tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post560174197860264729..comments2023-10-23T11:13:35.712-04:00Comments on Games with Words: Crowdsourcing My Data AnalysisEdwardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04295927435118827266noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-91561185380377130002016-02-21T10:57:56.588-05:002016-02-21T10:57:56.588-05:00You asked subjects about social comfort ability bu...You asked subjects about social comfort ability but only compared them m/f. The self selection of folks willing to read puns is in play. The comparison needs to be to the general population when answering the same question and, I postulate, 70% of the general population will rate themselves as above average in social skills (because our fellow humans are egocentric liars. Not us, the rest of them, I mean. We're ok.) Pirate John 'n Angel Jenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00261384053284618230noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-27887511292649738472014-09-10T23:56:34.296-04:002014-09-10T23:56:34.296-04:00Also years later, but still worth a comment...
Lik...Also <i>years later</i>, but still worth a comment...<br />Like WriterOfMinds, I am attracted by the perceived cleverness of a pun, which might depend on the unexpected use of technical or esoteric language. Thus, any pun referring to elision (highbrow) while eliding 'Honey' to 'Hon' (lowbrow) is going to be funny to me. The cleverness and unexpectedness of this is what makes it successful for some, though (apparently quite) unsuccessful to others. <br />Fortunately for me and unfortunately for most others, a similar 'logic' is at play in the one about the pilgrims, which makes a play on both pilgrim (a classic car and a religious traveler) and di/agnostic (as explained by Shana above), which works marvelously. <br />-Tim<br />PS: I love the fact that Will was explaining a pun about elision to a Blogger audience at 12:03 on Christmas eve.Timnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-40795022683163149652014-06-29T05:06:23.989-04:002014-06-29T05:06:23.989-04:00The one I rate among the highest in intellectual l...The one I rate among the highest in intellectual level needed to understand is what the British general telegraphed after he captured Sindh province - Peccavi (latin for I have sinned)<br />RajaTRaja Setlurnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-34775348668649879892014-06-15T01:43:25.626-04:002014-06-15T01:43:25.626-04:00For me personally, I think part of what makes a pu...For me personally, I think part of what makes a pun funny (or at least delightful ... I don't think I laugh at puns, exactly) is its perceived cleverness. So for example, a pun like this:<br /><br />"The town's residents just couldn't bear the visiting grizzly."<br /><br />isn't funny, because it's too obvious, and I've heard it before I don't know how many times. But I really enjoyed this one, which came up in a conversation about people getting sick:<br /><br />"I opened the window and in flew Enza."<br /><br />I also like this one:<br /><br />"We need to take all the bad chemistry jokes and barium." (bury 'em)<br /><br />A quality like "cleverness" is really hard to measure, but maybe as a start, one could look at the number of syllables used to form the pun ... since inventing a pun in which many syllables express a double meaning is probably harder ... and see if there's any connection between that and funniness. One could also consider how unique a pun is as compared to others in the database (there are probably a ton of "bear" puns).WriterOfMindshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03848533877998707168noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-70576344932403785472014-06-05T23:00:37.793-04:002014-06-05T23:00:37.793-04:00Of the five "bad" puns, the only one I &...Of the five "bad" puns, the only one I "got" was the one about the pitcher.<br /><br />After reading Shana's statement I get the one about the pilgrims, but I didn't initially. Not really sure why, but splitting diagnostic to "di-agnostic" didn't occur to me at all. Probably means more about me than about the pun.EternalAmbiguitynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-38728537561770882732014-06-04T14:56:56.038-04:002014-06-04T14:56:56.038-04:002236. Two pilgrims were left behind after their di...2236. Two pilgrims were left behind after their diagnostic test came back positive.<br /><br />Two pilgrims were tested and found as di- agnostic, hence they were left behind and not allowed to come with the religious folk.Shananoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-26274540171671064572014-05-28T14:47:24.147-04:002014-05-28T14:47:24.147-04:002238 is the funniest of the whole bunch2238 is the funniest of the whole bunchTreyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09360908276971263455noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-38258732384127684532012-03-11T14:34:13.648-04:002012-03-11T14:34:13.648-04:00One possibility that occurs to me is the subject m...One possibility that occurs to me is the subject matter: the top 5 all discuss distinctly emotive things (death, birth, vomiting up a limb, etc). It would be good to see the top 10/20.JV1987https://www.blogger.com/profile/09345425698407355614noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-3692292982390380462011-06-28T17:13:56.186-04:002011-06-28T17:13:56.186-04:00That is a good suggestion Tim because the problem ...That is a good suggestion Tim because the problem with puns is that if the vocabulary doesn't stand up it's instantly lame.Arahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14996466220408574957noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-45205527358206855042011-02-03T15:48:45.607-05:002011-02-03T15:48:45.607-05:00The fourth one has to do with the saying "a p...The fourth one has to do with the saying "a picture (pitcher) is worth a thousand words (blurs, a weak rhyme)."<br /><br />I'm stumped as to numbers 2235 and 2236.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-8269536529652196662010-12-25T00:03:53.563-05:002010-12-25T00:03:53.563-05:00I believe the last one depends on the similarity b...I believe the last one depends on the similarity between "elide"/"he lied", where elide means to leave out letters, as the speaker does in the word "hones'".<br /><br />The fifth to last one refers to what I think is a product sold in the UK known as "choc ices" which are like chocolate popsicles.<br /><br />The other ones remain a complete mystery to me.Willnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-9328142302080045892010-12-23T11:31:49.545-05:002010-12-23T11:31:49.545-05:00Very interesting data set! While you say that the ...Very interesting data set! While you say that the average rating for males/females is the same, did you see a difference in particular types of puns that are funny to males v. females?Michael B.http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/~bemike/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-85593980643013993992010-12-21T19:09:24.723-05:002010-12-21T19:09:24.723-05:00I should be writing a paper instead of following y...I should be writing a paper instead of following your suggestion, but we all have our weaknesses.<br /><br />I wrote a set of functions in R that would identify the maximum, minimum, mean and median word frequencies for all the words in any given pun. I used a frequency corpus based on 10 months of AP newswires -- not the best corpus, but it's what I had available. I believe there are some better tools available out there, so pointers in the right direction are also appreciated. (I know there are tools for frequency analyses; what I want are tools with access to better frequency databases.) Since the puns are not part-of-speech-tagged, I used raw frequencies of surface forms (not lemmas).<br /><br /><br />Pearson product-moment correlations with funniness<br /> r p<br />max -.01 .49<br />min -.03 .11<br />mean -.02 .33<br />median .02 .38<br /><br />In other words, none of these factors correlated significantly with funniness. A better test would have been, as you say, to look at the lexical frequency of the puns themselves, but I don't have the puns tagged (anyone who wants to do so will be much appreciated!). What we probably want is the frequency of the two *meanings*, which is probably not available (SemCor and other meaning-tagged corpora are too small). Also, many puns involve part-homophones, so we need to identify the target word and its frequency.<br /><br />So lots of reasons why this wasn't likely to work, but it would have been nice if it did.GamesWithWordshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15107067137612954306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7701757403364514168.post-66057125384815935172010-12-21T16:44:01.905-05:002010-12-21T16:44:01.905-05:00You should try ranking them by the lowest frequenc...You should try ranking them by the lowest frequency word that is present (or the lowest frequency of the implied homophone, if you can easily figure that out). I don't get most of the worst ones, probably because I don't know the words.<br /><br />(yes, I know I should be working on my talk instead of reading this...)Timhttp://web.mit.edu/tfbradynoreply@blogger.com