Nymph piss and gravy orgies: Local and global contrast effects in relational humor.

Abstract

How does the relation between two words create humor? In this article, we investigated the effect of global and local contrast on the humor of word pairs. We capitalized on the existence of psycholinguistic lexical norms by examining violations of expectations set up by typical patterns of English usage (global contrast) and within the local context of the words within the word pairs (local contrast). Global contrast was operationalized as lexical-semantic norms for single-words and local contrast was operationalized as the orthographic, phonological, and semantic distance between the two words in the pair. Through crowdsourced (Study 1) and best–worst (Study 2) ratings of the humor of a large set of word pairs (i.e., compounds), we find evidence of both global and local contrast on compound-word humor. Specifically, we find that humor arises when there is a violation of expectations at the local level, between the individual words that make up the word pair, even after accounting for violations at the global level relative to the entire language. Semantic variables (arousal, dominance, and concreteness) were stronger predictors of word pair humor whereas form-related variables (number of letters, phonemes, and letter frequency) were stronger predictors of single-word humor. Moreover, we also find that semantic dissimilarity increases humor, by defusing the impact of low-valence words—making them seem more amusing—and by enhancing the incongruence of highly imageable pairs of concrete words.

A comparison of word humor ratings across speakers of North American, British, and Singapore English

“…The average humor rating for these words are in parentheses, based on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (least humorous) to 5 (most humorous). These humor norms have proven to be useful in helping language scientists make some inroads into understanding the perception of humor in words and language (Siew et al, 2022;Westbury & Hollis, 2019. Engelthaler and Hills (2018) correlated humor norms with various lexical-semantic word norms and found that word humor was most strongly correlated with inverse word frequency (-0.42 with frequencies from the British National Corpus).…”

“…Westbury et al (2016)'s analysis of nonwords found that nonwords with lower entropy (which quantified greater incongruity between expectation and what was observed in the letter sequences, i.e., an "unlikely" nonword) were considered to be funnier than nonwords with higher entropy (e.g., the nonword "suppopp" is funnier than "tessina"). Siew et al (2022)'s analysis of word pair humor found that word pairs containing words with high phonological similarity and low semantic similarity (i.e., high levels of local violations of word co-occurrence expectations within a two-word context) were considered to be funnier as compared to word pairs containing words of low phonological similarity and high semantic similarity (e.g., the word pair "stripper hippo" is funnier than "conserve health"). In both of these examples as well as the current study, humor appears to involve the computation of expectations given one's linguistic experience (whether it is with sequences of letters or words or global frequency of words), coupled with an evaluation of whether expectations are violated.…”

Is the Mind a Network? Maps, Vehicles, and Skyhooks in Cognitive Network Science

“…A cognitive system with similar abilities could create novel nodes, such as the concept of cabbage cage or gravy orgy , which also represent the kind of novel high‐entropy stimuli associated with humor (Siew, Engelthaler, & Hills, under review). Moreover, if as network scientists we want to imagine that the nodes in our networks represent constellations of neural activity in a brain, then we must accept that cabbages , cages , and cabbage cages all represent different patterns of activity across a distributed representation (Musz & Thompson‐Schill, 2015).…”