Humorous Names

Names are one of the few bits of language that individuals are free to create, even going so far as to create sounds that are not ordinarily in the speaker's language. Because of this freedom, combined with the fact that every person, every place, every publication, and every commercial product must have a proper name, speakers can expect that some names will be intentionally humorous, while others will be unintentionally humorous.

Studying humorous names is easier than it used to be, but at the same time it isn't as enjoyable because much of the challenge is gone. The Internet is responsible for both of these changes. Today people can go to any search engine and find many sites dealing with humorous naming. This takes away from the surprise and the delight that people used to get from discovering a sign for a dentist named

Dr. Payne, a telephone listing for a surgeon named Dr. Crewel, or an academic article written by Paper and Penzl (Herbert Paper and Herbert Penzl, who were both professors in the linguistics program at the University of Michigan). Also, news can travel so fast on the Internet that within a year after a celebrity decides on a clever baby name, such as Nevaeh (heaven spelled backward), the name can become one of the top 1,000 most popular names for newborn females.

Nevertheless, names that can be interpreted with different semantic meanings still make people laugh as when on The Simpsons, Bart calls Moe's Tavern and asks to speak to non-existent patrons who he identifies with gag names that, when shouted out loud, will communicate more than the bartender has realized, for example, Amanda Huggenkiss, Ben Dover, and Seymour Butts. Brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of the popular radio show Car Talk, regularly make use of gag names and have registered the humorous string of Dewey, Cheetham, & Howe as one of their trademarks, even though it was used by comedians long before them.

Alluding to the names of well-known characters or historical figures is an efficient kind of literary humor demonstrated by Daniel Handler in his young adult series of books, A Series of Unfortunate Events, written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket and published by HarperCollins between 1999 and 2006. Although the series of 13 books are for children, Handler developed a secondary audience of adults through his deadpan allusions to dozens of famous Americans. The heroes of the books are two orphans named Klaus and Sunny (a reminder of Claus and Sunny von Bülow) who team up with two other orphans named Duncan and Isadora Quagmire. Young readers are amused at someone having the last name of Quagmire, while adults are probably reminded of the sad story of dancer Isadora Duncan, who became a tragic symbol of “the Roaring Twenties.” In the second book, The Reptile Room, the children think they are going to be adopted by their Uncle Montgomery, a collector of snakes, who tells the children to call him Uncle Monty. Handler leaves it to his readers to figure out the connection to Monty Python. In a darker example in the eighth book, The Miserable Mill, a worker at the sawmill gets one of his legs hopelessly mangled, and a fellow worker hands him a coupon offering “fifty percent off” at the Ahab Memorial Hospital.

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