Most children enjoy words that sound funny, like “woozy” and “nincompoop,” and I was no exception. As a senior citizen I still haven’t outgrown that interest, so I was pleased to discover that a team of researchers in Canada has developed a formula for recognizing the characteristics of a word that will make a stranger laugh.
The first step was to read the findings of a study in which participants rated the humorousness of some 5,000 English words. After breaking down what makes a word intrinsically comical, they expanded the list to 45,000 words and then used computers to create a statistical model to score the amusing factors and analyze the humor of each word.
There are two main predictors of what makes a word funny: (1) how it looks and sounds (as in “gobble” and “booger”) and (2) what it means (as in “poop” and “jackass”). For example, “pizzazz” is comical for how it looks, but in most cases it’s the definition of a word that tickles us the most. It’s hard not to smirk when you say “slobbering.” Let’s consider more examples.
“Fanny” is a synonym for “rear end,” and the statement “Get up off your fanny and help me out here” provides us with a means of chiding someone in a mild way. Certainly if you smile when aiming it at a friend, he is not likely to take offense. On the other hand, if you frown and berate him as a “lazy schmoozer,” an angry response might be expected.
But what about words that just make us laugh out loud before we even know their true meaning: “horse feathers,” “wabbit,” and “namby-pamby”? The first of those was a common American expression for “nonsense” in the 1920s and 30s but is now archaic. It was even used as the title for a Marx Brothers film released in 1932. “Wabbit” is a Scottish word most often used in the sense of tired, worn out or exhausted (as in “I’m wabbited”), but Elmer Fudd gave the term a different meaning when he used it as a noun to refer to Bugs Bunny in a cartoon.
“Namby-pamby” refers to someone who is childish or indecisive. It is a rhyming compound word, making it a good example of whimsical wordplay that often combines a real word with a nonsense one, as in “collywobbles,” and “hocus-pocus.”
A closer look at the 500 words the Canadian study ranked as most funny shows some common features. “Puking,” for example, combines the “oo” sound and the letter “k,” as well as associations with bodily function—one of the categories shared most often by amusing words. Other examples are “slobbering” and “poop.”
“Lickspittle,” which refers to a bootlicker or a fawning yes-man, is interesting because it’s a repulsive word formed by combining a verb with a noun that sounds like what it describes. Words that contain a consonant combined with the “le” sound show up often in the list of funniest words: “waddle,” “wiggly,” and “jiggle.”
“Fuddy-duddy” is composed of two nonsense words but both of them fit the description of acceptable English terms. “Dud” is an actual word and “fuddy” is constructed on the same pattern as “daddy” and “dotty.”
The sound of a word can surprise us if it seems nonsensical but contains a familiar word within it: “flibbertigibbet” is a good example. “Gibbet” is an archaic English word for “gallows,” which seems oddly out of place given the meaning of “flibbertigibbet,” as a silly, talkative scatterbrain, hardly a candidate for hanging.
Jerry Lincecum is a retired Austin College professor who now teaches classes for older adults who want to write their life stories. He welcomes your reminiscences on any subject: jlincecum@me.com.
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