Sorry to ask you to think of next year's MLA Convention when 2008's is
barely cold in a San Francisco dumpster, but Philadelphia, December 27-30,
2009, can't wait.  So here is the Call for Papers from the American Humor
Studies Association, which, while ostensibly independent, is a client state
of the Mark Twain Circle:

Inadvertent Humor.

Two examples:  (1) In 1992, a reporter, while testifying before Congress to
defend the role journalists play in an open society, called newspapers the
“fundament of democracy.”  The earthier of “fundament’s” two meanings was
certainly not intended, but the appropriateness of the pun enriched the
testimony, all the more so since nobody present seemed to notice.  (2) The
spell-check program of a popular word-processor offers, when confronted with
any of several misspelled versions of the word “philosopher,” the word
“falsifier” as a potential correction.  One doesn’t know if the program's
spelling algorithms select this word, so mischievously appropriate, or if
some playful programmer exercised creative license.  These are examples of
the kind of found comedy that feeds so much American humor, either in
re-contextualizing as comedy that which was intended to be serious (see
Julia Moore’s verse, much “found poetry,” or even business games such as
“Buzz-word Bingo”), or by playi
ng the dead pan to something intended as humor (see Yankee humor, the
malapropisms of  B.P. Shillaber’s Mrs. Partington, etc.).   Papers or fully
developed abstracts on any aspect of literary humor that mines these comic
veins will be considered if e-mailed to Gregg Camfield,
[log in to unmask], by March 15.

I wonder if anybody will write a paper on the unintentional humor of
"Philadelphia"?