After collecting humor ratings from multiple people on 120,000 individual words, they were able to analyze the data using AI algorithms to identify clusters of people with similar tastes in humor. The other duck said: 'I was going to say that!' Ī 2019 study presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning showed Artificial Intelligence (AI) could predict human ratings of humorous words. His LaughLab tested the degree of funniness among a family of jokes based on animal sounds the joke rated the funniest was also the one with the most k sounds: Richard Wiseman, a professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, conducted a small experiment to determine whether words with a k sound were actually considered funnier than others for English speakers. Cockroach is funny – not if you get 'em, only if you say 'em. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny. Vaudeville words can be found in Neil Simon's 1972 play The Sunshine Boys, in which an aging comedian gives a lesson to his nephew on comedy, saying that words with k sounds are funny: įifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer posited that humor is a product of one's expectations being violated. A 2015 study at the University of Alberta suggested that the humor of certain nonsense words can be explained by whether they seem rude, and by the property of entropy: the improbability of certain letters being used together in a word. Vaudeville tradition holds that words with the / k/ sound are funny. Words which have been described as inherently funnyĪn inherently funny word is a word that is humorous without context, often more for its phonetic structure than for its meaning.

3 funny words