In each of these pairs of nonsense words, which is funnier?

• quingel vs. heashes
• prousup vs. mestins
• finglam vs. cortsio
• witypro vs. octeste
• rembrob vs. sectori
• pranomp vs. anotain
• fityrud vs. tessina

If you’re like most people, you’ll find the first word in each pair funnier than the second. In a 2015 study, University of Alberta psychologist Chris Westbury found that the difference is explained surprisingly well by Shannon entropy, which here measures the unlikelihood of each combination of letters: Outlandish specimens such as yuzz-a-ma-tuzz, oobleck, truffula, and sneetch, all from Dr. Seuss, seem funnier than, say, clester, which might plausibly be a real word. (Schopenhauer had argued that humor results from the violation of expectations.)

“The results show that the bigger the difference in the entropy between the two words, the more likely the subjects were to choose the way we expected them to,” Westbury said. Indeed, the most accurate subject chose correctly 92 percent of the time. “To be able to predict with that level of accuracy is amazing. You hardly ever get that in psychology, where you get to predict what someone will choose 92 percent of the time.”

Interestingly, Westbury had to omit vulgar-sounding nonwords (whong, dongl, shart, focky, clunt) before he even got started — these were so consistently considered funny that they would have interfered with the rest of the examination.

(Chris Westbury, et al., “Telling the World’s Least Funny Jokes: On the Quantification of Humor as Entropy,” Journal of Memory and Language 86 [2016]: 141-156.)