First Blog Post

Welcome to our first blog!

Do you know what blog stands for? Basically Lame Official Gobbledygook!

So I’ll get to the point. Since the dawn of time, writers have played with language to create humour. And creating an inventory of the ways language can be played with to create humorous effects would fill an encyclopedia. 

Who has heard of Mondegreens? Wellerisms? Tom Swifties? Malapropisms? Cranberry morphemes? Spoonerisms? Backronyms? Paronomasia? Allusive homophony?

The answer is no one but students of verbal humour. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the mechanisms behind these joke forms are not that complex: they can be explained to anyone and reproduced with a bit of practice.

Take the basic witticism as an example. Who doesn’t enjoy these nuggets:

Girls just wanna have funds.

Monday is the root of all evil.

Hilarious, right? But the mechanism is simple: Just substitute a key word in a pre-existing idiomatic expression.

Take this old gem for example:

Time flies when you’re having fun.

All you need to do is replace the subject – Time – with another word that introduces a novel and maybe incongruous twist on the original.

How about: Wine flies when you’re having fun.

It may not be comedy gold. But by using it in a conversational setting, you will at least have avoided a cardinal sin: speaking in tired, hackneyed old clichés!

That’s what Humour For Life is all about!