Inherently Funny Word

An inherently funny word is a word that is humorous without context, often more for its phonetic structure than for its meaning.

Vaudeville tradition holds that words with the sound are funny. 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. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer posited that humor is a product of one's expectations being violated.

Funny words in English

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:

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. 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:

A 2019 study presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning showed Artificial Intelligence (AI) could predict human ratings of humorous words. 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 words with the highest mean humor ratings were identified as "asshattery", "clusterfuck", "douchebaggery", "poppycock", "craptacular", "cockamamie", "gobbledegook", "gabagool", "nincompoops", "wanker", and "kerfuffle". 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.

Robert Beard, a professor emeritus of linguistics at Bucknell University, told an interviewer that "The first thing people always write in o his websiteabout is funny 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".

The evidence above suggests that factors neurologically akin to sound symbolism and the bouba/kiki effect (i.e., sounds having inherent associations with semantics) contribute to inherent funniness of words. Clearly, though, semantic layers coexist with it in the underlying mechanisms. Some words are humorous not necessarily because of their pronunciation, but because of (1) the absurdity of their own meanings (for example, ''centicameral'', which would refer to a legislature composed of 100 chambers or houses, but its humor derives from the conceptual ridiculousness of such a governmental institution) or (2) the absurdity of the heterological contrast of their meaning with their form (for example, as with '' sesquipedalian'' and '' sesquipedalophobia'').

Rudeness and entropy

A 2015 study published in the ''Journal of Memory and Language'' examined the humor of nonsense words. 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.

The funniest nonsense words tended to be those that reminded people of real words that are considered rude or offensive. This category included four of the top-six nonsense words that were rated the funniest in the experiment: "whong", "dongl", "shart", and "focky". To explain why these words seemed funny, the study's author said "The expectation that you've read or uttered a rude word is raisedand then violated, because in fact it's harmless nonsense. There's a sense of reliefof getting away with it."

After removing from consideration the words that seemed rude, another factor was suggested to also be significant. The study's lead author, Chris Westbury from the University of Alberta, suggests that the humor of certain invented words can be explained by the property of entropy. Entropy (specifically Shannon entropy) here expresses how unlikely the letter combinations in certain nonsense words are: the more unlikely the letters are to be used together in English, the more funny the combination is likely to be found. Nonsense words such as "rumbus", "skritz", and "yuzz-a-ma-tuzz", which were created by children's book author and illustrator Dr. Seuss, were found to have less probable letter combinations and to seem funnier than most ordinary English words. According to Westbury, "there's actually a consistent relationship between how funny onwordsare and how weird they are".

The entropy explanation also supports the notion that words with a 'k' in them tend to be more funny, as the letter 'k' is one of the least frequently used letters in the English language.

The idea that humor can be predicted by a word's entropy corresponds to the work of 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who posited that humor is a product of one's expectations being violated. According to Westbury, "One reason puns are funny is that they violate our expectation that a word has one meaning". Violating expectations corresponds mathematically to having a low probability combination of letters, which also makes the word seem particularly funny, according to Westbury.

To provide a possible evolutionary explanation of these phenomena, the authors of the study said that unusual occurrences may be experienced as indicating the presence of potential threats, and that humor may be a way of signalling to others that one has realized that a perceived threat is actually harmless. Westbury said "Strange as it may seem, that same mechanism may be activated when you see an unlikely looking word or a highly taboo oneyou experience relief as you recognize that it's completely harmlessjust a joke."

See also

*Anti-humora form of ironic humor involving saying something that is meaningless or not funny when the audience expects it to be funny.
* ''Cellar door'' (phrase)a phrase mentioned as an example of a word or phrase that is beautiful purely in terms of its sound without regard for its semantics
* Ideophonewords that evoke an idea in sound
*Linguistic relativity, and the theme that a rose by any other name would smell as sweetexplorations of how a phenomenon such as inherent funniness of words is an accident
*Malapropismthe use of an incorrect word in place of a word that sounds similar
*Mondegreenmishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony
*Nonsense versethe poetic use of nonsensical words or phrases
*Onomatopoeiaa word that suggests a sound that it describes
*Place names considered unusualincludes names which seem offensive, inadvertently humorous, or highly charged
*Sound symbolismthe idea that vocal sounds or phonemes carry meaning by themselves

References

Further reading

* Barry, Dave (1991), ''Dave Barry Talks Back'', 1st edn., New York: Crown. .
* Shibles, Warren, ''Humor Reference Guide: A Comprehensive Classification and Analysis'' (Hardcover) 1998
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External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Inherently Funny Word
Humour
Comedy
English phrases
Phonaesthetics