Page 29 - The Language of Humour

16 ‘I SAY, I SAY, I SAY’
Activity with text
Analyse the following using the categories above.

1 A cartoon shows a butcher standing in front of his shop,
looking with a puzzled expression at the signs on the two
shops on either side of him: Butch/Butcher/Butchest
2 A price list in a hairdresser’s: Shampoo and set: £5;
Genuine poo and set: £10.
3 I’m on a seafood diet. I see food and I eat it. (badge)
4 (Speaking on telephone) It’s a polystyrene factory. (Pause)
No, it makes polystyrene.
5 Does a nightnurse look after the night? (Roger McGough)

Commentary

The ambiguity in 1 is caused by the suffix ‘-er’ which has two separate
uses in English: to make a noun, often from a verb, meaning the person
who does that, as in ‘teacher’; or to form a comparative from an
adjective, as in ‘quick’—‘quicker’. In 2 the single morpheme word
‘shampoo’ (Hindi) has been treated as a compound word made up from
‘sham’+‘poo’. In 3 there is also an ambiguity of sound, which allows
the compound word ‘seafood’ to be treated as two separate words. The
relationship of meaning between the two words in compounds is not
fixed, which allows an ambiguity in 4: either a factory made out of
polystyrene, or a factory for making polystyrene. There is a similar
ambiguity in 5: a ‘nightnurse’ is a nurse who works at night, though a
psychiatric nurse is one who looks after psychiatric patients.

Lexis

‘Have you heard the one about the woodpecker?’
‘It’s boring.’

A common source of puns is the lexicon, or vocabulary, of English,
which is vast and has borrowed from a variety of language sources:
Celtic, Germanic languages, Latin, French, Greek etc. Homonyms are
pronounced the same and have the same spelling, but are two different