Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Science of Funny Words

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. It wasn't? Yeah, it's awesome. That always gets me, poop is just funny. It is funny, it's literally a funny word. In this episode, we're talking 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 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 wriggly, squiffy, lummox, and boobs, colon. What makes some words funny? And this is just super interesting to me too, because like we were talking about

with the nouns of assemblage, words in etymology really interest 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 of Works article, a word like schenectady, or Rancho Cucamonga, or Kalamazoo. That's right. 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 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 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 really kind of not fun at all

in a minute, but he started off with a list of 5,000 English words that were rated funniest by people. I guess he did a poll or something, and then he constructed a mathematical model for predicting which ones, 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 can run any word through it. It's okay. He can run, the onion is hilarious, but he can run any word through it, and basically spit out like a, I guess, a ranking.

Yeah, like a laugh quotient. How funny, I guess, yeah, how funny 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 10 funniest words. One of which we probably shouldn't even say. Yeah, I guess so, but hey man, first amendment.

All right. All right. Upchuck, Yeah, funny. Bubby, Boff, Okay. Wrigley,

Yaps, Sure. Giggle, Chuck. No, no, no, no, no. Cooch, Okay. Gaffaw,

Yeah. Puffball, and Jiggly. Right, so those are the 10 funniest, the runners up were Squiffy, Flappy, and Bucko, and, Bucko's a great one. Poop, Puk, 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 word fart is funny. 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. Giggle, 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 that allows me to hold on to the fact

that there may be a God. That there are farts? Yeah, and 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 things about human beings.

It's pretty great. You know? Yeah, especially when it's like food goes in. Giggle, We say poot in our house now. Poot's good one. For obvious reasons. You know what I say, of course, which is 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 the incongruity 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 least as far as like all anecdotal evidence, all like sensible common sense, which is the most sensible kind, or the most common kind. When you really stop and think about incongruity theory, it really, really makes a lot of sense, right? But Chris Westbury was like,

that's all well and good, way to go, Cicero, for coming up with incongruity 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. ["Stuffin' Show"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back

to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I got a question. OK. Is Wes Burry 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 met this guy, and you wouldn't believe, like, he's got these theories and mathematical things. Yeah, we're following, like, we're selling off all of our stuff, and we're

going to start following around. Or he's like, oh, god, get 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 Keto diet for three years, and talk to them instead. Oh, man.

That's good. So what Chris- Keto's funny. It is. You know why? Because the letter K's in there, and we'll get to that in a minute. Totally. But what Chris Wes Burry did was he basically

took all of these words. I think he took several hundred of them to start, like, a subset of those 5,000 funniest words. And he just kind of took a random subset of them, 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 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. And all of the words had something to do with either an expletive, being an expletive, sex, the body partying, I guess, which one just kind of struck me

is out of the blue. I was not expecting that one. What else, Chuck? Animals or insults. OK. And so those are the six clusters of categories of funny words. OK, so he said, all right, great.

But the thing is, there's a lot of words that kind of straddle these categories. How can you say, like, 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. Maybe. But he basically assigned a statistical number

to a word, and insofar as it related to its category. So like birthday cake, we're probably pretty close to the party category. Like, it's probably pretty close. Or FET, or fiesta, or something like that. It's very close to. It's synonymous to a word in this category. But even that didn't quite describe what made a word funny.

And what he, I guess he figured out, and I'm not sure how he did this, was that the funniest words were related 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. It can be an expletive.

It can be part of the body. It can be a party. 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, 10 times, maybe? Yeah, just the way he was 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, 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 phonems, the individual sounds appear, like the more rare they are, the funnier that people think they are. Yeah, like basically, I guess K is much,

the K sound in particular is much less used in English than say like B. Yeah. So that's why like words with K sounds are funnier than words with say T sounds. So pickle is funnier than tomato, which is, we just inherently know. And so what Chris Westbury was basically onto

was 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 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 when that expectation isn't met, 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. And it kind of makes things funny to you

because it triggers that incongruity response. Yeah, your brain is, you don't know it, but it's constantly doing this in the background and you just hear it as funny. Right, 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 punchline,

because swapping out individual words can make a big difference. For sure. 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 Mathow.

Yes, it is the best. It is a great, great movie about this comedy team who hate each other's guts and they're old men now and they're trying to get them together for a reunion show. Nice. So Walter Mathow says this, 57 years in the business, you learn a few things. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny.

Alka Seltzer is funny. You say Alka Seltzer, you get a laugh. Casey Stingle, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake 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 kinda right. Oh, he's beyond kinda right. He's fully right for sure. Good stuff. But just one question.

That was your Walter Mathow? That wasn't great. Well, everybody go watch The Sunshine Boys and see what Chuck was talking about and you can compare his Walter Mathow to the real Walter Mathow. 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. The stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen

to your favorite shows.