The Funny Bone

Dear Dr. Plume,

      How come the bone by your elbow is called a funny bone? I banged it earlier today and it was not very funny. I spilled a whole bowl of soup.

                                                                             Jenny in Valdosta, WA
Dear Jenny,

      Sorry to hear about the soup. I dropped a sandwich today, so I know where you’re coming from.
      I would argue, however, that you might have found your predicament more comedic had the injury resulted in, say, a stack of dried sausages falling on an elderly, kosher woman.
      The funny bone derives it's name from a failed 15th century Chinese fortune-clock maker. When the fortune cookie market soared after most people realized that it is far too elaborate to take apart an entire clock just to get a silly fortune and some lucky lottery numbers (not to mention that it’s a pretty difficult item to include with take out food), his business went belly up. To help pay the bills, he took up stand-up comedy using, as his claim to fame, a newspaper article declaring him the “Shanghai man who think not enough about idea beforehand.” Once he worked the kinks out of his act, he also became popular as the only 15th Century Chinese comedian who solely told jokes involving the bone on his elbow.
      For example:
      “What go quack when I hit it with this part of elbow? (points to elbow) My mother-in-law!”
      And
      “I tell you one thing I can’t stand, mother-in-law’s complaining! She sure is pain in this part of elbow! (points to elbow)”
      While these jokes are not very funny by today’s standards, they are hilarious in their original Cantonese. So naturally, he became very popular for this brand of humor and gradually this bone became named after him, the former fortune-clock maker: Fun-Yee.
      Over the course of generations, Fun-Yee just got bastardized into “funny”, hence funny bone. For the other doctors among you, I am, of course, speaking of the humerus bone. You may be tempted to read into the fact that “humerus” is almost the same word as humorous, but you shouldn’t because there’s actually several letters that have to be replaced and inserted for that to work.

                                                                             Very Truly Yours Me,
                                                                             Dr. Douglas H. Plume*