when we ] anticipate one thing and another is say ; in which case our own defeated first moment makes us express mirth . "
While the incongruousness hypothesis of comedy makes perfect sense — even orangutansfind switcheroo play a trick on high - larious — Westbury say it ’s not a genuine scientific " theory " in that clearly not every incongruous consequence is as funny as another . A random coughing set in a crowded movie theater is n’t intimately as comical as a random flatus convulsion . ( I mean , just seek to say " random farting fit " without smile . ) So the goal of Westbury ’s modeling experimentation was to go beyond philosophical theorizing and come up with a in truth quantifiable scale of funny .
The Math of Humor
To do it , Westbury analyzed words in two different way : by their meaning and by their shape . For the first analytic thinking , the researchers looked at " semantic predictors " that radical words with similar meanings . Using afree tooldeveloped by Google that identifies words that are commonly used for one another ( Centennial State - natural event ) , Westbury mapped out the semantic human relationship between 234 of the funniest human - pick words . From this " correlational statistics plot , " the researchers identified six unlike clump or category of curious words : insult , sex , party , animal , bodily function and expletive .
Now this is where thing get dangerously mathematical . Since many of the Bible on the man - rated funny tilt fell into more than one category , the researchers needed a more precise measurement of how a word ’s meaning translated into clowning . Using the Google tool , they came up with inclination of word most closely related to to each of the six class . Then they came up with average values for each of those password family using something call linear regression analysis . Those average values for each category — insult , sex , expletive , etc . — became known as " category - define vector . "
When looking specifically at meaning , it turns out that the laughable words do n’t necessarily pass cleanly into the most categories , but are the words whose numerical values are the closest , on average , to those six class - defining vector . befuddled ? Here ’s how Westbury tot up it up in a press brief : " The average law of similarity of a word ’s substance to these six categories is itself the best measuring stick we found of a news ’s funniness , specially if the word also has powerfully positive emotional connotations . "
But meaning is only one character of measurement . Westbury and his team take care at the build of suspicious word , things like word length or the individual sound ( phonemes ) that make up each word . In this second analysis , the data fit nicely with the incongruity possibility of temper . It turns out that the fewer times a Son or its phoneme appear , the funnier we think they are . That helps explain why there are so many " k " and " oo , " sound in the risible Bible lists . They ’re statistically unlikely . Words ending in " le " ( like waddle " and " wriggle " ) were another informant of playfulness , suggesting as the study puts it , " repeat , usually with a diminutive aspect . "
So, Why Are We Laughing?
Now this is where thing 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 mass , our brains are invariably parsing language for subtle semantic hybridisation - connections and statistical probabilities . And the result — at least on this canonic , one - word level — is what we call bodily fluid .
" If I asked , ' Which missive is more vulgar , ' phosphorus ' or ' bacillus ' ? ' I remember the average individual would have no clue consciously . But unconsciously , they are sore to that , " says Westbury . " And we know that , because their funniness judgement are shine exactly that kind of fine - tuned computing . "
In other words , aver Westbury , " People are using emotions to do math . "
Westbury argues that all of this make everlasting sense evolutionarily . Our genius have been firmly - wired over 1000000 of twelvemonth to identify anything that ’s out of the ordinary as a potential menace . And human emotion , including humor , likely developed as ways of answer to marvelous result and environments .
" People laugh found on how unconvincing the world is , " says Westbury .
Of of course , it ’s a longsighted conceptual leap from promise the funniness level of single words to modeling the comedic mechanics of a knock - knock joke or a piquant limerick . But Westbury ’s work points the room . mayhap someday we ’ll finally understand why that volaille crossed the route . One affair ’s well-defined , though . A anuran would n’t have been half as funny .
