#Funny words or phrases series

Pairs made up of individual words with completely unrelated meanings were more likely to be found funny ( crab ghetto vs insult nickname, for example). But relationships between the two words were also important in determining how funny the phrase was. They found that word pairs participants considered funny tended to contain individual words that were emotionally arousing that were concrete (referring to something easily visualised, like gravy, vs something abstract, like nifty) that were less dominating (less threatening) and that were less frequently encountered in English. (In theory, the same person could access the app multiple times, so they donвЂ™t know the number of unique participants). After about two and a half years, the team had gathered a total of 55,100 ratings from 597 unique sessions. Participants rated as many pairs as they wanted. Each time, they had to choose whether the word pair was вЂњhumorousвЂќ or вЂњhumourlessвЂќ.

#Funny words or phrases series

These participants were presented with a series of word pairs made up from individual words used in the 2018 study. The first online study was open to anyone who accessed the researchersвЂ™ web app. вЂњNow,вЂќ the team writes, вЂњinstead of facing our participants with the task of rating individual words, like cage (which is not particularly funny on its own) or cabbage (only mildly funnier), our participants are faced with rating the humour of cabbage cage, which is arguably funnier than either word alone. In the new paper, Siew and her colleagues looked instead at how humorous people find pairs of words. The findings from both these earlier studies on single words are consistent with a popular theory of humour that holds that the more something violates our expectations - but at the same time is not threatening - the funnier it is. It revealed that words with a less common structure (with relatively rare letter sequences, for example - think talc vs code) tended to be deemed funnier than those with more familiar, predictable structures. Work published the following year by a separate group built on this finding. In a 2018 study on 4,977 individual English words, Engelthaler and Hills found that words that are encountered less frequently in English, such as humbug or czar, tended to be rated as funnier.

In their paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, they argue that these factors explain why gangster pasta, for example, is funnier than insult nickname. Hills at the University of Warwick, also identified broader factors at play. Siew at the National University of Singapore, along with Tomas Engelthaler and Thomas T. One very obvious difference is that those in the second set reference sex or bodily excretions, while the others donвЂ™t. In a new study, participants gave word pairs in the second set the highest humour ratings, while those in the first languished near the bottom. If you went for the second each time, youвЂ™d be in good company.