Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Zippy, on the origin of humor:

(#1)

Bill Griffith is fond of playful morphology: here, humorology ‘the study of humor’ and humorologist, plus humorosity ‘humorousness’.

Humorology has sometimes been coined playfully by others, as has humorosity, but the main net presence of humorology is in connection with the University of Wisconsin at Madison:

Humorology, or “Humo” for short, is an annual juried musical/variety show [begun in 1948] that takes place at the Union Theater of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The competition consists of six original mini musical comedies written, produced and performed by independent companies and overseen by a student-run executive board. (Wikipedia link)

I don’t find any humorology or humorosity elsewhere on the Zippy site (though its search program sometimes misses things). But Zippy strips have other ostentatious derivatives in -osity (especially randomosity ‘randomness’) and other novel formations in -ology (amphibiology, garbology, sanitology).

Three more occurrences of Zippiesque randomosity:

(#2: 5/3/07)

(#3: 11/14/11)

(#4: 2/24/12)

This entry was posted on October 14, 2013 at 8:53 am and is filed under Humor, Linguistics in the comics, Playful morphology, Silliness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.