Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff Lauren Bogelbaum. 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, 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 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 of eighteen in the Journal of Experimental Psychology with a first rate title, Reriggly, squiffy, lemmicks 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.
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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, and 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.
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 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, things like word length or 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 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
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 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 a potential threat, and human emotions, including humor, likely developed his ways of responding to improbable events and environments. O. 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 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 of other flappy boff topics, visit our home planet how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, to my Heart Radio is the heart dio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.