Any aspiring comic wanting to make it big should seek inspiration not so much from the likes of Michael McIntyre but that arch proponent of philosophical pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer.
For it seems that the German thinker, not easily confused with a ray of sunshine, may have been on to something when he came up with his now 200-year-old theory of humour.
Schopenhauer believed that we are most often amused when we are surprised by, and then resolve, an apparent incongruity, such as when we realise that a word does not mean what we originally thought it meant or when a person appears who we were not expecting. Schopenhauer argued that “the greater and more unexpected … this incongruity is, the more violent will be his laughter”.
Now a new study, published in the Journal of Memory and Language and discussed on the British Psychological Society research digest blog, puts his theory to the test in a groundbreaking experiment that could have important lessons not just for comedians but also doctors and advertisers.
The study, led by a team from the department of psychology at the University of Alberta, explored the theory that some nonsense words are inherently funnier than others – in part because they are simply less expected. The team used a computer program to generate thousands of random nonsense words and then asked almost 1,000 students to rate them for “funniness”.
To make sure the nonsense words were pronounceable, the program was written so that every three letters in each word actually appeared in a real word. Any words that sounded the same as real words or were rude were removed.
The team found that some words were indeed funnier than others. Some nonsense words, such as blablesoc, were consistently rated by the students as funny while others, such as exthe, were consistently rated as unfunny.
Identifying the funnier words would appear to be the skill of a good comedian or comic writer. For example, in Blackadder Goes Forth, Rowan Atkinson’s character repeats the word “wibble” after putting a pair of underpants on his head and pencils in his nose to fake insanity in a bid to escape the trenches. The word made such a humorous impression on viewers that it entered the lexicon.
But how to identify which nonsense words are funnier than others? To test the idea, the researchers created a list of nonsense words and then attempted to quantify how far each was removed from being a real word. The team believe that their findings corroborate Schopenhauer’s theory: the more a nonsense word challenged expectations for what counts as a real word, the funnier it was deemed to be. Among the funniest nonsense words thrown up by the test were subvick, quingel, flingam and probble. Among the least funny were tatinse, retsits and tessina.
The psychologists behind the study believe that Schopenhauer’s theory can be applied not just to incongruous words but to events. The ability to recognise anomalies or incongruities has been important in terms of human evolution because such events often signal danger. Distinguishing between dangerous and non-dangerous incongruities or anomalies is a useful, even vital, human skill.
As the psychologists explain: “It has proven adaptive across evolutionary time for us to be structured in a way that makes us involuntarily let conspecifics [friends and family] know about anomalies that we have recognised are not at all dangerous, since anomalies are generally experienced as frightening.”
The team believes its findings have potential medical and commercial applications. For example, the reaction of brain-damaged patients to nonsense words may provide a subtle measure of their sense of humour, allowing doctors to assess their true mental state.
“The effect may also have practical effects in product naming if it can be shown that the computable funniness of a name is a relevant factor in consumer behaviour,” the team suggests. “We predict that consumers will strongly prefer (funny nonsense words) ‘whook’ or ‘mamessa’ to (unfunny nonsense words) ‘turth’ or ‘suppect’ for a new product name.”
