A group of researchers at the University of Alberta have developed what may be the first mathematical theory of humor, all thanks to a funny-sounding nonsense word: snunkoople.
Psychology professor Chris Westbury was studying people with aphasia, a disorder affecting language comprehension, when he noticed something strange. Subjects were asked to read strings of letters and identify whether they were real words. After a while, Westbury noticed subjects seemed to laugh at certain nonsense words—snunkoople in particular.
Intrigued, Westbury quickly got to work on a theory of humor: He hypothesized that nonsense words with unpredictable letter combinations would generally be considered funnier than those with predictable letter combinations. Translating this theory into mathematical terms, Westbury argued that lower entropy words (uncommon letter combinations) were seen as funnier than higher entropy words (predictable letter combinations). The low entropy non-word finglam is funnier than the high entropy non-word clester, for instance.
via Mental Floss
