Funny $#!%: Predicting Profanity Use in Creative Humor Production

How do people come up with funny ideas? Profanity—the language’s rich panoply of obscenity, vulgarity, and indecency—is a ubiquitous comedic device deployed in creative humor. The present research explored variation in profanity use when generating jokes. A sample of adults (n = 618) completed a creative humor production task, and text-mining methods detected and coded the appearance and severity of profanity. Random forest models were used to identify potentially important predictors, such as variables relevant to profanity generally (e.g., age, gender, and personality traits) and variables specific to humor creation (e.g., humor self-concepts and self-ratings of their jokes’ funniness). Profanity in the jokes was reasonably common, used by 22% of the sample, diverse in type, and generally mild in severity. The random forest models identified a set of uniquely important predictors. Profanity use and severity were marked by being younger, identifying as male, rating one’s own jokes as funny, and expressing more confidence in one’s ability to be funny and make others laugh—a true profile in boorishness. The discussion explores roles for personality in indecorous humor and the broader question of strategic aspects of humor creation.