[2][3]Richard Wiseman, a professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, conducted a small experiment to determine whether words with a k sound were actually considered funnier than others for English speakers.
"[5]A 2019 study presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning showed Artificial Intelligence (AI) could predict human ratings of humorous words.
The words with the highest mean humor ratings were identified as "asshattery", "clusterfuck", "douchebaggery", "poppycock", "craptacular", "cockamamie", "gobbledegook", "gabagool", "nincompoops", "wanker", and "kerfuffle".
[6] This study not only found that AI could predict average humor ratings of individual words (and differences in mean ratings between women and men), but it could also predict differences in individual senses of humor.
[7][8] Robert Beard, a professor emeritus of linguistics at Bucknell University, told an interviewer that "The first thing people always write in [to his website] about is funny words".
Some words are humorous not necessarily because of their pronunciation, but because of (1) the absurdity of their own meanings (for example, centicameral, which would refer to a legislature composed of 100 chambers or houses, but its humor derives from the conceptual ridiculousness of such a governmental institution) or (2) the absurdity of the heterological contrast of their meaning with their form (for example, as with sesquipedalian and sesquipedalophobia).
A 2015 study published in the Journal of Memory and Language examined the humor of nonsense words.
The study's lead author, Chris Westbury from the University of Alberta, suggests that the humor of certain invented words can be explained by the property of entropy.
[11] Violating expectations corresponds mathematically to having a low probability combination of letters, which also makes the word seem particularly funny, according to Westbury.
Westbury said "Strange as it may seem, that same mechanism may be activated when you see an unlikely looking word or a highly taboo one – you experience relief as you recognize that it's completely harmless – just a joke.