Page 23 - The Language of Humour

10 ‘I SAY, I SAY, I SAY’
vowel letters can be spoken as / , for example in the mistake on a
driving school advert: ‘Duel control cars’. Both ‘dual’ and ‘duel’ are
pronounced even when the word is spoken in isolation. The
schwa sound occurs often in the unstressed words once words are
spoken as part of an utterance: ‘Are you going to the shops?’ could
easily be pronounced with five schwa sounds.
In spoken English, ambiguities can be caused by the way that words
are stressed and by their intonation: ‘It’s not my hand you should kiss’
(Voltaire, Candide). Using contrastive stress on either ‘my hand’ or ‘my
hand’ would radically change the meaning. Notice which syllables are
given primary stress to distinguish the meanings of these examples:

‘convict (noun) con’vict (verb)
a dark ‘room a’darkroom (where photos are developed)

There is a slight difference in stress and intonation that could resolve
the ambiguity in the following joke.

‘How do you make a cat drink?’
‘Easy, put it in the liquidiser.’
cat ‘drink=drink for a cat (like ‘dark room’)
‘cat drink=drink out of a cat (like ‘darkroom’)

The change in stress indicates different structures—two separate words
or a compound word.
In spoken language individual words are run together. Only the
context tells the listener how the stream of sounds should be divided:
‘Some others I’ve seen’ versus ‘Some mothers I’ve seen’. Sequences of
popular joke formulas exploit this type of ambiguity:

‘Knock, knock.’
‘Who’s there?’
‘Noah.’
‘Noah who?’
‘Noah good place to eat?’
Keep Fit by Jim Nastics
Victorian Transport by Orson Cart

Unintentional humour can be created in spontaneous speech. Mrs
Malaprop is a character in Sheridan’s play The Rivals, who doesn’t