A pompous snack: On the unreasonable complexity of the world's third-worst jokes.

Abstract

Although studies of humour are as old as the Western academic tradition, most theories are too vague to allow for modelling and prediction of humour judgments. Previous work in modelling humour judgments has succeeded by focusing on the world's worst jokes: the slight humour of single nonwords (Westbury, Shaoul, Moroschan, & Ramscar, 2016) and single words (Westbury & Hollis, 2019). Here that work is extended to the world's third-worst jokes, adjective-noun pairs such as dancing dildo, flabby goldfish, and pompous snack. Participants used best-worst scaling to rate the humour of random word pairs. Those judgments were modelled using both linear regression and genetic programming, which is not constrained by assumptions of linearity. The linear regression models were as successful as the nonlinear models at predicting humour judgments, accounting for 27% of the variance in a 540-item validation set. Predictors associated only with the noun and with the relationship between the adjective and noun accounted for much more variance (over 14% each) than predictors associated only with the adjective (6.3%). Greater cosine distance of the adjective word2vec vector from the vectors of the shared neighbors of the noun and adjective is associated with higher humour ratings, whereas the opposite relationship is true for the noun. This captures a form of incongruity not seen in single items, by which neighbours of the adjective become unexpectedly relevant only when the noun brings them into focus. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).