On this website, the treatment of every humor component is simplified compared to the treatment in the book Why Funny Is Funny. This is especially so for three major humor culture categories: Wordplay, Ridicule, and Pranks.
Clash Theory uses ‘wordplay’ to mean only those wordplay examples seen as humorous. For the subset of humor-with-words called ‘wordplay’, the sense and nonsense kernel elements are words themselves. Plugging in an electric appliance makes it work ‘better’, but this joke is not wordplay because the kernel is not a mental superposition of two words or phrases. On the other hand, coffee tastes like mud after the customer asks for ‘fresh ground’, and this is wordplay because the clash is between two interpretations of the same words.
I omit the particulars of setup from the wordplay discussions. Setups are usually essential for generating a humor clash with wordplay kernels.
A wordplay humor kernel requires both similarity and dissimilarity between the words in it. Both are needed to create the clash of humor. Two random words like chimney and violin can’t make a wordplay humor kernel, not even one with weak static strength, because there’s no similarity, no connection between them. Likewise, two instances of a completely-identical-in-all-ways word, like chimney and chimney, can’t form a wordplay humor kernel because there is no dissimilarity, no contrast, and no possibility of a clash.
SURREAL humor kernels could be constructed featuring (for example) Santa Claus coming down a violin, or coming down one chimney and another chimney (Schrödinger’s chimney?) but the resulting full jokes would not count as wordplay.
The need for both similarity and dissimilarity is actually an additional insight into humor kernels of every kind. Every humor kernel must have both a connection and a contrast between the paired elements. Without a connection, they can’t be trying to occupy the same cognitive space. Without a contrast, there is no clash. Awareness of similarity and dissimilarity is easier with words than with things like physical movements or behavior norms, but both exist for every humor kernel ever.
A word is a visual-auditory symbol for a concept or a thing. The three most obvious characteristics of a word (there are several others) are the visual look of the letters, how it sounds when spoken or sung, and the meaning of the word. All characteristics of words are exploited to make wordplay humor, meaning that one or more of the characteristics are similar and one or more are dissimilar. It is the mix-and-match of similar and dissimilar characteristics that divides wordplay into various subtypes.
Wordplay humor is made from acronyms, anagrams. knock-knock jokes, poetry forms like the limerick, and from mispronunciations, mistranslations, and misunderstandings. Fancier categories include malapropisms, spoonerisms, eggcorns, mondegreens, portmanteaus and neologisms. Clash Theory defines ‘verbal irony’ as self-referential contradiction between the meaning of words and how they are used.
Consensus is an illusion; everyone knows this.
Click for a further look at Figures of Speech commonly used to create humor
Click for a further look at the Pun
Return to the third broad category Culture
Continue to the second major Humor Culture category Ridicule
Why Funny Is Funny 