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. 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 ), and "focky". The funniest nonsense words tended to be those that reminded people of real words that are considered rude or offensive. 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. Rudeness and entropy Ī 2015 study published in the Journal of Memory and Language examined the humor of nonsense words. Beard's first book was The 100 Funniest Words in English, and among his own selected words are "absquatulate", "bowyangs", "collywobbles", "fartlek", "filibuster", "gongoozle", " hemidemisemiquaver", and " snollygoster". Robert Beard, a professor emeritus of linguistics at Bucknell University, told an interviewer that "The first thing people always write in about is funny words". 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. The words with the highest mean humor ratings were identified as "asshattery", "clusterfuck", "douchebaggery", "poppycock", "craptacular", "cockamamie", "gobbledegook", "nincompoops", "wanker", and "kerfuffle". 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 other duck said: "I was going to say that!" Ī 2019 study presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning showed Artificial Intelligence (AI) could predict human ratings of humorous words. 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: 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. Cockroach is funny – not if you get 'em, only if you say 'em. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny. 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: įifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer posited that humor is a product of one's expectations being violated.
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. Vaudeville tradition holds that words with the letter k are funny. Words which have been described as inherently funnyĪn 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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