An inherently funny word is a word that is humorous without context, often more for its phonetic structure than for its meaning. Vaudeville tradition holds that words with the /k/ sound are funny. A 2015 study at the University of Alberta suggested that the humor of certain nonsense words can be explained by whether they seem rude, and by the property of entropy: the improbability of certain letters being used together in a word.
Funny words in English Vaudeville words can be found in Neil Simon's 1972 play The Sunshine Boys, in which an aging comedian gives a lesson to his nephew on comedy, saying that words with k sounds are funny:
Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny. You say 'Alka Seltzer' you get a laugh ... Words with 'k' in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny. Car keys. Cleveland ... Cleveland is funny. Maryland is not funny. Then, there's chicken. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. Cab is funny. Cockroach is funny – not if you get 'em, only if you say 'em. 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. His LaughLab tested the degree of funniness among a family of jokes based on animal sounds; the joke rated the funniest was also the one with the most k sounds:
Two ducks were sitting in a pond. One of the ducks said: "Quack". The other duck said: "I was going to say that!" A 2019 study presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning showed Artificial Intelligence (AI) could predict human ratings of humorous words. After collecting humor ratings from multiple people on 120,000 individual words, they were able to analyze the data using AI algorithms to identify clusters of people with similar tastes in humor. The words with the highest mean humor ratings were identified as "asshattery", "clusterfuck", "douchebaggery", "poppycock", "craptacular", "cockamamie", "gobbledegook", "gabagool", "nincompoops", "wanker", and "kerfuffle". 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. 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". Beard's first book was The 100 Funniest Words in English, and among his own selected words are "absquatulate", "bowyangs", "collywobbles", "fartlek", "filibuster", "gongoozle", "hemidemisemiquaver", and "snollygoster". The evidence above suggests that factors neurologically akin to sound symbolism and the bouba/kiki effect (i.e., sounds having inherent associations with semantics) contribute to inherent funniness of words. Clearly, though, semantic layers coexist with it in the underlying mechanisms. Some words are humorous not necessarily because of their pronunciation, but because of 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 the absurdity of the heterological contrast of their meaning with their form (for example, as with sesquipedalian and sesquipedalophobia).
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