Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff Lauren Bogelbaum. Here in the movie The Sunshine Boys,
Speaker 1: an aging vaudeville comedian explains a classic truism of comedy
Speaker 1: to his nephew, The k sound is always funny. The
Speaker 1: comedian played by Walter Matthau said, fifty seven years in
Speaker 1: this business, you'll learn a few things. You know what
Speaker 1: words are funny and which words are not funny. Alka
Speaker 1: Seltzer is funny. You say alka Seltzer, you get a laugh.
Speaker 1: Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny,
Speaker 1: Cupcake is funny, Tomato is not funny, Cleveland is funny,
Speaker 1: Maryland is not funny. Then there's chicken. Chicken is funny,
Speaker 1: Pickle is funny. And it's true. If you need a
Speaker 1: place name for a punchline, you're guaranteed to kill with
Speaker 1: Kalamazoo's connecticy or Rancho cucamonga. But why? Psychology professor Chris
Speaker 1: Westbury at the University of Alberta has a fascinating theory,
Speaker 1: and it's based on perhaps the two unfunniest words in
Speaker 1: the English language. Statistical probability Westbury published a paper in
Speaker 1: October of eighteen in the Journal of Experimental Psychology with
Speaker 1: a first rate title, Reriggly, squiffy, lemmicks and boobs. What
Speaker 1: makes Some Words Funny? In his research, he started with
Speaker 1: a list of the five thousand English words rated funniest
Speaker 1: by real humans and constructed a working mathematical model for
Speaker 1: predicting the laugh factor of nearly every word in the dictionary.
Speaker 1: When Westbury applied his model to a data set of
Speaker 1: forty five thousand, five hundred and sixteen English words, it
Speaker 1: decided that these ten words were the funniest of all.
Speaker 1: Up chuck, bubbly, boff, wriggly, yeaps, giggle, cooch, gafa, puff ball,
Speaker 1: and giggily. Runners up included squiffy, flappy, and bucko, and
Speaker 1: the perennial favorites of every eight year old on the
Speaker 1: planet poop, puke, and boobs. On the other end of
Speaker 1: the spectrum, the word found to be the absolute least
Speaker 1: funny was harassment. In his paper, Westbury explains that philosophers
Speaker 1: have been trying to unraffle the mystery of humor for millennia.
Speaker 1: Plato and Aristotle weren't big fans of humor, seeing it
Speaker 1: mostly is a way of denigrating and feeling superior to others.
Speaker 1: Casaro introduced incongruity theory, writing that the most common kind
Speaker 1: of joke is when we expect one thing and another
Speaker 1: is said, in which case our own disappointed expectation makes
Speaker 1: us laugh. While the incongruity theory of comedy makes perfect
Speaker 1: sense of even orangutans find switchery tricks hi hilarious, Westbury
Speaker 1: says that it's not a true scientific theory and that
Speaker 1: clearly not every incongruous event is as funny as another.
Speaker 1: A random coughing fit in a crowded movie theater isn't
Speaker 1: nearly as comical as a random farting fit. I mean,
Speaker 1: just try to say random farting fit without smiling. So
Speaker 1: the goal of Westbury's modeling experiments was to go beyond
Speaker 1: philosophical theorizing and come up with a truly quantifiable scale
Speaker 1: of funny. To do it, Westbury analyzed words in two
Speaker 1: different ways, by their meaning and by their form. For
Speaker 1: the first analysis, the researchers looked at semantic predictors that
Speaker 1: group words with similar meanings using a free tool developed
Speaker 1: by Google that identifies words that are commonly used for
Speaker 1: one another a k A co occurrence. Westberry mapped out
Speaker 1: the semantic relationships between two hundred and thirty four of
Speaker 1: the human picked funniest words. From this correlation plot, the
Speaker 1: researchers identified six different clusters or categories of funny words insult, sex, party, animal, bodily, function,
Speaker 1: and expletive. Now this is where things get dangerously mathematical.
Speaker 1: Since many of the words on the Human Rated funny
Speaker 1: list fell into more than one category, the researchers needed
Speaker 1: a more precise measurement of how a words meaning translated
Speaker 1: into comedy. Using the Google tool, they came up with
Speaker 1: lists of words most closely related to each of the
Speaker 1: six categories, and then they came up with the average
Speaker 1: values for each of those word categories using something called
Speaker 1: linear regression analysis. Those average values for each category you know, insult, explicit, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Became known as category defining vectors. When looking specifically at meaning,
Speaker 1: it turns out that the funniest words don't necessarily fall
Speaker 1: cleanly into the most categories, but are the words whose
Speaker 1: mathematical values are the closest on average, to those six
Speaker 1: category defining vectors. Here's how Westbury summed it up in
Speaker 1: a press brief, The average similarity of a words meaning
Speaker 1: to these six categories is itself the best measure we
Speaker 1: found of a word's funniness, especially at the word also
Speaker 1: has strongly positive emotional connotations. But meaning is only one
Speaker 1: type of measurement. Westbury and his team looked at the
Speaker 1: form of funny words, things like word length or the
Speaker 1: individual sounds or phonemes that make up each word. In
Speaker 1: the second analysis, the data fit nicely with the incongruity
Speaker 1: theory of humor. It turns out that the fewer times
Speaker 1: a word or its phonemes appear in the language, the
Speaker 1: funnier we think they are. That helps explain why there
Speaker 1: are so many k and oo sounds in funny word lists.
Speaker 1: They're statistically improbable, or it's ending in l e like
Speaker 1: wattle and wriggle, or another source of funds suggesting, as
Speaker 1: the study put it, repetition, usually with a diminutive aspect.
Speaker 1: So why are we laughing? Now? This is where things
Speaker 1: get really weird. The human brain, it seems, is running
Speaker 1: all of these complex mathematical models all the time without
Speaker 1: any of us knowing it. As we watch TV and
Speaker 1: read and talk to people. Our brains are constantly parsing
Speaker 1: language for subtle semantic cross connections and statistical probabilities, and
Speaker 1: the result, at least on this basic one word level,
Speaker 1: is what we call humor. Westbury said, if asked which
Speaker 1: letter is more common P or B, I think the
Speaker 1: average person would have no clue consciously, but unconsciously they
Speaker 1: are sensitive to that. And we know that because their
Speaker 1: funniness judgments are reflecting exactly that kind of fine tuned calculation.
Speaker 1: In other words, said Westbury, people are using emotions to
Speaker 1: do math. Westbury argues that all of this makes perfect
Speaker 1: sense evolutionarily, our brains have been hardwired over millions of
Speaker 1: years to identify anything that's out of the ordinary as
Speaker 1: a potential threat, and human emotions, including humor, likely developed
Speaker 1: his ways of responding to improbable events and environments. O.
Speaker 1: Westbury summed it up, people laugh based on how improbable
Speaker 1: the world is. Of course, it's a long conceptual leap
Speaker 1: from predicting the funniness level of individual words to modeling
Speaker 1: the communic mechanics of a knock knock joke or a
Speaker 1: salty limerick. But Westbury's work points the way maybe someday
Speaker 1: we'll finally understand why that chicken crossed the road. One
Speaker 1: thing is clear, though a frog wouldn't have been half
Speaker 1: as funny. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and
Speaker 1: produced by Tyler Playing. For more on this and lots
Speaker 1: of other flappy boff topics, visit our home planet how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I
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