A team of researchers and linguists from the University of Tübingen in Germany and the University of Canada discovered a way to quantify just how hilarious an invented word is. Lead researcher Chris Westbury first came up with the idea during this study on patients with aphasia.
The people were presented with a string of letters and they had to guess if the word was real or made-up, like snunkoople. Westbury noticed that some of the made-up words made the participants laugh more than other words.
In the new study, Westbury and his colleagues showed 900 people 6,000 non-words or made-up words and discovered that words with lower entropy or predictability made people laugh more. Westbury described entropy as a 'measure of non-word weirdness'. The words used in the study were created to sound almost similar to real words.
Some of the words used in Dr. Seuss books are funny but they are also long. Westbury controlled the length of the made-up words used in the study and gave a limit of seven characters. This measurement was then used to test the relation between comedy and entropy.
The team discovered that unlikely sounding words such as 'finglam', 'himumma' and 'suppopp' were funnier compared to 'advical', 'menclar' and 'rousent'. Westbury used Dr. Seuss' word 'yuzz-a-ma-tuzz' as an example and said it would have a low-entropy measurement because the letter Z is deemed as an improbable letter.
Westbury stressed that the study is the first to present a measurable theory of humor. They found that entropy can help in the understanding of what makes non-words more hilarious that real words.
"The results show that the bigger the difference in the entropy between the two words, the more likely the subjects were to choose the way we expected them to," said Westbury, who stressed the complicated state of real humor. One of the key findings is the relationship of improbability to humor. The team plans to further study the content of the word letter combinations found to be most hilarious.
The research is scheduled for publication in the Journal of Memory and Language in January 2016.
Photo: Alex Lebedev | Flickr
