An inherently funny word is a word that is humorous without context, often more for its phonetic structure than for its meaning.

Vaudeville tradition holds that words with the /k/ sound are funny. A 2015 study at the University of Alberta suggested that the humor of certain nonsense words can be explained by whether they seem rude, and by the property of entropy: the improbability of certain letters being used together in a word. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer posited that humor is a product of one's expectations being violated.