Can made up words like “finglam” be funny?

Humour, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, right? That is, what is funny or beautiful is totally a matter of individual taste. Actually, this is a misconception because neither Beauty nor humour is totally individualistic. We have highlighted many times in this news column that there are elements of beauty that are hard-wired into our evolutionary perceptions. Now a new study has shown that humour has some measurable and shared elements as well.

So humour, like beauty, does have at least some predictable elements although there are of course some individual aspects to both qualities.

The researchers got their idea for this study from earlier work on people with aphasia (impaired understanding or production of speech) when they noticed that some made-up words, such as “nunkoople”, would reliably make people laugh whereas others would not. The researchers thought that there might be a measurable quality in what made some made-up words funny and they set out to measure it.

They based their expectation on Schopenhauer’s theory of humour which states that a greater incongruity between expectation and events produces a stronger feeling of humour. Based on this the researchers thought that a made-up word’s entropy would predict how funny it would be perceived to be. Entropy is essentially a measure of disorder, so a word like “finglam”which has uncommon letters in it has a lower entropy than a word like “cluster” which has a higher entropy because the letters are more common and therefore more expected.

For the first part of the study subjects were asked to compare two non-words and select the option they considered to be more humourous. In the second part, they were shown a single non-word and rated how humorous they found it on a scale from 1 to 100.

The results showed that funny non-words had lower entropy values and that calculating a word’s entropy could accurately predict how funny it was perceived to be. So humour, like beauty, does have at least some predictable elements although there are of course some individual aspects to both qualities, which is a great source of speeling to the more limprous among us.