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

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: there's Chuck and we have one word for you, buddy wiggle.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Here's another one, Chuck. Poop. That's a genuine laugh. Always
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: gets me. Poop is just funny. It is funny. It's
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: literally a funny word. Um. And this episode we're talking
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: about a guy named Chris Westbury who is a researcher
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: out of the University of Alberta, a psychologist actually, and
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: he wanted to figure out what makes things funny and
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: specifically what makes some words funnier than others. And apparently
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: he was a bit of a math genius as a child,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: really got into the statistical analysis kind of stuff, and
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: he's applied that as an adult in a study that
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: has one of the better names of any study ever published.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Are you setting me up? I am, Yeah. It was
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: called Wrigglely Squiffy lummocks and boobs colon what makes some
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: words funny? And this is just super interesting to me too, because,
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: like we were talking about, with the nounds of assemblage,
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: words and etymology really interests me, and comedy interests me.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: And even though I've never done stand up, I know
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: that comedians take a lot of great care with not
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: only the bits and the flow and the tone, but
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: specific words are funnier than others and can really punch
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: up a joke. Agreed, And it says here in this house,
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: stuff works article a word like Schenectady or Rancho, cucamonga
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: or kalamazoo or just kind of funny words. And this
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: guy went out to figure out why. Yeah, he said why.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: People said, who cares, it's it's just funny. Don't look
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: too deeply into it. And he said, no, I'm gonna
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: do the opposite of that. You will sit there and
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: listen when I explain it to you through Josh and Chuck.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: That's right. So what he did was he started off
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: with and this is gonna get it really kind of
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: not fun at all in a minute. But he started
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: off with a list of five thousand English words that
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: were rated funniest by people. I guess he did a
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: poll or something. And then he constructed a mathematical model
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: for predicting which one's uh what what would be funny
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: for every single word, like a ranking I guess for
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: every single word in the dictionary. Yeah, this model he
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: came up with it's kind of complex, it's multi layered.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: It's kind of like an onion, and he basically now
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: came run any any word through it. It's okay, he
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: can run the The onion is hilarious, but um, he
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: can run any word through it and basically spit out like, ah,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: I guess a ranking, how funny? I guess yeah, how
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: funny that that word will probably be received? Right, And
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: this is all English words specifically, But he came up with,
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: based on this mathematical model, the ten funniest words, one
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: of which we probably shouldn't even say. Yeah, I guess so,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: but hey man, first amendment, All right up, chuck, yeah, funny, bubby, bof,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: wriggly yaps, giggle, chuck, no, no, no, no, no, cooch, guffaw, puffball,
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: and jiggly. Right, so those are the tin funniest. The
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: runners up were squiffy, flappy and bucko and buck is
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: a great one, poop, puke and boobs got you just now,
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: it just got you just. I mean, it's funny. Poop
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: is funny the same reason farting is funny. Yeah, the
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: word fart is funny. Far the word fart is funny,
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: but it's also like shame inducing, you know, like it
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: really makes you feel really bad about yourself when you
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: use it, right, Yeah, I mean it might just be me,
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: but poop basically, no one feels bad for saying the
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: word poop, and it is just a genuinely funny word. Yeah.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: And I'll also mention that farting is the one thing
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: that allows me to hold on to the fact that
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: there may be a God, that there are far yeah,
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: and that that God has a sense of humor because
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: the fact that a smelly, flammable gas comes out of
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: your butt hole and makes a sound. Yeah, And believe us, everybody,
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: we've verified it is flammable. It's one of the greatest
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: things about human beings. It's pretty great, you know. Especially
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: it's like food goes in. We say poot in our house. Now,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: poot's a good one for obvious reasons, you know what
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: I say, of course, or just shoot a duck that's right,
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: or just pretend it didn't happen. One of those two. Right.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: So another thing we should mention here is um the
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: increm congruity theory, and that is the idea that and
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: this is sort of a tried and true comedy virtue
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: which is something unexpected will make you laugh. Most times.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: It's when you have an expectation of something and something
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: else happens. A lot of good comedy can come from that.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: And I mean that's absolutely the basis of comedy, at
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: least as far as like all anecdotal evidence, all um,
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: like sensible common sense, which is the most sensible kind
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: or the most common kind? Um When you when you
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: like you really stop and think about in congruity theory,
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: it really really makes a lot of sense, right. But
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: Chris Westbury was like, that's all well, and good way
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: to go Cicero for coming up with in congruity theory.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: But I like to quantify things, so I'm going to
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: do that and we'll be right back to explain exactly
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: how we did that. After this, I got a question,
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: is Westbury the most interesting guy at the dinner party?
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: Or does he make you want to gouge your eyeballs out?
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: I he might be listening, so I'm not going to
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: answer that question. He's one or the other, right, there's
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: no in between. You're either like, oh my god, I
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: meant this guy and you wouldn't believe like he's got
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: these theories and mathematical things we're following, like we're selling
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: off all of our stuff and we're gonna start following
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: them around. Or he's like, oh God, give me away
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: from this, dude. I just tried to make a fart joke,
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: and he tried to explain it to me. Right, let
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: me go find somebody who's been on the keyto diet
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: for three years and talked to them instead. Oh man,
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: that's good. So um, what it is? You know why
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: because the letter K is in there and we'll get
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: to that in a minute. Totally. But what Chris Westbury
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: did was he basically took all these words. I think
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: he took um several hundred of him to start, like
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: a subset of the was five thousand funniest words, and
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: he just kind of took a random subset of him
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: and he started analyzing them with a Google tool that
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: basically shows co occurrence. Right, So basically you run these
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: words through this little Google machine learning algorithm and it
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: spits out other words that people have used instead of
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: or in conjunction with it, right. And what he figured
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: out was that out of like this couple hundred sample set,
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: you could basically boil it down to six general categories um,
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: and all of the words had something to do with
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: either an expletive, being an expletive, um, sex, the body, partying.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: I guess which one just just kind of struck me
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: as out of the blue, Um, I was not expecting
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: that one. What else, chuck, animals or insults? And so
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: those are the six clusters of categories of funny words. Okay,
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: so he said, all right, great, but the thing is,
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of words that like kind of straddle
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: these categories. How can you how can you say, like,
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: you know, what makes one funnier than the other? What's
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: the deal here? And I'm not sure how he did this.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: I'm not even sure that he knows how he did this.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: But he basically assigned a statistical UM number two a
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: word and insofar as it related to its category. Right,
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: so like um uh, birthday cake were probably pretty close
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: to the party category, like it's it's probably pretty close
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: or fete or fiesta or something like that. It's very
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: close to its synonymous to a ward in this category.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: But even that didn't quite describe what made a word
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: funny and what a guess he figured out And I'm
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: not sure how he did this was that the funniest
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: words were related, um equally roughly to a number of
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: different categories. And it seems like the more that a
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: word was related to one or a number of these
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: six categories, the funnier it was. And a good example
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: he gave was poop right, it's uh it. It can
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: be an expletive, it can be um, part of the body,
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: it can be a party. Um. There's it has to
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: do with multiple categories, and so it's funnier than say,
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: fiesta is you know that made sense to me for
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: the first time after reading this like seven times, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, seven, seven, eight,
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: ten times maybe yeah. It just the way he was
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: putting it never made sense, but you brought it around
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: for me. So thank you, thank you, Chuck Man. That
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: means a lot to me. So he got to that point,
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: but then he said, you know what the meaning of
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: these words, that's only one kind of measurement. Everyone else
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: was saying, stop, that's good, that's good, you're fine, you
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: did it, you did it. But he said, no, no, no,
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: that's not enough. Meeting is only one type of measurement.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: And so he said, let's look at and this is
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: actually kind of the good part to me, He said,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: we need to look at the form of these words,
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: how long they are, the individual sounds that make up
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: these words, And that's where incongruity theory of humor kind
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: of comes back, because the fewer times that these uh
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: phone ms uh, the individual sounds appear like, the more
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: rare they are, the funnier that people think they are. Yeah, Like, basically, um,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: I guess K is much The K sound in particular
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: is much less um used in English than say, like B.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: So that's why like words with K sounds or are
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: funnier than words with say, T sounds. So pickle is
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: funnier than tomato, which is we just inherently know. And
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: so what Chris Westberry was basically onto is that by
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: analyzing the arrangement of letters and how frequently they occur
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: in words in the English language, that he tied it
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: into that incongruity theory. And he basically said, our brains
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: are constantly analyzing the information that's coming in from watching
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: TV or talking to people or reading or something like that,
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: and we have a certain expectation. And with that expectation,
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: isn't met um like something that statistically is improbable like
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: the word walla, walla Washington comes up out of nowhere.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: You don't see that every day. You weren't really expecting it,
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: and it kind of makes things funny to you because
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: it triggers that incongruity response. Yeah, and that your brain
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: is you don't know it, but it's constantly doing this
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: in the background, and you just here it is funny, right,
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: you just you just go walla, walla Washington. So yeah,
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: if you're just starting out in comedy, really pay attention
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: to the words, and especially the words in the punch
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: line because swapping out individual words can make a big difference. Um.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: Can we close with this quote from The Sunshine Boys? Yeah,
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: I think so the great. Have you ever seen this movie?
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: I have not, man, but I know it's George Burns
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: and Walter math Yes, it is the best. It is
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: a great movie about this comedy team who hate each
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: other's guts and they're old men now and they're trying
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: to get them together for a reunion show. So Walter
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: math Aw says this, fifty seven years in the business,
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: you learn a few things. You know what words are
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltza is funny.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: You say alka seltza, you get a laugh Casey stingle.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: That's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny, Cupcake
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: is funny, Tomato is not funny. Cleveland is funny, Maryland
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: is not funny. And then there's chicken. Chicken is funny,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: Pickle is funny. And he's kind of right. Oh, he's
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: beyond kind of right. He's fully right, for sure. Good stuff.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: But just one question. That was your Walter math Now
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: that wasn't great. Well, everybody go watch the Sunshine Boys
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: and see what Chuck was talking about, and you can
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: compare his Walter math out to the real Walter math. Ow,
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: how about that? And in the meantime, you can go
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: check out this article on how stuff works. Right, Chuck,
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: that's right. And in the meantime, meantime, short stuff is out.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
• 13:13
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• 13:16
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