The creation of humorous lexicon in Les Luthiers

Abstract

The creation of lexicon with a humorous purpose constitutes a special form of verbal humor. In a humorous neologism the form of the resultant word is a decisive factor upon evaluating the humorous efficacy of this artifice. This research intends to examine the morphological procedures that lead to the creation of humorous lexicon and, at the same time, analyze to what extent these are distanced themselves from the morphological procedures that usually generate new words accepted into the Spanish lexicon. With this aim, the research analyzes the lexical creations that appear in the work of the Argentinian group Les Luthiers and classifies them according to their origin in productive or creative procedures. These latter turned out to have a slight prevalence when analyzing the total number of cases. In this work, distinct procedures within each one of these categories are described and different examples taken from Les Luthiers are reviewed.