Snunkoople? Hablump? Folibbysm? Science knows why they’re funny
University of Alberta professor Chris Westbury was working with people with language problems when he noticed a funny thing. They all seemed to laugh at the made-up word “snunkoople.”
“Don’t you find the word funny?” Westbury asks.
He already knows the answer.
In a new study published in the Journal of Memory and Language, Westbury and his colleagues prove what Dr. Seuss knew instinctively: That when it comes to made-up words, folibbysm is funnier than tatinse and hablump is more humorous than anceste.
“The weirder the word is, the funnier the word is,” Westbury says.
“Funniness is a function of weirdness.”
The idea for the study came from a test where people were shown computer-generated strings of plausible — but imaginary — words.
While administering the test, Westbury noticed that non-words comprised of uncommon letter combinations were the ones people found funny, as opposed to nonwords with more predictable letter combinations. After seeing the same trend repeated many times, he decided to further examine why.
The results were released in a paper entitled, ‘Telling the world’s least funny jokes: On the quantification of humour as entropy.’
The science behind the findings isn’t really very funny — especially since Westbury and his colleagues removed all the dirty-sounding non-words the computer generated. (Including hilarious examples like whong, dongl and focky.)
And, as it turns out, the study of humour is rather serious business.
“It wasn’t as funny as it should have been,” Westbury admits. “All our words were generated automatically. We barely looked at the words. I didn’t get a lot of humour out of it myself.”
What Westbury did get were test results that showed people dramatically and predictably find certain non-words funnier than other non-words.
The key to the findings is entropy, a mathematical measure of uncertainty that allowed Westbury to more-or-less write a formula for funny. In Westbury’s formula, when a word contained unusual combinations of letters, its entropy was low, and it would naturally sound more humourous to test subjects. Words with high entropy sounded more common, and therefore, weren’t as funny.
“The theory of humour that we were using comes from the suggestion that the funniness comes from the fact that there’s a violation of expectation,” he says. “And the violation of expectation is that when you read a non-word, you’re expecting a word.”
So if entropy walked into a bar, and the bartender asked, “Hey, why so low?” Then it would be funny. Or at least it should be.