Why Are Some Words Funny?

Words like 'poop' and 'wiggle' are inherently humorous, and science may have figured out why. Learn what research has to say about why some words tickle us in this episode of BrainStuff. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here in the movie The Sunshine Boys, an
aging vaudeville comedian explains a classic truism of comedy to
his nephew, The k sound is always funny. The comedian
played by Walter Matthau said, fifty seven years in this business,

(00:22):
you'll 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. Casey Stengel,
that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny, Cupcake
is funny, Tomato is not funny, Cleveland is funny, Maryland
is not funny. Then there's chicken. Chicken is funny, Pickle

(00:43):
is funny. And it's true. If you need a place
name for a punchline, you're guaranteed to kill with Kalamazoo's
connecticy 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 words in the
English language. Statistical probability Westbury published a paper in October

(01:05):
of twenty eighteen in the Journal of Experimental Psychology with
a first rate title, Reriggly, squiffy, lummocks, and boobs. What
makes some Words Funny? In his research, he started with
a list of the five thousand English words rated funniest
by real humans and constructed a working mathematical model for
predicting the laugh factor of nearly every word in the dictionary.

(01:26):
When Westbury applied his model to a data set of
forty five thousand, five hundred and sixteen English words, it
decided that these ten words were the funniest of all.
Up chuck, bubbly, boff, wriggly, yeaps, giggle, cooch, gafa, puff ball,
and giggily. Runners up included squiffy, flappy, and bucko, and
the perennial favorites of every eight year old on the

(01:48):
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 unraffle the mystery of humor for millennia.
Plato and Aristotle weren't big fans of humor, seeing it
mostly is a way of denigrating and feeling superior to others.

(02:10):
Casaro introduced incongruity theory, writing that the most common kind
of joke is when we expect one thing and another
is said, in which case our own disappointed expectation makes
us laugh. While the incongruity theory of comedy makes perfect
sense of even orangutans find switchery tricks hi hilarious, Westbury
says that it's not a true scientific theory and that

(02:32):
clearly not every incongruous event is as funny as another.
A random coughing fit in a crowded movie theater isn't
nearly as comical as a random farting fit. I mean,
just try to say random farting fit without smiling. So
the goal of Westbury's modeling experiments was to go beyond
philosophical theorizing and come up with a truly quantifiable scale
of funny. To do it, Westbury analyzed words in two

(02:56):
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 a k A co occurrence. Westberry mapped out
the semantic relationships between two hundred and thirty four of

(03:16):
the human picked funniest 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

(03:37):
list fell into more than one category, the researchers needed
a more precise measurement of how a words 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 the average values
for each of those word categories using something called linear
regression analysis. Those average values for each category you know, insult, explicit, etcetera.

(04:03):
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. Here's how Westbury summed it up in

(04:23):
a press brief, The average similarity of a words meaning
to these six categories is itself the best measure we
found of a word's funniness, especially at 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 of things like word length or

(04:43):
the individual sounds or phonemes that make up each word.
In the 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 in the language,
the funnier we think they are. That helps explain why
there are so many k and oo sounds in funny
word lists. They're statistically improbable, or it's ending in l

(05:05):
e like wattle and wriggle, or another source of funds suggesting,
as the study put it, repetition, usually with a diminutive aspect.
So why are we laughing? Now? This is where things
get really weird. 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

(05:27):
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. Westbury said, if asked which
letter is more common, P or B, I think the
average person would have no clue. Consciously, but unconsciously they

(05:48):
are sensitive to that. And we know that because their
funniness judgments are reflecting exactly that kind of fine tuned calculation.
In other words, said Westbury, people are using emotions to
do math. Westbury argues that all of this makes perfect
sense evolutionarily, our brains have been hardwired over millions of
years to identify anything that's out of the ordinary as

(06:09):
a potential threat, and human emotions, including humor, likely developed
his ways of responding to improbable events and environments. Oh,
Westbury summed it up, people laugh based on how improbable
the world is. Of course, it's a long conceptual leap
from predicting the funniness level of individual words to modeling
the communic mechanics of a knock knock joke or a

(06:30):
salty limerick. But Westbury's work points the way. Maybe someday
we'll finally understand why that chicken crossed the road. One
thing is clear, though a frog wouldn't have been half
as funny. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and
produced by Tyler Playing. For more on this and lots

(06:51):
of other flappy boff topics, visit our home planet, how
stuff works dot com