There is a joke in “Shrek 2” that breaks one of comedy’s golden rules. It takes place in a bar, where Shrek, Donkey and Puss-in-Boots nurse their beers after suffering a reversal in fortunes. Puss-in-Boots looks at his drink, and says, “I hate Mondays.”
“Mondays” is a dreaded “m”-word, and, according to a school of comic thought, “m” is not funny. As opposed to ‘k.’ K-words are inherently funny. That’s why it’s a chicken that crosses the road, and not a horse, pig, dog or sheep.
Neil Simon popularized this theory in his play “The Sunshine Boys.” Curmudgeonly ex-vaudevillian Willie Clark, portrayed by Walter Matthau in the movie version, impatiently explains to his nephew-agent “which words are funny and which words are not funny.” Alka-Seltzer and chicken, he says, are funny. Tomato and lettuce are not funny.
Billy Crystal put this timeless comic practice to memorable use Oscar night. Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation,” he noted, took 27 days to make, about the same time it took her father, Francis Ford, to wake up Marlon Brando on the set of “Apocalypse Now.” “He did it with three little words,” Crystal deadpanned. “Key lime pie.” Try your own punch line — apple brown betty, hot fudge sundae, duck a l’orange. Key lime pie has a simplicity that can’t be topped.
Explains Michael Silverstein, a Charles F. Gray Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, “Key lime pie is an exceedingly rich tropical dessert that is associated with the tropics, with which Brando is also associated, as he is with obesity. [The joke] has a lovely three one-syllable word structure with vowels that go e-I-I. It’s got ‘k’ in the beginning and ‘p’ at the end, and a nice ‘m’ resonance in the middle.”
The venerable Sid Caesar, from whom Neil Simon learned his craft as a comedy writer on “Your Show of Shows,” put it more poetically in a recent e-mail exchange: “Comedy is like music. It has melody, rhythm and cadence. Funny words are comedy’s melody.
“Words with the k sound, like ‘chicken,’ evoke funny images and responses.”
Lest you think that this is taking a simple joke way too seriously, remember always that comedy is serious business.
“Sometimes the difference between a laugh and a quizzical look from the audience is one word,” said Paul Rodriguez, now in his 25th year as a stand-up comedian, in a phone interview prior to a recent appearance in Elgin.
In the case of one fledgling Second City e.t.c sketch, that one word was “bucket,” according to Matthew Craig, co-starring in the revue, “Show Title Deemed Indecent By the FCC.” The scene, he said, which did not end up in the show, was about what Americans preoccupy themselves with in the face of global war. A group of people was ordering food in a restaurant. One character asked the waiter, “I’m a vegetarian and I’m on the Atkins diet. Could I just get some eggs?” Laughs were scarce until the order was changed to “a bucket of eggs.”
“With that,” Craig said, “people got the vegetarian [aspect], as well as the quantities people can consume [on Atkins]. It became a joke that could almost stand on it own. Pail would have worked too. A pail of anything is funny.”
Double consonants
Of course, not all of those audience-slaying words have a `k’ in them. Working night after night, comedians discover vowel and consonant corollaries to the `k’ rule.
Craig offered, “Double consonants back-to-back,” as in such usually reliable laugh-getters as “nipple” and “tummy,” can make a word funny. Perhaps this explains the mainstream acceptance of Snoop Dogg’s “izzle” slang.
A certain breakfast item elicited big laughs in two recent films. In the Coen brothers’ remake of “The Ladykillers,” criminal mastermind Tom Hanks proclaims, “We must have waffles, forthwith.” In the first “Shrek,” Eddie Murphy’s Donkey happily settles in at the ogre’s cabin, and rapturously promises, “And in the morning, I’m making waffles.” Again, try to substitute another food item there, even pancakes with a k. Nothing quite stands up to “waffles,” which, according to Joe Stillman, co-screenwriter of “Shrek” and “Shrek 2,” Murphy improvised.
“Why anything is funny is one of the great mysteries,” Stillman said in a phone interview. “If Eddie Murphy had said, `Bagels with a schmear,’ it would be too Jackie Mason. If he had said, `Home fries and a side of bacon,’ I don’t think people would be laughing. `Waffles’ gives you a triple whammy. It is an anachronism, it is a funny-sounding word, and it’s just absurd.”
Another category of funny words is places. “Los Angeles never gets a laugh,” Stillman said. “Walla Walla, Washington, could be one of the funniest places going, although I’ve never been there. New Jersey has been used and abused by comics forever. It always works. Why? I don’t know.” (Delivery does play an important role. “Philadelphia” is perhaps only funny if W.C. Fields utters it. And “Ohio” was never funny until Mary Tyler Moore’s Laura Petrie tried to get out the word while in the grip of one of her crying jags in the “Dick Van Dyke Show” episode “The Attempted Marriage.”)
Foreign sounding words, such as kreplach or caramba, add exotic punctuation to a joke because they not only sound funny, but they also forge a bond between an ethnic comedian and audience members with a shared culture.
Letterman’s advice
Recent National Magazine Award-winner Bill Zehme, whose book “Hef’s Little Black Book” was just published, once posed the question of foolproof funny words to David Letterman for a magazine profile. Zehme says, “He told me `hot’ and `wet,’ and noted that if you put both in front of another word, the result will be hilarious. We tried it with pony. It was pretty funny.'”
For “Tonight Show” and Academy Awards broadcast writer Jon Macks, few words do it like “sheetcake.” In his book, “How To Be Funny,” he offers others: “Tramp, pants, hooters, kinky and buffoon.” Also: “chicken.”
And proving that even comedy’s golden “m” rule is fluid, Moe Howard of the Three Stooges made “moron” one of his most quotable insults (again, delivery).
Patty Vasquez, a fixture at Zanies comedy club in Chicago, has had success with the word “magenta,” painting a colorful image that evokes her Mexican heritage.
“People tell me how I don’t look Mexican, like it’s my secret skill,” she explained. “I joke that I’ll move into their neighborhood and paint my house magenta. It draws a very specific image, and it’s fun to say. I think that’s another part of it. If a word is fun for someone to say, it’s easier [for the comedian] to sell to an audience.”
Fellow stand-up Rodriguez says, “There is no science behind comedy, period. Certain sounds are just like poetry to the ears. It has something to do with certain sounds with a rhythm and rhyme that are pleasing to our ear.”
