Why don’t cannibals eat clowns?

By Mark Daniell

25/01/2010

Isn’t it funny how in English we have a single word that can mean either humorous or odd? Well in a word, no, it’s not funny; at best it’s peculiar, but it’d never raise a smile. And yet peculiar it is. Peculiar because it appear to be a phenomenon almost exclusive to the English language, as if there’s something inside us English speakers that immediately associates the peculiar with the ha ha, minting them to either side of the funny coin. 

Do the Portuguese have such a coin? Or the Swedes? Apparently not. If a Greek were to describe something paranormal, everyone would know they meant weird. In England, it could be the start of a joke. Indications of this association overseas are scant: lately the Germans have started to use komisch as a slang term akin to our ‘random’, and the French have the expression‘drôle de...’ which switches from humorous to weird when paired with a preposition, but for complete interchangeability between meanings, English stands alone. The question is, has it always been so? And if not, why then did the convergence happen in English and nowhere else?

The word ‘funny’ was adopted to mean ‘odd’ sometime in the early nineteenth century, and  remains a transition which isn’t too difficult to accept since oddities have often made us laugh. The unexpected is, after all, one of the three fundamentals of humour (the other two being the out of place, and anything to do with poo.) And yet contrast this with plain old ‘peculiar’. By itself, what’s peculiar isn’t necessarily a recipe for laughter. So for example if aliens landed outside parliament tomorrow, that wouldn’t be funny. If however they then trotted out of their flying saucer and said, ‘wotcha, I’ve got a burning O-ring from last night’s curry, can you spare a Michael Bubleh CD?’ That is funny. See the difference?

Humour is a side effect of a highly developed brain. The usefulness of a big brain is that it’s good at spotting patterns. It can tell when winter is on the way, it can tell the rate at which food is being consumed, it can forecast problems and solve them before they arise. If you’ve got a big brain you stand a better chance of surviving, hence of reproducing and hence of evading extinction. A developed brain can see the patterns in mathematics and apply them to the interaction between magnetised stones and coils of wire and broadcast Loose Women. A developed brain means progress. 

So as humans we’ve evolved big old brains that are good at spotting patterns. Sometimes these patterns are so thick, so checkered and interwoven, that deciphering them is only achievable through the unconscious. The humour arrives when, while unfurling these reams of patterns, we are surprised by the lily-white Scottish buttocks that have been trembling underneath. When your brain spots patterns unwittingly, it doesn’t take much to trip it up.

Some evolutionists believe a sense of humour is a reward for such intelligence. If you’re good at spotting patterns, and so are more frequently surprised, you laugh more. And just as flavour entices animals to eat well, laughter promotes the search for patterns, and so the development of bigger brains.

But none of this has got us any closer to the word funny. ‘Fun’ or ‘fon’ in Middle English meant to make a fool of, to play a joke on. Still today: to make fun of. Its subsequent derivation ‘funny’ popped up some time in the eighteenth century to mean ‘filled with fun’. If a soup filled with water becomes watery, then a teenager faceplanting into gravel becomes funny. 

And so right from the start we can see an association with melancholy. Sure it’s funny to trick someone into peeing on an electric fence, but not for the peer, nor the fence. Perhaps that’s where the ambiguity of the word first took seed. To mock someone is funny, but you simultaneously feel some sympathy for them, which is peculiar, if you see what I mean. Could funny peculiar have arisen from this dichotomy? Who knows? But if so, how come it’s so specific to the English language? Don’t the Italians laugh at diners who suck spaghetti so hard it whips arrabbiata sauce into their eye? Don’t the Japanese chuckle at children with broken tamagotchis? Don’t the Germans wheeze asthmatic belly chortles at a spot of schadenfreude? Of course they do. The difference over here is, since its establishment as a synonym for strange, the word funny has taken on a further role in the English language. Witness its usage in the following lyrics:

Ain’t it funny how time slips away?

Funny how my memory slips while looking over manuscripts of unpublished rhyme.

It’s a funny old world.

Funny means strange, but with a resigned acceptance. It says: that’s weird, but then that’s the way it is. It’s as if in English the word is trying to tackle the more intangible emotions of human existence. Which would explain why it has not performed this metamorphosis in other languages. Sure, Komisch and Drôle can mean peculiar, but these nations have outlets for their angst, namely the German angst, and the French bof. Meanwhile, English has steered clear of labelling such emotions. We can do happy and we can do sad. We can even do fed up. But a word to describe the emotions attached to sitting on a wet rock spinning through the infinite blackness of space is just not in our vocabulary. Which is funny.

So is it funny how in English we have the same word for humorous and odd? Well yes it is funny; it’s fucking hilarious. It’s a sick joke we’ve played on ourselves to make the gap between now and death pass more quickly. After all, if we didn’t have this overlap we’d never have the nervous pause after hearing the line: You know what’s funny about rabies?