Tag: humorous speech contest

Secret Comedy Writing Technique – Spoonerisms

In my on-going mini series Secret Comedy Writing Techniques I’m going to briefly cover Spoonerisms. A spoonerism is a play on words in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched. It is named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), Warden of New College, Oxford, who was notoriously prone to oming out with these …

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Secret Comedy Writing Technique – Colemanballs

The next entry in my mini series Secret Comedy Writing Techniques is the technique Colemanballs. This is a term coined by the British satirical magazine Private Eye. It describes verbal gaffes made by (usually British) sports commentators. As you will see they’re very similar to malapropisms, as I mention in a previous post. The term …

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Secret Comedy Writing Technique – Goldwynisms

In my on-going mini series Secret Comedy Writing Techniques I’m going to deal with Goldwynisms. To give you a quick context Film Studio owner Samuel Goldwyn of M.G.M was famous for his own version of malapropisms and various speech errors which ended up being called: “Goldwynisms”. The Wikipedia definition is as follows: “a humorous statement …

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Secret Comedy Writing Technique – Oxymorons

Here’s the next part in my on-going mini series Secret Comedy Writing Techniques, in this post I’m covering Oxymorons. And no, they’re not a type of stupid cattle. That’s Oxenmoron. Anyway, Wikipedia gives us the following definition for Oxymoron: “An oxymoron (plural oxymorons or, more rarely, oxymora) is a figure of speech that combines two …

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Secret Comedy Writing Technique – Funny Names

I decided to write a follow-up to my last post Secret Comedy Writing Technique – Funny Words. As I said before you don’t have to use this technique at all in order to be funny, but it’s certainly worth being aware of. This post focuses on funny names and is an area that frequently pops …

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