Words that Sound Funny

 

I had my first comedy hit with the phrase “itty-bitty kidneys.” Of course, the audience was my eight-month-old son, so it wasn’t much of a hit, but every time I uttered those magic words he’d laugh until he couldn’t breathe. Similar phrases (including “itty-bitty fingers,” “itty-bitty toes,” and the rarely amusing “itty-bitty latissimus dorsi”) never had the same comic effect. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was employing some powerful tools for verbal comedy.

K-Words

Here’s the first one. Words with the K-sound — like “kidneys” — are inherently funny.

The humor potential of the letter K has been part of comic lore for years. In the Neil Simon play “The Sunshine Boys,” the character Willy explains it to his nephew: “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.”

So the names “Squiggly” and “Aardvark,” two recurring characters in the Grammar Girl example sentences, both have great comedy potential because they both contain the K sound. It masquerades as a QU in “Squiggly” and it lurks at the end of “Aardvark.”

Scientist and researcher Richard Wiseman put the “K is funny” theory to the test during his LaughLab research in 2001. Although the main focus of the research was finding the funniest joke, Wiseman also performed a “mini-experiment” to see if the letter K actually gets more laughs.

The experiment was built around a simple joke:

There were two cows in a field. One said, “Moo.” The other one said, “I was going to say that.”

During the experiment, people were invited to visit the LaughLab website and rate jokes pulled at random from a database. In addition to the cow joke, Wiseman and his colleagues put several variations in the database including mice that went “eek,” tigers that said “grrr,” and birds going “cheep.” The winning variation, which had the most K’s was this joke:

There were two ducks on a pond. One said, “Quack” and the other said, “I was going to say that.”

K’s for the win!

There are other verbal techniques you can use to elicit a chuckle, guffaw, or belly laugh. All of them have their roots in poetry. Humor and poetry often make use of...

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