Historical February 1985 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
(Warning: This column will be best read after a few drinks or other artificial stimulation. Loud music and a cheap cigar will also help.) Humor, appropriately enough, is a funny thing. Funny in the “ha-ha” sense, but also funny in the odd and peculiar sense. It’s hard to predict exactly what will elicit a smile or cause a guffaw. I guess peoples’ sense of humor, like their political leanings and taste in food, are all over the map.
Oh, there are a couple of certainties— eternal truths of the world, if you will.
We all laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel and we all chortle at re-runs of “Car 54, Where are you?” on television. Beyond that, though, it’s up in the air.
One man’s laugh is another’s grimace. I, for example, thought it quite humorous when I forgot to tell my wife about the three couples I had invited over to the house for a quick bit to eat.
She didn’t see the humor. Nobody seemed to mind much. It’s amazing how far those “Lean Cuisines” will stretch! Similarly, the old rubber-snake-in-themailbox routine always gets a big laugh at work. Carrying that to its logical conclusion, then, several of us were surprised when the new rubber-snake-in-the-saladat-lunch routine didn’t get such a good response. (It might have been funnier if it had been discovered a bit earlier when all of the snake was still in the plate . . .) I’ve come to reflect on humor lately (although you couldn’t tell it from this column!) in thinking about funny sounding words. Yeah, words that simply sound funny to the ear.
Not words that rely solely on context for humor, like, “Boy, he really fell flat on his bazumba!” but words that tickle when they play on the eardrums.
There are actually quite a few funny sounding words. More than you’d think (this doesn’t hold true for marriage counselors—I imagine that they hear lots of funny words).
A slight mis-use of a word will often make it even funnier. Given the way that we all fold, staple, and bend the language, it’s surprising we’re not always in peals of laughter. Granted, with the elections behind us, there are fewer funny words loose out there, but there are still bazumbas of ’em! (“Bazumba” is one, in case you haven’t noticed. It’s what we educators call a “reflexive transitory “gerund”; that means, like any good politician or chameleon, it can be whatever you want it to be.) Lots of commonplace words are silly sounding. You need only to say them slowly and crisply, letting the sounds and concomitant images gently flow across your mind. How about: twinkie, Saab, Volvo, jughead, google, Skeksie, and kazoom! Or, consider: perfidy, Hobokin, cucumber, cuckoo, coccyx, cucuracha, and porky! Now, remember, these are pretty good words in isolation . .. put them in (or out of) context and they can be really bazumba! “Jughead ate a perfidy in his Saab while smoking a cuckoo cucumber with Porky.” (Odd, as I wrote that I felt like I was in the fifth grade again, trying to make up sentences for my spelling words.) Soft-sounding words are humorous: any word containing “pud,” “flop,” or “dip.” Novel combinations are possible, as in: “While taking a dip, he slipped into a vat of pud-flop.” “Newton” is laughable, but then the entire Newton family is entertaining—Sir Issac, Wayne, and cousin Fig. Angular words generally create a smile: zoot, twit, bazooka, foot, xylophone, Nixon, and protractor. How about: “He loved her for her protractor” or “I’d like you to meet my friends, Zoot and Twit and Nixon.” (By now, if you’re not smiling, go back to the warning at the beginning of this article. You obviously need another cheap cigar.) All German words are funny: “glockenspiel” and I need say no more. Guacamole is another good German word as are hootchie-cootchie and hanky-panky. Funny, Charo doesn’t even look German. How about place names? Rhyming with “boys,” Illinois is a good one. Consider, as Rod Serling would say, “The surgeon-general removed her Illinois.” Schenectady, Sudan, Palo Alto, Albuquerque, Hootnanny, Iowa, and LaDue all bring a smile to any cartographer. Foods can often sound (and taste, at my house, at least) funny. Baloney (or as pronounced in the suburbs, “balongia”) always makes me grin, especially with ketchup and ice cream. Other food names guaranteed to evoke a laugh in any hot tub are yogurt, sushi, egg, egg nog, Twinkie (the proper noun), orifice, corn pops, drumsicle, toufetti, bazumbas, and taco. (Boy, if you put all of those together in the hot tub, it sounds like a Yuppie diet.) I’ve saved the best, though, for last. Listen to “onomatopoeia.” Not only does it sound funny, the definition of onomatopoeia is “the naming of a thing or action by vocal imitation of the sound associated with it.” That opens up a whole new raft of grin words: barf, woof, bang, barf (the dog), pow, zip, kaboom, petard, crunch, grunt, crash, buzz, ring, arf, meyow, and mooooooo, to name a few. Sounds like the soundtrack from an old Batman show! Enough on sounds and words that are funny sounding. I won’t dare to address body parts, societal rituals, or the sounds associated with the dentist’s office.
The article that does those topics will come with an audio cassette to be played while reading. Remember, “A bazumba in time, saves a glockenspiel.”
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, February 1985.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1985_02.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
