Telling the world’s least funny jokes: On the quantification of humor as entropy

Publication date: Available online 6 October 2015 Source:Journal of Memory and Language Author(s): Chris Westbury, Cyrus Shaoul, Gail Moroschan, Michael Ramscar In assessing aphasics or conducting experiments using a lexical decision task, we have observed informally that some non-words (NWs) reliably make people laugh. In this paper, we describe a set of studies aimed at illuminating what underlies this effect, performing the first quantitative test of a 200year old theory of humor proposed by Schopenhauer (1818). We begin with a brief overview of the history of humor theories. Schopenhauer’s theory is formulated in terms of detection/violation of patterns of co-occurrence and thereby suggests a method to quantify NW humor using Shannon entropy. A survey study demonstrates that there is much more consistency than could be expected by chance in human judgments of which NWs are funny. Analysis of that survey data and two experiments all demonstrate that Shannon entropy does indeed correctly predict human judgments of NW funniness, demonstrating as well that the perceived humor is a quantifiable function of how far the NWs are from being words.
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research