Professor Chris Westbury's
newest psychology study is about farts. It is also about snots,
chortles, wienies, heinies and bozos; things that are wriggly,
jiggly, flappy, and slaphappy. That is because Westbury studies
funny words and, more specifically, what makes some words funny
and others not.
"As schoolboys of a certain age rediscover repeatedly, there is
a sense in which simply uttering the word fart is a one-word
joke," Westbury and Geoff Hollis, both professors at the
University of Alberta in Canada, wrote in a study published Oct.
18 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General [Does It
Fart? 10 Fascinating Facts About Animal Toots].
Westbury wondered, makes the word "fart" so funny? He already
knew from a 2016 study he co-authored that part of a word's
funniness could be explained by the popular theory of humor
known as incongruity theory; the idea that something becomes
funnier the more it subverts your expectations. In that study,
students rated the funniness of several thousand meaningless,
computer-generated words, or nonwords. The nonwords with
surprising letter combinations that looked least like known
English words, such as "snunkoople," "hablump" and "jumemo" were
consistently rated funniest.
Dirty-sounding nonwords like "whong," "dongl," and "focky" also
performed very well, suggesting that a word's perceived
connotation played a role in humor, even for words that had no
real meaning.
In their new study,
Westbury and Hollis delved further into the relationship between
word sounds, meanings and humor, this time, they started with a
list of 4,997 common words previously compiled by a team of
psychologists at the University of Warwick in the U.K. and
scored with funniness ratings by a panel of 800 online
participants. The Warwick psychologists found that words like
"booty," "tinkle" and "nitwit" were consistently ranked as being
very funny, while words like "pain," "torture" and "deathbed"
were ranked as being decidedly unfunny.
They categorized words based on 20 different factors, including
how long the word itself was, how positive or negative the
word's meaning was, how common each letter or combination of
letters was in English, and whether the word contained a crude
or profane-sounding string of characters within it.
With these factors and the pre-existing humor scores for the
words in the entire list, the researchers devised several
different equations that could, theoretically, predict the
humorousness of any given word. They tested two of their humor
equations on a list of more than 45,000 words, then ranked the
results in their new paper. One algorithm decided the top five
funniest words on the list were:
1. Upchuck
2. Bubby
3. Boff
4. Wriggly
5. Yaps
The second equation, which was written with the help of a
special data-modeling program Hollis and Westbury co-created in
2006, predicted the funniest words were:
1. Slobbering
2. Puking
3. Fuzz
4. Floozy
5. Cackling
The perfect funny word, the authors concluded, is "a short,
infrequent word composed of uncommon letters," and has a meaning
that is "human and insulting, profane, diminutive and/or related
to good times."