If you’re funny and you know it, you’re probably not funny – and the same goes for theories of humour (like: comedy makes us feel superior, or: it’s about “benign violations” of expectation), which can’t begin to explain the context for humour, or get big laughs out of a tough crowd. Freud was great on “The Joke”, but then again he never played the Glasgow Empire on a Monday night, so what does Freud know? In “Wriggly, Squiffy, Lummox, and Boobs: What Makes Some Words Funny?”, 2019, Chris Westbury and Geoff Hollis narrow the focus. What if humour turned out to be a semantic property of some words and not others? They look closely at a data set of 5,000 words rated for humorousness and find certain patterns – insults are funny, the “oo” vowel is funny, and so are various other phonemes, particularly a hard “k”. As Mike Nichols once put it, “‘Casey’ is a funny name. Robert Taylor is not.” It‘s persuasive stuff, until you add a lot of other words – sense, that is – and begin to wonder what happens to “funny” sounds in any extended context. Comedians on tour know all about this: “funny” can be shared, but it isn’t universal. Things don’t have to make one kind of sense, of course, and most comedy doesn’t, because it relies on inversion and doubling up, either for the hell of it, or to make a point. The Nonsense Songs (1872) of Edward Lear turned the world upside down and “The Jumblies”, famously, went to sea in a sieve: it’s delightful nonsense, because sieves can’t be boats, but it’s also a parody of Victorian adventuring, so the innocence has a sharp edge to it. Even sharper are the thrills we get from tales of the impossibly macabre, such as Florence Sunnen’s “The Hook” (Nightjar Press, 2018), in which a bored undergraduate eats himself. The narrator watches her brother disappear, with his parents’ approval. Real food is still on the table, but the limbless consumerist won’t touch it. No one says “Stop!”. Are they mad, or are we?