ok, so tell me whether or not this is funny.
K: I have a work dinner party tonight. Do you want to come?
D: No, you go. I'll stay home with M.
K: We can ask Klaudia [German chick next door] to watch M, so you can...
D: No, no, I've got to stay home to watch M.
[Pause while K works it out.]
K: You can't use your centrifuge on me. I know what you're doing.
See, I meant "subterfuge," but I said "centrifuge." It's a malapropism. That's funny, right?
D says it's not funny. The thing is that I couldn't exactly remember the word "subterfuge" at the time, but I knew it was close to "centrifuge," and I knew it'd be funny if I said "centrifuge" instead.But after D didn't know what I was talking about, we had to use an online thesaurus to find the word "subterfuge." D said that it's not funny if you have to look up the word in order to make the joke clear.
I told him that I wasn't to blame for his poor vocabulary. D said that he hadn't known the word, but that I hadn't known the word either, so it wasn't funny.
I said that I had known the word but that it had escaped me at the moment, and I knew it was close to "centrifuge," so to keep good comic timing, I went ahead and made the joke, hoping that he would know "subterfuge"--but sadly, he didn't.
So if a malapropism falls in the dining room, but nobody knows the original word, is it still funny?
posted by the wanderer @ 20:05
6 Comments
6 Comments:
no. -me
neither of you are funny
ANONYMOUS COWARDS. what do YOU know?
oh, and it's neither of you *is* funny. "neither" is singular. pppphhhttt.
Mondegreens, malapropisms, spoonerisms, eggcorns . . . these are all great fun for wordsmiths . . . lovers of language . . . “fluff merchants,” as my dad a would have call me. Currently, I’m “all about” mondegreens . . . they’re just so much fun to create and decipher. There’s even a board game called Mad Gab that’s devoted to mondegreens . . . it’s sort of like charades in a weird way . . . yes, it’s dorky . . . and nerdy . . . and silly . . .but it is entertaining. Similarly, your joke was funny. Not take-a-knee and gasp-for-breath funny . . . but funny nonetheless. Also, even if you didn’t remember the word at that moment, you remembered well enough to think of a rhyme and look it up in a thesaurus. Besides, if D claims that it’s not funny because neither of you knew the word (which doesn’t seem wholly true), then he’s really blaming you for giving him too much credit and thinking too highly of his lexical skills. That seems like a strange quality to want to quash in one’s spouse. Anyway, I know the word, and I thought it was funny . . . then again, I do have a photogenic memory . . . hell, I even amphibious since I can write with both hands.
ROW
what *is* quash, anyway? :-) do tell.
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