Quite possibly the funniest joke ever conceived
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[ A dispatch from the Youth and Popular Culture Desk here at Language Log Plaza, where things have been kinda slow lately. Hat-tip to Jim Wilson. ]
It's been just over two days since Comedy Central aired the Fishsticks episode of South Park. (See the full episode here.) The basic premise: the fact that "fish sticks" kinda sounds like "fish dicks", and the assertion that this is "quite possibly the funniest joke ever conceived".
A: Do you like fishsticks?
B: Yes.
A: Do you like putting fishsticks in your mouth?
B: Yes.
A: What are you, a gay fish?
Another part of the premise of the episode is that nobody (in the fake world of South Park) had ever thought of the joke before. In the "real" world (as viewed via the lens of YouTube, anyway), the joke has been around, if only covertly; see for example this video posted November 2007.
Yet another part of the premise is that Kanye West doesn't get the joke and thinks that everyone is seriously suggesting that he's a gay fish. Various people try to explain the joke to Kanye — by repeating it slowly, pointing out that it's "word play", and asking "don't you get it?" — but Kanye figures that he should be able to understand it because he's a genius, "the voice of a generation", and that he doesn't need it explained to him.
At the risk of ruining the joke a little, I'm going to go ahead and explain it — not for the benefit of those who don't get it in the first place (because there's no hope for you), but rather for the benefit of those who might like to understand a little better why "fish sticks" sounds like "fish dicks" in the first place.
There are two basic things going on. One is that the sounds represented by "sh" and by "s" are very similar, and when they come together in anything but hyper-careful speech in English, they often reduce to something that sounds like a slightly longer "sh". (This works in either order — pronounce "horse shoe" and "crash site" and you'll see what I mean.) So, it sounds like the first "s" of "sticks" is missing.
The other thing is that the "t" in "stick" is pronounced not much differently than the "d" in "dick". Although the distinction between the English phonemes /t/ and /d/ (and other pairs such as /p,b/ and /k,g/) is often described as a voicing distinction, the real contrast is between "tick" (with aspiration of the /t/) and "dick" (with no aspiration of the /d/); the "t" in "stick" is also unaspirated, and in fact if you splice the /s/ off of a recording of "stick", it sounds a lot more like "dick" than like "tick". (This is in fact the basis of the Jimi Hendrix "kiss the sky" lyric being misheard as "kiss this guy", as Heidi Harley explained a couple of years ago.)
Ian Tindale said,
April 11, 2009 @ 4:31 pm
Quite how 't' and 'd' are supposed to sound in any way similar escapes me. Are you absolutely sure?
Faldone said,
April 11, 2009 @ 5:10 pm
The fact that "horse shoe" also works in the same way with "horse you" is ably exploited by the Car Guys when they announce on their weekly radio show that guest accommodations are supplied by the Horse Shoe Road Inn.
Lazar said,
April 11, 2009 @ 5:26 pm
@Ian Tindale: They sound similar in this context because one of the major distinguishing features, the aspiration of /t/, is lost in the combination /st/.
Jair said,
April 11, 2009 @ 5:26 pm
It's been my experience that most Americans, including myself, routinely substitute "d" for "t", to the point where I don't even notice it. For example, "latter" and "ladder" are pronounced the same way, "potato" is "potado", etc.
[(myl) You're talking about flapping and voicing, which regularly applies to intervocalic /t/ when it's not the onset of a following stressed vowel. This includes not only cases like those you cite, where the previous vowel is stressed and the following one is not (or at least is less strongly stressed), but also cases like "fat Albert".
However, this is a different phenomenon from the unaspirated allophone of /p/, /t/, and /k/ that occurs in clusters with a preceding /s/.
Two indications of the difference: (1) voicing does not apply to /p/ and /k/ in the same environments as /t/ — compare "sitter" to "sipper" and "sicker"; (2) varieties of English that lack /t/-flapping and voicing still usually have unaspirated /p/, /t/, /k/ in clusters after /s/. ]
Wells Hansen said,
April 11, 2009 @ 5:39 pm
The embedded video does not include, even "covertly," the "fishsticks/fish dicks" joke. That this joke (clearly the funniest joke in history and certainly the exclusive brainchild of Eric Cartman, who is not at all fat) was current before last Wednesday remains an unsupported assertion.
Sridhar Ramesh said,
April 11, 2009 @ 5:41 pm
Yes, that's "intervocalic alveolar flapping". It's not really that the typical /t/ sound is becoming the typical /d/ sound though. Rather, both /t/ and /d/ are reduced to the same sound in such contexts (a voiced flap, which thus sounds more similar to typical /d/ than typical /t/).
Sridhar Ramesh said,
April 11, 2009 @ 5:43 pm
Whoa, how did I end up so late on that reply? I must've loaded this page a while ago and not noticed that the actual expert had already answered.
[(myl) That's the fast-moving world of high-stakes phonetics!
More seriously, I was probably composing my reply at exactly the same time as you were. ]
David Eddyshaw said,
April 11, 2009 @ 5:45 pm
The same lack of aspiration of stops after s occurs in Welsh; just as in English, the sounds are unvoiced but unaspirated, unlike the corresponding word-initial voiceless stops.
(Modern) Welsh, however, has a peculiar convention of writing sg, sb but st:
esgob "bishop"
ysbryd "spirit"
but
eisteddfod
Sili said,
April 11, 2009 @ 7:20 pm
But aren't fishsticks actually made from squid?
Of course, "squidsticks" doesn't sound remotely like "tentacle" …
kip said,
April 11, 2009 @ 10:39 pm
As soon as I saw this episode I wondered if it would make it onto Language Log. :)
Skullturf Q. Beavispants said,
April 12, 2009 @ 1:36 am
Here's a knock-knock joke I remember telling at the age of about 7.
(ahem)
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Horsp.
Horsp who?
[it sounds like "horse poo"]
marie-lucie said,
April 12, 2009 @ 8:14 am
I can't believe this is considered "the funniest joke ever conceived", even if we restrict the scope of the pool of jokes to those thought up by American males.
Chandan Narayan said,
April 12, 2009 @ 12:24 pm
There's also something to be said for the offending word being preceded by a voiceless sibilant. It's almost like that's an enhancing context for the "dick" percept. (Ha!).
So something like "red stick" will probably not be pronounced as *[rEdzdIk] with voicing spreading, but with an audible voiceless sibilant to maintain the integrity of the word boundary [rEdstIk]. If the preceding coda is a voiceless stop, like [p t k], then the following [s] could be interpreted as a plural or possessive marker giving the "dick" percept. So "Eric stick"… JK, Eric.
Jon Weinberg said,
April 12, 2009 @ 12:47 pm
Marie-Lucie: The assertion that this is "quite possibly the funniest joke ever conceived" is part of the joke.
Mr Fnortner said,
April 12, 2009 @ 4:04 pm
The page in Porky's: "Is Mike Hunt here? Has anyone seen Mike Hunt?" Now that's funny.
SDT said,
April 12, 2009 @ 5:22 pm
Something similar happens in the Brittany Spears song, If You Seek Amy.
mollymooly said,
April 12, 2009 @ 7:27 pm
In British English "fish sticks" are called "fish fingers". This opens a whole new vein of comedy gold to mine. It also means that if you ask a Brit "Do you like putting fishsticks in your mouth?" they are quite likely to think you really are saying "fish dicks".
Emily said,
April 12, 2009 @ 9:03 pm
Oh oh!! Also when you say Rainbow it sounds like Raimbow.
Rubrick said,
April 13, 2009 @ 3:43 am
(This works in either order — pronounce "horse shoe" and "crash site" and you'll see what I mean.)
Alas, I don't. For me, the effect in the first example is as suggested, but in the second the "s" in "site" refuses to be subsumed.
The "s/tick" recording is interesting. To my ear, it sounds as though the speaker has something akin to a slight lisp, so that the beheaded version sounds much more like "thick" than "dick".
marie-lucie said,
April 13, 2009 @ 7:59 am
JW: I have been told that I am rather obtuse when it comes to recognizing humour. Rereading the original post and comments, I see that I have missed a few clues. Thanks!
Craig Russell said,
April 13, 2009 @ 8:18 pm
I am mildly upset that I sat through that entire You Tube video, and got made fun of by my wife in the process, without seeing one reference to the "fishsticks=fish dicks" joke. Are we to assume that this is being subtly implied by the repetition of "fishsticks" in the video? Because somehow, to me, that video doesn't exactly scream "subtlety."
Eric Baković said,
April 14, 2009 @ 8:07 pm
@ Wells Hansen and Craig Russell: I suppose I may have leapt to the assumption that the only conceivable reason why someone would bother to write a song about "fish sticks" is because it sounds like "fish dicks" (and because that's funny, at least to non-marie-lucie-types). The line "and now my fish sticks are in your face" in particular seems to me inexplicable otherwise. But if you can think of another (better) reason, I'm all ears…
Largo said,
April 15, 2009 @ 12:22 pm
No mention of cork soaking?
marie-lucie said,
April 15, 2009 @ 5:11 pm
EB: I know what "fish sticks" are and have eaten some, but they are not something my anglophone friends and I are used to talking about, so I have to take your and others' word for it that it sounds like "fish dicks" (there may be a regional difference in pronunciation too). I am not saying there is no humour at all in the joke once it is explained to me, but on a scale of funniness it seems to me to be towards the low end, and likely to appeal mostly to barely pubescent boys rather than fully grown men. That said, I think there is also a play on "queer fish" which used to mean just "odd guy" and the former euphemism "queer" for the now generalized, no longer euphemistic "gay".
David in Brooklyn said,
April 18, 2009 @ 12:36 am
"Due to pre-existing Contractual Obligations, we cannot stream this episode until 05.09.09"
But by then I won't care!
anonymous said,
April 19, 2009 @ 11:58 pm
This appears to be the same reason that at a poetry reading recently, the reader was mistaken for saying "breasts" instead of "breaths", disrupting the reading of the poem. As previously mentioned in posts, the "ths" is much more difficult to pronounce than the more common "st" letter combination.
Peter McAndrew said,
January 18, 2010 @ 11:52 pm
I know of a football team that got fined by the league for putting their votes in the paper (after a particularly poorly played game) as Mike, Hunt, Hertz.