Funny words for poop11/11/2023 Words that have certain phonemes in them are also funny, he said. He has also found more letter combinations that bring out the giggles. He confirms that k-words are indeed inherently funny, at least on the people he has tested them on. Westbury’s research into what makes words funny has expanded. In this case, it’s not just the sound that makes Hausmann smile, but also the gulf between the sound and its concrete meaning. “It was at my rich friend’s house in Connecticut - because who else has a gazebo?” Hausmann said she has probably only used gazebo once in context. “What it’s used to describe is so specific and dumb.” “I just think the word gazebo doesn’t feel English,” Hausmann said. Take “gazebo.” It’s one of comedian Joanna Hausmann’s favorite funny words. The theory that incongruous nonwords make people laugh works with real words, too. “But if you make a reasonable word that’s made up of unusual letters and sounds - the more unusual the letters and sounds are, the funnier people find it.” “If you make a really stupid word that has no vowels in it or something, people don’t find it funny,” Westbury said. Westbury and his team analyzed their computer-generated nonwords and determined that when their letter combinations were incongruous, they were more likely to provoke laughter. “We didn’t choose that word because it was funny.” “All of the nonwords were made up by computer,” Westbury said. When snunkoople came up, everyone laughed. The team asked participants to look at nonwords among a sea of random letters on a screen. His team was looking at aphasia, a form of brain damage that affects one’s ability to process language. Westbury discovered this while working on a study that had nothing to do with humor. And it turns out, snunkoople makes most people chuckle. Westbury’s research didn’t actually start with jokes, but with an invented word, or what he calls a “nonword”: “snunkoople.”īecause Westbury’s nonword has no meaning, people react purely to its sound. “Of course, we only succeeded because we were looking at the world’s worst jokes.” “We were really the first people to seriously try to predict what people are going to find funny - and succeeded,” Westbury said. The team analyzed a series of randomly generated letter combinations and tested their funniness on the public. In the movie, a comedian played by Matthau tells his nephew, a talent agent, how he uses k-words like “pickle” and “chicken” to make his audience laugh.īut is there really anything to that belief? When people laugh at “cupcake” in a standup routine, is it only the “k” sound that they are responding to? Or is there more to it?Ĭhris Westbury heads a team of psycholinguists at the University of Alberta who are trying to figure this out. Playwright Neil Simon referenced it in “The Sunshine Boys,” a play about the craft of comedy that was made into a 1975 movie with Walter Matthau. In fact, comedians have long believed that words rich in k’s will elicit laughter.
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