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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here in the movie The Sunshine Boys, an

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Speaker 1: aging vaudeville comedian explains a classic truism of comedy to

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Speaker 1: his nephew, The k sound is always funny. The comedian

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Speaker 1: played by Walter Matthau said, fifty seven years in this business,

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Speaker 1: you'll learn a few things. You know what words are

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Speaker 1: funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny.

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Speaker 1: You say alka Seltzer, you get a laugh. Casey Stengel,

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Speaker 1: that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny, Cupcake

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Speaker 1: is funny, Tomato is not funny, Cleveland is funny, Maryland

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Speaker 1: is not funny. Then there's chicken. Chicken is funny, Pickle

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Speaker 1: is funny. And it's true. If you need a place

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Speaker 1: name for a punchline, you're guaranteed to kill with Kalamazoo's

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Speaker 1: connecticy or Rancho Cucamonga. But why? Psychology professor Chris Westbury

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Speaker 1: at the University of Alberta has a fascinating theory, and

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Speaker 1: it's based on perhaps the two unfunniest words in the

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Speaker 1: English language. Statistical probability Westbury published a paper in October

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Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen in the Journal of Experimental Psychology with

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Speaker 1: a first rate title, Reriggly, squiffy, lummocks, and boobs. What

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Speaker 1: makes some Words Funny? In his research, he started with

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Speaker 1: a list of the five thousand English words rated funniest

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Speaker 1: by real humans and constructed a working mathematical model for

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Speaker 1: predicting the laugh factor of nearly every word in the dictionary.

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Speaker 1: When Westbury applied his model to a data set of

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Speaker 1: forty five thousand, five hundred and sixteen English words, it

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Speaker 1: decided that these ten words were the funniest of all.

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Speaker 1: Up chuck, bubbly, boff, wriggly, yeaps, giggle, cooch, gafa, puff ball,

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Speaker 1: and giggily. Runners up included squiffy, flappy, and bucko, and

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Speaker 1: the perennial favorites of every eight year old on the

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Speaker 1: planet poop, puke, and boobs. On the other end of

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Speaker 1: the spectrum, the word found to be the absolute least

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Speaker 1: funny was harassment. In his paper, Westbury explains that philosophers

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Speaker 1: have been trying to unraffle the mystery of humor for millennia.

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Speaker 1: Plato and Aristotle weren't big fans of humor, seeing it

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Speaker 1: mostly is a way of denigrating and feeling superior to others.

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Speaker 1: Casaro introduced incongruity theory, writing that the most common kind

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Speaker 1: of joke is when we expect one thing and another

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Speaker 1: is said, in which case our own disappointed expectation makes

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Speaker 1: us laugh. While the incongruity theory of comedy makes perfect

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Speaker 1: sense of even orangutans find switchery tricks hi hilarious, Westbury

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Speaker 1: says that it's not a true scientific theory and that

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Speaker 1: clearly not every incongruous event is as funny as another.

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Speaker 1: A random coughing fit in a crowded movie theater isn't

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Speaker 1: nearly as comical as a random farting fit. I mean,

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Speaker 1: just try to say random farting fit without smiling. So

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Speaker 1: the goal of Westbury's modeling experiments was to go beyond

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Speaker 1: philosophical theorizing and come up with a truly quantifiable scale

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Speaker 1: of funny. To do it, Westbury analyzed words in two

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Speaker 1: different ways, by their meaning and by their form. For

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Speaker 1: the first analysis, the researchers looked at semantic predictors that

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Speaker 1: group words with similar meanings using a free tool developed

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Speaker 1: by Google that identifies words that are commonly used for

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Speaker 1: one another a k A co occurrence. Westberry mapped out

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Speaker 1: the semantic relationships between two hundred and thirty four of

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Speaker 1: the human picked funniest words. From this correlation plot, the

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Speaker 1: researchers identified six different clusters or categories of funny words insult, sex, party, animal, bodily, function,

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Speaker 1: and expletive. Now this is where things get dangerously mathematical.

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Speaker 1: Since many of the words on the Human Rated funny

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Speaker 1: list fell into more than one category, the researchers needed

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Speaker 1: a more precise measurement of how a words meaning translated

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Speaker 1: into comedy. Using the Google tool, they came up with

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Speaker 1: lists of words most closely related to each of the

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Speaker 1: six categories. Then they came up with the average values

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Speaker 1: for each of those word categories using something called linear

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Speaker 1: regression analysis. Those average values for each category you know, insult, explicit, etcetera.

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Speaker 1: Became known as category defining vectors. When looking specifically at meaning,

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Speaker 1: it turns out that the funniest words don't necessarily fall

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Speaker 1: cleanly into the most categories, but are the words whose

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Speaker 1: mathematical values are the closest on average, to those six

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Speaker 1: category defining vectors. Here's how Westbury summed it up in

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Speaker 1: a press brief, The average similarity of a words meaning

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Speaker 1: to these six categories is itself the best measure we

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Speaker 1: found of a word's funniness, especially at the word also

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Speaker 1: has strongly positive emotional connotations. But meaning is only one

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Speaker 1: type of measurement. Westbury and his team looked at the

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Speaker 1: form of funny words of things like word length or

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Speaker 1: the individual sounds or phonemes that make up each word.

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Speaker 1: In the second analysis, the data fit nicely with the

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Speaker 1: incongruity theory of humor. It turns out that the fewer

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Speaker 1: times a word or its phonemes appear in the language,

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Speaker 1: the funnier we think they are. That helps explain why

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Speaker 1: there are so many k and oo sounds in funny

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Speaker 1: word lists. They're statistically improbable, or it's ending in l

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Speaker 1: e like wattle and wriggle, or another source of funds suggesting,

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Speaker 1: as the study put it, repetition, usually with a diminutive aspect.

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Speaker 1: So why are we laughing? Now? This is where things

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Speaker 1: get really weird. The human brain, it seems, is running

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Speaker 1: all of these complex mathematical models all the time without

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Speaker 1: any of us knowing it. As we watch TV and

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Speaker 1: read and talk to people. Our brains are constantly parsing

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Speaker 1: language for subtle semantic cross connections and statistical probabilities. And

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Speaker 1: the result, at least on this basic one word level,

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Speaker 1: is what we call humor. Westbury said, if asked which

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Speaker 1: letter is more common, P or B, I think the

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Speaker 1: average person would have no clue. Consciously, but unconsciously they

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Speaker 1: are sensitive to that. And we know that because their

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Speaker 1: funniness judgments are reflecting exactly that kind of fine tuned calculation.

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Speaker 1: In other words, said Westbury, people are using emotions to

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Speaker 1: do math. Westbury argues that all of this makes perfect

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Speaker 1: sense evolutionarily, our brains have been hardwired over millions of

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Speaker 1: years to identify anything that's out of the ordinary as

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Speaker 1: a potential threat, and human emotions, including humor, likely developed

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Speaker 1: his ways of responding to improbable events and environments. Oh,

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Speaker 1: Westbury summed it up, people laugh based on how improbable

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Speaker 1: the world is. Of course, it's a long conceptual leap

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Speaker 1: from predicting the funniness level of individual words to modeling

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Speaker 1: the communic mechanics of a knock knock joke or a

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Speaker 1: salty limerick. But Westbury's work points the way. Maybe someday

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Speaker 1: we'll finally understand why that chicken crossed the road. One

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Speaker 1: thing is clear, though a frog wouldn't have been half

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Speaker 1: as funny. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and

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Speaker 1: produced by Tyler Playing. For more on this and lots

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Speaker 1: of other flappy boff topics, visit our home planet, how

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Speaker 1: stuff works dot com