Certain nonsense words may be inherently funny, according to a 2015 study published in the Journal of Memory and Language. The study's lead author, Chris Westbury at the University of Alberta, suggests that the inherent humor of certain non-words can be explained by the property of entropy. Entropy, in this case, expresses how usual the letters in the word appear to be: the less commonly they are used, the lower the total entropy and the more funny they are likely to be found. According to Westbury, "Some non-words are funny, and they’re weird when they are [...] But there’s actually a consistent relationship between how funny they are and how weird they are".
The idea that humor can be predicted by a word's entropy corresponds to the incongruity theory of 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who posited that humor is a product of one's expectations being violated. According to Westbury, "One reason puns are funny is that they violate our expectation that a word has one meaning".
The idea that humor can be predicted by a word's entropy corresponds to the incongruity theory of 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who posited that humor is a product of one's expectations being violated. According to Westbury, "One reason puns are funny is that they violate our expectation that a word has one meaning".
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