Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theories of humor suffer from insufficient operationalization. We build on the Engelthaler & Hills (2017) humor ratingnorms, by analyzing the semantic and word form factors that play a role in the judgments. Our model can predict theoriginal humor rating norms and ratings for previously unrated words with greater reliability than the split half reliabilityin the original norms. The model is consistent with several theories of humor, while suggesting that those theories are toonarrow. In particular, it is consistent with incongruity theory, which suggests that experienced humor is proportional tothe degree to which expectations are violated. Words are judged funnier if they are less common and have an improbableorthographic or phonological structure. We also describe and quantify the semantic attributes of funny words that arejudged funny and show that they are partly compatible with the superiority theory of humor, which focuses on humor asscorn.