Short Stuff: The Science of Funny Words

Why are some words funnier than others? Well, one man has sought to figure that out. We'll tell you all about him and his project in today's episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and we have one word for you, buddy wiggle.
Here's another one, Chuck. Poop. That's a genuine laugh. Always
gets me. Poop is just funny. It is funny. It's
literally a funny word. Um. And this episode we're talking

(00:27):
about a guy named Chris Westbury who is a researcher
out of the University of Alberta, a psychologist actually, and
he wanted to figure out what makes things funny and
specifically what makes some words funnier than others. And apparently
he was a bit of a math genius as a child,
really got into the statistical analysis kind of stuff, and

(00:49):
he's applied that as an adult in a study that
has one of the better names of any study ever published.
Are you setting me up? I am, Yeah. It was
called Wrigglely Squiffy lummocks and boobs colon what makes some
words funny? And this is just super interesting to me too, because,

(01:09):
like we were talking about, with the nounds of assemblage,
words and etymology really interests me, and comedy interests me.
And even though I've never done stand up, I know
that comedians take a lot of great care with not
only the bits and the flow and the tone, but
specific words are funnier than others and can really punch
up a joke. Agreed, And it says here in this house,

(01:32):
stuff works article a word like Schenectady or Rancho, cucamonga
or kalamazoo or just kind of funny words. And this
guy went out to figure out why. Yeah, he said why.
People said, who cares, it's it's just funny. Don't look
too deeply into it. And he said, no, I'm gonna
do the opposite of that. You will sit there and

(01:52):
listen when I explain it to you through Josh and Chuck.
That's right. So what he did was he started off
with and this is gonna get it really kind of
not fun at all in a minute. But he started
off with a list of five thousand English words that
were rated funniest by people. I guess he did a
poll or something. And then he constructed a mathematical model

(02:15):
for predicting which one's uh what what would be funny
for every single word, like a ranking I guess for
every single word in the dictionary. Yeah, this model he
came up with it's kind of complex, it's multi layered.
It's kind of like an onion, and he basically now
came run any any word through it. It's okay, he
can run the The onion is hilarious, but um, he

(02:39):
can run any word through it and basically spit out like, ah,
I guess a ranking, how funny? I guess yeah, how
funny that that word will probably be received? Right, And
this is all English words specifically, But he came up with,
based on this mathematical model, the ten funniest words, one

(03:00):
of which we probably shouldn't even say. Yeah, I guess so,
but hey man, first amendment, All right up, chuck, yeah, funny, bubby, bof,
wriggly yaps, giggle, chuck, no, no, no, no, no, cooch, guffaw, puffball,

(03:28):
and jiggly. Right, so those are the tin funniest. The
runners up were squiffy, flappy and bucko and buck is
a great one, poop, puke and boobs got you just now,
it just got you just. I mean, it's funny. Poop
is funny the same reason farting is funny. Yeah, the

(03:51):
word fart is funny. Far the word fart is funny,
but it's also like shame inducing, you know, like it
really makes you feel really bad about yourself when you
use it, right, Yeah, I mean it might just be me,
but poop basically, no one feels bad for saying the
word poop, and it is just a genuinely funny word. Yeah.
And I'll also mention that farting is the one thing

(04:13):
that allows me to hold on to the fact that
there may be a God, that there are far yeah,
and that that God has a sense of humor because
the fact that a smelly, flammable gas comes out of
your butt hole and makes a sound. Yeah, And believe us, everybody,
we've verified it is flammable. It's one of the greatest

(04:35):
things about human beings. It's pretty great, you know. Especially
it's like food goes in. We say poot in our house. Now,
poot's a good one for obvious reasons, you know what
I say, of course, or just shoot a duck that's right,
or just pretend it didn't happen. One of those two. Right.
So another thing we should mention here is um the

(04:59):
increm congruity theory, and that is the idea that and
this is sort of a tried and true comedy virtue
which is something unexpected will make you laugh. Most times.
It's when you have an expectation of something and something
else happens. A lot of good comedy can come from that.
And I mean that's absolutely the basis of comedy, at

(05:19):
least as far as like all anecdotal evidence, all um,
like sensible common sense, which is the most sensible kind
or the most common kind? Um When you when you
like you really stop and think about in congruity theory,
it really really makes a lot of sense, right. But
Chris Westbury was like, that's all well, and good way

(05:42):
to go Cicero for coming up with in congruity theory.
But I like to quantify things, so I'm going to
do that and we'll be right back to explain exactly
how we did that. After this, I got a question,

(06:11):
is Westbury the most interesting guy at the dinner party?
Or does he make you want to gouge your eyeballs out?
I he might be listening, so I'm not going to
answer that question. He's one or the other, right, there's
no in between. You're either like, oh my god, I
meant this guy and you wouldn't believe like he's got
these theories and mathematical things we're following, like we're selling
off all of our stuff and we're gonna start following

(06:31):
them around. Or he's like, oh God, give me away
from this, dude. I just tried to make a fart joke,
and he tried to explain it to me. Right, let
me go find somebody who's been on the keyto diet
for three years and talked to them instead. Oh man,
that's good. So um, what it is? You know why
because the letter K is in there and we'll get
to that in a minute. Totally. But what Chris Westbury

(06:54):
did was he basically took all these words. I think
he took um several hundred of him to start, like
a subset of the was five thousand funniest words, and
he just kind of took a random subset of him
and he started analyzing them with a Google tool that
basically shows co occurrence. Right, So basically you run these
words through this little Google machine learning algorithm and it

(07:16):
spits out other words that people have used instead of
or in conjunction with it, right. And what he figured
out was that out of like this couple hundred sample set,
you could basically boil it down to six general categories um,
and all of the words had something to do with
either an expletive, being an expletive, um, sex, the body, partying.

(07:42):
I guess which one just just kind of struck me
as out of the blue, Um, I was not expecting
that one. What else, chuck, animals or insults? And so
those are the six clusters of categories of funny words. Okay,
so he said, all right, great, but the thing is,
there's a lot of words that like kind of straddle

(08:03):
these categories. How can you how can you say, like,
you know, what makes one funnier than the other? What's
the deal here? And I'm not sure how he did this.
I'm not even sure that he knows how he did this.
But he basically assigned a statistical UM number two a
word and insofar as it related to its category. Right,

(08:28):
so like um uh, birthday cake were probably pretty close
to the party category, like it's it's probably pretty close
or fete or fiesta or something like that. It's very
close to its synonymous to a ward in this category.
But even that didn't quite describe what made a word
funny and what a guess he figured out And I'm

(08:49):
not sure how he did this was that the funniest
words were related, um equally roughly to a number of
different categories. And it seems like the more that a
word was related to one or a number of these
six categories, the funnier it was. And a good example
he gave was poop right, it's uh it. It can

(09:10):
be an expletive, it can be um, part of the body,
it can be a party. Um. There's it has to
do with multiple categories, and so it's funnier than say,
fiesta is you know that made sense to me for
the first time after reading this like seven times, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, seven, seven, eight,
ten times maybe yeah. It just the way he was

(09:32):
putting it never made sense, but you brought it around
for me. So thank you, thank you, Chuck Man. That
means a lot to me. So he got to that point,
but then he said, you know what the meaning of
these words, that's only one kind of measurement. Everyone else
was saying, stop, that's good, that's good, you're fine, you
did it, you did it. But he said, no, no, no,
that's not enough. Meeting is only one type of measurement.

(09:54):
And so he said, let's look at and this is
actually kind of the good part to me, He said,
we need to look at the form of these words,
how long they are, the individual sounds that make up
these words, And that's where incongruity theory of humor kind
of comes back, because the fewer times that these uh
phone ms uh, the individual sounds appear like, the more

(10:15):
rare they are, the funnier that people think they are. Yeah, Like, basically, um,
I guess K is much The K sound in particular
is much less um used in English than say, like B.
So that's why like words with K sounds or are

(10:36):
funnier than words with say, T sounds. So pickle is
funnier than tomato, which is we just inherently know. And
so what Chris Westberry was basically onto is that by
analyzing the arrangement of letters and how frequently they occur
in words in the English language, that he tied it
into that incongruity theory. And he basically said, our brains

(10:59):
are constantly analyzing the information that's coming in from watching
TV or talking to people or reading or something like that,
and we have a certain expectation. And with that expectation,
isn't met um like something that statistically is improbable like
the word walla, walla Washington comes up out of nowhere.
You don't see that every day. You weren't really expecting it,

(11:21):
and it kind of makes things funny to you because
it triggers that incongruity response. Yeah, and that your brain
is you don't know it, but it's constantly doing this
in the background, and you just here it is funny, right,
you just you just go walla, walla Washington. So yeah,
if you're just starting out in comedy, really pay attention
to the words, and especially the words in the punch

(11:43):
line because swapping out individual words can make a big difference. Um.
Can we close with this quote from The Sunshine Boys? Yeah,
I think so the great. Have you ever seen this movie?
I have not, man, but I know it's George Burns
and Walter math Yes, it is the best. It is
a great movie about this comedy team who hate each
other's guts and they're old men now and they're trying

(12:05):
to get them together for a reunion show. So Walter
math Aw says this, fifty seven years in the business,
you learn a few things. You know what words are
funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltza is funny.
You say alka seltza, you get a laugh Casey stingle.
That's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny, Cupcake

(12:28):
is funny, Tomato is not funny. Cleveland is funny, Maryland
is not funny. And then there's chicken. Chicken is funny,
Pickle is funny. And he's kind of right. Oh, he's
beyond kind of right. He's fully right, for sure. Good stuff.
But just one question. That was your Walter math Now

(12:48):
that wasn't great. Well, everybody go watch the Sunshine Boys
and see what Chuck was talking about, and you can
compare his Walter math out to the real Walter math. Ow,
how about that? And in the meantime, you can go
check out this article on how stuff works. Right, Chuck,
that's right. And in the meantime, meantime, short stuff is out.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart

(13:10):
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