Poop vs Boobs vs Bubby

As the world spins ever faster toward oblivion, with seemingly no rests stops along the way, two reasearchers from the University of Alberta have spent a lot of time analyzing exactly what the funniest English words are and why they are funny. Six categories were chosen: sex, bodily functions, insults, swear words, partying, and animals.

Words were analyzed by meaning, structure, length, sound, and how many categories a word fit into.

Alert Readers may be wondering why these specific categories were chosen and not others, say presidential wit, presidential wisdom, or things stuck to the bottom of one’s shoe. The answer is, Life in the Boomer Lane does not know.

The researchers discovered the following:

Works with “k” and the “oo” sound were most likely to make the funny list.

Words that fell into more than one category were winners, as were words that were closest to all categories. For example, the word “boob” inhabited both the sex category and the bodily functions category. LBL is still wondering why “boob” is a bodily function, but she leaves that determination to the researchers. After all, she is a mere human who simply posesses two of them and not a highly-educated scientist who may or may not posess any.

The Grand Prize Winners of Funny Words were the following: upchuck, bubby, boff, wriggly, yaps, giggle, cooch, guffaw, puffball, and jiggly. LBL personally does not think of any of these as a laugh riot.

LBL, herself, is not happy about “bubby” being on the list of Grand Prize Winners. “Bubby” is a favored word for Jewish grandmothers. While some Jewish grandmothers are, indeed, funny people, and LBL likes to think she is one of these, the word, itself, conjures up for LBL piles of food and a lot of force-feeding.

LBL’s grandson, a devotee of all things funny, lodged a formal complaint about the omission of one specific word that didn’t make the top funny list: poop. Poop has the “oo” sound, fits into three categories (bodily functions, insults, swear words) and serves as an all-purpose word when one brother grabs another brother’s Legos. It can also be easily combined into alarmingly visual insults such as “poopyface” and “poopyhead.”

LBL told him that, when he becomes a wealthy proctologist in later life, he can use his financial resources to fund his own research project and have “poop” added to the list of fun-filled words.