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  2. Daddy was a bankknobber
    David Knobbie (sings Knobbing The Alien)
    Knob Brydon
    The Right Reverned Knobert Runcie
    I knob, you knob, he/she/it knobs, we knob

    Oh yes, I can see your point

  3. Oh but it’s a great term of abuse, especially delivered with sufficient spittle-flecked hatred.

    C. 1990 The family Moose have the telly on. My Dad has always taken the ‘shouting-at-the-telly’ aspect of fatherhood very seriously. During a commercial break there was an ad for the TV Times, made up of vox pops from bizarrely satisfied customers of the aforesaid waste-of-trees. One of the readers was a bearded bloke who cheerfully said, “I like it, and I’ll buy it!”

    My dad responded directly: “You….KNOB!” And so we had the birth of a family catchphrase.

    *dabs away a tear of pride*

  4. I’ve always found the word lurk, or any of it’s variations funny for some reason. Not in all circumstances I guess. Rapists and murderers must do a fair bit of lurking, for instance. But when not describing someone with serious crime on their mind, lurking is funny.

  6. Arse.
    Many years ago, I co-wrote a book with a couple of comedians, and when we received the editorial markings from the publishers, they’d changed ‘arse’ to ‘bum’ every time (and there were a fair number of times). We changed them all back, but great was the disappointment we felt at the lack of understanding.
    On a sort of similar theme, back in the late 80s, IPC had a spate of making the music papers asterisk out the swear words. At Melody Maker, a compromise was reached: they could use one unasterisked swear word per issue. For a lark, the designer mocked up the new issue’s cover. Melody Fucker.

  8. Was watching a recent repeat of an interview Mark Lawson did with the late Barry Cryer who maintained that words that contained Ks or hard Cs were always inherently side-splitting,

    From the above, it seems this insight may be one of the reasons he’d managed to crack this comedic caper for so long

  15. I was once called up by a friend, quite drunk at the time, asking me to come and join him and a few others for a drink.

    ‘Yeah alright. Where are you?’

    ‘The Nurglies’

    ‘The what?’

    ‘The Nurglies’

    ‘Eh?’

    ‘Nurglies. Down from Kennington tube’

    He was trying to say The Hercules, a pub on the Kennington Road in Lambeth. Anyway, it’s remained The Nurglies ever since, And, to the point, is a funny word.

  22. Is it woody or tinny?

    In 1942 England, a family sit in a drawing room making conversation. The father, Mansfield Vermin-Jones (Graham Chapman), lets out a sighing “gorn” and his wife Mrs Vermin-Jones (Eric Idle) asks him what ‘gorn’ means. He says it doesn’t mean anything, it just gives him confidence as it has a ‘woody’ quality about it. He then complains how ‘newspaper’ and ‘litter bin’ have a tinny sound to them, upsetting their daughter Rebecca (Carol Cleveland) at the word ‘tin’. ‘Sausage’, ‘seemly’, ‘prodding’, ‘vacuum’, ‘leap’ have a woody sound, though the mother and Rebecca disagree at the last one, as it’s a PVC sort of word. ‘Bound’ and ‘vole’ also have woody sounds, but not ‘recidivist’, which Rebecca runs out the room after hearing the word ‘tinny’ again.

    Mrs Mansfield says ‘caribou’ which Mr Mansfield approves of, but she meant there was a caribou in the garden. He shoots it, and says ‘intercourse’ and other rude words as examples of woody words. The mother tosses a bucket of water over him and he returns to normal. They realise that all the naughty words are woody, apart from ‘tit’. He leaves to fire a servant with a tinny name, Simpkins.

    The RAF pilot Gervaise (Michael Palin) bursts in telling his mother a story in RAF slang, but she doesn’t understand. His mother asks him to sing a woody song, and he begins to sing-shout “She’s going to marry Yum Yum”, killing her.

    • It’s a good debagging of the awful fucking elitist nonsense Nancy Mitford peddled as u and non-u words. Fry and Laurie and Theresa May give that sort of 1% self-love a good kicking here

  28. On balance I think the word “trousers” has delivered more laughs over time. Not sure why.

    Depeche Mode used it in one of their songs and US fans were perplexed. It’s just not in their vocabulary, apparently.

  29. For full effect, imagine Kevin Bridges or Billy Connolly saying this Scottish word:

    Bawbag!

    Generally used as an insult, this word, meaning scrotum, gained international notoriety when The West Wing’s Richard Schiff discovered it and started referring to Trump online with the hashtag #presidentbawbag.

  38. Only marginally part of the English language, but there’s a place up the road in QLD called Wonglepong which always brings forth a titter. But don’t get me started on Aussie place names. Oh.

  41. “Nevertheless” is my pick as the funniest word in the world in any language.
    Below is the reason why.
    It’s a two minute clip of the director of Boogie Nights talking about the difficulty they had filming a scene where Mark Wahlberg and Burt Reynolds are arguing…

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