Washington: Chris Westbury was trying to get work done and everyone around him kept laughing.
As part of a study on aphasia, a speech and language disorder, the University of Alberta psychology professor was running a study in which test subjects were shown strings of letters and asked to distinguish real words from made-up ones. But every time the (non) word “snunkoople” cropped up, the subjects would collapse with mirth.
When the aphasia project ended, Westbury turned his attention to a new topic: what makes “snunkoople” so funny? His conclusions, which will be published in the January 2016 issue of the Journal of Memory and Language, formed the first “quantifiable theory of humour”, Westbury said. It explains not just the hilariousness of “snunkoople”, but the genius of the world’s wittiest made-up wordsmith, Dr Seuss.
The theory gets its inspiration from two decidedly unfunny sources: 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and maths.
Schopenhauer is better known for establishing a philosophy called “Pessimism” than theorising on the principles of humour. But he apparently did find time to jot down some thoughts on comedy, among them, the idea that things are funny when they violate our expectations. This idea, termed “incongruity theory”, explains why people laugh at puns and the sight of a dozen clowns clambering out of a teeny, tiny car – both defy what we expect to hear or see. This probably held true for funny words, too. An unusual non-word like “snunkoople” or Dr Seuss’s “yuzz-a-ma-tuzz” would be more likely to make people laugh than one that sounds like it could almost be real, like “clester”.
But Westbury and his psychologist colleagues had no way of quantifying incongruity, so they borrowed one from mathematics: Shannon entropy. The formula, developed by information theorist Claude Shannon, will make your head spin more than a Dr Seuss sentence, but the gist is that it quantified how much entropy, or disorder, is contained within a message. Words with unusual or improbable letter combinations – “snunkoople”, “yuzz-a-ma-tuzz”, “oobleck”, “truffula”, “sneetch” (the last four are all Seuss-isms) – are more disordered, and therefore, Westbury hypothesised, funnier. To test that idea, Westbury, his psychology department colleagues and two linguists from the University of Tubingen in Germany drew up a list of made-up words, some with high degrees of entropy and some with low ones. They asked subjects to compare two words and choose which was funnier, then rate how humorous the words were on a scale from 1 to 100.
Almost always, the more disordered a word, the funnier people found it. Dr Seuss seemed to recognise that intuitively. When Westbury and his colleagues ran 65 famous Seuss-isms through the entropy formula, Seuss’s terms were reliably more disordered than ordinary English words.
According to Westbury, the theory shows that humour isn’t completely subjective. What we find funny is predictably unpredictable. And though readers may think they’re laughing instinctively at young Gerald McGrew hunting the “Russian palooski” and the “Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill” in his “skeegle-mobile”, they are actually doing an “unconscious calculation” in their heads about the improbability of those words, he explained.
“They’re going on their gut feeling, going ‘it feels funny to me’,” he said. “And we’re showing that feeling is actually a kind of probability calculation. Emotion is helping us compute the probabilities in the world.”
By laughing, humans can “signal to the world that a violation is indeed okay”. – The Washington Post