Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Quantifiable Theory of Humor - What Makes the Writer's Work so Funny

The theory gets its inspiration from two decidedly un-funny sources: the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and math.

Schopenhauer is better known for establishing a philosophy called “Pessimism” than theorizing on the principles of humor. 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. Theformula, developed by information theorist Claude Shannon, will make your head spin more than a Dr. Seuss run-on-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 hypothesized, funnier.

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Even though, according to Westbury, this is the first time a theory like this has been applied to humor, it’s actually not such a radical notion. As far back as the 1920s, researchers have known that there’s a sort of innate sense to the way words work. For example, when asked to match the words “kiki” and “bouba” with shapes, people assign the first to a spiky shape and the latter to a curvy one. This is true whether they’re American undergraduate students or Tamil-speakers in India or toddlers who can’t even read yet. All humans, regardless of their native language, are born with certain expectations for how things should sound.


And when words defy our expectations, Westbury explained in the press release, it makes sense that we respond with laughter.


“Organisms that could separate benign violations from real threats benefited greatly,” McGraw said. By laughing, humans can “signal to the world that a violation is indeed OK.”

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