Resource Guide for the Classroom: "Rock Out with Your Schnoz Out: The COVID Play"

Linguistic Comedy

Linguistic comedy has traditionally been associated with "verbal jokes...based on virtually any level of language structure, namely, sound, word, or sentence." Including "various deviations from the normative pronunciation may serve as a basis for imputed or real accents associated, often falsely, with joke targets” (The Encyclopedia of Humor Studies vol. 2, 458). 

In Rock Out with Your Schnoz Out: The COVID Play, a degree of linguistic humor can be found in the scene "Anatomy of a Mask." This scene features a university professor in the year 2233 giving a lecture about COVID-19. Throughout the lecture, the professor uses nonsense words like "prolifignant...advention...definititively...perfluated...[and] eradicalization" to represent mis-information that was widespread during the pandemic. Alongside these nonsense words, the professor uses many humorous words that served as nicknames for the pandemic. These words include "The Great Pandemi Moore [and] the Pananaramabangbang." These words all serve as "verbal jokes" and thus constitute linguistic comedy.