Word Salad Humor

"Carrageenan, Monteljohn. Can you detect me to the nearest bus stamp?"

—Senor Cardgage, Homestar Runner

Using Inherently Funny Words or random gibberish to humorous effect. Often used in Surreal Humor.

Occasions in which Word Salad Humor may be employed:

• Dada Comics
• Non Sequitur Thud
• Real Dreams Are Weirder
• Surreal Humor
• Talkative Loon
• True Art Is Incomprehensible
• Word Salad Lyrics
• YouTube Poop

Examples of Word Salad Humor include:

Advertising

• Rowntree's "Randoms" campaign had people dropping the names of the various shapes of the sweets into otherwise normal dialogue.

Comic Books

• The Happy Noodle Boy one-shot comics in Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez
  • Jhonen Vasquez's works in general have a lot of this.

Fan Fiction

• In addition to his usual gross-out humour, the infamous Comics Nix also makes heavy use of this trope. Typically, he'll use a mish-mash of completely unrelated and often obscure words to describe something or someone, occasionally hiding exactly one relevant term among them.

Film

• This wonderful picture from Godzilla's Revenge.

Music

• Zabadak:

Zabadak,
Karakakora kakarakak
Zabadak
Shai shai skagalak

• Bulbous Bouffant by The Vestibules takes the surrealism inherent in the sound of words and eventually turns it into a kind of poetry.
• The song "Hubba Hubba Zoot Zoot" by Carumba.
• Comedy music act Worm Quartet's lead singer (and sole member) Shoebox has numerous songs that consist entirely of syntactically correct gibberish. If you listen long enough, things like "my prostitute has evaporated" almost start to make sense.
• "Drinking Out Of Cups" by Dan Deacon, a spoken word piece that later became better known when Liam Lynch made a short animation to go with it. Passages like "Who's this guy? Mr. Balloons? Mr. Balloon hands?" and "I'm in love with the seahorses. They're fuckin' unreal. I love them, they're like all the clocks..." were the result of him acting like a macho Long Islander stereotype and spontaneously responding to things he saw while watching a TV on mute (although some people have other ideas about its origins).

New Media

• Homestar Runner, full stop, with characters often inserting bizarre malapropisms randomly into perfectly normal dialog. There are also the characters Homsar and Senor Cardgage, who only ever speak this way.
• LOLcats seems to revolve around extracting humour from posting pictures of cats alongside AOL-speak.
  • The earliest "Caturday" pictures had proper language and were still plenty funny, making this another instance of Flanderization.
• This is the appeal of most YouTube Poop.
• The Llama Song. Llama llama cheesecake llama tablet brick potato llama.
• Badger, badger, badger, badger. Mushroom, mushroom! Snake!
• Spam poetry, composed of the randomized text which spammers use to trip up filters. The "Hello Muscle palace" message here is an example.

Television

• Many of The Muppet Show's musical numbers were acapella non-verbals arranged for a song-like quality. Especially funny when done with characters whose speech is incomprehensible. Even moreso if the original is in a language the audience doesn't understand anyway.
• Taken to its logical conclusion by Eric Idle in the Rutland Weekend Television sketch 'Gibberish', which takes a typical television interview, then simply removes the dialogue and replaces it with random silly words.

"I see. Rapidly piddlepot strumming Hanover peace pudding mouse rumpling cuddly corridor cabinets?"
"Sick in a cup! Toejam whisper tap Sunderland shower-curtain, ice wallpaper cups grounchingly rubber king wrapped butter kissing-feathers definitely pheasantry daughter successfully douche dinner-bottom."
"Machine wrapped with butter?"
"Machine wrapped with butter."

• Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Cartoon Planet just loved this trope, with segments featuring Space Ghost, Zorak, and Brak just saying a single word, such as "pants", back-and-forth to each other for no reason.
• From Monty Python's Flying Circus (one of a vastly enormous number of examples):

Raymond Luxury-Yacht: That's not my name.
Interviewer: I'm sorry, Raymond Luxury Yach-t.
Raymond Luxury-Yacht: No, no, no. It's spelled Raymond Luxury-Yach-t, but it's pronounced 'Throat-Warbler Mangrove'.
Interviewer: You're a very silly man, and I'm not going to interview you.

• In Gilmore Girls, after Lorelai has just pointed out to Emily and Rory that both "oy" and "poodles" are very funny words

Lorelai: In fact, if you put oy and poodle together in the same sentence, you'd have a great new catch phrase, you know? Like, oy with the poodles already. So from now on, when the perfect circumstances arise, we will use our favorite new catch phrase.
Rory: Oy with the poodles already.

Theatre

• In Dogg's Hamlet by Tom Stoppard, most of the characters speak a language called "Dogg", which consists of English words given different meanings.

Web Comics

• Occurs frequently in White Ninja Comics
• The Chef Brian strips from Ctrl+Alt+Del most definitely qualify as this.
• Twisp and Catsby from Penny Arcade are basically Chef Brian as two people. (Or possibly Chef Brian is them as one, depending on which came first. This led to accusations of Plagiarism against Tim Buckley, though Chef Brian came first).
• Known as Random-Access Humor in Sonichu. It's horrendously unfunny, even when compared to other examples of Word Salad Humor.
• Ozy and Millie, occasionally. Usually from Millie. "Armadillo! Armadillo! The cheese from Zimbabwe has lugubriously flattened my popcorn!"
• George Washington tried this once just to see if it's funny. It was.

Web Original

• Grey Wolf's schtick in AH Dot Com the Series is basically halfway between this and Non Sequitur Thud.
• Phonetic "translations" of foreign-language songs misheard into the listener's native language often fall into this. "My loony bun is fine Benny Lava!" "Distort that tart in my nub!"
• Awesome in Kansattica does this sometimes.
• Some of the answers in Tims Chemistry Exam fall into this trope, such as "fork + shoe = spleen".
• Bad Lip Reading, a youtube channel that essentially does elaborate gag dubs of pop music videos, uses a lot of this kind of humor. Witness Rebecca Black singing about gang fights and chicken, Ludacris claiming to be a magic man with a magic goose, and Miley Cyrus wanting to "get dumb and bang a wizard".
• @Horse_ebooks, a bot that tweets random, broken sentences from ebooks about horses (in a rather pathetic attempt at advertising a shady ebook website). It's followed by over sixty thousand people.
• Andrew Huang and fellow youtuber Gunarolla have a series of shorts called "We Are What You Tweet", with dialogue submitted by viewers via twitter. Conversations full of wacky non sequiturs ensue.

Western Animation

• Rejected's first sketch basically consists of a man saying "Mah spoon is too big" in various inflections, then an anthropomorphic banana appears and yells "I am a banana!", followed by a vacuum cleaner noise. It still manages to be hilarious.
  • "Tuesday's coming. Did you bring your coat?"
    • "I'm feeling fat, and sassy."
    • "I am the Queen of France."

Memetic Mutation

• A semi-legendary post at the 4chan in response to a trailer for The Conduit: "Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?"
  • “You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve been further even more decided to use even go need to do look more as anyone can. Can you really be far even as decided half as much to use go wish for that? My guess is that when one really been far even as decided once to use even go want, it is then that he has really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like. It’s just common sense.”