![]() ![]() It’s possible that our ancestors evolved to think things were funny to show when surprises aren't threats. Using this idea, Westbury has devised a mathematical model to explain humor, reports Kaplan. So when a word diverges greatly from what sounds like a real word, people more often find the nonsense word funny. This isn't a new idea: The 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer proposed the "incongruity theory," which suggests that the basis of humor lies in violated expectations, like when a parade of clowns gets out of a tiny car, writes Kaplan. … Emotion is helping us compute the probabilities in the world." "And we’re showing that feeling is actually a kind of probability calculation. "They’re going on their gut feeling, going 'It feels funny to me,'" Westbury says in the video. As it turns out, there’s a kind of “Goldilocks Zone” of nonsense words: A word like “anotain” got fewer laughs because it looks more like a real word, while “pranomp” got more because it looks just silly enough, David Shariatmadari writes for The Guardian. Westbury and his colleagues discovered that the more unusual a word looks or sounds, the funnier it is. ![]() “But there’s actually a consistent relationship between how funny they are and how weird they are.” “Some non-words are funny, and they’re weird when they are,” Westbury says in a video produced by the University of Alberta. So Westbury and a group of linguists from the University of Tübingen in Germany came up with a list of nonsense words to see which ones got the biggest laughs. But Westbury found that every time his subjects saw the word “snunkoople” they cracked up, Sarah Kaplan reports for the Washington Post. He was initially conducting a study to see whether people with a speech and language disorder called aphasia could distinguish between real and fake words. According to a new study published in the Journal of Memory and Language, there’s a scientific reason why made-up words like these might get you to chuckle.Ĭhris Westbury, a psychology professor at the University of Alberta, didn’t set out to study what makes people laugh at nonsense words worthy of Dr. But if you think they look or sound funny, you’re not alone. These are all nonsense words generated by a computer. Does the word “quingel” make you giggle? How about “finglam? Or “rembrob?” Don’t worry about reaching for the dictionary. ![]()
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