Which word is funnier: porridge or oatmeal?
That was the question that inspired a new study that ranks the funniest words in the English language.
“Apparently my supervisor's kids couldn't stop laughing at 'porridge' one morning during breakfast,” Engelthaler said. “He was really confused because 'porridge' and 'oatmeal' are the same thing, but they sound different. He thought 'porridge' was funnier, I thought 'oatmeal' was funnier. So, we decided to make a study to kind of settle the argument.”
Engelthaler and his colleagues at the University of Warwick asked 821 people in the U.S. to rate 200 words, which were chosen from a list of 5,000.
The top 12 words, in order of funniest, were:
booty, tit, booby, hooter, nitwit, twit, waddle, tinkle, bebop, egghead, ass and twerp.
At the other extreme, these were the words respondents found least humorous:
rape, torture, torment, gunshot, death, nightmare, war, trauma, rapist, distrust, deathbed, pain.
The researchers' main objective was to establish a data-set to be used in future humor studies. Still, the results showed some interesting trends, particularly in the differences between what men and women consider funny.
“Men find more dirty words funnier,” Engelthaler said. “Women kind of prefer humor that’s sound-driven and innocent. So, women find words like giggle and beast funnier, whereas men find words like orgy and bondage funnier.”
“We found that words that are really infrequent, so words people are unfamiliar with, are funnier on average,” Engelthaler said. “I think you’re less used to them, so you find them strange and funny.”
Engelthaler thinks this might be explained by the benign violations theory, which suggests that we find something funny when it deviates from our expectations, but only in a way that’s not too offensive. That might explain why curse words didn't top the list.
“They end up being somewhere closer to the top,” Engelthaler said. “But they're not at the very top, which is because, I guess, they offend a slight fraction of the people they're presented to.”
Strange words could also be funny for a different reason.
“One thing we want to look into is the sounds of the words, because there have been studies that have taken a look nonsensical words,” Engelthaler said . “They found that certain sounds in the words and sound patterns make them really funny. So even though the word has no meaning at all, they still can be funny words.”
Although the words were rated by people in the U.S., the U.K. researchers didn't notice much of a difference between what people in the two countries consider funny.
“As long as something’s slightly naughty and slightly dirty, and not too negative, you would find funny in both the U.K. English and the U.S. English,” Engelthaler said.
Scott Dikkers has written and edited countless jokes during his tenure as the longest-serving editor-in-chief of The Onion. But in all those years, he’s never come across a joke that didn’t fall within one of 11 categories – or “funny filters.”
Dikkers was planning a curriculum for a comedy writing class at Chicago’s Second City when he first put this idea into words.
"I had never articulated them before, I just knew them from doing this for years and years and years," Dikkers said on The Rob Cressy Show podcast. "It was kind of weird to finally articulate these things that were in my head that didn’t have words attached to them. They were just things that you did. And I’m very pleased to say they’ve been around now for a few years, and I still — I wouldn’t change a thing. I wouldn’t say, ‘Oh yeah, there’s actually 12,’ or, ‘These two could be the same, so there’s only 10.’ And I’ve never encountered a joke or something that was funny that did not employ one of these 11 literary devices."
Dikkers' 11 funny filters are listed below, using notes from Rob Cressy and satirical headlines from The Onion as examples.
1. Irony – Intended meaning is opposite of literal meaning
Alcoholic Father Disappointed In Pothead Son
2. Character – Comedic character acting on personality traits
Mom Thinks You'd Enjoy Restaurant She Can't Remember Name Of Right Now
3. Reference – Common experiences that audiences can relate to
Day Chalked Up As Loss By 10:15 A.M.
4. Shock – Surprising jokes typically involving sex, drugs, gross-out humor, swearing
Holy Shit, Man Walks On Fucking Moon
5. Parody – Mimic a familiar character, trope or cliche in an unfamiliar way
Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet
6. Hyperbole – Exaggeration to absurd extremes
Magnanimous Boss, King Of Kings, Allows Employees To Watch World Cup In Office
7. Wordplay – Puns, rhymes, double entendres, etc.
Fritolaysia Cuts Off Chiplomatic Relations With Snakistan
8. Analogy – Comparing two disparate things
Man Approaches Unfamiliar Shower Knobs Like He Breaking Wild Stallion
9. Madcap – Crazy, wacky, silly, nonsensical
Wheelchair Basketball Players Stunned By Thunderous Slam Dunk
10. Meta-humor – Jokes about jokes, or about the idea of comedy
It Sadly Unclear Whether This Article Will Put Lives At Risk
11. Misplaced Focus – Attention is focused on the wrong thing
Really Fun Toy Banned Because Of 3 Stupid Dead Kids
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The filters apply to all jokes, not just headlines from The Onion. Take this joke from stand-up comedian Anthony Jeselnik as an example.
“Yesterday I accidentally hit a kid with my car. It wasn’t serious – nobody saw me.”
This joke uses misplaced focus. Jeselnik makes you think he's concerned about the kid. But then he reveals the only reason the accident wasn't “serious” was because there were no witnesses. You could also say this joke uses shock — it's surprising to hear someone talk so callously about hitting a kid with their car.
(Photo: Justin Sullivan)
In addition to categorizing jokes, Dikkers said the filters can also help comedians take a rough idea and find the best way to express it.
First, you start with a premise — say, childbirth is not a miracle. Then you run that premise through each filter, producing different kinds of jokes. Maybe you try out the character filter, and get a joke about how God, an expert on miracles, is decidedly unimpressed by childbirth. Scrap that. You try a few more. Finally, you run the premise through the irony filter and get: Miracle Of Birth Occurs For 83 Billionth Time.
At least, you might go through all that trouble to write an eight-word joke if you work for "the most powerful and influential organization in human history."
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Check out more comedy writing advice in Scott Dikkers' book “How To Write Funny: Your Serious, Step-By-Step Blueprint For Creating Incredibly, Irresistibly, Successfully Hilarious Writing.”
Remember a great comedian who made you both laugh and think? George Carlin perhaps? Richard Pryor? Or maybe Bill Hicks? Only the best comedians can do that, and when you manage to find one that can do both, it is a moment to always recall with a smile. If only there was someone today whose comedy matched the philosophical edge of the old comedy gods.
Allow us to suggest for you a new Clown Prince of Philosophy.
The “Philosopher-King” of comedy is Louis C.K. You may know his work, but you might not realize there is some serious philosophy behind some of the best jokes.
On his hit television broadcast Louie, Louis C.K plays a slightly fictional version of himself, who is overweight, aging, depressive, bald, and divorced. Basicly he plays himself, but a more depressing version. In the show, despite meeting a series of hilariously absurd roadblocks to happiness, Louie basically enjoys life, despite it all, including his tendency to be a bit depressed.
“Oh no, I know the darkness,” Louie says in one episode. At the same time, he demands that we understand how good life is. Replying to his daughter, who says she's "bored," Louie responds:
“‘I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.”
Louis’ character, and to some extent the real man, are manifestations of what is often called “The Absurd Hero”, first described by Albert Camus. Who is this hero? The man who understands that life is absurd and meaningless, but who finds joy in it anyway. Louie, in encouraging us to laugh at such horrible topics as death, meaninglessness, and the problems of doing the right thing, is a kind of hero in this way.
Death is, indeed, a favorite topic of his. Covered brilliantly in many of his best stand up routines. Louis’ system of stand up writing is perfectionistic, and only the best jokes which appeal to all of us make it to his standard line up; only to be removed after one year’s use. Since death comes for us all, this subject often makes the cut.
As was explained by Martin Heidegger, death is the one thing we all move towards at all times. Louis, similarly, hardly goes a minute into a routine based around death before reminding the audience a few times about that fact. The subject of death was a major one for the existentialist philosophers, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger among them, who saw the end of life as the major problem in understanding it, and a focus of all of their work.
Louis takes this and runs, showing us how death can be hysterically funny, especially when we know it is inevitable but try to avoid it or ignore it anyway. He points out the pointlessness of this attitude, and makes death as mundane an issue as playing hide and seek with a child. Not to belittle either event, but to show us that both are inevitable, relatable, and unintentionally hilarious.
A great comedian can make you laugh until you cry. The best comedians can make you laugh until you think. As the above jokes show you, Louis is one of the best. In the course of giving us what Time magazine called “reflections on what it means to be human” he makes us laugh, forget our troubles for a bit, and then return to our lives better able to face the problems he just made fun of so well.
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