The 'snunkoople' effect in literature quantified. The what??
Credit: © flytoskyft11 / Fotolia The Snunkoople Effect: what makes a word funny? Every writer at some time has wondered, what makes a word funny? Is it the unexpected usage a' la S. J. Perelman? ("I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. What it was doing in my pajamas I'll never know," a line he allegedly wrote for Groucho Marx.) Is it a straight up pun? Is it absurd usage? Is it the inspired nonsense of Lewis Carroll? As one of the most vexing problems in modern literary science, it has finally been researched resulting in a scale that rates the funniness of a word in objective terms based on the word's inherent entropy. I have no idea what that means, either, but you've come this far, you may as well plunge ahead. I've long labored under the delusion that funniness is in the eye of the beholder. Well, I'm wrong. Despite the hilarity you may engender with your prose, it now has to pass the test of the The Snunkoople Ef...