The Language of Humour
The Language of Humour
The Language of Humour
TITLE NO 16
Ian A. Gordon
A LINGUISTIC GUIDE TO ENGLISH POETRY 4
Geoffrey N. Leech
AN INTRODUCTION TO 7
MODERN ENGLISH WORD-FORMATION
Valerie Adams
COHESION IN ENGLISH 9
M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan
AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH 10
TRANSFORMATIONAL SYNTAX
Rodney Huddleston
MEANING AND FORM 11
Dwight Bolinger
DESIGNS IN PROSE 12
Walter Nash
STYLE IN FICTION 13
Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short
THE RHYTHMS OF ENGLISH POETRY 14
Derek Attridge
MESSAGE AND EMPHASIS 15
Josef Taglicht
THE LANGUAGE OF HUMOUR 16
Walter Nash
GOOD ENGLISH AND GRAMMARIAN 17
Sidney Greenbaum
RHYTHMIC PHRASING IN ENGLISH VERSE 18
Richard D. Cureton
THE INFINITIVE IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH 19
Patrick Duffiey
The language of humour
WALTER NASH
Senior Lecturer in English Studies.
University of Nottingham
~ ~~o~~~~n~~~up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1985 by Longman Group Limited
Sixth impression 1994
Notices
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material herein.
Foreword IX
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xv
I EXPLAINING
E X P L A IN IN G THE
THE JOKE
JOKE I
I. I Stages of explanation: (a) the culture of the joke 2
1.2 Stages of explanation: (b) material facts 4
I .3 Stages of explanation: (c) logic and likelihood 5
1.4 Stages of explanation: (d) the directive of form 6
I .5 Stages of explanation: (e) language 7
1.6 A thesis to begin with 9
From the time that the English Language Series was launched in the
mid 1960s, it has been my ambition to include a volume exploring the
ways in which language resources are exploited to create or enhance
wit, amusement, laughter. For long I was dissuaded from pursuing
such a venture. 'A couple of hundred pages analysing humour,' I was
repeatedly warned, 'and your readers will never smile again.'
The hazards of taking a poem to pieces are bad enough. Will it ever
work again when it is re-assembled? The most admirable and highly
motivated critical purposes can be frustrated in the critic's dissecting
room.
It may seem absurd to display comparable anxieties over the dan-
ger of fatality to a joke. On the one hand, we may feel that jokes are
surely organisms with a great deal of rude robustness, of less delicate
constitution than a lyric. Alternatively (and almost as a corollary) are
jokes actually worth the effort and skill of the dissector's art? Do we
need, in particular, to worry about life-support systems? That is, to
switch the metaphor again from organism to machine, not only may
the act of dismantling reveal merely an array of uninteresting compo-
nents but we would scarcely wish to re-assemble a toy which cannot
(unlike a lyric) repeat the joy it could of its nature evoke but once.
In fact, the premises of the preceding paragraph are multiply false.
In the first place, there is a similar degree of delicate art in the well-
formed joke and the well-formed poem. And both - the products of
Ogden Nash and Ted Hughes, of Perelman and Frost - yield fresh
enjoyment on re-acquaintance. Above all, at least under the hand of
Walter Nash, the revelations of analysis are rewarding to the observer
and actually breathe fresh life into what has been analysed.
This is partly because Dr Nash has the essential lightness of touch to
handle such gossamer without misplacing a single thread. Partly be-
cause his wide and deep acquaintance with so vast a range of fabrics
enriches his every act of criticism. But chiefly because he is not 'mere-
X FOREWORD
I assured myself that by the time I had finished this book I would
never want to hear another joke, let alone make one. Such humbug.
Not want to hear another joke? I am more than ever greedy for
laughter, and grateful to those who create it; and I still have my wist-
ful ambitions to make others smile. All that has happened is that an
avuncular worldliness now tinges my attitude to humour. Having dis-
mantled its mechanisms and rehearsed its paradigms, I think I know
how things are put together; and the penalty of all knowledge is the
loss of surprise.
I have been struck by the complexity of the subject - by the realiz-
ation of what we are required to know, what social competence we
must possess, what intellectual operations we may have to perform
before we can grasp even a simple joke. I do not mean that you have
to be Wittgenstein before you can grapple with a pun; only, that if
you are about to converse with wits you must have your wits about
you.
The fact is that, in humour, the diversities of our living and thinking
tumble together in patterns adventitious and freakish and elegant, like
the elaborate conformations of a kaleidoscope. In trying to describe
intricacies of humorous conformation, I have borne constantly in
mind three informing principles: the workings of our language, the
varieties of our social experience, and our habitual modes of thought.
Each of these is so intimately involved with the others as to defy
abstraction for the purposes of analysis. My commission, however,
was to write a book on the language of humour, and I have accor-
dingly tried to give the linguistic principle pride of place. In doing so,
I have interpreted my brief quite broadly, endeavouring to set
humorous language in the larger context of comic style. This concern
with stylistic matters has directed the programme summarized in § 1.6
and §2.9; I trust that as the reader proceeds from chapter to chapter
the development of the argument will become clear to him.
xii PREFACE
University of Nottingham WN
NOTE
Unless otherwise documented, literary extracts used for the purpose
of illustration are followed by a number referring to an item in the
bibliography. Where it is deemed necessary, the item number is
accompanied by a page or line-number.
Acknowledgements
Though the name of Little Willie tops the pathetic polls, it is ri-
valled in song and story by those of other mortally afflicted cherubs -
for example, Little Jim, who figures in an affecting dialogue with
his grief-stricken mother:
She gets her answer from the child,
Soft fell these words from him -
'Mother, the angels do so smile
And beckon Little Jim.
I have no pain, dear mother, now,
But oh! I am so dry;
Just moisten poor Jim's lips again,
And, mother, don't you cry.'
With gentle, trembling haste she held
The tea.:.cup to his lips;
He smiled to thank her, as he took
Three tiny little sips. [3 I ]
In course of time, his pathos lapsed, Jim the virtuous babe became
an object for ruthless parody:
'I have no pain, dear mother, now,
But oh! I am so dry:
Connect me to a brewery
And leave me there to die.' [3 I ]
That poignant stanza brings us back to our original example, be-
cause it is a corroborative illustration of the development of a cer-
tain kind of humour. Between the Victorian parlour-recitations and
the grim social and personal realities they reflect, there is, we may
say, an affective association. They not only treat the theme of child
mortality seriously and sympathetically; they also have the psycho-
logical functions of propitiating grief by paying tribute to it, gen-
eralizing the individual sorrow, providing postures of acceptance.
With the mocking parody comes a dissociation, an apparent reneging
of the emotions. The worthy feeling lapses, is withdrawn at the very
moment when it should be at its strongest. Why is this? Is it really
because the parodist has hardened his heart against these wretched
infants and their lachrymose parents, and wants to hold them up to
cruel ridicule? Hardly. His target, surely, is not the social fact, but
the literary form; and one reason for the dissociation of feeling on
4 EXPLAINING THE JOKE
which the joke depends could simply be that the facts are altered
or mitigated. Suppose that there is a steep decline in the rate of in-
fant mortality - eg with the introduction of vaccines; then it becomes
possible to make fun of the forms of expression once affectively as-
sociated with it. Such an explanation might not apply to all types
of 'heartless' or 'black' humour; but it seems plausible in the present
instance.
~CHILLY ~
('deathly') ('cold')
~ ~
MERCURY, 1 MERCURY,2
(mirror) (thermometer)
I I
(poison) WENT DOWN (scalar measure)
I ~ ~ I
('was swallowed') ('sank in level')
'Twas a chilly day for Willie
When the mercury went down. '
quickly\ II
perceptively
incisively
sharply
I I \promptty
intelligently
A THESIS TO BEGIN WITH 9
ticisms can be based. The graffito master who propounds the equa-
tion I drink, therefore I am; I'm drunk, therefore I was, invites us
to enjoy locatively his word-play and his skewed grammar; but this
we cannot do without first recognizing the derivation of his joke in
the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum, 'I think, therefore I am.' Academic
humour is often a game of recognize-the-quote; but there are or-
dinary, unacademic, man-in-the-street jokes that also rely on textual
allusion, ie on references to things said or written in political
speeches, advertisements, TV shows, etc. The slogan, catchword,
or much-quoted remark becomes a model for (deverly-pointed vari-
ations. Larger texts offer scope for essays in parody, lampoon, bur-
lesque, etc, and this is yet another aspect of the generic game.
Random examples of parodic models might be the Ten Command-
ments, Shylock's 'Jew' speech, Keats' Ode to Autumn, Dickens' A
Christmas Carol, The Gettysburg Address, Eliot's The Waste Land.
Often by their sheer monumentality such exemplars of literary lan-
guage create standards for our language of humour; they are the
solid walls on which our irreverent commentaries are scribbled.
Derivations are often blurred or obscure; it may be that no one
knows for certain how a particular type of joke began, or how far
it has wandered from its social origins. In such cases the form of the
joke becomes, as it were, its voucher. Who was Kilroy, polytropic
hero of so many brief mural histories? A disgruntled, many-times-
posted soldier? An engineer (as has been suggested) in a US Navy
maintenance yard? It hardly matters. We recognize the verbal pat-
tern of his joke, Kilroy was here, and accept it as the ground out
of which other jokes can grow. The intention to joke, as we have
already seen, can be announced by a form, and there are many
'micro-forms' which invite the respondent to play the jesting game.
For example, the 'banana' jokes much loved by British schoolchil-
dren usually have the question-form What is A and Band C?, where
A and B are adjectives, while C might be another adjective, or a
finite verb, or even a clause: What's yellow and curved and makes
a noise when it travels through water? The second half of the banana
joke, the response, generally answers to the formula A banana +
X, where X is some kind of postmodifying phrase or clause; A ba-
nana with an outboard motor. There is a kind of ritual associated
with the joke, a pattern of predictability and a licence for variation,
which we shall later observe in connection with many other micro-
forms - one-liners, 'question-and-answer' jokes, aphorisms, 'assertion-
12 EXPLAINING THE JOKE
Now let us take the same joke, so wittily compact in its graffito
form, and observe it in an expanded variant. Philip Larkin supplies
us with a perfect comparison piece in his ironic, sad, funny poem
I Remelnber, I Remember (the title of which alludes, of course, to
the well-known 1 Remember, by Thomas Hood):
Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number-plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
'Why, Coventry!' I exclaimed. 'I was born here.'
16 WITTY COMPRESSION, COMIC EXPANSION
These "comic ideas', however, are in the main echoic of notions and
phrases that we have met before, and Larkin's poem is to a great
extent an essay in parody. In some cases, a cliche is explicitly
mocked by its inverted commas: 'mine', "where you have your
roots', 'really myself', 'all became a burning mist'. The Mayor's cou-
sin's unspeech is also parodically marked, by the italic type. Other
phrases, eg: family hols, determined to go through with it, go un-
pointed, but any reader with a basic literary competence notes them,
and is aware of their 'period' associations with junior magazines and
pulp. fiction for adolescents. Indeed, all the fun of the piece is at the
expense of some threadbare notions (plus the accompanying con-
ventional language) derived from third-rate narrative of the 'con-
fessional' type - the debased Bildungsroman. The humour of the
piece is enhanced by our recognition that these images are fictional,
that they are the happenings of life re-worked by the imagination. We
know that the artist does not look like this young man.
A further element in the parody, and an important one, is its sly
allusiveness to Hood's poem. That, too, has its 'elaborative in-
stances' - not of a governing joke, but of a feeling of childhood joy;
Hood mentions the house where he was born, the window of his
room, the fir trees, the laburnum his brother planted, the various
flowers - from which he creates, if not exactly blinding theologies,
at least a hint of Trahernian beatitude:
I remember, I remember,
The roses, red and white,
The vi'lets and the lily-cups,
Those flowers made of light!
This is the pattern of the Larkin poem. From virtually the first
word, 'Why, Coventry! ... I was born here', to the last 'Nothing,
like something, happens anywhere', the poet uses or implies direct
speech - which, of course, has to be directed at someone. That
'someone' is ultimately the reader; it is really the reader to whom
the remark 'I'll show you' is addressed, and to whom the map of
20 WITTY COMPRESSION, COMIC EXPANSION
tation of all texts, that the design is made once and for all, without
possibility of an adaptive improvisation, for the distant, anonymous
respondent who must interpret complex signals made via the restric-
tive conventions of print. There is also, however, the corresponding
strength of all texts, the strength of a permanent record that can
store, for later recovery, the details of a complicated narrative
pattern.
Look. Out of the distance, over the baked and burnished plain, along
the rattlesnake trail that winds past red, uprearing buttes, comes the
stagecoach. And here, in the foreground, behind a rock that tops
a rise, we see a group of men. Who they are, we do not know. We
do know, from their stubbled faces, their greasy waistcoats, their
crushed and begrimed headgear, that they are up to no good. Their
very horses are mud-coloured and nameless. It is a matter of certain
prediction that when the coach draws abreast of the rock, these men
will rob it. We do not yet know how the robbery will proceed -
whether a boulder will roll downhill into the path of the horses,
whether a shot will tumble the guard from his perch, or whether,
after a prolonged chase, the most athletic bandit will swing on the
harness between the lead horses and bring the equipage to a stand-
still. What we are assured of is, that given these elements - the
coach in the distance, the men lurking behind the rock - the nar-
rative must take a certain turn; elements of structure enable us to
predict a course of events.
But stay - even while the malefactors are taking aim - who is this,
riding towards us from yonder town of Tombstone? His waistcoat
has been drycleaned, and his comely hat, neatly blocked and
brushed, sits agreeably atop his bronzed, regular, firm, scrupulously-
razored features. He is dazzlingly dentifriced, and his horse, wash-
day-white, answers to the name of Flash. On his newly-laundered
shirt is pinned a conspicuous star. Of a certainty, this is the sheriff,
and his arrival is going to change matters. We must now reconsider
our position. The stage will not, after all, be robbed. Hearing gun-
fire, the keen executive of the law will spur his mount ('Hi-yuh,
Flash!') towards the provocative noise; the desperadoes will be out-
gunned and outwitted; one or two will die spectacular deaths and
TWO ASPECTS OF JOKE DESIGN: (A) THE NARRATIVE SHAPE 27
the rest will be driven off; the stage will get through.
Will get through, that is, if and only if the sheriff is drawn towards
those crackerjack pistols and the periodic boom of the guardian
shotgun. But what now? See - our man rides head-heavy, preoc-
cupied, seemingly heedless of the fusillade. What is amiss? Listen -
he mutters to himself: 'Danged ef thuh goldurned batt'ries in mah
hayrin'-aid ain't plumb tuckered out agin.' Can such things be? A
deaf sheriff? Why, what becomes of our predictions now? Narrative
ingenuity is baffled by this perverse circumstance.
A problem indeed - but here comes another, for the leader of the
bandits has removed his battered black Stetson to reveal a discreet
skull-cap - yes, truly, a yarmulka. A pious Jew of good family, for
all his despicable trade, he has just learned to his consternation that
by a mistaken reckoning (last year's calendar - a ludicrously false
economy) they have set out to rob the stage on a Saturday. In every
fibre of his Jewish being he is appalled. 'On the Sabbath you want
I should rob the stage? I should plunder and ravage, God forbid, like
it was Tuesday already?' Chastened, his companions holster their
guns, and prepare to withdraw. This is a momentous shift in the
structural balance, cancelling the sheriff, indeed cancelling every-
thing, for now there will be no robbery, no gunfight, and the stage
will rattle ignorantly down the winding trail to Tombstone. Between
them, Dan the Deaf Sheriff and Benjamin the Orthodox Bush-
whacker have managed to confound all prediction. So -
Question: Where do we go from here?
Answer: We get on to the next stage.
For the foregoing frivolity, with its excruciating final pun (puns are
conventionally 'excruciating') we may plead a double excuse. Firstly,
it makes a bridge from the discussion of 'compression' and 'expan-
sion' in Chapter 2; here is an expanded narrative, ending in the
compression of a wisecrack. Secondly, and consequently, it intro-
duces the proposition that there are two aspects of joke design, one
having to do with the method of extended narration, the other with
the construction of witticisms in formulaic patterns.
28 THE DESIGN OF THE JOKE: (I) LOCATIVE FORMULAE
~
stagecoach party ... bandits leap out and
defend themselves attack stagecoach
From this descriptive stasis no outcome is possible, but still the piece
has a design: a design consisting of attributive matchings rather than
of counterpoised actions. Thus it mocks the commonplace pro-
gression of rudimentary narratives, in which, things happening as they
do, an ending appears; here, things being what they are, no con-
clusion offers itself. It is a different kind of design, no less legitimate
30 THE DESIGN OF THE JOKE: (I) LOCATIVE FORMULAE
or effective than the other; some comic narratives take this form,
perhaps because, in its deadlock of absurdities, it suggests the pat-
tern of life itself.
matic layout: the fact that Guy Fawkes failed in his original attempt.
Here we see the relationship that most commonly operates when
jokes are told and laughter is raised. The listener/reader has spon-
taneous resort to his 'generic' knowledge for the particles of infor-
mation that make sense of the verbal superstructure. The quicker
the substructured response to the verbal stimulus, the greater the
likelihood of laughter; we are not tickled or prodded into mirth
when we must scan the understanding like an encyclopaedia -
though it is possible to relish the· joke in meditative retrospect by
discovering more items in the substructure.
This, however, is a fairly simple account of the structure of hu-
mour, assuming that the superstructure is some kind of formula, and
that the substructure consists of a few relevant generic details. Such
a description would not quite .cover the essay in humour which opens
this chapter, where an anecdote, provides the basis of reference for
a formula, anecdote and formula sharing a 'generic' substructure,
thus:
SUPERSTRUCTURE: anecdote CO-STRUCTURE formula
~ generic d e t a i l / '
SUBSTRUCTURE
The stagecoach story and its offspring quip are co-structured, so that
the formula is interpreted with reference to its companion joke, and
substructured by common allusion to iconographic detail in a popu-
lar art-form.
This more sophisticated representation of joke design still does
not account for all structural relationships. What are we to say, for
example, about the humorous episodes, anecdotal in character, that
make up the fabric of many comic texts? All anecdotes have a
generic substructure, clearly; but in many cases they also bear refer-
ence to another kind of underlying pattern, the design of the
continuous narrative. Anecdotal episodes in fiction are often para-
digms of a total theme. Not only is it difficult to interpret them fully,
as anecdotes, without having access to the underlying narrative de-
sign; it is also the case that they are comments on the narrative, il-
lustrating a character, pointing to a motive, often providing the
reader with landmarks in the discursive terrain. They may refer, in
fact, to a planned discursive substructure, for which a convenient
LOCATIVE FORMULAE 33
I
INFRA-STRUCTURE
I
SUB-STRUCTURE
(INF) (SUB)
(narrative concept) (generic detail)
This is a joke for the television age. Its locus is in the phrasal com-
pound action replay - meaning 'repeat of the action recorded on TV
film', but 'Irishly' interpreted as 'an actual repetition, a real second
attempt'. The cream of the joke is the surreal implication that one
could score a goal in this way if only one were 'Irish' enough. In
Irishisms, as in the Pickwickian sense of things, there is the faith of
innocence.
Recognition of a locus is partly a matter of consulting the mental
dictionary that lists the relevant generic details, and in part a re-
sponse to the general structure of the joke. A location, a phrasal
siting of the locus, requires a.matrix form. Some sort of preparation
for the discharge of the joke, a pre-location (or collocation: see
below) is necessary; and this pre-location may embody more than
one significant or directive element:
PRE-LOCATION LOCATION
quotation that has knocked about too long and has worn into a
cliche (thus 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned' yields Hell hath
no fury - - like a woman's corns / - - like a female jury / - -
like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle). In short,
there are forms of words that warn us of the advent of a joke, in
some cases all the more emphatically because they are only used for
joking purposes.
More widely, the signal of intent may embrace the whole form of
the joke, as immediately perceived by the recipient. Many jokes are
bedded in a fossil syntax, a received verbal structure that we rec-
ognize as belonging wholly or in the main to humorous practice. For
example, the sentence-frame Come back ... all is forgiven is used
only with the intention to joke, and never in the straightforward,
unironic expression of a wish. I may say, without mischievous pur-
port, I wish Oscar Wilde were alive and writing today, but if I ex-
claim Come back, Oscar Wilde, all is forgiven, it will be understood
that I speak with some sort of humorous implication.
Orientation is an element that may be omitted, or that may co-
incide with the declaration of a context. It indicates, as a rule, that
the joke will belong to a thematic type, eg that it will be an 'Irish'
joke, or a 'banana' joke, or a 'waiter' joke, or an 'elephant' joke
('How d' you know if there's an elephant in the fridge?' - 'Footprints
in the butter'). In a less specific way, the orientation of a joke may
be established by peculiarities of language. For instance, the ques-
tion Why didn't the viper vipe 'er nose? tells the addressee that this
is going to be a joke about funny pronunciation, and that he is not
to expect a quibbling answer such as Because she thought she could
wriggle out of it, or a lunatic-logical response of the type Because
her hands were full. (The answer is Because the adder 'ad 'er 'and-
kerchief·)
The context is the playing surface of the joke; a background, a
condition, a set of limiting facts. In humour, as in usage generally,
context may be verbally represented, or may be perceived extra-lin-
guistically, in the understood situation or the general cultural as-
sumption. It may be convenient to distinguish between the defined
and the implied context. Jokes that are exhaustively formulated de-
fine a context, jokes that leave something to conjecture do not; in-
deed, some of the most effective jokes draw their strength from an
element of the unstated. Often a joke that makes no extensive def-
inition of context carries some word that briefly indicates contextual
36 THE DESIGN OF THE JOKE: (I) LOCATIVE FORMULAE
signal
signal
Typical verdicts:
(i) The DC 10 isn't all it's cracked up to be (a 'black' pun on crack
up = 'praise' and crack, up = 'crash', with reference to the dis-
VARIETIES OF FORMULATION 39
Group I
('Quaint Conjectures')
(i) Maybe the Joneses are trying to keep up with you. (An inversion
of the common phrase 'trying to keep up with the Joneses')
(ii) I think sex is better than logic, but I can't prove it
In these examples, a note of conjecture is sounded by maybe
and I think, characteristic signals of this genus of joke. (Another
variation is Have you ever thought. .. ?) The pronoun you be-
comes the locus in example (i) as a result of inverting the popu-
lar phrase in which the Joneses stand for acquisitiveness,
materialism, snobbery, status-seeking, etc. The inversion needs
to be marked orally by a pattern of intonation and stress that
puts a focusing accent on you. In example (ii) (a joke for frus-
trated or fallacy-fancying philosophers) the locus is obviously
prove, with a reflection of the pre-locative think; here again,
40 THE DESIGN OF THE JOKE: (I) LOCATIVE FORMULAE
Group II
('Vexed questions')
(i) Why is it that the only people capable of running this country
are either driving taxis or cutting hair?
(ii) How will I know if I'm enlightened?
In each case the signal is a query-phrase, Why is it that. .. ?,
How will I know . .. ? In jokes of this kind the locus is seman-
tically complex, a two (or more) stranded riddle. The point about
taxi-drivers and barbers is that, to keep their clients and them-
selves amused, they talk a great deal, often about politics. In
example (ii) enlightened is a locative pun, = (I) having knowl-
edge, or the ability to obtain it, and (2) having acceptably 'lib-
eral' attitudes.
Group III
('Complaints, accusations, grouses')
(i) Stop the world, I want to get off.
(ii) Down with early Byzantine church music.
(iii) All this drinking will be the urination of me.
Example (i) began life as a graffito, and became the title of a
musical play; example (ii) is said to have been observed on a
wall at the University of Edinburgh (it is a type of academic
joke that either misfires completely or proves irresistibly
funny). These examples have the characteristic interjection sig-
nals (Stop litl, Down with) associated with common phrases or
cliches (Stop the bus, Down with capitalism).
The point of (iii) (should it need explaining) is that urination
is an inspired anagram of ruination - as in the periodic, pater-
familiar wail All these phone bills I credit accounts I dental
charges I price increases: etc I will be the ruination of me.
VARIETIES OF FORMULATION 41
Group IV
('Maxims, bywords, pseudoproverbs')
(i) We have been standing on an economic precipice, and we have
taken a great step forward. (Said with reference to the policies
of Mrs Thatcher's government)
(ii) Give them the job, and they will finish the tools. (Said with ref-
erence to technical aid for 'developing' countries, this sarcasm
inverts the words of Winston Churchill's wartime appeal to the
United States - 'Give us the tools and we will finish the job.')
(iii) When the revolution comes, don't turn round.
Such jokes are often political, and are generally marked (a) by
expressions of time - when, have been, will, (b) by locative
punning, eg: turn round = (1) 'look back', (2) 'revolve', finish
= (1) 'complete', (2) 'destroy', and (c) by imperatives - give
them, don't.
LOCATION COLLOCATION
(i) She was only a baker's daughter, but she never went short of
dough; updated alternative . . . but she could always make the
bread. (The wording of jokes can change with the language
itself, in this case with current slang; dough, once the knock-
about word for 'money', has been overtaken and largely re-
placed by bread.)
(ii) She was only a greengrocer's daughter, but she certainly knew
her onions.
(iii) She was only a banker's daughter, but nobody made her a loan.
(With a ribald double entendre on make == 'have sexual re-
lations with', and a pun on a loan == alone.)
The ~daughter' routine, obscure in origin, is conceivably an irrev-
erent comment on nineteenth-century romantic iconography. Co-
mely daughters abound in Victorian literature and balladry.
Tennyson, for example, wrote poems on the topic of the gardener's
daughter, the doctor's daughter, and the miller's daughter, and
thought of writing one on the innkeeper's daughter. Echoed in The
Miller's Daughter is the erotic theme of the young man attracted to
a girl of lower social rank. (And slowly was my mother brought / To
yield consent to my desire / She wished me happy, but she thought /
1 might have looked a little higher.) 'She was only a miller's daugh-
ter,' one might comment, 'though bred for a nobler role'; or per-
haps, 'She was only a miller's daughter, but her soul was a fine white
flower' - etc, etc.
Among other catchword forms are the 'Wanted" and 'They call'
jokes, currently not much in evidence. ~Wanted' jokes make simple
fun of everyday idiom:
(iv) Wanted: coffins for the dead of night.
(v) Wanted: pockets for a coat of paint.
The structure of these jokes is rudimentary: a conventional signal -
Wanted - a context-defining term - coffins - and a locus - the dead
of night. Reformed as a riddle, this might read: 'Where will you find
the dead without a coffin?' - 'The dead of night', or 'What's still,
lifeless, and unburied?' - 'The dead of night'. There is a close re-
lationship between catchword forms and riddles, a relationship
clearly signposted in the because of 'They call' jokes:
(vi) They call her 'Checkers', because she jumps when you make a
bad move. (Alternative: They call her 'End game', because she
VARIETIES OF FORMULATION 45
(g) Exhortations
Here is another type of joke that feeds parodically on the forms of
public notices - in this case, on notices that nag us into exemplary
behaviour. Be Like Dad, Keep Mum, ran the World War II poster
warning Britons against careless talk. This theme of public-spirited-
ness is mocked in latterday imitations:
(i) Be alert - England needs lerts. (This has provoked the sequel-
joke that comments, No, we have too many lerts - be aloof;
which in its turn has begotten the retort No, don't be aloof,
there's safety in numbers - be alert. A remarkable exercise in
Humpty-Dumpty lexicography.)
(ii) Help save our forests - eat more beavers. (No comment.)
(iii) Come home to a real fire - buy a cottage in Wales. (A witty mix
of adlanguage and political allusion. The slogan 'Come home
to a real fire' figures on the advertisements of the National Coal
Board; Welsh nationalists have burned down many 'second
homes' and holiday cottages owned by English people.)
Exhortations are related in pattern to glossed propositions. As ex-
amples (ii) and (iii) may suggest, they frequently occur as a form
of laconically pointed commentary on current social and political
events.
(h) Jonathanisms
'Brother Jonathan' is the tall-ordering personifier of American folk
humour. Jonathan says X is so Y that Z:
(i) My uncle Sam is so tall that he has to climb a ladder to shave
himself·
VARIETIES OF FORMULATION 47
(ii) Our Lily's mouth is so big, she daren't laugh in case her head
falls off.
(iii) He's so mean, he stands on one foot at a time, to save shoe-
leather.
The structure consists of a declarative clause of the type Subject-BE-
Complement (my uncle is tall, her mouth is big, he's mean), which
is followed first by a result-clause (jso that/ he has to climb a ladder,
she daren't laugh, he stands on one foot at a time) and then by an
explanation-clause of infinitive or adverbial pattern (to shave him-
self, in case her head falls off, to save shoeleather). Jonathan's nar-
rative logic notes a state of affairs, describes a result, and adds a
reason. The first clause is the signal of intent and the orientation to
a type of joke; the second clause amplifies contextual information
supplied in the complement of the first clause; and the third clause
is the location of the joke, the point at which strands of information
(he is tall, he uses a ladder) are absurdly joined (to shave) This is
one of those productive formulae, on which invention can freely
elaborate (eg: He's so forgetful, he ties a knot in his belt to remind
himself why he tied the knot in his handkerchief).
LOCATION
As a rule the answer element falls into one of two categories, ie the
play on sound and meaning or the breach of logical/discursive ex-
pectations. Examples (i) and (ii) represent the word-play type; in
(iii) and (iv) we have jokes about the predictability of discourse. The
addressee in (iii) is entitled to suppose that red-white-and-blue is
significant information, but the answer treats it as irrelevant. In (iv),
the import of the question as a speech act is deliberately misread;
it is clearly meant to be a complaint, but the waiter in the joke ac-
cepts it as a scientific enquiry. (Or possibly as a different species of
complaint - NOT 'Why is this dead fly in my soup?' but 'Why is my
fly dead?')
This suggests that the quatrain is the whole joke, with the first lines
as a form of prelocation; Candy is dandy is text, liquor is quicker,
rejoinder. It is possible, however, to set out the structure in a dif-
ferent way:
joke 1 + joke 2
PRELOC. LOC. but PRELOC. LOC.
liquor is
I I I I
signal locus signal locus
(verdict- (implied (implied
syntax) context: context:
for elegant for speedy
courtship) seduction,
speed
being the
important
consideration)
passage. Of these, the first exploits the hoary old play on touch =
(a) 'make physical contact with', and (b) 'borrow money from'. This
punning could be reduced to a one-line gag, in the style of the
variety comedian:
She said she wouldn't let me touch her for all the money in the
world, so I touched her Daddy for ten dollars.
And indeed, this is the formulaic root of Leacock's fun. He, how-
ever, expands the formula in his own characteristic fashion, making
his heroine rejoice ludicrously in one kind of touching (the handle
of my parasol touched the bottom button of his waistcoat) while she
remains woefully ignorant of the other kind (I cannot tell what it
means). The joke of 'meaning' - that is, of Marie's elaborate in-
ability to perceive the obvious - runs through the entire piece; in our
extract it is represented by her comments I cannot tell what it means,
I read his meaning, I divined his thought.
The second sequence of jokes runs through the last three 'entries'
in our extract. Here the root notion might be expressed as a text-
and-rejoinder or question-and-answer formula (see § 3.6 (j) and
(k) ):
A: Take money from a woman? Shame on you! Is that any way
to show your love?
B: Well, it shows how DEAR I am, doesn't it?
(This chestnut was a-growing in Shakespeare's time. Fabian says to
Sir Toby, 'This is a dear manakin to you, Sir Toby' - referring to
Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Sir Toby replies, 'I have been dear to him,
lad, some two thousand strong or so.') In Marie's diary the ancient
joke about the values of love versus the values of the bank balance
(as in Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend) is bedded in the other
running joke, about meaning and perception. Marie 'reads' Otto's
meaning, and obligingly practises a confidence trick upon herself.
Her perception of Otto's supposed symbolism is so naively assured
that eventually she does not even bother to announce explicitly I
read his meaning. On being given the bronze kopek, she expresses
her self-deception with oblique modality - 'Our love is to be as pure
as gold and as strong as bronze.'
Marie is the wide-eyed victim of the repeated and interlinked jokes,
but she is something slightly more than a simple knockabout.
Through the humour of her victimization, and of Otto's venality, we
62 THE DESIGN OF THE JOKE: (n) THE OUTGROWTH OF ANECDOTE
leaves, he laid his putter on the grass and got down and
squinted along it. At last, after a few practice shots, he
addressed the ball and struck it very gently. It rolled straight
and true, and stopped one inch from the hole. 'Hell and
damnation! Missed!' cried Billy Benson. And out of the sky
shot a ball of lightning. And hit the vicar.
Then from on high came a mighty voice saying, 'Hell and
damnation. Missed.'
The pattern of this anecdote is clear from the outset to anyone who
has ever heard, or told, a fairy tale; it is the old ritual of three oc-
currences plus the crucial consequence. Thus:
Phase I: Billy Benson swears - the vicar protests
Phase 2: Billy Benson swears - the vicar warns of
again God's lightning
Phase 3: Billy Benson swears for - God's lightning strikes
the third time - but hits the vicar
Many humorous anecdotes adopt this kind of phasing, generally
suggestive of the 'external' viewpoint of a narrator who is not in-
volved in the plot and is free to demonstrate to his audience the
compulsive symmetry of events. (On symmetry and prediction, see
§3.2.) The user of this conventional frame can fill out the scheme
at will, supplying information or interpretative comment, providing
significant adverbial pegs - so to speak - of time or place, and telling
his audience what the characters say. It is, indeed, the speech-
element, in the shape of the fatal comment, Hell and damnation.
Missed, that conspicuously frames the narrative, marking off the
phases till they culminate in a joke that might be expressed as a one-
liner with a transforming tag (see § 3.6(d)): He'll be sorely missed,
as God said when the thunderbolt hit the vicar. (Many anecdotes can
be compressed formulaically, and many formulaic jokes can be
expanded anecdotally.)
If we take it that the essential elements - the scaffolding members,
as it were - of this anecdote are (a) the pieces of information that
mark the onset of successive phases, (b) the adverbial 'pegs' that
locate the story from phase to phase, and (c) the speeches of the
characters, we might represent its framing as follows:
Introduction
Opening informs: The vicar, who enjoyed his golf . .. etc.
Adverbial pegs: down to the club, there.
64 THE DESIGN OF THE JOKE: (II) THE OUTGROWTH OF ANECDOTE
Phase 1
Opening informs: Billy's trouble was that he was very bad at
golf . .. etc
Adverbial pegs: every time, past the hole
Ends: 'Hell and damnation. Missed.'
Phase 2
Opening informs: The vicar put up with this for some time,
but . . . + speech to Billy
Adverbial pegs: at the very next hole
Ends: 'Hell and damnation. Missed.'
Phase 3 + Conclusion
Opening informs: Now the vicar was really annoyed +
speech to Billy.
Adverbial pegs: at the next hole, one inch from the hole,
out of the sky
Pausing informs: And hit the vicar
Ends: 'Hell and damnation. Missed.'
Reference to the text of the anecdote will show that the filling out
of the frame is longer and more elaborate from Phase I to Phase
2, and from Phase 2 to the end of Phase 3; there is a deliberate re-
tarding of the narrative before its climax - a common enough fea-
ture, perhaps, of the story-teller's art. Even a trifle such as this,
evidently, is a small piece of fiction, with fiction's customary elements
and fiction's conscious craft. The simple joke develops into the hu-
morous fantasy. We may, of course, criticize the efficiency of the
narration, but if we do, our attention is no longer concentrated on
the merits of rival formulae (see, for example, §3.5), but on the
viability of anecdotal structures and the appropriateness of the style.
ist, the literary art consists in masking them, presenting what is on the
face of it a casually-told tale.
Some books are constructed anecdotally, in a loosely-linked series
of short narratives that arise out of, and in many cases make 'in-
frastructural' comment on, the central theme. Such a book is Three
Men In A Boat. The principal episodes are festooned with anecdote;
so adeptly, in fact, does Jerome manage his method of deliberate
digression, that the anecdotes sometimes grow out of one another,
or even cluster within one another, a short anecdotal comment in-
terrupting a larger anecdotal process. Here, from the first chapter
of the book, is an example of Jerome's narrative method. The 'three
men' of the title discuss ways of spending a holiday, and one of
them, Harris, suggests a sea trip. Jerome then sets in train a series
of anecdotes, of which this is the second:
Another fellow I knew went for a week's voyage round the
coast, and, before they started, the steward came to him to
ask whether he would pay for each meal as he had it, or
arrange beforehand for the whole series.
The steward recommended the latter course, as it would
come so much cheaper. He said they would do him for the
whole week at two-pounds-five. He said for breakfast there
would be fish, followed by a grill. Lunch was at one, and
consisted of four cou:a:ses. Dinner at six - soup, fish, entree,
joint, poultry salad, sweets, cheese, and dessert. And a light
meat supper 1t ten.
My friend thought he would close on the two-pounds-five
job (he is a hearty eater), and did so.
Lunch came just as they were off Sheerness. He didn't feel
so hungry as he thought he should, and so contented himself
with a bit of boiled beef, and some strawberries and cream.
He pondered a good deal during the afternoon, and at one
time it seemed to him that he had been eating nothing but
boiled beef for weeks, and at other times it seemed that he
must have been living on strawberries and cream for years.
Neither the beef nor the strawberries and cream seemed
happy, either - seemed discontented like.
At six, they came and told him dinner was ready. The
announcement aroused no enthusiasm within him, but he felt
that there was some of that two-pounds-five to be worked off,
66 THE DESIGN OF THE JOKE: (II) THE OUTGROWTH OF ANECDOTE
story are Where could he begin? The joke - the root joke of the
book, adumbrated in one episode after another - is that the whole
sorry/comic saga of Gold's attempts to come to adaptive grips with
gentility is in itself an epitome of the Jewish Experience in Amer-
ica, a fact that Gold either cannot or will not see. On the final page
is a brief episode that perfectly embodies the point. Gold watches
a group of Jewish seminarists - students at a yeshiva, a religious
school - playing baseball. They play the American summer game,
but it happens to be winter. They wear yarmulkas, not baseball
caps. Instead of the clipped hair of the baseball player, they have
sidelocks - but some of the sidelocks are blond or ruddy, framing
faces that look more Irish than Jewish. The game is suspended while
an argument rages, and in the heat of the argument these religious
seminarists mingle Yiddish words with American obscenities. Gold
smiles at the contrariness of the scene, the Jewish stubborness of
playing baseball in winter, but it does not occur to him that this is
the very image of what he wants to write about. He turns away, still
brooding over the promised book, still asking himself Where could
he begin?
Joseph Heller's narrative power ensures that even a foreign reader
can hardly miss the root joke of Good as Gold. Much of the strin-
gent, mocking humour of the story, moreover, is articulated in the
verbal games and lunatic logics for which this author seems to have
a particular fondness (some examples are given in Ch. 6 below); so
that a firsthand sociological knowledge of American culture,
whether in its gentile or its Jewish manifestations, is not a prerequi-
site to the general understanding of the book. The fact remains,
however, that Good as Gold, like other comedies, does reflect a so-
ciety, a history, an experience, and is consequently full of allusions
and hints of parody which give depth to the joke, but which are in
great measure lost to the outsider. Problems of narrative structure
may be mastered, but the teasing allusiveness of humour and the
parodic challenge of comedy are difficulties (or delights, according
to one's point of view) that persist.
Five
Allusion in the very broadest sense is never absent from our dis-
course; always there is some fact of shared experience, some cir-
cumstance implicit in the common culture, to which participants in
a conversation may confidently allude. For families, friends, neigh-
bours, colleagues, there is a generic knowledge of the affairs of the
day - of politics, of social questions, of sports and entertainments,
of current notions and phraseology. Such knowledge informs a good
deal of what we say to each other, making its point even when its
presence is veiled.
What we commonly understand by 'allusion', however, is some-
thing more explicit and overt, something for which the word 'cita-
tion' might be a more accurate name. These citations often have a
function that goes beyond the mere decoration of a conversational
exchange. They are a kind of test, proving the credentials of the
initiated, baffling the outsider. In effect, they are a device of power,
enabling the speaker to control a situation and authoritatively turn
it to his own advantage.
The story is told of Jonathan Swift, that he was once present at
a reception where he witnessed a peculiar mishap. On a table lay
a violin, which was caught up in the skirts of a lady's gown and fell
to the floor. Swift's reported response was a brilliant bilingual pun,
in the form of a citation from Virgil's ninth Eclogue: Mantua, vae,
miserae nimium vicina Cremonae, 'Alas, Mantua, too close a neigh-
bour to wretched Cremona'. Only by patient cultural reconstruction
can the twentieth-century reader work out the allusive purport of
this line, which ostensibly refers to the resettlement of army veterans
in the Roman provinces, with the consequent eviction of the unfor-
tunate natives. (Cremona was the principal victim, but Mantua,
Virgil's birthplace, lay nearby and shared the taint of having sup-
THE CONTROLLING ALLUSION 75
ported the wrong party in a civil war.) What, we may ask, has this
plangent cry to do with violins? The point is, that Swift cleverly
made the Virgilian line designate objects of his own time and cul-
ture. 'Mantua' was the name for a kind of loose gown, and Cremona -
the home of Antonio Stradivari - was renowned for the skill of
its violin makers. Thus, 'Mantua, too close, alas, to wretched Cre-
mona', was Swift's punning comment on the tale of a flounce and
a fiddle.
A brilliant joke indeed, for those who could understand it - and
it is worth reflecting on the kind of audience on whom this virtuosity
was practised. For many of those present, in that classically educated
age, Virgil's words would certainly have the familiarity of a school-
room text. It must be remembered, though" that schoolrooms and
tutors were in the main for the sons of the well-to-do, who learned
their Latin as a staple of rhetoric, an element in the curriculum of
power. From this scheme of education, women and servants were
generally excluded. (Eighteenth-century records do make some
mention of learned ladies; Dr Johnson remarks that his friend Mrs
Carter could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus - but
clearly the priority lay with the pudding.) Swift's sally would there-
fore be keenly appreciated by some of the company" the formally
educated menfolk, leaving others baffled and smiling uncertainly" in
the fashion of those who acknowledge a pleasantry without under-
standing it.
Interpreted thus, the joke begins to look a little too smart, too
hard and shiny with wit's metallic gleam. We imagine the poor lady's
embarrassment when the violin topples to the floor, and her deep-
ening confusion when those educated men burst into a laughter of
which she feels herself to be the cause, yet which she cannot in the
least understand. Does no one comfort her? Does no one say,
'Never mind, these things happen, it shouldn't have been left there
in the first place'? Swift's pun, clever as it is, seems to jibe round
these simple humanities, to assert a conceited maleness in the face
of the poor, ignorant, disaster-prone female. So, at all events, a
story-teller might read the occurrence.
On the other hand, the conjunction of accident and comment
might be construed in a quite different way. Supposing the lady to
be greatly distressed, and the violin to be dismayingly valuable, we
might read into Swift's joke a kindly attempt to ease the burden of
the event by distracting attention from it. This is surely as plausible
76 ALLUSION AND PARODY
as any other account of the matter. Then what was the truth about
Swift's witticism? Did it merely illustrate the nervous necessity of
joking, an affliction as stubborn as a stutter? Was it the compulsion
of a clever man to draw attention to himself? Was it a way of laying
claim - he being a humble domestic chaplain, there among the
wealthy and well-born at that Dublin Castle entertainment - to a
certain authority and intellectual rank? Was it a useful device for
smoothing out an unluckily wrinkled moment? Biography does not
tell us. In one way or another, however, the clever citation from
Virgil had a social intent, taking a certain situation into scope and
exercising control over it. To make an allusion is often to make a
bid for situational power, the kind of power that interprets, com-
ments, directs responses and allots social roles.
vices to Holland, (b) that road signs in the vicinity announce 'Har-
wich for the Continent', and (c) that the small resort of Frinton, not
far from Harwich, has a population that includes many elderly and
retired people. In an explanation of the joke these circumstances
would have to be made clear, for the benefit even of native speakers
of English. For those whose native language is not English, it would
perhaps be necessary to add a linguistic commentary on the textual
locus of the allusion, the counterpointing of the noun continent
(= 'large land mass') and the adjective incontinent (= 'unable to control
the urinary function'). Such explanation inevitably destroys the
joke; things that are allusively funny lose their humorous charm
when classification sets in.
Robert Graves sees an image of parody in the folk myth of the witch
who invisibly stalks her victim, following close on his heels and im-
itating his gait so aptly that she at last possesses it, and can make
him stumble at will. This striking comparison suggests that parody
appraises - learns the way of walking - in order to ridicule and dis-
comfit. But not all parody is hostile; many acts of literary caricature
and burlesque show affectionate familiarity with the things they im-
itate, and are a form of positive criticism, of stylistic analysis, and
ultimately of tribute. If there are malign witches, there are also ben-
evolent warlocks, who learn the steps in order to show just how
well the 'victim' dances. Parody of a personal style often aims to do
just that. It is the shortest and most concrete way of commenting
on typical features of syntax, lexicon, phonology, prosody, and all
the apparatus of learned dissertation.
The point is illustrated by the following attempt, on my part, to
parody the distinctive poetic idiom of Gerard Manley Hopkins:'
G. M. HOPKINS TAKES LUNCH IN THE RESTAURANT CAR
Ah, waiter, are there any any, where are, tell me, come,
Napkins, lovely all-of-a-starch-staring
PARODY AS APPRAISAL: (I) PERSONAL STYLES 83
generates the designated style. To this, add one further element: the
intrusion of the parodist's own idiom, or at all events of a patently
alien accent (dim was it? dumb?; coo - lummy -) confessing to the
irreverent act, reminding the reader, should he need reminding, that
this is not the style itself, not a blatant forgery, not an attempt to
pass off as genuine a gobbet of pastiche, but something that remains
from first to last a piece of jocose mimicry. The apparent ineptitudes
of the clown are at one and the same time the setting for his bur-
lesque act and his admission that it is a burlesque and nothing more.
Cdisp
brother prize the edible qualities of the snail above that of the
crisp and oleaginous bacon? Delicious are the grasshoppers
that sport on the hillside - are they better than the dried
apples of the Pale, Faces? Pleasant is the gurgle of the torrent,
Kish-Kish, but is it better than the cluck-cluck of old Bourbon
from the old stone bottle?'
'Ugh!' said the Indian, - 'ugh! good. The White Rabbit is
wise. Her words fall as the snow on Tootoonolo, and the
rocky heart of Muck-a-Muck is hidden. What says my brother
the Gray- Gopher of Dutch Flat?
'She has spoken, Muck-a-Muck,' said the Judge, gazing
fondly on his daughter. 'It is well. Our treaty is concluded.
No, thank you, - you need not dance the Dance of Snow
Shoes, or the Moccasin Dance, the Dance of Green Corn, or
the Treaty Dance. I would be alone. A strange sadness
overpowers me.'
'I go,' said the Indian. 'Tell your great chief in Washington,
the Sachem Andy, that the Red Man is retiring before the
footsteps of the adventurous Pioneer. Inform him, if you
please, that westward the star of empire takes its way, that
the chiefs of the Pi-Ute nation are for Reconstruction to a
man, and that Klamath will poll a heavy Republican vote in
the fall.'
And folding his blanket more tightly about him, Muck-
a-Muck withdrew.
[15; P 339ffJ
The first thing to acknowledge about this is that it is funny. Joyless
must that reader be who can sit unsmiling while Muck-a-Muck,
noble scion of nature, hitches his pants and snitches the silverware
- quietly but firmly, like the aristocrat he is; or who can harden his
features against Genevra's mirthfully magniloquent discourse on
such benefits of civilization as the esculent and nutritious bean and
the cluck-cluck of old Bourbon from the old stone bottle. The piece
is certainly funny enough in its own right to survive without the sup-
porting reference of a parodied original. Yet a reader with any sense
of literary conventions must surely suspect parody. Something is
being mocked here. It is a familiar scene, this tableau of the simple
Red Man coming to pow-wow with his white brother, who sympath-
izes with the sons of the wild, yet knows (with a strange sadness)
that the march of the future cannot be halted. Very familiar it is -
THE RECOGNITION OF PARODY 91
for 10, have we not seen it shining on the Great White Cloth of Ki-
ne-ma, where the braves bite on Chok-ba and Pop-kon, crying yay?
Never before, however, have we witnessed such devious urbanity
in the Pale Faces (their log cabin is appointed within like a salon,
with a grand piano and pictures by Tintoretto and Rubens), or such
scruffy delinquency in the clean-limbed prince of the prairie; and
certainly we have never heard the Indian chief make remarkable
switches of rhetoric, from Simple Savage (ugh!) to Basic Civil Ser-
vant (Inform him, if you please), from Redmanspeak (the rocky
heart of Muck-a-Muck is hidden) to Hustingtalk (westward the star
of empire makes its way . . . will poll a heavy Republican vote in the
fall). There are hilarious discrepancies, in the style and the handling
of the content; discrepancies of the kind that characterize the par-
odic method.
And it is indeed a parody - by Bret Harte, of Fenimore Cooper's
Leatherstocking novels (an iconographic source, incidentally, for
many a matinee Western). The object of Harte's mockery is not
solely Cooper's extraordinary narrative style. The Cooper content
(take one rude man of the woods, add one gently-nurtured female,
and whisk to a paste) also comes under attack. Here, as in one of
our earlier examples, the parody of D. H. Lawrence, assault on con-
tent is bound up with mimicry of style. We may contrast "style par-
ody', as in the Hopkins example, with "style-and-content' parody,
the latter being modelled thus;
Es
/
Ed
Cs Capp
this subject' , says the parodist to the reader. Not all parodies written
in this way are unfriendly, but still a fairly common mode of parodic
attack is to father a likely subject onto the victim, and then bring
out its absurdity with an irreverent simulation of his style.
Cdisp
instrument of ~ ~h·
myt lcalb·
elng; b ·
estlary
communication character; subject of legend
'displacing content' = 'apposed content'
94 ALLUSION AND PARODY
(ii)
/ " (i)
"
/
Cs C app Cdisp
sword, sees an arm rise from the lake, catch the hilt, and draw it
down beneath the water. Here is Tennyson describing Sir Bedivere's
first false report, and his thoughts as he goes to the lake for a second
time;
Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:
'Hast thou performed my mission which 1 gave?
What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?'
And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:
'I heard the ripple washing in the reeds,
And the wild water lapping on the crag.'
To whom replied King Arthur, faint and pale:
'Thou hast betrayed thy nature and thy name,
Not rendering true answer, as beseemed
Thy fealty, nor like a noble knight:
For surer sign had followed, either hand,
Or voice, or else a motion of the mere.
This is a shameful thing for men to lie.
Yet now, 1 charge thee, quickly go again,
As thou art lief and dear, and do the thing
1 bade thee, watch, and lightly bring me word.'
Then went Sir Bedivere the second time
Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere,
Counting the dewy pebbles, fixed in thought;
But when he saw the wonder of the hilt,
How curiously and strangely chased, he smote
His palms together, and he cried aloud:
'And if indeed I cast the brand away,
Surely a precious thing, one worthy note,
Should thus be lost for ever .from the earth,
Which might have pleased the eyes of many men.
What good should follow this, if this were done?
What harm, undone? Deep harm to disobey,
Seeing obedience is the bond of rule.
Were it well to obey then, if a king demand
An act unprofitable, against himself?
The King is sick, and knows not what he does.
What record, or what relic of my lord
Should be to aftertime, but empty breath
96 ALLUSION AND PARODY
Cs
/
The source-content is that of Tennyson, in The Passing of Arthur;
the source-expression is that of Byron's Don Juan, from which the
parodic expression is derived. Note, however, that there are hints
of Tennysonian language in the parody, in words like brand and
mere, which, taken out of their epic context and put into clubman-
PSEUDOPARODY AND INTERTEXTUALITY 99
chatty company (Assured the king the brand had gone at last)
become comically quaint. The notation /Es(i/' indicating a source-
expression (Tennyson's poetic language) that has been displaced, is
thus not altogether accurate. Residual elements of this 'displaced'
language do appear in the 'derived' parodic expression, and Squire's
parody is therefore even more complicated than our diagrammatic
model would suggest.
might certainly argue that one of the axes of comic writing - the
'style-axis', if we like to call it that - is a progression of allusions,
parodic hints, pseudoparodies. There is, however, another principle,
working in correlation with the devices of an echoic style: a principle
of logic, or logic-in-likelihood. The comedian frequently shifts the
ground of probability and subverts the rules of argument, and is able
to do this very often with the help of a parodic style. Parody ac-
commodates and even excuses the mockery of logic; the unlikely
circumstance is made acceptable by the amusing distortions of par-
odic expression. Parodic style and subverted logic together define
one essential quality of comic narrative; the integrity of its artifice
- the 'artefactuality', to coin a monstrous word, that leads us to con-
sider it purely in its own terms, as something distanced from all that
is involved in the word realism. This may appear to be a paradoxical
conclusion, since humour and comedy often have reference to social
institutions and interactions, and are therefore commonly supposed
to be realistic. They may be truthful in their reflections on human
nature, but realistic is seldom the word for their style and narrative
method. At their funniest, their wisest, their most revelatory, they
transcend realism and require us to acquiesce in the laws of the
surreal.
Six
In hot pursuit of the canary, this cat, this villainous film-cartoon cat,
running two-footed and two-fisted, treads on the upturned fangs of
garden rakes, flattens his features on flapping fence-boards, rolls up
like a blind on sudden laundry-lines, is piledriven chin-deep by a
toppling telegraph pole, fragmented by falling masonry, paunched
by a flying anvil, and still, still pursues, unrelenting and undeterred.
How will he catch his quarry? His catty gift of climbing is useless.
The canary has grease, to pour down the pole; has a cross-cut saw,
for lopping off branches; can whisk out from some recess of its tiny
plumage a large black object, bearing the legend 1 cwt, which it will
deposit in the obligingly upturned paws of the horrified feline, just
as he is about to complete his ascent of the bird table. Well, then -
the rocket deftly strapped to the spine with four expert hitches and
a dainty reef-knot on the midriff? Disastrous; the telephone wires
deflect its course, and poor pussy explodes starrily, nosedown in the
rose bed. So what about that length of rope that should swing us
neatly through the window of the bedroom where the wretched bird
is preening itself? Good, if only our calculations are right; if wrong,
we make a raw, spreadeagled hole in the clapboard side of the neat
white North American house. Yet here's a notion - a smart tech-
nological trick with the lady's stays, providentially found in the an-
cient steamer trunk in the loft. A pair of wings are manufactured
in a trice; soon the cat is airborne and confidently aerobatic; but ah! -
presently the laces break, the wings droop, and our hooligan hero
plummets heavily onto the prone form of the snoozing bulldog. All
expedients are exhausted, it seems; yet wait one moment; still some-
thing remains. Grinning apologetically (one might almost say sheep-
ishly), the cat produces from his fur a crayon, and spirits up a large
sheet of card, on which he writes, and exhibits to us, the following
104 LIKELIHOODS AND LOGICS
Anyone who has seen film cartoons of the 'Sylvester and Tweety-
Pie' or 'Tom and Jerry' variety will recognize the content and con-
ventional absurdities of 'Anything Can Happen'. These animals -
or perhaps one should say these animates - enact their comic conflict
in a world which straddles the frontier of natural law and fabulous
licence. At the narrator's convenience the cat runs upright, like a
man, or scampers four-footed, like a domestic beast; here he makes
a fist and grips tools, there his claws snag in the curtains or the car-
pet; now, resplendent in straw boater and blazer, he dashes off a
note to his ladylove, and then, in furry ignorance, curls up in his
basket in front of the fire. The meaning of 'anything can happen'
is that the impossible is available in free conjunction with the poss-
ible, and furthermore that 'impossible' actions, events, etc, have
analogies in possibility, analogies just strong enough to give passing
credence to what is patently absurd.
The partners to such fantasy - the narrator/presenter and the spec-
tator/reader - are united in their knowledge of its rules and con-
ventions; above all, they know where the 'frontier of natural law'
lies, and whenever it is crossed they are perfectly well aware of the
fact. They are, indeed, schooled in the conventions of a type of nar-
rative. 'Anything Can Happen' exhibits a further degree of artistic
self-awareness, in that one of the characters in the story - the cat -
is allowed to reflect on, and manipulate, the devices of this kind
of fable-making. Despite this sophistication, however, our cartoon
tale has the crude limitations of mere fantasy. Anything can happen,
but nothing can develop. The cartoon maker is content to go on
exploiting one factor of comic narrative, the factor of likelihood.
~ is male /
I
is adult
This, of course, is the basis of the likelihood game in the cartoon.
The cartoonist studiously explores visual representations of the false
paraphrase (Sylvester is a man = Sylvester is a male adult feline) or
the insufficient paraphrase (Sylvester is a tomcat = Sylvester is a
male adult) until felinity either alternates with humanity, or merges
with it, or is overlapped by it:
106 LIKELIHOODS AND LOGICS
is adult
is a fe lin e anim al
'strange'
~
(Bob's view of the (Barman's view of
implausible) the implausible)
I I
man walks on walls man drinks sherry
and ceiling instead of whisky
I I
'extraordinary' , 'unusual', 'not
'preternatural' customary'
can happen; it is the privileged world of the cartoon. (Note that the
entry into 'privileged worlds' is often marked by the frontier-
feature - the rabbit-hole, the looking-glass, the stairway, the
door".) The fact that anything can happen, however, does not mean
that nothing will be perceived as remarkable. It is part of the joke
that even in a world of suspended physics people are expected to
follow common patterns of minor behaviour; the law of gravity
lapses, but the force of habit remains. Therefore, even though any-
thing can happen, the barman can still perceive something out of the
ordinary.
From Bob's point of view, the wall-walking episode is more than
out of the ordinary; his quavering comment means 'It's impossible',
or 'I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it'. For the purposes of the
story, he is committed to a view of likelihood; his astonishment
(contrasted with the low-key reponse of the barman) arises out of
that commitment. He must believe - his role in the narrative de-
mands it - that this is a preternatural event. In this, the character-
within-the-tale possibly differs from the listener/reader, the audience
of the story. Our perception of reality is the same as Bob's, but we
are not committed to it in the same way; if we were, we would not
be so ready to stand back and laugh. We accept that the outrageous
thing does happen, and by that acceptance we have access to the
humour of the barman's response. Unlikelihood does .not provoke
in us an astonishment from which we cannot free our minds. We
accept the impossible as a theoretical postulate, the necessary con-
dition of the joke. With regard to this particular anecdote, three
different responses are evident:
THE 'LOGIC' FACTOR 109
fairy-tales), break the circle, and set the captives free. An inde-
pendent, 'extra-circular' doctor would do wonders for the hapless
airmen of Catch-22; but there is no such person in Heller's narrative.
The crews have no rescuing angel, no redeemer from elsewhere;
though at the end of the book one of the pilots brings hope by es-
caping to neutral Sweden, breaking out of the manic war-prison,
leaping over its murderous logic. That social and institutional sys-
tems trap their members in the pinch of absurd but apparently ines-
capable arguments is the besetting nightmare of the book, and also
the source of its undoubted humour. The lunatic precision of the
argument itself makes us laugh, through episodes in which the un-
derlying reality is tragic or pathetic. Catch-22 logic invades the most
trivial situations. There is, for example, a rumbustious episode in
which Yossarian, the hero, sentimentally asks an Italian streetwalker
to marry him. She tells him that he is crazy to want to marry her,
because she is not a virgin. When he replies that he will marry her
nonetheless, she protests that she cannot marry anyone who is crazy.
When he asks her why he is crazy, she says it is because he wants
to marry her. This is the kind of reasoning that R. D. Laing has
frequently observed in psychiatric patients, and has recorded in the
verbal patterns of the book called Knots. The following extract, en-
titled Jill, is strong on Catch-22 logic:
I don't respect myself
I can't respect anyone who respects me
I can only respect someone who does not respect me.
I respect Jack
because he does not respect me
I despise Tom
because he does not despise me
Only a despicable person
can respect someone as despicable as me
I cannot love someone I despise
Since I love Jack
I cannot believe he loves me
What proof can he give? [18]
This woman is the victim of her personal closed system, just as the
112 LIKELIHOODS AND LOGICS
Together with the shifted likelihood and the dislocated logic goes
a third major source of humour: the waywardness of words missing
their mark in ordinary conversational interactions. The philosopher
J. L. Austin has reminded us that words not only mean something,
114 LIKELIHOODS AND LOGICS
denum, along with the other so-called organs of speech, has two
functions'; 'Julius Caesar, as is well known, was never completely
converted to Christianity'; 'Lightning, striking upwards, produces the
optical illusion of striking downwards.'
Hang-up no. 3: the 'backhander'
Example:
A: 'Let's go for a picnic.'
B: 'A picnic! In this weather! You must be out of your mind.'
A: 'All right, let's stay home and listen to some records.'
B: 'That's just like you - no drive, no imagination.'
Comment: This is the familiar conversational behaviour of the nag-
ging or implacable partner, who counters all suggestions cussedly,
with a series of rebuffs, or 'backhanders'. The maxim of Quality is
breached; it is quite pointless for A to push on with this conversa-
tion, though he/she may well do so in an attempt to make a domestic
concord with B.
Hang-up no. 4: the 'googly' (or 'spitball')
Example:
A: 'How would you like to spend seven days in a Portuguese villa?'
B: 'I'd love it!'
A: 'Good, then you can envy me all next week.'
Comment: The player - in this case, B - is deceived by the teasing
flight and spin of the ball. He not unreasonably anticipates an in-
vitation; and he is cruelly caught out. Inasmuch as A's question is
intentionally misleading, it may be said to offend doubly, against the
maxims of Quantity (give enough information) and Manner (avoid
obscurity). A might have pitched up a straightforward delivery - 'I'm
going to spend next week in a Portuguese villa. Don't you envy
me?'; but he prefers to bowl a googly. It isn't cricket.
Sid throws his final skid, in the form of a fatal heart attack which
strikes him just as Gold is preparing to meet the President at an
Embassy Ball. 'He does this to me every time', says Gold; but it is
Sid's death that leads him to reconsider his relationships, his Jew-
ishness, and his absurd hankering for a White House career.
To claim that the whole content and texture of a complex novel
like Good as Gold might be expounded in terms of typical conver-
sational patterns is patently absurd. Comedy is always deeper than
the verbal game, and all the explanation of jokes and ironies and
topsy-turvy argument cannot come to terms with the manifold truths
of character and situation. Furthermore, there is a parodic richness
in the text that may only be fully enjoyed by a reader who is both
American and Jewish. Nevertheless, exchanges of the type exam-
ined above are consistently related to the infrastructure of the novel,
just as, in other instances, anecdotes may have infrastructural sig-
nificance. (On 'infrastructure', see §3.4.) The reader who fails to see
how these segments of jesting dialogue are part of a general com-
mentary on a world of misapprehensions may taste their humour,
but will miss their comedy.
Seven
7.1 'LAYERING'
> >
~------...
TEXT: .-O~O
,,..---- ............. ,
,,,-,, "
" 0 0 "
>~-----(-0 --0-) - - - - - - - 1 )
I \
TEXT:
\,0 0 /
\", 0 ,,"/ ... "."
'zone of choice'
(This would characterize the selection of glum out of the set
that includes 'dejected', 'depressed', etc)
zone 1 zone 2
"
'
/",..---- ........" ~//";--- ..... ",
>-
~\ ,'............. \
,
~, ,~\ ~
TEXT: ~-.-,-O
\ ,~\
O-,-.--I---~7
'
',' ..... _-
I
-;"/
\
' ........ _---,.. /
I
The 'sets' which the humorist, like any other creative writer, tries
to exploit imaginatively, are somewhat inadequately represented in
a thesaurus, where words are grouped in clusters expressing related
motions. The inadequacy of the thesaurus is the fixity of its scope.
A good thesaurus provides cross-references, showing how words
SETS AND SCALES 133
may fall into more than one notional category, but still there is no
book that can competently demonstrate the polysemic shifting of
words as our thought locates and re-Iocates them in different group-
ings and perspectives. We labour with concepts like synonym (words
of allied meaning), antonym (words of contrasted meaning), and
hyponym (subordinate terms of a superordinate concept), and our
cogitations yield an occasional glimpse of how these things might be
interrelated, eg:
'EDIFICE'
hyponymic
line
'HABITATION'
/
I
(= 'kinds of')
t hyponymic synonymic
bUil~ing line. line I
1
hovel - shack - shanty ... synonymic
line
tepee
igloo
134 LANGUAGE IN ITS HUMOUR: (I) MANIPULATIONS OF MEANING
• HOVEL • ABoDE/abode?
• shack • place
informal
PUNS RULE; THE SPUN LURE 137
would occupy many pages and catalogue many variants. What fol-
lows is not an attempt to list exhaustively the modes of the pun, but
a general commentary on some prominent types:
(a) Homophones
Homophones are pairs (or more) of words having the same sound
but different meanings, eg: rain/reign, sighs/size, urn/earn,
need/knead. The difference of meaning is reflected in distinctive
spellings. Many riddles turn on homophonic puns:
When does the baker follow his trade?
- Whenever he needs (kneads)
or
When does the baker follow his trade?
- Whenever he needs (kneads) the dough.
The second version adds to the homophonic pun on needs/kneads
a homonymic play on dough, which means (i) 'flour-and-water
paste', (ii) 'money'. (On homonyms, see (f) below.)
The homophonic pun is the form above all loved and practised
by nineteenth-century wits like Lamb and Hood and Carroll. The
Victorian era, indeed, is sometimes blamed for bringing the pun into
intellectual disrepute, as a mere exercise in parlour jocosity; though
homophonic skittishness had already enjoyed one outrageous run,
in Tudor times. The plays of Shakespeare - comedies, histories, and
tragedies alike - are littered with homophonic quibbles, very often
of obscene import. A typical sample is the seemingly innocuous
phrase and thereby hangs a tale. (See As You Like It, II. VII. 26; the
lines concluding with this phrase are among the most nastily prurient
in the canon, but time has wheedled them into innocence.) The
point of this pawky piece of Tudor rudery is the homophony of tale
and tail, which entails (mea culpa) the double meaning of 'caudal
appendage' and 'penis'. A more respectable example of the
Shakespearean obsession with punning is the tiresome bandying of all
and awl in the first scene of Julius Caesar. The cobbler, who lives by
his awl and all, tells the tribune he plies a very honourable trade,
as a mender of soles/souls.
PUNS RULE; THE SPUN LURE 139
(c) Mimes
'Mimes' (a nonce-term) are phonetic similitudes, usually rhymes,
with the appeal of homophones. They make for a particularly out-
rageous kind of pun, because they bend the rules of punning itself,
bending the bender, as it were. The central principle of punning is
homomorphic ('homomorph' = 'the same form'), but mimes are im-
pudently allomorphic ('allomorph' = 'variant form'). An example,
from the primary school treasury:
What do policemen have in their sandwiches?
- Truncheon meat.
What truncheon impishly mimes is obviously the word luncheon.
Another example, from the same copious source:
What do cats read?
- The Mews of the World.
In which oracle, mews mimes news. The pun is deeper than one
might at first suppose, since it links the notion of 'vocalizing', 'phon-
ation', 'oral activity', with that of 'publicizing', 'announcing', 'pro-
claiming'. (The same combination of the notions 'sound' and
140 LANGUAGE IN ITS HUMOUR: (I) MANIPULATIONS OF MEANING
(e) Homonyms
The homonym is a companion device to the homophone:
PUNS RULE; THE SPUN LURE 141
(0 Homonymic phrases
Whole phrases can be turned into homonymic puns. This, indeed,
is a common procedure in making 'tag' jokes (see §3.6(d»:
'I have designs on you', as the tattooist said to his girl.
The idiom to have designs on = 'to have plans for conquest or ac-
142 LANGUAGE IN ITS HUMOUR: (I) MANIPULATIONS OF MEANING
(h) Pseudomorphs
Behold the silly pseudomorph, flexing its unmuscles:
Samson was terribly distressed by Delilah.
Distressed because dis-tressed; shorn therefore forlorn. There is no
verb to dis-tress in English; it is a false form, a pseudomorph, in-
vented to make a homonymic pun. Prefixes like dis- and ex- lend
themselves to the game:
A: In his exposition, he took a very firm stand on spending cuts.
B: How can you stand in an ex-position?
But any word with an arbitrarily detachable pseudo-morpheme will
also serve:
What do you do with a wombat?
- Play worn.
(i) Portmanteaux
Lewis Carroll gave us the term portmanteau - gave in jest what is
now used in terminological earnest - as a label for the coinage that
packs two meanings into one word. In Through The Looking Glass,
Humpty Dumpty - linguist, philosopher and exegete - comments on
the strange poem called 'Jabberwocky', and explains to Alice that
words like slithy and mimsy are portmanteaux, ie of 'lithe' and
'slimy' in the one case and 'flimsy' and 'miserable' in the other. Port-
manteaux now travel widely, in literature (see Finnegan's Wake).,
in comic patter, in youthful riddles:
If buttercups are yellow, what colour are hiccups?
- Burple
And also, we might add, in divers tongues - eg the following stately
and sonorous portmanteau-pun, made by a Swedish student, who
referred to a well-known actress - regal of bearing., generous in per-
sonality, generous, too, in her physical endowments - as barmher-
tiginnan. This was a brilliant composition of the following elements:
barm = 'bosom'
barmhertig = 'merciful'., 'gracious"
hertiginna = 'duchess'
-n = the definite article
144 LANGUAGE IN ITS HUMOUR: (I) MANIPULATIONS OF MEANING
(I) Pun-metaphors
A frisky trick of journalism is the headline that shakes a cliche to
rattle a metaphor to ring a pun:
Council puts brake on progress of cycle path scheme.
Murky consequences of washing our hands of Europe.
The second example (from the Guardian) illustrates the ramshackle
character of this variety of punning. A poetic metaphor is precise,
and in its precision illuminating. Pun-metaphors are often deliber-
ately sloppy. To wash oneJs hands, as Pontius Pilate demonstrated,
is to absolve oneself of responsibility; but the headline writer does
not really want to use the phrase in that sense. His latent verb is not
'abnegate', 'repudiate', or 'disavow', but quite simply 'withdraw
from'; what he is referring to is the possibility of Britain's with-
drawal from the European Economic Community. His casual use of
the hand-washing idiom, however, enables him to work the pun on
murky, using a figurative meaning, 'disreputable', side by side with
its primary meaning, 'dark', here stretched to include the nuance
'dirty'. This freedom with the dictionary admits the creation of a
kind of oxymoron, the suggestion of a dirty cleanliness. In literal fact
we 'wash our hands' to be rid of dirt; but the kind of hand-washing
the headline writer denotes can have no clean issue.
This catalogue of pun-types may well be capable of extension, for
the activity of punning, so often deplored, is widespread and is prac-
tised even by its accusers. Puns, like metaphors, fossilize in the very
substance of the language; it is hardly possible to work the ground
extensively without turning up a figure or a pun. At the heart of all
this word-play seems to be a concern with two ancient and related
processes: naming and riddling. So often, in folklore, to know a
name, a secret name, is to have power, but the power can only be
secured by the adept who guesses the answer to a riddle. In the most
preposterous riddles of the playground there lurks this traditional
sense, of being compelled, like the wise scribes of old, to find the
right name, the power-giving name:
What's a myth?
- A female moth.
The anonymous author of this riddle may not have been aware of
doing anything profound with language; it has the air of plain high-
spirited lunacy. But the lisping adroitness of the mime-pun on
GRAPHOLOGIES: 0, MAN'S GREAT GAMES - GET SOME ANAGRAMS 147
On the other hand, there are formulations that have no design and
no creative history; lucky lapses; examples of the comic felix culpa
which could not be improved by taking thought. Often the orig-
inators of these are people whose conceptual reach slightly exceeds
their linguistic grasp; who know well enough what they want to say,
but through ignorance, or failure of memory, through some neuro-
physiological defect, or even through sheer pretentiousness, can-
not quite manage to say it. Some of these tumblers in language
achieve name and fame - eg the luckless Revd William Archibald
(I'll-damn-you-for-sewages) Spooner, who is said to have dismissed
a student with the words You have deliberately tasted two worms and
you can leave Oxford by the town drain; and the great Sam Gold-
wyn, who has enriched the English language with such delightful
pronouncements as Include me out and In two words: im-possible.
Historically, the type of the linguistic blunderer is celebrated in fic-
tional characters like Dogberry (Comparisons are odorous) and Mrs
Malaprop (If I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my
oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs).
In such cases, the propensity to error is a kind of malady, which
we label with the suffix-ism; we speak of Spoonerisms, Goldwyn-
isms, Malapropisms. Some patients, however, are not above the sus-
150 LANGUAGE IN ITS HUMOUR: (I) MANIPULATIONS OF MEANING
junction to set on fire and abide the ejaculation. The beauty of such
aberrations is that while the meaning is reasonably clear, it is ex-
pressed in language so far removed from standard idiom as to con-
stitute an exotic strain of poetry. It was the perception of such
potential in the language of a tourist pamphlet that led Robert
Graves to write a very funny poem called' !Wellcome, To The Caves
of Arta!' He prefaces his poem with a passage from the leaflet:
They are hollowed out in the see coast at the muncipal
terminal of Capdepera, at nine kilometer from the town of
Arta in the Island of Mallorca, with a suporizing infinity of
graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, wich prives
the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness. The
way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style
mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called
'The Spider'. There are good enlacements of the railroad with
autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually
Wednesday and Satturday Since many centuries renown
foreing visitors have explored them and wrote their eulogy
about, included Nort-American geoglogues.
And his poem begins:
Such subtile filigranity and nobless of construccion
Here fraternise in harmony, that respiracion stops.
While all admit their impotence (though autors most
formidable)
To sing in words the excellence of Nature's underprops,
Yet stalactite and stalagmite together with dumb language
Make hymnes to God wich celebrate the stregnth of water
drops. [13]
Mrs Malaprop would doubtless have applauded this, as a very nice
derangement of epitaphs in the oracular tongue. What may be
noted, is that neither in the stanza quoted nor in the rest of his poem
does Graves refer directly, in the form of any identifiable cita-
tion, to his pamphlet-source. It is stimulus rather than source; from
its varieties of error he generates a comic/poetic dialect. Thus mis-
takes have their heuristic value; through them we may discover
paradoxes, epigrams, metaphors, ironies, singularly beautiful and
grotesque forms of humour, sculpted by chance usage like pieces of
wood on the beach.
152 LANGUAGE IN ITS HUMOUR: (I) MANIPULATIONS OF MEANING
7.8 IRONIES
Humour has its prosodic laws that command the resources (alliter-
ation, rhyme, rhythm) but flout the principles of 'serious' poetics.
In comic versifying, rhyme and rhythm have, potentially, a dual
function. We may regard them as merely decorative applications,
providing a setting and, so to speak, a lighting for the humour, or
we may assign to them a more significant role as directive elements,
features that organize the comedy and are essential to it. In this,
comic verse is not so different from any other kind of verse com-
position; lyric poetry also uses rhyme and rhythm both decoratively
and directively. The subversiveness of humorous prosody, however,
lies in its whimsical play with the notions of expectation and prob-
ability - with the game of prediction. The following notes elaborate
this theme.
'Definition' 'Response'
The Princess of Wales is
Princess Di
And a person appointed
to observe the activities
of the Princess of Wales
is ... a Princess Di spy
And a convenience food
consumed by a person
appointed to observe the
activities of the Princess
of Wales is ... a Princess Di spy pie
And a man who supplies
with convenience foods
the person appointed to
observe the activities of
the Princess of Wales
is ... a Princess Di spy pie guy
And a false report
concerning the man who
supplies with
convenience foods the
person appointed to
observe the activities of
the Princess of Wales
is ... a Princess Di spy pie guy lie
And a loud exclamation
following that false
report concerning the
man who supplies with
convenience foods the
person appointed to
observe the activities of
the Princess of Wales a Princess Di spy pie guy lie
is ... cry
RHYME AND RHYTHM 161
I VI v IV' V v' oJ V ,
8.2 FRAMES
Humorous intention is made apparent through the construction of
a setting, or frame, which sanctions the joke ('given these con-
ditions, you may laugh') and also suggests an interpretative process.
These matters have been discussed elsewhere, notably in Chapters
Three and Four, but one or two additional or summarizing com-
ments may be made:
example 2
wild weeds of the straggled into the
hedgerow flower-garden
wallflowers and made counter-raids into farmyard and
garden bushes lane
In example I there is a touch of word-play on the matching verb-
adverb constructions (cf: She flew into a temper and flounced into
the garden). In example 2 there is the mildest invitation to smile at
the poise of straggled and made counter-raids, expressions that cast
incongruous military shadows across the bland pacific imagery of this
rural scene. We may not laugh outright, but if we read sensitively
we at least observe the humorous focus, created by a syntactic
pattern.
course, the change of numbers led them astray again, and the
corridor gradually filled with panic-stricken, scantily robed
humans, dashing wildly about like rabbits in a ferret-infested
warren. [21;P56]
Dashing wildly about like rabbits in a ferret-infested warren; the
comic point of the simile is hardly its propriety - the customary
measure of efficiency in rhetoric - but rather, the deliberate incon-
gruity that exaggeratedly suggests terror, in conditions that betoken
the lesser evils of bewilderment or mere annoyance. This figure be-
longs to the comic mode of hyperbole, or overstatement, the stylistic
trademark of many a tall tale.
Understatement, which the British are said to cultivate, is a com-
mon ironic resort: Napoleon, who knew a little about musketry; One
man who enjoyed a snack was Henry VIII. Counterstatement takes
various forms, eg that of the oxymoron which I use when I complain
that Some clergymen are aggressively meek, or· some wider form of
paradox, such as the remark of a friend who had undergone a long
course of psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis cures the patient beyond all
hope of recovery. Playful paradox runs like a grain through the writ-
ings of wits like Oscar Wilde and Saki:
His baptismal register spoke of him pessimistically as John
Henry, but he had left that behind with the other maladies of
infancy, and his friends knew him under the front-name of
Adrian. His mother lived in Bethnal Green, which was not
altogether his fault; one can discourage too much history in
one's family, but one cannot always prevent geography. And,
after all, the Bethnal Green habit has this virtue - that it is
seldom transmitted to the next generation. [21; p 53]
This is in fact Saki, but some constructions, in their affectation of
a bantering detachment, sound a Wildean note: one can discourage
too much history in one's family, but one cannot prevent geography.
One is a significant pronoun here; also significant are the scrupu-
lously and ironically reasonable adverbs - not altogether, too much,
cannot always, is seldom. The passage combines the effects of
counterstatement (the baptismal register is pessimistic), understate-
ment ('not altogether his fault') and overstatement (for indeed, to
imply that a baptismal name is one of the maladies of infancy is surely
overstating the case).
Overstatement and understatement are major principles of comic
170 LANGUAGE IN ITS HUMOUR: (II) THE STAGING OF RECITALS
A popular song of the 1930S declared to the world that It ain't what
you do, it's the way that you do it, with the corollary It ain't what
you say, it's the way that you say it. This applies to humour as much
as to anything. Everyone knows that jokes are made or marred in
the telling; for which reason, the inexperienced teller accepts and
respects formulae handed down to him, seldom daring to attempt
variations in the pattern of a locative joke, or to practise improv-
isations in the structure of an anecdote. Professionals originate and
improvise; laymen follow a script.
There is, indeed, a 'performance element' in humour, a histrionic
capacity that can raise a chuckling response to material virtually
devoid of any distinctively cornie feature. A skilled cornie actor can
read aloud a set of names culled from the telephone catalogue, and
by intonations, by exquisitely judged pauses, by sensuous variations
of vocal timbre, by a magisterial solemnity of countenance, can
make the onlooker smile. Skilled cornie actors, however, are seldom
required to exercise their arts of interpretation on such unlikely
material. As a rule they are provided with scripts into which the
notations of humour have been more or less emphatically written
by authors concerned with the vocal implications of their writing.
THE PERFORMANCE ELEMENT 171
This brief bibliography lists items ranging from The Old Joke Book to the
Journal of Literary Semantics, a piquant association that expresses for me
something of the oddity of the enterprise. Writings on the language of
humour are neither numerous nor easily accessible, and few are directly con-
cerned with humour and style; in consequence, it is hardly possible to produce
the sort of bibliography that might be said to be coherently representative of
an argument.
Section (i) cites literary sources substantially quoted in my text, and men-
tions some collections, anthologies, etc, which have provided me with an
illustration here and there. Section (ii) lists books and articles on humour,
together with a miscellany of works that I have found to be in some way
relevant to the structure, philosophy, and pragmatics of humorous discourse.
II Forster, John (repr. 1972) Life of Jonathan Swift, John Murray: London;
repr. Folcroft Library Editions.
12 Gilbert, Sir W. S. (1932 edn) Plays and Poems of w. S. Gilbert, with a
preface by Deems Taylor, Random House: New York.
13 Graves, Robert (1951) Poems and Satires, 1951, Cassell: London.
14 Graves, Robert (1955) The Crowning~Privilege, Cassell: London.
15 Harte, Bret (1900) The Complete Works, Vol. V, Chatto & Windus:
London.
16 Heller, Joseph (1980 edn) Good as Gold, paperback repr. Corgi Books:
London.
17 Jerome, Jerome K. (1980 edn) Three Men in a Boat, Penguin Books:
London.
18 Laing, R. D. (1973) Knots, Penguin Books: London.
19 Larkin, Philip (1955) The Less Deceived, The Marvel Press: London.
20 Leacock, Stephen (1973 edn) The Bodley Head Leacock, Priestly, J. B.
(ed.), The Bodley Head: London.
21 Munro, H. H. (Saki) (1981 edn) The Best of Saki, Tom Sharpe (ed.),
Picador: London.
22 Nash, Ogden (1952) The Face is Familiar, J.M. Dent: London
23 Rees, Nigel (1978) Quote-Unquole, George Allen and Unwin: London.
24 Rees, Nigel (1979) Graffiti Lives, O. K., George Allen and Unwin: Lon-
don.
25 Rees, Nigel (1981) Graffiti 3, George Allen and Unwin: London.
26 Squire, J. C. (1900; volume undated) Collected Parodies, Hodder and
Stoughton: London.
27 Squire, J. C. (1929) Apes and Parrots: an Anthology of Parodies, Jenkins:
London.
28 Tennyson, Alfred Lord (1969 edn) The Poems of Tennyson, Christopher
Ricks (ed.), Longman: London.
29 Thurber, James (1963 edn) Lanterns and Lances, Penguin Books:
London.
30 Tidwell, James Nathan (ed.) (1956) A Treasury of American Folk
Humor, Crown: New York.
31 Turner, Michael P. (ed.) (1974) Parlour Poetry: A Casquet of Gems, Pan
Books: London.
32 Waterhouse, Keith (1963 edn) Billy Liar, Penguin Books: London.
33 Waugh, Evelyn (1980 edn) Decline and Fall, Penguin Books: London.