Japanese giggle words
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Japanese giggle words
Daniel Morales has a fun article in Japan Times (7/2/21): "‘PPAP,’ ‘golden jewels’ and other words that make the Japanese giggle". It begins:
Unintentional comedy is actually relatively easy to pull off. All you have to do is trip and fall.
Intentionally getting a laugh, on the other hand, takes practice. Especially in a second language. What’s funny in Japan may be different from what’s funny in other countries, but one common thread is that humor can be found in the way you wield the language — any language — not just ドタバタ喜劇 (dotabata kigeki, slapstick).
Knowing the funny words, so to speak, can give students of Japanese a leg up and, fortunately for us, in 2019 the online comedy site オモコロ (Omocoro) conducted an extremely “scientific” survey of 356 Japanese-speaking individuals on the internet to determine the funniest Japanese words. What it found suggests that there are certain patterns that make some words funnier than others in Japanese.
The first pattern of words the site examines makes logical sense: 言葉の響きが面白い (kotoba no hibiki ga omoshiroi, words with funny sounds). The sound of words alone are funny: 意味を知らなくても笑える (Imi o shiranakute mo waraeru, You can laugh [at them] even if you don’t know the meaning).
This category includes words like 毛むくじゃら (kemukujara, covered in hair), クルトン (kuruton, crouton), モヒート (mohīto, mojito), 一本糞 (ipponguso, a long strand of poop), パイナポー (painapō, pineapple), パンティ (panti, panties) and ウーピーゴルドバーグ (Ūpī Gorudobāgu, Whoopi Goldberg).
One interesting note is the strength of the パ行 (pagyō, syllables in the “pa” column of the Japanese syllabary). There’s something inherently funny about the 破裂音 (haretsuon, plosive sound) they make.
This could explain why Pikotaro’s “PPAP” became the comedic juggernaut that it did in 2016. Just look at all those plosives in ペンパイナポーアッポーペン (pen painapō appō pen, pen pineapple apple pen).
One thing Omocoro neglects to mention is that many of these words are 外来語 (gairaigo, words of foreign origin). Perhaps there’s something intrinsically funny about the unfamiliarity of these sounds to the Japanese?
Another category the site found was 言葉と意味のギャップ (kotoba to imi no gyappu, the gap between words and their meanings). This category proves that both 外来語 and native Japanese compounds can get laughs.
One funny word is 墓標 (bohyō, gravestone/grave marker). Omocoro explains the humor like this: 人が死んでるのに「ボヒョー！」はちょっと不謹慎でバカっぽいから (Hito ga shinderu no ni ‘bohyō’ wa chotto fukinshin de bakappoi kara, Somebody is dead, but the pronunciation bohyō is a bit silly and ridiculous).
There’s also a word in this category that almost everyone should be familiar with: 炊飯器 (suihanki, rice cooker). Omocoro provides this explanation for the humor: 音の弱々しさと、見た目のスマートさと、熱や重さの仰々しさと、炊きあがる米の優しさがちぐはぐだから (Oto no yowayowashisa to, mitame no sumātosa to, netsu ya omosa no gyōgyōshisa to, takiagaru kome no yasashisa ga chiguhagu dakara, [it’s funny] because the gentleness of the pronunciation, the sleekness of how a rice cooker looks, the grandiosity of its heat and weight, and the pleasantness of freshly steamed rice are all mismatched).
…
And, of course, there’s the more obvious, low-hanging fruit: The word most respondents listed as funniest was a certain part of the male anatomy — 金玉 (kintama, “balls”) — which is funny because of the fact that they have nothing to do with money but include the characters for gold (金) and jewels (玉).
Omocoro concludes its article with staff competing in a word game somewhat similar to Cards Against Humanity, giving the winner the chance to choose the funniest combination of words. The winner put together a plosive-laden 外来語 with a funny Japanese animal: パワータニシ (pawā tanishi). The translation is “power pond snail” and is actually quite funny in English as well, thanks in part to an accidental alliteration.
The website Quora has a more serious discussion of a similar topic: 一番おもしろい単語は何ですか？ (Ichiban omoshiroi tango wa nan desu ka, What is the funniest word?). Here the participants include words from foreign languages like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” “inflammable” and “пукать,” which is apparently pronounced プゥーカチ (pūkachi) and means “to fart” in Russian.
As far as Japanese words go, the responders do provide some physical comedy with words such as うんこ (unko, poop), おっぱい (oppai, boobs) and どや! (doya!, a sort of self-satisfied way to say “There ya go!”), but another person offers up 整備 (seibi, maintenance) because of the breadth of compounds it can be used in belies its simplicity: 環境整備 (kankyō seibi, environmental improvement), 法整備 (hōseibi, legislation), 整備士 (seibishi, mechanic), 施設整備 (shisetsu seibi, facilities maintenance), 道路整備 (dōro seibi, road maintenance), and 書類整備 (shorui seibi, document management).
…
Variety is a critical element of humor, so we should endeavor to expand our vocabulary and seek out new and interesting combinations to amuse and entertain. Being familiar with these patterns and strategies can help students develop an ear and an eye for what will make people laugh in Japanese. But it’s a relief to know that a well-timed fart will add a little levity, no matter where you are on the planet.
Some folks, like myself and one of my favorite graduate students, think that farts are intrinsically funny, but others who are more fastidious, like my son and my brother, both of whom are named Thomas, and another of my favorite graduate students, don't think they're funny at all, and avoid them or any mention of them at all costs. To each their own (also here, end of penultimate paragraph).
Etymological afterword
pì 屁 ("fart")
From Proto-Sino-Tibetan *pja-n/t/s (“fart; shit”). Cognate with Tibetan ཕྱེན (phyen), འཕྱེན ('phyen, “flatulence”), Jingpho hpyet (“to fart”).
(source) VHM: By extension, "buttocks".
Old English feortan, ultimately from PIE *perd- (source also of Old High German ferzan, Old Norse freta, Danish fjerte, Sanskrit pard, Greek perdein, Lithuanian perdžiu, persti, Russian perdet), of imitative origin.
(source)
Talk about plosives!
Suggested readings
- "Amazing things you can do with the Japanese writing system" (7/1/19)
- "'Take off your pants and fart'" (3/23/21)
- "Stream of consciousness blather" (4/4/12)
- "Bull Fart" (9/30/09)
- "Full fart" (9/16/14)
- "Artsy-fartsy" (8/2/18)
- "Odoriferous Mandarin term for 'copycat'" (4/1821)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
Bathrobe said,
July 3, 2021 @ 6:57 am
Speaking of farts, I remember an extremely ancient TV comedy program in which someone farted and then another person did a grotesque imitation of a horse's facial expression (hard to describe). The pun here was "馬馬馬 uma uma uma "horse horse horse", also interpretable as うま、うま、うま！uma uma uma!"delicious delicious delicious!"
Matt McIrvin said,
July 3, 2021 @ 7:39 am
In old American comedy lore it's said that words with K sounds in them, especially repeated K sounds, are inherently funny. Kokomo, Cucamonga, Schenectady, etc. Is this different for every language?
Trogluddite said,
July 3, 2021 @ 10:15 am
Coincidentally enough, I recently finished the book 'Does It Fart?', a collection of zoological tidbits about animal flatulence (I like to read at least one silly book for every couple of serious ones). Both when purchasing it, and while reading it on the bus home, it was interesting to notice how many people couldn't resist a grin or snigger merely upon seeing the title. When I was paying the bookshop cashier, she commented along the lines of; "All of us have an inner ten-year-old boy, don't we?"
"…something intrinsically funny about the unfamiliarity of these sounds…" rings very true to me. I grew up around humour involving putting on strange voices and creating neologisms, especially neologisms illegal in our monoglot BrE phonotactics. I suspect that hereditary autism may have played some part in this; since mine manifests compulsive bouts of glossolallia (speaking in tongues). This seems rather like a grown-up form of baby babbling, and has somewhat consistent phonotactic rules, including but in no way limited to those of my native tongue. The compulsion to do it is related to stress relief, and usually ends when I can't squeeze any more out for laughing. Consonant clusters which to my untrained ear sound vaguely Scandinavian or African seem to tickle me the most. Notably, the plosives noted in the main article, and Matt's 'K'-sounds also feature very prominently – maybe releasing trapped gas is just intrinsically humorous, whichever part of the body is doing the trapping and releasing!?
Chau said,
July 3, 2021 @ 10:42 am
Repeated P sounds are funny. I recall a very old Red Skelton TV show in which he, dressed like a clown, said "I am from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania," pronouncing the two P's with such an explosive effort as if he was going to spit – drawing laughter from the audience.
In colloquial Taiwanese, pha-phi-phu-phe-pho (borrowed from the Japanese パ column) means 'diarrhea', that is onomatopoeic at its truest. Diarrhea is an uncontrollable gastro-intestinal discharge. It is similar to fart, just the wet, non-gaseous kind.
poftim said,
July 3, 2021 @ 11:55 am
Matt,
In Romanian, "cacophony", the utterance of repeated "ca" (or similar) syllables, even across word boundaries, is a big deal. Some people go to great lengths to avoid it, even in situations where you really can't, such as "Biserica Catolică" (Catholic Church). I've asked Romanians why "ca-ca" verges on taboo, and it seems to be a combination of "ca-ca" being inherently funny and the fact that "căcat" means "shit".
As far as I can tell, Romanian speakers have no problems with other repetitions like "mămăligă" or "pepene" or "lalelele" or "de dedesubt".
Michael Watts said,
July 3, 2021 @ 5:01 pm
Do they call it "cacophony", or is that your term? "Cacophony" is a straightforward arrangement of the roots kak-, "bad", and phon-, "sound". It has nothing to do with any specific sound, though kakos may be cognate with căcat.
Artyom Barmazel said,
July 4, 2021 @ 9:59 am
I liked the pun with "low-hanging fruit"
poftim said,
July 4, 2021 @ 10:17 am
Michael Watts,
"Cacofonie" is what Romanians call this (I should have used the Romanian word). So it has a more specific meaning than what we think of as cacophony in English.
Sam Spackman said,
July 5, 2021 @ 2:48 am
I saw a twitter comment the other day that said it is better to find farts funny than not funny because you encounter them in life no matter what.
Philip Taylor said,
July 6, 2021 @ 4:05 am
Trogluddite — "a collection of zoological tidbits about animal flatulence". When I first read this, I was surprised, as I thought that I recalled that you were a native <Br.E> speaker, but now that you have confirmed this in another thread, may I ask why "tidbit" and not "titbit", the latter being the normal form [*] in <Br.E> in my experience ?
[*] The form tidbit is now chiefly North American.[OED]
Trogluddite said,
July 6, 2021 @ 6:40 am
@Philip Taylor
I couldn't say why for sure, and I am now questioning whether I even consistently use the same spelling (a brief search of my computer turned yielded zero occurences of either). Until now, I hadn't though of the 'd' variant as being from across the Atlantic, and I can easily believe that I have picked it up from US writing given my reading habits. Since both seem equally correct to me, it's entirely possible that I favoured 'tidbit' simply because I subconsciously still find 'tit' childishly smutty or dislike the aesthetics of three 't's in a six-letter word.
Trogluddite said,
July 6, 2021 @ 6:42 am
PS: Please excuse the botched edit of "turned up" to "yielded"!
Josh R said,
July 6, 2021 @ 8:04 pm
Just to head off the seemingly inevitable comments about American prudishness…
https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2012/04/tidbits-and-titbits.html?m=1
Ronan Maye said,
July 8, 2021 @ 1:05 am
I might be getting some details slightly wrong here, but the news recently reported that some official was fired from the Japanese government after suggesting that someone could be an オリンピック (olympig) at the olympic ceremony. At the time, I didn't think much of it, but I just noticed that it both is a 外来語 and contains a plosive in the pa row, so maybe that's why the official thought it was funny (the sound might have amused him). It's just like the pineapple pen thing, which made no sense to me when I saw it, but this explanation really clarifies the cultural relativity of sounds, which I had never thought too much about before.
R. Fenwick said,
July 8, 2021 @ 10:27 pm
@Sam Spackman: from an anthropological point of view, I imagine the reason why fart jokes remain so popular – despite intense prescriptive disdain from an arrogant minority – is exactly because they're fundamentally (forgive the pun) relatable. Everyone everywhere does it. There's a short Ubykh story, tactfully entitled Un talent de Dədarəq° by Georges Dumézil, that's literally all about a man who can fart on command. A short excerpt:
The visiting pasha asked: "What's this you're saying?"
"This guest here has a habit…"
"What is it he does?"
"He farts at will."
"Is he really able to fart any time he wants?"
"He farts every time he wants."
"If that's the case, then when I go home, let him come with me, and if he farts at every step, I'll give him a lira every time."
[So they left, and] as they were travelling together to the pasha's house, at every step, Dədarəqʷ farted once, and at every fart, the pasha gave him a lira. He did this for forty steps [in a row] and the pasha had to give him forty lira.
[At last] he said, "That's enough, Dədarəqʷ bey!"
"Then you can have these ones for free!" said Dədarəqʷ, and he farted several more times, one right after the other.