Responses to “The World’s Funniest Joke”

Chris Says: May 25th, 2008 at 9:02 am
As a graduate student in linguistics, I hereby challenge you to provide a citation for “linguistic studies that suggest that velar consonants are funnier than alveodentals”.
My first impression is that the claim is preposterous and false, but I’m willing to follow-up on any citation you can provide.
Funniest joke in the world?: Brad Neese: Living Large in Oklahoma Says: May 25th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
[…] McNamee examines “The World’s Funniest Joke“: […] according to research conducted a few years back at the University of Hertfordshire, […]
Gregory McNamee Says: May 26th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Chris, as someone who holds a graduate degree in linguistics, let me turn it around: I challenge you to prove the theory wrong. There’s a thesis or dissertation in there somewhere.
(Snide is a pretty funny word, come to think of it, and it’s all fricative and nasal and interdental, not a velar element in sight.)
Anyway, here’s a source that, as I recall, cites further studies, followed by a dissertation by a pretty funny guy.
1. “The power of ‘k’ has become comedy lore. . . . Hard consonant sounds, especially K sounds, which include C [and] Qu . . . tend to make words sound funnier. The comic Wendy Liebman told me that she’s always trying to write a joke that ends with ‘kayak.’”–Tad Friend, “What’s So Funny?: A Scientific Attempt to Discover Why We Laugh,” The New Yorker, November 11, 2002
2. “Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny. You say ‘Alka Seltzer’ you get a laugh . . . Words with ‘k’ in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that’s a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny. Car keys. Cleveland . . . Cleveland is funny. Maryland is not funny. Then, there’s chicken. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny.”–Neil Simon, “The Sunshine Boys”
Chris Says: May 31st, 2008 at 9:16 am
Gregory, thanks for following up. I have not been able to find Friend’s article, unfortunately. Even though The New Yorker has many of his article available in their archive, they do not have that particular one, as far as I can tell.
“as someone who holds a graduate degree in linguistics”, you must know that languages differ in their phonological inventories. Do you believe that a Comanche speaker finds words with K inherently funny? Tagalog speakers? Quechua speakers?
Wikipedia has a web page called “Inherently funny word” which cites Neil Simon as well as H.L. Mencken as early example of this idea. But surely you must understand my skepticism. This is anecdotal lore at best. My first guess is that this ‘funny K words’ tradition is rooted in Yiddish humor, and is not universal by any stretch, but your claim was couched in phonetic descriptions that are universal (”alveodentals”).
This reminds me of sound symbolism, the idea that certain sounds have inherent meaning. While it may be the case that certain sounds or phoneme clusters come to be loosely associated with a related set of words (/fl/ = “flat” in flip, fly, flat), this association is typically historical and cultural, not inherent.
My guess is that any “scientific” study which found K words to be funnier than others had serious methodological flaws, probably in its population.