ABSTRACT
If a group of people were to be asked what they understood by the term ‘word play’, it would be pretty safe to say that most of them would answer in terms of jokes and puns. What springs to the mind of most people is probably a picture of someone telling a joke or interrupting a conversation with a witty aside or a pun. Quite often, word play is not necessarily a deliberate occurrence. It is perfectly possible to make people laugh quite unintentionally by simply mis-saying something. Someone slips up, says something wrong, and others, for some reason, find this terribly funny. Suddenly we find ourselves faced with an underdog, someone who has slipped up, and who has thus temporarily become our inferior. This, in itself, is funny.
