Here ’s why phrases like “rowdy bowels” and “moose ooze” seem funny

By Emma Young Which is funnier: Sell bargain — or nymph piss? Roof darkness — or gravy orgy? Large small — or moose ooze? If you went for the second each time, you’d be in good company. 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. One very obvious difference is that those in the second set reference sex or bodily excretions, while the others don’t. But Cynthia S. Q. Siew at the National University of Singapore, along with Tomas Engelthaler and Thomas T. Hills at the University of Warwick, also identified broader factors at play. 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. 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. Work published the following year by a separate group built on this finding. 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. 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 ou...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Language Laughter Source Type: blogs