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11-yr-old erupts in infectious giggles over his National Spelling Bee word and then nails it

He couldn't keep it together, and his joy made everyone laugh.

Scripps National Spelling Bee/Facebook

Kennyi Aouad totally lost it when he tried to say "sardoodledom."




Almost 100 years ago, nine newspapers joined forces to create a national spelling bee to help promote literacy. Now the Scripps National Spelling Bee has become so popular that was televised for 27 years on ESPN before moving to its own network in 2022.

The Scripps National Spelling Bee is a serious competition with students who have studied arduously to memorize root words, phonetic rules and unusual spellings in the hopes of being crowned the nation's spelling champion. The honor also comes with a $50,000 cash prize, so the competition is fierce.

But that didn't stop one competitor from bursting into giggles at being asked to spell the word "sardoodledom."

During the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee, 11-year-old Kennyi Aouad approached the microphone with serious concentration when it was his turn to spell. But when the judges told him the word he was to spell and he repeated it, he burst out laughing.

"Sardoodledom" isn't a word most of us have ever even heard, much less recognize. (It means "mechanically contrived plot structure and stereotyped or unrealistic characterization in drama"—basically "melodrama"—according to Merriam-Webster.) It does sound a bit funny saying it out loud, and even one of the judges started giggling at the young contestant's reaction to it.

Watch Kennyi lose it repeatedly as he tries to make it through his turn:

Despite how serious the competition is, these kids are still just kids and people loved seeing his joyful reaction to a silly-sounding word.

"His laugh!! ❤️ I love that in the seriousness of spelling bees, he was able to be himself. This made me smile!" wrote one person.

"So cute. Smart with a touch of sense of humour," wrote another.

"Talk about breaking the tension!!" shared another. "I love it and he got it right!"

If you're curious, Kennyi placed 34th in that year's spelling bee. He would go on to compete again, however, and tied for 5th place in the 2009 bee.


This article originally appeared on 9.28.23

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Joy

See if you can watch these 'Magic Flute' videos without laughing at least once

It seems that few can make it through the Magic Flute Challenge without losing it.

@ilse.faith/TikTok

The Magic Flute challenge has people trying to stifle their giggles.

They say laughter is the best medicine, and it's true. When we're in a bad mood, it's practically miraculous how a good laugh can lift us out of it. Giggles can help relieve stress, which is good for our overall health, and as Patch Adams taught us, raucous joy can even help our bodies heal.

However, research shows that adults only laugh an average of 15 times a day, compared to children who laugh around 400 times a day. So we can all use some ways to laugh more.

Ironically, one almost surefire way to laugh is to be in a group of people who are trying to keep a straight face when something funny happens. There's something about trying not to laugh that makes it nearly impossible not to, especially when you're with others.

The "Magic Flute Challenge" illustrates this phenomenon beautifully—and hilariously.

This challenge is simple—a group of people takes turns trying to sing a piece of the famous aria from Mozart's "The Magic Flute" with no one laughing. Sounds easy enough, but some people's singing is…well, it can't really be called singing. Squawking, perhaps? Imitating a rooster with a bad cold? Whatever it is, hearing someone attempt to opera sing and having it come out sounding like a wounded animal is so funny, especially when everyone is supposed to keep a straight face.

Take this video from Reddit's Contagious Laughter subreddit (make sure you watch with sound up from the beginning):

How long would you last? I lost it at the strangled rooster 😆
by u/enacheionut1991 in ContagiousLaughter

This is one of those videos where picking one person to watch the whole time makes it funnier and funnier. Not one of them lasted through the whole thing. Can't really blame them.

Here's another iteration of the same challenge from @ilse.faith on TikTok. Again, no one survives.

Tuck this one away for when you're trying to figure out an activity the whole family can do together, or for when you and your friends are bored, or for when everyone in the household is cranky. Instant mood lift, right here.

Keep laughing, everyone. It really is good for us.

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10 uplifting things that made us smile this week

Buitengebieden/Twitter, Gurjiv,/Twitter, Phil Gates/Dr. Beth Nichols/Twitter,

The internet can be a complicated place, but when you dig beneath social media's problematic elements, there are so many gems of joy to be found. From personal triumphs to adorable animal encounters to delightful moments caught on film, here are 10 things guaranteed to bring a smile to your face this week.

1. Woman celebrates becoming a published author at age 83.

Mary V. Macauley said she couldn't even send an email a short time ago, and now she's officially a published author in her ninth decade of life. It's never too late to follow your dreams, kids. (You can find her book "Free to Be Me" here.)

2. Daughter surprises her parents with her optometry school acceptance letter, and their reaction is priceless.

Her dad reading "Dear Gurjiv, COMMA" is just pure delight. So much joy in this family.


(Read the whole story here.)

3. Dog insists on joining a couple's first dance as a married couple.

Doggo doesn't want to be left out of the lovefest! Equally impressive and adorable.

4. Groom swats his bride's face mid-wedding ceremony, and it's actually hilariously sweet.

He was saving her from a bee! His expression after the instinctual swat is precious, their mutual laughter is adorable, and the officiant's "There was a bee" clarification for the people in the back is just perfectly timed.


5. Woman shared a sweet story of beloved children's author Eric Carle's unexpected response to her missing cat poster.

Eric Carle, the creator of more than 70 children's books including "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," didn't just help a stranger look for her cat, but also supported her emotionally through the whole ordeal. She didn't find out until afterward that the kind man who had helped her was famous children's author. (Read the whole story here.)

Lara B. Sharp


6. The same judge who gave a drug dealer a second chance swears him in as a lawyer 16 years later.

Judge Todd Russell Perkins saw something in Edward Martell when he showed up to his court as a drug dealer 16 years ago. Martell got his life together and became a lawyer this month—a beautiful story of second chances and redemption. (Read the whole story here.)

7. Disabled man celebrates overcoming obstacles to achieve independent living

Reddit user u/A-a-ron98 shared his celebratory announcement that he'd moved into his own place, living 100% independently. "Adulting" is hard for many, but for people with disabilities, being able to live independently can be a significant challenge. The support on Reddit for this win was beautiful to see (in addition to the education of folks who didn't understand that a disabled person can have a job.)


8. A woman who died at age 97 had her fudge recipe engraved on her tombstone.

There are people who take their secret recipes to their graves, and then there's Kathryn Andrews, who had her fudge recipe engraved on hers. "She really loved people," her family said. "She would take fudge whenever people got together." Gonna have to try out this recipe now! (Read the whole story here.)

via Find a Grave


9. Donkey recognizes the girl who raised it and holy moly the reunion is beautiful.

Who says animals don't have memories or emotions? Watch this donkey snuggle up to the girl who raised it and try not to smile. (Sound up.)

10. Microscopic image shows that grass is always happy to see us.

Okay, so they're actually "vascular bundles" that look like they're smiling at us, but still. How fun is this? The image originally came from naturalist Phil Gates, who shares wonders of the microscopic world on his blog "Beyond the Human Eye," and was shared by computational biologist Dr. Bethany Nichols on Twitter. Amazing.

As we work on our individual and collective challenges, let's also remember to celebrate the best of humanity wherever we see it. Joy is energizing, and the more we focus on what's good in the world, the more vitality and strength we'll have to confront the problems that need fixing to make it a better place for everyone.

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A good laugh is contagious. These New Zealand parrots seem to agree.

When researcher Raoul Schwing went up to the valley, a bird tried to take apart his car.

Photo from iStock.

That bird, a kea, was precisely the reason he was there. Keas are large parrots that live in the mountainous areas of New Zealand's South Island. They're wicked smart and armed with a beak like a Swiss army knife, which makes them great at dismantling puzzles (and Schwing's poor car).

They're also highly social and love to play with each other, chasing their bird peers in complex aerial dogfights or hopping across the ground and making a huge variety of whoops and calls. It was those play calls that Schwing was really interested in, a kind of squeaky "bwa-ha-haaaa."

It sounded — well, it sounded a lot like laughter.

Was it laughter Schwing was hearing? That raises a weird question: Can animals even laugh?

Photo from iStock.

Laughter is a difficult concept to study. There are plenty of animals that sound like they’re laughing. Kookaburras, for instance, or hyenas. But a kookaburra’s laugh is territorial, not gleeful, and a hyena’s cackling seems to be the equivalent of a nervous wail, not it enjoying a particularly hilarious joke.

True laughter is as much as message as it is a noise. In humans, it's a way to communicate playfulness or relaxation and a way to infect others with that mood as well. We might laugh at our dates' corny jokes not because they're the next Tig Notaro, but to show we're having a good time. We giggle when we're nervous to let off steam, and we add laugh tracks under sitcoms to invite the audience into the joke.

In this emotional messaging capacity, most animals aren't part of the evolutionary comedy club. But there are some. It turns out that rats enjoy a good tickle. There's tentative evidence dogs might laugh. Great apes, like chimps or orangutans, seem to laugh too. None of them sounds like human laughter — rats giggle at frequencies too high for humans to hear and chimps sound like they're panting — but they seem to carry that oh-so-important emotional messaging.

But do keas deserve entry into this group? Maybe, says Schwing.

Photo from Raoul Schwing.

When Schwing went to the research sites, he brought with him a specially designed, kea-proof speaker system (no taking apart this one). From a distance, he could use a remote control to play a variety of recorded calls at the kea.

Most didn't seem to have any specific effect, but the play call — that bwa-ha-ha noise — did. When he played it, nearby kea often would turn to each other and begin hopping and playfully chasing each other around. Even solitary birds got into the act, playing with objects or doing aerial acrobatics. In short, the play call definitely seemed to fit the emotional contagion category.

So while it may be going a bit far to label this as laughter as we humans know it, it could at least be a cousin of it.

Schwing and his team published their findings in the journal Current Biology.

These kinds of studies can have a lot of interesting results, but maybe most of all, they remind us how complex animals can be.

Some researchers have used it to study how our brains organize emotion or create a mood; there's even a potential antidepressant currently being tested that got its start from studying laughter in rats. Others have used laughter in the great apes to speculate about our own human roots.

For Schwing and his colleagues, studying the kea's play call gave them a window into the animal's social life. They're planning to continue to study the role of play in the kea's lives.

If nothing else, it's something to think about. "If animals can laugh," said Schwing, "we are not so different from them."

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