interface

LANGUAGE
OF JOKES
ANALYSING
VERBAL PLAY

DELIA CHIARO

\
The INTERFACE Series

A linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar

indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic
methods, are equally flagrant anachronisms. ~ Roman Jakobson
This statement, made over twenty-five years ago, is no less relevant
today, and ‘flagrant anachronisms’ still abound. The aim of the
INTERFACE series is to examine topics at the ‘interface’ of language
studies and literary criticism and in so doing to build bridges between
these traditionally divided disciplines.
Already published in the series:
NARRATIVE
A Critical Linguistic Introduction
Michael J. Toolan
LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CRITICAL PRACTICE
Ways of Analysing Text
David Birch
LITERATURE, LANGUAGE AND CHANGE
Ruth Waterhouse and John Stephens
LITERARY STUDIES IN ACTION
Alan Durant and Nigel Fabb
LANGUAGE IN POPULAR FICTION
Walter Nash
LANGUAGE, TEXT AND CONTEXT
Essays in Stylistics
Edited by Michael J. Toolan

The Series Editor

Ronald Carter is Professor of Modern English Language at the
University of Nottingham and was National Coordinator of the
‘Language in the National Curriculum’ Project (LINC) from 1989 to
1992.
The Language of Jokes
Analysing verbal play

Delia Chiaro

R
London and New York
First published in 1992 by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge

a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 1000]
Reprinted in 1996
© 1992 Delia Chiaro
Set in 10/ 12pt Times by Florencetype Ltd, Kewstoke, Avon
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Chiaro, Delia
The language of jokes: analysing verbal play. — (Interface)
I. Title II. Series
827.009
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Chiaro, Delia
The language of jokes: analysing verbal play/ Delia Chiaro.
p. cm. fl (Interface)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Joking. 2. Play on Words. 3. Pragmatics. I. Title. II. Series: Interface
(London, England)
P304.C48 1992
306.4’4—dc20 91—336] 6
ISBN 0—415—03089—7 (hbk)
ISBN 0—415—03090—0 (pbk)
Contents

Series editor’s introduction to the Interface series vii

Introduction
About word play
Inside word play 17
Framing word play
Translating word play 77
Word play in action 100
Conclusion 122
Bibliography 124
Index 128
Series editor’s introduction to the
Interface series

There have been many books published this century which have been
devoted to the interface of language and literary studies. This is the
first series of books devoted to this area commissioned by a major
international publisher; it is the first time a group of writers have
addressed themselves to issues at the interface of language and
literature; and it is the first time an international professional associ-
ation has worked closely with a publisher to establish such a venture.
It is the purpose of this general introduction to the series to outline
some of the main guiding principles underlying the books in the
series.
The first principle adopted is one of not foreclosing on the many
possibilities for the integration of language and literature studies.
There are many ways in which the study of language and literature can
be combined and many different theoretical, practical and curricular
objects to be realized. Obviously, a close relationship with the aims
and methods of descriptive linguistics will play a prominent part, so
readers will encounter some detailed analysis of language in places. In
keeping with a goal of much work in this field, writers will try to make
their analysis sufficiently replicable for other analysts to see how they
have arrived at the interpretative decisions they have reached and to
allow others to reproduce their methods on the same or on other texts.
But linguistic science does not have a monopoly in methodology and
description any more than linguists can have sole possession of insights
into language and its workings. Some contributors to the series adopt
quite rigorous linguistic procedures; others proceed less rigorously but
no less revealingly. All are, however, united by a belief that detailed
scrutiny of the role of language in literary texts can be mutually
enriching to language and literary studies.
Series of books are usually written to an overall formula or design.
In the case of the Interface series this was considered to be not
viii The Language of Jokes
entirely appropriate. This is for the reasons given above, but also
because, as the first series of its kind, it would be wrong to suggest
that there are formulaic modes by which integration can be achieved.
The fact that all the books address themselves to the integration of
language and literature in any case imparts a natural and organic
unity to the series. Thus, some of the books in this series will provide
descriptive overviews, others will offer detailed case studies of a
particular topic, others will involve single author studies, and some
will be more pedagogically oriented.
This range of design and procedure means that a wide variety of
audiences is envisaged for the series as a whole, though, of course,
individual books are necessarily quite specifically targeted. The gen-
eral level of exposition presumes quite advanced students of language
and literature. Approximately, this level covers students of English
language and literature (though not exclusively English) at senior
high-school/upper sixth-form level to university students in their first
or second year of study. Many of the books in the series are designed
to be used by students. Some may serve as course books — these will
normally contain exercises and suggestions for further work as well as
glossaries and graded bibliographies which point the student towards
further reading. Some books are also designed to be used by teachers
for their own reading and updating, and to supplement courses; in
some cases, specific questions of pedagogic theory, teaching pro-
cedure and methodology at the interface of language and literature
are addressed.
From a pedagogic point of view it is the case in many parts of the
world that students focus on literary texts, especially in the mother
tongue, before undertaking any formal study of the language. With
this fact in mind, contributors to the series have attempted to gloss all
new technical terms and to assume on the part of their readers little
or no previous knowledge of linguistics or formal language studies.
They see no merit in not being detailed and explicit about what they
describe in the linguistic properties of texts; but they recognize that
formal language study can seem forbidding if it is not properly
introduced.
A further characteristic of the series is that the authors engage in a
direct relationship with their readers. The overall style of writing is
informal and there is above all an attempt to lighten the usual style of
academic discourse. In some cases this extends to the way in which
notes and guidance for further work are presented. In all cases, the
style adopted by authors is judged to be that most appropriate to the
mediation of their chosen subject matter.
 Series editor’s introduction to the Interface series ix
We now come to two major points of principle which underlie the
conceptual scheme for the series. One is that the term ‘literature’
cannot be defined in isolation from an expression of ideology. In fact,
no academic study, and certainly no description of the language of
texts, can be neutral and objective, for the sociocultural positioning
of the analyst will mean that the description is unavoidably political.
Contributors to the series recognize and, in so far as this accords with
the aims of each book, attempt to explore the role of ideology at the
interface of language and literature. Second, most writers also prefer
the term ‘literatures’ to a singular notion of literature. Some replace
‘literature’ altogether with the neutral term ‘text’. It is for this reason
that readers will not find exclusive discussions of the literary language
of canonical literary texts; instead the linguistic heterogeneity of
literature and the permeation of many discourses with what is con-
ventionally thought of as poetic or literary language will be a focus.
This means that in places as much space can be devoted to examples
of word play in jokes, newspaper editorials, advertisements, histori-
cal writing, or a popular thriller as to a sonnet by Shakespeare or a
passage from Jane Austen. It is also important to stress how the term
‘literature’ itself is historically variable and how different social and
cultural assumptions can condition what is regarded as literature. In
this respect the role of linguistic and literary theory is vital. It is an
aim of the series to be constantly alert to new developments in the
description and theory of texts.
Finally, as series editor, I have to underline the partnership and co-
operation of the whole enterprise of the Interface series and acknowl-
edge the advice and assistance received at many stages from the
PALA Committee and from Routledge. In turn, we are all fortunate
to have the benefit of three associate editors with considerable collec-
tive depth of experience in this field in different parts of the world:
Professor Roger Fowler, Professor Mary Louise Pratt, Professor
Michael Halliday. In spite of their own individual orientations, I am
sure that all concerned with the series would want to endorse the
statement by Roman Jakobson made over twenty-five years ago but
which is no less relevant today:
A linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary
scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with
linguistic methods, are equally flagrant anachronisms.
x The Language of Jokes
The Language of lakes may not appear an obvious candidate for
inclusion in a series of books concerned with the interface between
language and literary studies. Jokes are certainly not part of a canoni-
cal tradition of literature with a capital L, nor are they normally
considered to be contexts of language use which may have ‘literary‘
applications.
In this book Delia Chiaro reveals much that is of interest to
students of both language and literature and convinces us that jokes
have been neglected as rich sources of patterned creativity in lan-
guage use. Dr Chiaro demonstrates her case through a detailed and
systematic attention to language functions which have parallels in
more traditional contexts of literary study. The diverse range of
material treated includes: the narrative organization of jokes; degrees
of conformity to and deviation from established conventions; the
‘tellability’ of jokes and the role of the reader/listener in interpreting
them; discourse strategies in making jokes; the creative uses of puns,
word play and ambiguities. The emphasis in Dr Chiaro’s argument
falls increasingly on sociocultural contexts for the production and
reception of jokes, and she explores the extent to which jokes are
both universal in their appeal and specific cultural artefacts, embed-
ded within and representing different cultural assumptions.
To this highly readable study, Delia Chiaro brings a seriousness of
mind and playfulness of style which befits a subject which is now
likely to be studied further as a result of her work.

Ronald Carter
Introduction

Studies on humour and what makes people laugh are countless. Over
the centuries, writers of diverse interests have attempted to define it,
supply reasons for it, analyse it. From Plato and Aristotle to Cicero,
through Hume and Kant to the more recent Bergson and Freud, the
resulting bibliography provides us with as many theories as there are
theorists. Nevertheless, most works on humour tend to be concerned
with themes such as its physiological, psychological and sociological
aspects and few scholars in comparison have worked on the linguistic
aspects of the comic mode.
Naturally, most major works on language do include something on
verbal humour, but the norm tends to be the inclusion of a page or
two which play mere lipservice to phenomena such as metathesis,
polysemy, homophony and so on. On the other hand, linguists such
as Charles Hockett, Harvey Sacks and Joel Sherzer have taken a
deeper interest in word play, producing what, must be the only truly
seminal works on the language of jokes, while it has only been of late
that entire books dedicated to the language of humour have appeared
(e. g. Walter Nash, Walter Redfern). Perhaps the lack of abundance
of major works in the field could be due to the fact that there is a
widespread feeling that academic respectability is directly correlated
to unenjoyable subject matter, thus the study of humour, by its very
nature, cannot be taken seriously. On the other hand, in an era in
which scholarly books on phenomena connected to mass media such
as soap opera, quiz shows and football matches have given rise to the
discipline of media studies, it may be the case that we are ready to
accept books on verbal humour which do not need to be justified by
psychological or philosophical whys and wherefores and examples
taken from traditional literature.
From John o’Groats to Land’s End word play appears to be one of
the nation’s favourite pastimes. The term word play includes every
2 The Language of Jokes
conceivable way in which language is used with the intent to amuse.
Word play stretches way beyond the joke which, in itself, is indeed a
handy container in which such play may occur, but this blanket term
also covers the sort of double entendre which is so common in
conversation, public speeches, headlines and graffiti, not to mention
the works of famous punsters such as Shakespeare and Joyce.
British humour attracts and mystifies non-natives of the British
Isles. The notoriety of the British sense of humour is as widespread as
tea at five o’clock and stiff upper lips, although possibly not as
mythical. A glance at the shelves of any bookshop will reveal a
marked preference for the comic genre: written Spin-offs of situation
comedies, books by well-known comedians, collections of jokes and
compendiums of rhymes and riddles for children. Such literature
undoubtedly interests a large sector of the nation‘s reading public
while more ‘serious’ humour can be found amongst the classics. If
Britain’s more high-flown literature envies others their Balzacs and
Dostoevskys, as far as the comic mode is concerned, it remains quite
unrivalled. There are, in fact, hardly any writers in English literature
who have not attempted at least once to be funny with or through the
medium of words.
This book will not be dealing with the eminent punsters of the
literary world, but with the nation’s unknown jokers. The anonymous
authors of countless millions of quips, asides, graffiti and rhymes are
rarely considered worthy of serious study; in fact, people would
probably consider such instances of language as insignificant.
However, the sprawling mass which is word, or verbal, play can be
ordered and classified in such a way as to show that the linguistic
options available to the joker are no different from those available to
the poet. Of course, -taxonomies of word play already exist (e.g.
Hockett, 1977; Alexander, 1981; Nash, 1985) as do analyses of the
narrative structure of jokes. On the other hand, we know very little of
the interactive processes involved in word play. Although we know
that it is particularly pervasive in British culture, we hardly know why
it nonplusses foreigners both at a formal level and at an interactive
level. Furthermore, few studies have been carried out which consider
word play in contrast across languages.
We shall thus try to go one small step further than the existing
literature on word play by considering what occurs outside the
humorous text, how people react and interact in the face of verbal
play and where, if anywhere, lies the cut-off point between serious
and humorous discourse.
The examples in the book have either been taken from collections
 Introduction 3

of jokes or else retrieved from my memory; others still have been

recorded at dinner parties while speakers were unaware that they
were being recorded. However, most frequently, especially with
regard to the chapter on interaction, I have had to work from
memory. Predicting when someone is going to be funny is not always
possible and this has, of course, caused a few inevitable inaccuracies;
these should not, however, detract from the gist of the analyses.

Acknowledgements
I would first like to thank all the colleagues, students and friends who
have unwittingly or otherwise contributed to this book; in particular,
researchers of the Cobuild Dictionary working at Birmingham
University in the summer of 1985 and those present at the numerous
informal gatherings during the AIA conference in Turin later that
same year, especially Wanda d’Addic and John McRae. I am also
grateful to Charmaine Lee, Denise Poole and the French, Spanish,
German and Russian lettori of the lstituto Universitario Orientale,
Naples, who helped me ‘get’ jokes in their respective languages. I
would also like to thank Sarah Pearsall for her endless patience with
me and the British/Italian postal services.
Last but not least, my thanks go to Malcolm Coulthard who, so
long ago, helped me clarify my somewhat confused thoughts on puns
and word play as well as encouraging me to continue in my research;
and to Ron Carter for his invaluable comments and criticisms during
the various stages of the preparation of the manuscript.
1 About word play

The term word play conjures up an array of conceits ranging from

puns and spoonerisms to wisecracks and funny stories. Word play is,
in fact, inseparably linked to humour which in turn is linked to
laughter; so in a book which sets out to explore such a subject, it is
hard to resist not to begin by pointing out the obvious analogy which
exists between language and laughter, the fact that both are human
universals.
In all its many-splendoured varieties, humour can be simply de-
fined as a type of stimulation that tends to elicit the laughter reflex.
Spontaneous laughter is a motor reflex .produced by the coordi-
nated contraction of 15 facial muscles in a stereotyped pattern and
accompanied by altered breathing. Electrical stimulation of the
main lifting muscle of the upper lip, the zygomatic major, with
currents of varying intensity produces facial expressions ranging
from the faint smile through the broad grin to the oontortions
typical of explosive laughter.
(Koestler, 1974)
The physiological processes involved in the production of laughter
described above are identical in men and women the world over.
Equally complex physiological processes underlie the formation of
speech sounds. In fact, from Birmingham to Bombay the formation
of speech sounds is simply variations of identical physical procedures
involving the various speech organs; in other words, as far as laughing
and speaking are concerned, we all do it in the same way. However,
the comparison between laughter and language cannot be developed
any further, for, if it were, then, just as different languages are simply
manifestations triggered off by the universal blueprint of a single
grammatical matrix, it should follow that all laughter has a single
stimulus. Where laughter is concerned, however, the process is
 About word play 5
reversed; while the physical manifestation of laughter is the same the
world over, its stimulus differs from culture to culture.
It is a well-known fact that the same things are not funny to everybody.
We have all at some time made what we consider to be a witty remark
at the wrong time and in the wrong company and have cons-
equently had to suffer acute embarrassment to find the joke falls flat. Tacit
rules underlie where, when and with whom it is permissible to joke. What
is more, what may appear to be funny at a certain moment in time may
cease to be so a few months later. If we then begin to consider the
exportability of funniness, we will soon find that a traditional vehicle of
humour such as the joke does not generally travel well. The concept of
what people find funny appears to be surroundedby linguistic, geographi-
cal, diachronic, sociocultural and personal boundaries.
The notion of humour and what makes people laugh has intrigued
scholars of various disciplines for centuries. Philosophers, psycholo-
gists and sociologists have attempted to define the whys and wherefores
of humour and, above all, its essence. Such studies have resulted in
numerous theories on the subject, some of which are more convincing
than others; yet in their quest for a reason why, students of humour
have tended to lose sight of the ways in which humorous effects are
achieved. In fact, while considerable interest has been'aroused by the
subconscious processes concealed behind a burst of laughter or a smile,
the stimulus itself has been largely ignored, rather as though unworthy
of serious consideration.
Word play, the use of language with intent to amuse, is, of course,
only one of numerous ways of provoking laughter. Although at first
sight it may appear to be convenient to detach it from non-verbal
stimuli, this soon proves to be an impossible task due to the fact that
word play is inextricably linked to circumstances which belong to the
world which exists beyond words. While it is perfectly possible to
stimulate laughter without words, once words become part of the
stimulus, whatever the type of verbal conceit, it is bound to be the
verbalization of a state, an event or a situation. Over and above this.
although the manipulation of the language itself may well be involved
in the creation of a stimulus, instances of word play in which the
language is used as an end in itself with the aim of amusing would be a
contradiction in terms.

BEYOND WORDS
Everyone is capable of producing laughter, yet different people are
amused by different things, so let us try to identify what, if anything,
6 The Language of Jokes
may be considered funny universally. There are situations which may
be seen as funny in all western societies. Practical jokes such as
pulling a chair away when someone is about to sit down are a pretty
universal source of amusement to schoolchildren, while other stock
examples include seeing someone slip on a banana skin or receive a
custard pie in the face.
Henri Bergson, in his famous essay Le Rire, in an attempt at
explaining why we laugh, concluded that we always laugh at ‘some-
thing human’, at ‘inelasticity’, at ‘rigidity’ and ‘when something
mechanical is encrusted on something that is living’. In this light we
can perhaps explain the laughter triggered off by the clumsiness of a
clown or the mishaps of a comic like Buster Keaton. Yet on the other
hand, it may be equally feasible to suggest that laughter is triggered
off by something which is not at all funny in itself, but which symbo-
lizes a well—established comic pattern. After all, is there any real
reason why Groucho Marx’s cigar and raised eyebrows should make
us laugh? Yet they do and they do so universally. Are we really
simply laughing at his mechanistic movements? If we try to trace such
a stimulus back to its source or primeval association in order to find
an explanation we soon find ourselves involved in a complicated and
possibly hopeless task.
Like Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin with his ill-fitting suit and
rickety walk, the antics of Laurel and Hardy, and more recently the
lecherous Benny Hill chasing lightly clad ladies around fields have all
succeeded in amusing audiences despite geographical boundaries; yet
where slapstick (and lewdness in the case of Benny Hill) stimulates
laughter universally, other situations are only amusing well within the
borders of their country of origin.
In Italy, for example, where most television situation comedies are
imported from either Britain or the United States, a series is only
successful if the situation depicted is not too culture-specific. For
example, in the early 19805 the series George and Mildred and
Different Strokes became extremely successful in Italy. Both pro-
grammes are basically farcical in structure with dramatic irony used
as an indispensable feature in each episode. The main character is
usually responsible for a misdeed which is worsened when he tries to
remedy it. This results in situations which are not too different from
the ‘fine messes’ in which Stan Laurel constantly involved Oliver
Hardy. On the other hand, the problems of a priest trying to outdo
his Anglican counterpart in a parish somewhere in England (Bless
me, Father) are far too culture-specific to hope to amuse Roman
Catholic Italy. In fact, the latter series was quickly relegated to off-
 About word play 7
peak viewing time on one of the country’s minor commercial
channels.
Situation comedy frequently plays on stereotypes. John Cleese’s
bowler-batted business man (Monty Python) and hotelier (Fawlty
Towers), members of the French resistance (’Allo, ’A110) and typical
British civil servants (Yes, Prime Minister) are all figures belonging to
British culture which are instantly recognized in their inflated paro-
died forms by home audiences. Outside the British Isles, the stereo-
types do not necessarily correspond as being comic in intent.
Situation comedies involve someone getting into some kind of
mess. From the intricate farces of Plautus, through to the court jester
and then the clown, from boss-eyed Ben Turpin to John Cleese’s
‘Silly Walks’, from the ill-treated guests at Fawlty Towers to the
painfully embarrassing situations created by Candid Camera, it would
appear that people’s misfortunes have always been a laughing matter.
As far back as Philebus we find Plato claiming that:

when we laugh at the ridiculous qualities of our friends, we mix

pleasure with pain
(1925: 338-9)

while Aristotle declares that:

Comedy . . . is a representation of inferior people, not indeed in

the full sense of the word bad, but the laughable is a species of the
base or ugly. It consists in some blunder or ugliness that does not
cause pain or disaster, an obvious example being the comic mask
which is ugly and distorted but not painful.
(1927: 18-21)

COMMON DENOMINATORS IN VERBAL HUMOUR

If we now turn to the field of verbal humour, we will find that the
intrusion of language will restrict the stimulus to a smaller audience.
Nevertheless, the topics of jokes tend to be universal. Degradation,
for example, is the subject of an entire category of jokes. Physical
handicaps which are the topic of ‘sick’ jokes may well appeal to
feelings of repressed sadism, while most western societies possess a
dimwitted underdog who is the butt of a whole subcategory of
derogatory jokes which possibly allow their recipients to give vent to
equally repressed feelings of superiority. The Irishman in England is
transformed into a Belgian in France, a Portuguese in Brazil and a
8 The Language of Jokes
Pole in the United States. All of them are victims of jokes in which
they clearly become ‘inferior people’ in unlikely situations in which
they display pure stupidity. The Polish captain in the following joke
can be substituted by a captain of the ‘inferior’ group of one’s choice
in order to adapt it to a non-American audience:
J1
A Polish Airline passenger plane lands with difficulty on a modern mnway
just stopping short of disaster. The Polish captain wipes his brow after
successfully braking the plane. ‘Whew!’ he says, ‘that's the shortest runway
I’ve ever seen.’
'Yes’, says his capilot, looking wonderingly to his left and then to his right,
‘but it sure is wide.’
Why it is that any minority ethnic group can find itself becoming the
subject of a derogatory joke (and consequently laughed at by its recipi-
ents) may not, however, necessarily depend upon the inventor’s hidden
feelings of superiority. Over the years, practically every ethnic group in
the United States has taken its turn at being the underdog. Recent
literature on the subject (Bier, 1979 and 1988) suggests that it would be
equally feasible to suggest that Blacks, Jews, Italians and Puerto Ricans
may have presented both an economic and phallic threat to the white
middle-class American, thus suggesting that such jokes conceal repressed
feelings of fear and anxiety rather than superiority.
Minority groups do not however necessarily have to be of the
ethnic variety in order to qualify as joke material. In Italy, the cara-
bim'eri, one of the country’s three police forces, replace the ethnic
stooge, while in Poland the role is played by the secret police. Other
types of derogatory jokes involve cripples, the mentally sick, homo-
sexuals, wives, mothers-in-law and women in general. Only recently,
after the advent of feminism, have we begun to hear jokes in which
men are the butt of derogatory humour:
J2
0. Why are women had at parking?
A. Because they 're used to men telling them that this much (joker indicates
an inch with thumb and forefinger) is ten inches.
This joke of course combines the put-down joke with another
western joke universal: sex. Generally speaking, in ‘civilized’ socie-
ties dirty jokes are considered amusing especially if they concern
newly-weds or sexual initiation. However, such jokes undergo vari-
ations from culture to culture. In many cultures, male prowess and
penis size are a common feature of the ‘dirty’ joke, while in others,
seduction, adultery and cuckolded husbands appear to amuse, and let
 About word play 9
us not forget that many people find other bodily functions funny too,
so that ‘lavatorial’ jokes are far from being unusual, both among
children and adults.
Many people would agree with Charles Lamb when he claims that:
‘Anything awful makes me laugh’ (letter to Southey, 9 August 1815);
and Freud’s idea of the child born free but who is forced into a state
of repression within months of birth certainly rings true if we consider
that by playground age a child is ready to giggle guiltily at a scurrilous
remark. Later on in life we see that an important aspect of male
camaraderie lies deeply ingrained in traditions in which the dirty joke
reigns supreme — the rugby song and the banter and repartee of the
working man’s club and the stag night are just two examples. 12
upsets a rather male-centric tradition of dirty jokes by poking fun at
the male. He is now forced to laugh at himself and his over-
preoocupation with penis size and sexual performance. As for laugh-
ing at the underdog, who in this example is the male, surely here we
laugh the self-satisfied laugh of he or she who knows better?
Alongside the topics of sex and underdogs, another common de-
nominator which is universally present in jokes is what we shall term
the ‘absurd’ or ‘out of this world’ element. Jokes containing such
elements can be easily compared to fairy tales as both may be
inhabited by humanized objects and talking animals. Throughout the
duration of these jokes, the recipient’s disbelief must be suspended in
the same way as it is suspended in order to watch an animated
cartoon in which famous cats like Tom and Sylvester get flattened by
steamrollers, hit over the head by gigantic hammers and pushed off
mountains, yet, nevertheless, always manage to survive and return
for another episode.

J3
Jeremy Cauliflower is involved in a very bad car accident; sprigs are scat-
tered all over the road and he is immediately rushed to hospital where a
team of surgeons quickly carry out a major operation. Meanwhile, his
parents, Mr and Mrs Cauliflower sit outside the operating theatre anxiously
waiting for the outcome of the operation. After five hours one of the surgeons
comes out of the theatre and approaches Jeremy’s parents.
‘Well, ’ asks Mr Cauliflower, 'will Jeremy live?’
‘lt's been a long and difficult operation’, replies the surgeon, 'and
Jeremy’s going to survive. However I'm afraid there's something you ought
to know. '
'What?‘ ask the Cauliflowers.
‘I’m sorry, 'repIies the surgeon, ‘we've done our best but. . . but I’m afraid
your son's going to remain a vegetable for the rest of his life.’
10 The Language of Jokes
The recipient of J3 does not question the fact that vegetables are
referred to by name, are involved in car accidents and undergo major
surgery. Being game to a world in which anything goes but which
would be totally out of the question in reality by even the wildest
stretches of the imagination, appears to be a tacit rule between joker
and recipient.

THE CONCEPT OF SHARED KNOWLEDGE

We have already seen that when a comic situation is too culture-
specific it will not be seen as amusing outside the culture of origin. It
therefore follows that if a joke contains a situation which is heavily
culturally oriented, it too will not travel well. Let us consider two
translated jokes to demonstrate the importance of shared knowledge
between sender and recipient in order for a joke to be understood.
The first joke, J4, is translated from Italian:
J4
At a party in a luxurious villa, the host says to his playboy guest: ‘See the
women in this room? Except for my mother and my sister, I ’ve been to bed
with all of them.’
The irritated playboy retorts: ‘Well then, that means that, between the pair
of us, we’Ve been to bed with them all!’
The joke is not a straightforward put-down as the playboy’s answer
might suggest to the non-Italian. At first the answer may appear to be
a simple attempt at numerical one-upmanship but this interpretation
ignores the underlying Italian sociocultural implications of sisters’
and mothers’ sexuality. In order to ‘get’ the joke completely, the
recipient must be aware of the fact that, until quite recently, to some
Italian men the purity of their mothers and sisters was unquestion-
able, and they could thus be cuckolded through their sexuality as well
as through their wives’ infidelity. Naturally, nowadays such a menta-
lity is no longer widespread; in fact, it is highly unlikely to exist at all
outside a few remote rural areas, yet it is still recognized as an Italian
‘semi-myth’ alongside those of the Latin lover and an exclusive diet of
spaghetti. Whether it is funny or not, in Italy, the joke is certainly
recognized as an attempt at being so. The following joke, which has
been translated from Spanish, is equally restricted to a Spanish
audience:
J5
During the Second World War, Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were travelling
on the same plane. They were discussing the people they governed and
 About word play 11
each of them claimed that his subjects were the most fervid patriots in the
world. As the discussion got more and more heated they decided to resolve
the question and see which people were, in fact, the most patriotic. The
plane would fly over Berlin, Rome and Madrid, a feather would be dropped
on each city and whoever it would fall on was to commit suicide, thus proving
their total commitment to their country.
First, the plane flew over Berlin. A feather was dropped and after a few
minutes a shot was heard.
‘There you are!’ said Hitler. ‘The Germans are the most patriotic race in
the world!’
Next, the plane flew over Home. A feather was dropped and after a few
minutes a shot was heard.
‘There you are!’ said Mussolini. 'The Italians are the most patriotic people
in the world!’
Finally, the plane flew over Madrid. A feather was dropped. However, no
shot was heard. The plane swooped down towards the city to see what had
happened. Thousands of Spaniards were busy blowing the feather as far
away from themselves as possible.

To the British recipient the joke is not amusing, as he or she is not

likely to be aware of the Spanish habit of poking fun at themselves
and at their poor sense of patriotism through the joke form.
Furthermore, since British jokes in which the British are depicted as
cowards are practically unheard of (it is in fact the Italians who are
the cowards in British jokes), the text becomes quite meaningless
through a lack of correspondence too.
If word play is to be successful, it has to play on knowledge which is
shared between sender and recipient. Translated jokes like J3 and J4
require an explanation for a non-Italian or non-Spaniard to recognize
them (in their entirety) as attempts to amuse, otherwise they will
remain restricted to those who are au fair with all the underlying
implications. British humour frequently intrigues non-native
speakers of English and one of the reasons for their not appreciating
it to the full is precisely due to a mismatch not only in language but
also in shared sociocultural knowledge.
Therefore, the recipient of a joke must understand the code in
which it is delivered and, although recognition of language is, of
course, the lowest common denominator required for the compre-
hension of a joke, this recognition appears to include a large amount
of sociocultural information which should also be in their possession.
As we shall see from the examples that follow, such knowledge
is extremely varied and ranges from mundane everyday experiences
common to the culture of the language in which the joke
12 The Language of Jokes
is delivered to what we shall term as encyclopaedic or ‘world’
knowledge.
J4 and JS clearly show how important it is to possess a knowledge
of the ‘world’. Linguistic competence in such jokes is the least of the
recipient’s problems. The same is true of J6.

J6
British Fiaii announced today that coffee was going up 20p a slice
(Barker. 1978)

To get J6, a great deal of knowledge regarding the quality of

catering provided by British Rail is required; it is therefore restricted
to those who have a sound knowledge and/or experience of refresh-
ments served by British Rail. Of course, the joke could be explained
by describing the temperature, colour, consistency and, above all,
the freshness of the liquid in question. Although such an explan-
ation would help the recipient towards an interpretation of the joke,
a personal experience, even at hearsay level, may well prove ess-
ential to understanding exactly why British Rail coffee is likened
to last week’s loaf. What is more, the remark plays on implication,
thus relying on pretty complex reasoning on the part of the reci-
pient who wishes to work it out. (The chances are that, due to the
lack of pragmatic signals, a not particularly proficient non-native
speaker may not even recognize the remark as an attempt at
being funny. This, of course, raises the question of how recipients,
regardless of their mother tongue, recognize this fact. See Chapter
5.)
Sociocultural knowledge is, however, by no means restricted only
geographically. A brief perusal of playground jokes collected by Opie
and Opie in the 19508 clearly shows how joke material changes as
time goes by. It is highly unlikely that schoolchildren of the 1990s will
be familiar with Ian Christie, teddy boys or Davy Crockett (or with
the theme song of the TV series, ‘Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the
wild frontier!’) and therefore they probably will not get the puns on
which the following examples play:

J7a
0. if Christie had two sons what would he call them?
A. Fiopem and Chokem’

J7b
Do you know a teddy boy's just been drowned - in his drainpipe trousers
(Opie and Opie. 1959: 106)
 About word play 13
J7c
‘How many ears has Davy Crockett?’
'Two, hasn ’t he?‘
No, three. He 3 got a left ear and a nght ear and a Wlld frontier. (ibid.: 120)

The last example, J7c, shows that there is still a third factor to be
considered. The recipient of a joke often needs to be able to re00gnize
instances of broken (or merely bent) linguistic rules. In other words
his/her linguistic knowledge requires a high standard of proficiency to be
able to deal with the ambiguities and hidden traps of, in this case, the
English language.
We can thus say that three systems interact with each other in order
to make up the sort of competence required in order to get a joke:
linguistic, sociocultural and ‘poetic’. Richard Alexander (1982) defines
poetic competence as the ability to recognize the ways in which linguis-
tic options can be manoeuvred in order to create a desired effect — the
recipient of a joke, in a sense, is in a similar position to the reader of
poetry; both need to appreciate exactly how the comic/poet has toyed
with the language.
J7c illustrates how the linguistic/socioculturallpoetic systems can act
together to produce a joke which could only be understood by a rather
proficient non-native speaker of English. However, the interaction of
these systems may well create more complex problems for such a
recipient:
J8
Sum ergo eogito
Is that putting Des-cartes before de-horse?
Sociocultural restrictions, as well as being geographical or historical,
may also be of an intellectual variety. First, here we see that part of the
attraction of this example is that it tests the reader’s ability to spot the
reference. It will only appeal to a limited audience who will have to
unravel and actually work out a solution to the ‘joke’, rather as though
they were solving a puzzle. In fact, in this case the reader has to (a) know
the quotation, (b) see that it has been inverted, (c) know that Descartes
was the author of the quotation and that he was French, (d) recognize the
idiom in the punchline, and (e) link the marked form of ‘the’ ICU] as
indicative of a French accent. The recipient will need to possess an
extremely proficient knowledge (which is usually totally subconscious in
native speakers) of the inherent comic possibilities of the English
language in order to perceive the allusive homophony involved: what we
have defined as poetic competence. .
Thus, if someone does not get a joke, this will be due to a certain
14 The Language of Jokes
amount of unshared knowledge between sender and recipient. Not
getting a dirty joke may reveal gaps in sexual knowledge (it is not at all
unusual for adolescents, for example, to laugh at sexual jokes even if they
have not understood them, so as not to lose face with their peers);
similarly, not seeing a literary reference may reveal a cultural lacuna
(which may be equally well camouflaged before our intellectual peers if
and when the need arises!); while not understanding why British Rail
coffee is compared to stale bread simply demonstrates that the recipient
has never travelled on trains in the United Kingdom. However, not
getting a joke may also be due to linguistic limitations, as in the case of
non-native speakers of English exposed to jokes like J8, which is doubly
difficult to get because linguistic play intersects play on world knowledge.
On the other hand, J8 is generally considered a good joke because it does
indeed crosscut the language/world knowledge barrier. Cicero makes this
very point in his distinction of these two types of humour:
For there are two types of wit, one employed upon facts, the other
upon words.
(De Oratore, II, LIX, 239—40) (1965: 377)

a witty saying has its point sometimes in facts, sometimes in words,

though people are most particularly amused whenever laughter is
excited by the union of the two.
(II, LXI, 248) (1965: 383)

PROSAIC AND POETIC JOKES?

In his seminal paper on jokes, Charles Hockett (1977) neatly divides
all instances of word play into two broad categories using terminology
normally reserved for literature: prosaic and poetic. According to
Hockett, while prosaic jokes play on some aspect or other of world
knowledge, poetic jokes simply play with the language itself.
Such a distinction at first sight appears to be quite helpful; we
simply separate jokes containing puns from those that do not:
J9
‘Mummy, Mummy, ldon't like Daddy!’
'Then leave him on the side of your plate and eat your vegetables.’
J10
Is the tomb of Karl Marx just another Communist plot?
According to Hockett, if we translated J9 into another language it
should create no particular linguistic difficulties, while it would be
 About word play 15
seen as a joke by members of all cultures who share the same eating
habits as the British. On the other hand, J10 qualifies for the poetic
category owing to the fact that, like the poet, the punster is utilizing
an option within the language with which to create an effect. In this
case the desired effect is humorous. Undoubtedly, Hockett’s distinc-
tion is neat and convenient, but it is not completely convincing. The
word plot does indeed contain an element of duplicity: it is in fact
polysemous and an added similarity with poetry is created by the fact
that the option played upon (in this case plot) is only typical of the
source language. It thus follows that poetic jokes tend to encounter
similar difficulties to poetry when an attempt is made at translation.
Yet to agree with Hockett that a joke such as 19 does not play on
language, and merely works on the principle of defeated expec-
tations, would be grossly oversimplifying matters. Although no actual
punning (in the traditional sense which sees a pun as a double
entendre) is involved, the reply forces the recipient to recontextualize
the first utterance and in particular the reference of the item like. It
seems to be a contradiction in terms to suggest that a verbal conceit
such as the joke does not in some way play on words. After all,
doesn’t J9 play on apparently hidden facets of meaning of the item
like, albeit in a less obvious way than in J10 in which the polysemous
item plot is exploited.
So any joke, whether it contains a pun or not, by the very nature of
its verbalization, necessarily plays on language. It may not be an
ambiguous item which acts as its focal point; it could be its delivery,
the intonation or the accent in which it is delivered, or even non-
verbal additions such as gesture or mime.
At this point, it may be worth commenting on the concept of
appreciation of word play. As we have already mentioned, not
everybody is amused by the same things and, what is more, over and
above shared knowledge of whatever type, finding something funny
relies on a number of subjective variables. What may appear amusing
under the influence of a few drinks may not appear quite so funny in
the cold light of the morning after. A homosexual is hardly going to
enjoy being insulted by someone’s idea of a witty remark at his or her
expense, any more than the Irish are amused by the thousands of
jokes which depict them as imbeciles. Some people are offended by
sexual innuendo, while others by political references contained in a
oke.
J Despite our good sense, when someone does not find something
funny we often tend to make a character judgement in negative
terms. Accusing someone of not having a sense of humour is actually
16 The Language of lakes
quite offensive in western society. Whether the sober recipient is
shocked by lewdness, offended by racism or simply confused by
cultural references, this does not necessarily mean that they are
lacking in a sense of humour. Monty Python’s skit of the German
national anthem in which Deutschland, Deutschland, fiber alles is
transformed into an ironic ‘Germans have a sense of humour/ho, ho,
ho, ho, ho, ho, ho’ merely strengthens the hypothesis that Germans
laugh at different things from the British. When we accuse a person
of not having a sense of humour, what we really mean is that they do
not find the same things funny as we do.

NOTE
1 Malcolm Coulthard pointed out to me that Ian Christie raped his victims as
well as killing them, rather than simply roping them as Opie and Opie
would have us believe; it is therefore more likely that the original answer
to the riddle was Rapem ’n Chokem and that the writers censored the
answer before including the riddle in their collection, which was first
published in the 19505. He also remembers Christie’s last request as having
been said to be ‘A cup of tea and a couple of tarts’.
2 Inside word play

If a group of people were to be asked what they understood by the

term ‘word play’, it would be pretty safe to say that most of them
would answer in terms of jokes and puns. What springs to the mind of
most people is probably a picture of someone telling a joke or
interrupting a conversation with a witty aside or a pun. Quite often,
word play is not necessarily a deliberate occurrence. It is perfectly
possible to make people laugh quite unintentionally by simply mis-
saying something. Someone slips up, says something wrong, and
others, for some reason, find this terribly funny. Suddenly we find
ourselves faced with an underdog, someone who has slipped up, and
who has thus temporarily become our inferior. This, in itself, is
funny.
Our present concern is the mistake itself rather than the mechan-
isms it triggers off at a social level, and, interestingly enough, the
kinds of ‘mistakes’ which people make, and consequently cause
others to laugh, appear to be universals in natural languages. As we
shall see, languages seem to contain hidden traps at all levels of
linguistic analysis, so that a transposed sound or syllable or a mis-
placed preposition can potentially cause havoc to the general mean-
ing of an utterance. Such havoc provokes laughter.

SLIPS OF THE TONGUE

Slips of the tongue could well be defined as verbal banana skins which
cause us, from a position of non-involvement, to laugh at the
unknowing victim. Freud’s work on verbal blunders and their re-
lationship to the subconscious is so well known that these mistakes
have come to be popularly referred to as ‘Freudian slips”.
The utterance,
18 The Language of Jokes
E1
Idrove Wlfh him tete a béte (Freud, 1976: 57)

according to Freud, is an ‘abbreviation’ of a stream of thought which

is far more complex than the signal which the surface structure seems
to c0nvey. In this case, what the speaker actually says is, in fact, a
reduction of something like:
I drove with X téte a téte, and X is a stupid ass.
In other words, the utterance reveals a subconscious thought or idea
which is then accidentally (or deliberately in the case of jokes proper)
modified slightly. According to Freud it is the very fact that the
suppressed ‘ass’ is given a linguistic form through a ‘t’ which is
transformed into a ‘b’ which makes the example a good joke, by subtly
revealing feelings which would have otherwise remained hidden. What
is more, the slighter the modification is, the better the joke will be.
It is a well-known fact that Freud interpreted slips in relation to
hidden feelings of the psyche. The typing error in a letter enquiring
about pubic transport in Naples might well have caused Freud to
comment on the writer's sexuality. Hockett, however, rather than
question the writer's libido, would have explained the error purely in
linguistic terms, by putting it down to some kind of ‘blend’ (1967:
913), although in this particular case the mistake was most probably
caused by mere cackhandedness. Nevertheless, slips of the pen,
typewriter, word processor and tongue are generally considered
amusing. Their recipients laugh at the person who slipped up rather
than at the mistake which, in itself, is not funny.

Metathesis
One type of verbal slip which is common to all natural languages is
technically known as the ‘distant metathesis’ or, more colloquially,
the ‘Spoonerism’; this type of lapse is imitated in intentional word
play and owes its name to an Oxford don, Dr William Spooner, who
allegedly sent down a student uttering, ‘You have deliberately tasted
two worms and you can leave Oxford on the town drain.’ What
happened to the unfortunate Dr Spooner was that he transposed the
sounds (in this particular example, /w/ and It], and /d/ and ltl)
contained in two words within his intended utterance. Owing to the
fact that the sentence still made some sort of surrealistic sense,
despite the phonological confusion, the tradition of the Spoonerism
soon became a traditional form of word play in its OWn right.
 Inside word play 19
Hockett (1967: 923) considers the utterence, ‘I fool so feelish’,
where ‘I feel so foolish’ had actually been intended. Rejecting any
Freudian interpretations, Hockett sees the metathesized utterence as
a blend of the ingredients of the intended utterance. Although the
item fool precedes feelish, fool may well be a phonological contami-
nation of feel by foolish. In fact, it is not unusual for speakers to be
aware of the slip which they are about to create, as in the following
example:
52
(intended) according to Smith and Trager
(spoken) according to Smayth? - and Trigger
(ibid.)
After having slipped up, the speaker decides to carry the lapse
through as a metathesis, as he is aware that by doing so he is being
mildly witty. This example is in direct contrast to Freud’s example of
someone slipping up on the names Freud and Breuer and referring to
the ‘Freuer*Breudian method’. Freud suggests that the lapse was due
to the fact that the speaker was unimpressed by psychoanalysis. Here
too, Hockett puts the slips down to a blend created from two names
which are habitually used together.
Hockett provides another interesting example of self-awareness, in
which, after the two real lapses, the speaker continues metathesizing
even further:
E3
This is how we go to Berkland and Oakley? - Erkland and Boakley? — no,
Boakland and Erkley? - darn it! Oakland and Berkeley!
The original slip is a reversal of the initial syllables of the intended
place names, the second attempt contains a reversal of the initial
consonants of the first slip. In the third attempt, the initial syllables of
the second try are interchanged; finally a fourth reversal (this time of
the third slip) results in the desired ‘Oakland and Berkeley’. Hockett
suggests that the speaker was aware of the comic effect of the various
permutations and thus classes the example as a ‘half-witticism’.
Needless to say, beyond such examples we find totally deliberate
attempts at metathesizing:
J1 1
l’d rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.
20 The Language of Jokes
Malapropisms
Another universal slip is the ‘Malapropism’. Sheridan’s Mrs
Malaprop (The Rivals) is famous for her continual attempts at using
inappropriate words in place of ones which resembled them in sound.
This resulted in disastrous effects such as ‘arrangement of epitaphs’
for ‘arrangement of epithets’. Clearly, Mrs Malaprop tries to use
words with which she is not accustomed, or what Bolinger calls
‘uneducated blends’, cases of ‘higher level coding falling back on
lower level coding’ (1968: 239—40).
What proud parents consider to be ‘bright’ remarks made by their
toddlers, are caused by the same mechanisms as Malapropisms,
although, unlike their adult/literary counterparts, children using ‘dif-
ficult’ words are not trying to be clever. The child overheard saying
‘Nice one, Squirrel’, on seeing a squirrel in a park in London, had
obviously misunderstood the name Cyril in a popular song of the
time, ‘Nice one, Cyril’, as Squirrel, and therefore knew no differ-
ently. The adults present on that particular occasion clearly showed
wonder and amusement at the comment and, by doing so, in a certain
sense ‘disrupted’ the child’s previous discourse. In fact she was
immediately silenced as she found herself becoming the centre of
attention. Similarly the reaction caused by a slip in the flow of a
normal, adult conversation will cause a disruption in its flow, whether
the agent is laughter, a comment or a correction of the mistake.

Misplaced words
Both Sacks (1973) and Sherzer (1978) argue that certain slips of the
tongue actually add to, rather than disrupt, discourse cohesion:
E4
The oorral’s the big joke now — it just doesn't look very stable.
(Sacks, 1973: 135)
E5
In his search for economic and military aid, Anwar Sadat has not exactly
been greeted by open arms.
(CBS News Report, 10 June 1975; Sherzer 1978: 338)
Quick-witted recipients of E4 and E5 will catch on to the unfortu-
nate lexical choices of the two speakers, yet, although discourse may
well be interrupted by a mild chuckle, at the same time those very
choices accentuate cohesion. The recipient with a sense of humour
will misread the adjective stable for a noun, thus linking it to corral;
 Inside word play 21
the polysemic item arms cannot but be linked to military aid, thus
creating anaphon'c indices in both examples. What is more, such
cohesion adds to Hockett’s argument of linguistic blending. There is
no reason why these slips should be considered in terms of the
subconscious, when lexical fields might be considered instead.
However, cohesive indexing can also be exophoric in nature, as in the
following comment by a female poet during a lecture on poetry:
56
There are some things which only happen to women. Period.
(woman poet reported by Sherzer, 1978)

REPORTED SLIPS
As we have seen, people tend to make mistakes in speech and writing
which others are likely to find amusing. Accidental jokes are formally
similar to deliberate ones (cf. E3 and J10); the linguistic options
available for exploitation to the would-be joker are, of course, lim-
ited to the same areas where a potential error may occur. However,
before examining the technicalities of deliberate jokes in detail, let us
explore briefly an area which lies on the interface between the slip
and the joke proper. In the same way as it is perfectly possible to
make people laugh by reporting an amusing incident which happened
to someone else, we can provoke laughter by simply reporting the
linguistic mistake made by someone else.
There is a tradition in the British press of reporting instances of
unintentional word play in special columns; furthermore, in many
newspapers, readers may participate in such columns by sending in
examples of lapses they have discovered, in exchange for a modest
monetary prize. The more popular press publishes such examples in
letter pages, with popular women’s magazines specializing in ‘bright’
remarks made by toddlers.:
E7
My friend’s three-year-old son recently made us laugh by pointing out
various makes of car, and than asking if ours was a Ford FlASCO!
(H. Gullen, Twickenham; Woman, February 14th. 1989)

Bright remarks form a separate category from the bulk .of reported
slips because of the sort of mechanism which supposedly clicks when
the reader sees them. Presumably such clever remarks are considered
‘sweet’, with the emphasis being very much on the appropriacy of the
lapse at such a young age. Nevertheless, let us consider the way the
22 The Language of Jokes
‘joke’ is framed. Ms Gullen reports a situation in which she herself,
the narrator, is involved. The text leads up to a peak (in this case the
punchline) which is couched in terms of a narrative report of a speech
act. The next example of a reported gaffe is very different in terms of
framing; the ‘writer’ gives no indication of his amusement regarding
what is being reported to his readers, yet he does still create a ‘story’
around the actual event and consequent slip:
as
A primary school teacher in Wellington, Oxon. sent a request to a local
bookshop for a Diagnostic and Remedial Spelling Manuel and also for a
Teacher's Manuel.
(Peterborough Column, Daily Telegraph, n.d.)
Here the journalist himself is telling readers about the mistake he has
found, with very little elaboration compared to text E7. In fact he
limits himself to merely contextualizing the mistake without entering
into the story at all. While laughing at the unfortunate Hispanically-
influenced teacher, who is unintentionally practising homophony
through his/her spelling problems, the reader also laughs with the
journalist the self-satisfied laugh of someone who knows better. Let
us now compare these examples with texts E9, 810 and E l l , where
any narrator is totally absent:
59
It has been medically and scientifically proved that a poet which is properly
cared for will keep you active, give comfort and companionship and stimu-
late comfort and laughter.
(She, September 1985)

510
An American package of a make of contraceptive pill containing two month '5
supply is labelled 'Twin Pack’.
(Daily Telegraph, n.d.)
E 11
First Prize in a competition is ‘a luxury Caribbean Cruise for two'. Second
prize is a rowing machine.
, (Slimming Magazine)
Here the reader knows the events are being re-told through the
context in which they occur. The fact that they appear in columns
dedicated to slips of the pen is in itself a pointer for the reader. The
reporter simply reports, while it is the macro-frame, the column
itself, together with any details which may follow (e.g. E9, Ell),
which act as structures on which to peg the ‘story’.
 Inside word play 23
In E9, the accidentally inserted extra letter renders the whole text
as appropriate as it would have been simply with the desired item pet
and hence it is mildly amusing. E10 and E11 are good examples which
parallel Sacks’ and Sherzer’s examples, E4 and E5, with the differ-
ence that, here, the journalist is telling the public what he has read.
Anaphoric cohesive irony is displayed in both cases even though twin
and rowing machine are in juxtaposition to the items to which they
refer. Contraceptive pill/twin, cruise/rowing machine occur in the
same respective lexical fields — albeit at opposite poles. The fact that
E11 appeared in Slimming Magazine adds to the overall irony.
The reader, however, supposedly laughs both at the authors of the
mistakes and, at the same time, with the person who spotted them.
The columns which publish these lapses must be prizing the reporters
for their powers of observation rather than the cleverness (or funni-
ness) of the remarks themselves.
E 12
Sign displayed in shop window: ‘Sausages made without conservatives. '
In yet another example from the Daily Telegraph, the journalist sets
out to make his readers giggle at the thought of eating Tory-flavoured
sausages. Despite the spartan frame, the finder of E12 is, in a way,
telling a joke. However, the laugh this time is actually on the journa-
list who is unaware of the double-take which has occurred. It is highly
likely that the butcher displaying the sign is a speaker of a Romance
language. In Italian, for example, conservanti are preservatives and
preservativi are condoms. It would appear that the butcher in ques-
tion may have wanted to avoid the use of the word ‘preservatives’ just
in case it had any taboo connotation in English.
Another way of making a joke out of someone else’s errors lies in
the tradition in such columns of poking fun at hoteliers and caterers
the world over in their poor attempts at translating into English; once
again we laugh with the discoverer of the gaffes:

E13
In hotel restaurant: ‘The waitress will give you the bill and you may sign her
on the backside.‘
E 14
On the coffee shop menu of the excellent Rincombe Hotel in Chiang Mai,
Northern Thailand, a recent tourist noted: ‘Today’s special: Fried crispy
wanton with beef and vegetables.’

Here, of course, the reporters distance themselves from the con-

tent of what they are reporting by use of quotation marks; they
24 The Language of Jokes
merely set the scene of where the slip occurred and then quote it.
This way of structuring verbal blunders can be considered in direct
parallel to the ways of framing jokes proper in which a joke might be
preceded by something like: ‘Have you heard the one about . . .’
I will now report an example of my own of a bad translation which I
found on a packet of depilatory wax bought in Italy - it is, however,
worth bearing in mind that, while I am presenting it quite crudely, a
journalist might well have pre-empted it, or rather framed it, with
something like ‘Instructions on depilatory wax carton’:
E15
Melt wax, shaking from time to time. Then let it make cold somewhat up to
reach a certain thickness and make sure the temperature is not extreme.
Strew the part to be removed with talcum powder and spread on it a layer of
wax longer and larger and of a certain thickness (3 MM. abt.) so that at may
possible to get hold of it for pulling up. Hardly before wax is solified, take off
from skin an end of hair-removing stn'p so that the same may be kept with
safety. As soon as the wax is made cold, get hold of the prearranged end
and pull up SUDDENL Y. It wisher, apply some cream or oil. E ventual
residue of wax are removed passing a cotton flock imbued with alcohol or all.
To removing the hair from the upper lip see the drawings.
Why this should be funny is hard to say. Certainly several syntactic
structures have been blatantly misused; yet, rather than laugh at the
translator, in this particular case, it is the text itself which triggers off
hilarity. It is an obvious word-for-word translation carried out by
substituting each source word with the first English equivalent listed
in the dictionary without paying attention to target-language word-
order. Inappropriate abbreviations and odd use of upper case,
together with the alternation of formal items with colloquial terms
help create the text’s overall comic effect.

DELIBERATE WORD PLAY

Deliberate jokes very often have an ‘accidental-but-on-purpose’ fla-
vour about them. A colleague who insists on calling a textbook
‘English trough Reading’ as opposed to ‘English through Reading’
clearly voices his feelings about the book by means of playing with
the spelling, and consequently the pronunciation, of the item
through. Omitting the first ‘h’ in that particular word seems to be a
mistake which could feasibly be made when writing quickly or per-
haps by a non-native speaker. What the ‘joker’ does is to manipulate
the language in such a way that it almost appears to be a slip. In fact,
 Inside word play 25
the pseudo-book title could indeed easily be a slip. The difference
between the two versions lies only in the fact that, while the deliber-
ate joke sets out as an attempt at being funny, the slip happens to be
so fortuitously.
We could go as far as saying that there are two points which match
in slips and jokes proper: linguistic form and the underlying stimulus
or purpose of the amusing utterance. In his work on the subject of
jokes, Freud suggests that deliberate jokes reveal attitudes from the
speaker’s subconscious in the same way as accidental slips. With both
form and stimulus being so similar, we can now see why it is so simple
to offend someone because of (what the speaker seems to think is) an
innocent joke or remark made in jest. How often is a gaffe followed
by a penitent ‘I was only joking’ on the part of its inventor? The
creator of ‘English trough Reading’ would have to be wary of the
company in which he uses his own particular title; nevertheless,
should it slip out in the presence of the author, say, he could easily
pretend it was just a slip of the tongue.
What now follows is a taxonomy of the different types of language
play adopted in deliberate jokes, bearing in mind their direct parallel
to so-called Freudian slips. Each subsection contains jokes which
exploit a certain linguistic option and is duly classified according to
the labels normally used in descriptive linguistics, e.g. graphology,
phonology, morphology, lexis, syntax, etc. Wherever possible,
examples have been chosen not only because of their resemblance to
slips or because they really could have been mistakes, but above all
because their authors have done their best to make them appear to be
so.

From icon to word

Before considering jokes which are purely verbal, let us briefly

consider those which come about by some kind of non-verbal means.
There is a whole category of graffiti which is purely iconic. The
‘reader’ is faced with some kind of diagram which may or may not
contain a linguistic sign such as a letter, a number or a word. The
following, strictly visual examples were popular amongst servicemen
in the early 19605.
26 The Language of Jokes
E16

(a) A (b)

The reader is forced to translate these mysterious visual clues into

words. In fact, (a) represents ‘discontent’ (i.e. disc-on-tent) and (b)
represents ‘hate’ (i.e. H + eight = hate). We could say that these
illustrations are no more than rebuses which require solving by the
reader, yet the links between icon and verbal message are extremely
tenuous and it would be rather hard for the reader to actually solve
them unless she/he has seen them before. In this sense, these dia-
grams are reminiscent of riddles which are equally impossible to solve .
Both of these verbal and visual riddles are unsolvable; sooner or later
the recipient must be given the answer. Nevertheless, they reveal
some kind of irritating cleverness on the part of their authors; even
without finding'these examples funny or particularly clever, recipi-
ents are able to recognize that their authors are trying to be so.
Luckily not all graffiti are as difficult to ‘solve’ as E16. The reader is
sometimes given some verbal help from graffitists who couple their
diagrams with a caption:
E17

Balls to Picasso

. and ’oles to Moore

E18

Y-fronts prevent
fall-out
 Inside word play 27
The reader is helped along by the added words, and one could argue
that, with an enormous dose of imagination, the two icons in E16
could be ‘worked out’; E17 and E18 need their captions to make any
sort of sense, as well as knowledge of the intertextual referents (i.e.
modern art, CND, men’s underwear). There are, however, other
graffiti which depend on a less iconic visual element for their impact:

E19 LIFE = DEA TH

(happiness) dt

°<
BIRTH'

* Life is an integral function of happiness over the time between birth and
death.

Here, for the benefit of non-mathematicians, the author provides

readers with the solution.
All the examples quoted so far contain a quizzical element; an
information gap exists between the graffitist and the reader who has
to solve the problem the graffito poses. In this sense, as we have
already said, it would appear that these graffiti are closely related to
rebuses. They are, in fact, genuine word games, literal examples of
word play which exploit unusual representations of words through a
mixture of icons and letters:

E20 (a) I TA = capitalist

(b) LUN OH = lunch break

Play need not necessarily involve laughter. The rebuses are not
meant to be funny at all but only ‘clever’, even if many people would
agree that they tend to be so in an exasperating way.
28 The Language of lakes
Playing with graphology
Verbal graffiti offer us some excellent examples of imitations of
genuine spelling mistakes. Consider the similarity between the
reported:
521
IMthout primeval pants, he argued. we'd still have carbon dioxide of around
15%, instead of the present trace quantity.
(She, n.d.)
and a notice in St Mary’s church, Oxford, pointing towards the Brass
Rubbing Centre, which someone has amended to ass Rubbing Centre
by visibly crossing out the ‘B’ and the ‘r’. Similarly, a graffito declar-
ing Lesbians — when only the best will do was changed by inserting an
‘r’ in ‘best’ to form ‘brest’. The joker tampers with serious written
language in a way which is not immediately obvious, yet which, at the
same time, reflects some kind of unseen trap inherent in the original
text, like the possibility in the example below of inserting an adjective
between the participle and the gerund:
522 SICK
PEOPLE HAVE BEENICROSSING THE CHANNEL TO BOULOGNE FOR
YEARS
(Poster, Waterloo Station. London)
The graffitists of the first two examples have created jokes which
could just have easily been mistakes (cf. pubic transport, p. 18), yet
they are clearly not mistakes. In fact each graffitist has made a point
of drawing attention to the amendment.
Hockett’s claim that certain jokes can be defined as being poetic,
finds at least one justification in ‘concrete poetry style’ graffiti:
523
(a) The king of Siam rules Bangk 0K '
(b) Yo-yos rule 0 —

K
Both these examples need to be seen in order to make any sort of
sense at all. It would be extremely difficult, or even impossible, to
read them aloud and have them make any sense, let alone render the
desired effect. It is hard to imagine what kind of articulatory acroba-
 Inside word play 29
tics a reading of the ‘yo-yo’ graffito would involve; similarly a verbali-
zation of E23 (a) could in no way capture the punning of Bangk 0K.
Of course, poetry should normally be read aloud if we really want
to appreciate a text to the full. Many poems depend on devices such
as rhyme, rhythm and alliteration, and can only be done justice if
read aloud. On the other hand a recital of a poem such as Lewis
Carroll’s ‘Mouse’s Tail‘ would require an extraordinary amount of
effort and imagination to illustrate the shape of an ever diminishing
tail merely with the use of one’s voice.

524 “ Fury said to a

mause, That he
met in the
house,
‘ Let us
both go to
law: I will
prosecute
you. Come,
1’“ take no
denial; We
must have a
trial: For
really this
morning I'vc
nothing
to do.‘
Said the
mouse to the
cur. ‘ Such
a trial,
dear Sir.
Wi
no jury
or judge,
would
wasting

Lewis Carroll may well be the inspiration of several joker/poets;

consider the technique adopted in the following traditional graffiti
and their similarity to Jabberwocky:

E25 (8)
30 The Language of Jokes

525“” z'cugow 3w 2: ZIHT

TnT HOUOQHT—332 T2912:
The parallel with poetry can now be taken one step further. Part of
the skill involved in ‘getting’ E23 (a) and (b) lies in knowing that they
are indeed ‘OK’ jokes (naturally, this category of jokes also plays on
other devices besides graphology). The reader needs to recognize
that they belong to a certain genre, and to understand what the genre
is. It is not sufficient merely to link Siam and Bangkok or know what
to do with a ydyo.
The 0K form of late twentieth-century ‘laymen’s poetry’ has estab-
lished its own forms and traditions to which all its poets must adhere.
In order to invent an OK graffito the writer has to be able to imitate
the form, structure and rhythm of all the other graffitists of the school
who have gone before him/her. As with ‘real’ poets, any one of them
may break the tradition and start off a new school. If a new formula
catches on, then a new tradition (and school) will flourish in its own
right. So, returning to examples E23 (a) and (b), we can now see that
the reader must be capable of recognizing that the writer has
manoeuvred the formula ‘X Rules OK’ to accommodate a link with
Siam or a yo-yo.
Furthermore, let us not forget the considerable difficulty involved
in translating such poetry/graffiti into another language. After all,
what likelihood is there of, for example, Miro (/mrral) having a
mispronounced homophonic counterpart in Russian or Spanish?

Anagrams

E26
Anagrams rule — or Luke?
As every crossword addict knows, or Luke is a signal that the
utterance is in a cryptic code which requires unravelling by the
reader. The OK genre has now been twisted to accommodate the
mental scrabble of the anagram.
E27
Alas poor Yorlik, I knew him backwards
Traditionally, anagrams are warped signifiers which warn their recipi-
ents that they contain a buried signified which wants to surface. It is
 Inside word play 31
the word backwards which tells the recipient how to unpuzzle the
anagram by reading something in the utterance from left to right. The
joke is, of course, doubly intertextual. Apart from the clear
Shakespearian reference, Yorlik backwards reads Kilroy, the well-
known character who is frequently mentioned in the slogan Kilroy
was here. Yet again the recipient is faced with having to know about
an item of world knowledge which is imperative for the complete
appreciation of the joke.
E28
Say it with Fowler’s
(sign above dictionaries in London bookshop)
E28 can also be read at more levels. It is not a true anagram at all,
because Fowler is indeed the editor of the dictionary in question.
However, a rearrangement of the letters of the editor’s name will
produce the item flowers and hence the Interflora slogan, Say it with
flowers. The ‘joke’ is obviously more enjoyable if the reader can
appreciate it on both levels.

Palindromes

For the sake of completeness, I should like to briefly mention palin-

dromes, words which read in both directions. The phrase Madam,
I'm Adam has a nonsensical appeal to it which is quite inexplicable,
and British schoolchildren continue to savour the traditional ‘naugh-
tiness’ of Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?

Playing with sounds

As Opie and Opie point out (1959), word play is first learnt in the
playground, with tongue-twisters certainly being one of a child’s first
encounters with it. The acoustic complexity of Peter Piper’s pickled
pepper is pleasing to the ear, and its performance involves a chal-
lenge. Furthermore, when someone slips up in trying to utter a
tongue-twister, matters become even more amusing to whoever is
listening. As was pointed out earlier, people tend to laugh at others’
misfortunes, and schoolchildren find out pretty quickly that if they can
trap a chum into saying something wrong, they will then (a) feel good
and (b) look clever in front of their friends. If whatever is said also
happens to be ‘naughty’, then the instigator gains even more points.
A phrase like The elephant is sitting on the bucket can be transformed
into something totally unintelligible if someone is made to utter it
32 The Language of Jokes
with their forefingers stretching their lips to their outmost limits -—
unintelligible except for the words fuck it, the naughtiness of which is
bound to provoke peals of laughter in anyone of primary school age.
As we saw previously (see p. 18), the Spoonerism originated as a
slip of the tongue which developed into a deliberate joking conven-
tion. Due to the fact that nowadays this form of word play has a
tendency to be somewhat obscene, traditionally, the taboo part of the
utterance is usually left for the recipient to complete mentally:
J12
0. What’s the difference between a Radox bath and Louis Fre’maux?
A. Radox bucks up the feet.

The answer is of course incomplete and presents the recipient with an

interesting challenge. However, the recipient must recognize that the
answer is indeed incomplete; native speakers automatically recognize
this as they possess prior knowledge of the fact that they will be
required to transpose certain syllables in order to obtain the ‘answer’.
The recipient may well be aware that Radox are bath salts but will not
necessarily know at the outset that Louis Frémaux is a conductor.
While the native speaker will be able to work this out by transposing
the ‘f‘ and the ‘b’ in the answer, a foreigner will surely remain
nonplussed. The native speaker knows that the unanswerable ques-
tion itself indicates the onset of a joke. Children’s riddles frequently
play on this very type of metathesis. Two totally different elements
are put up for comparison:
J13
0. What's the difference between a doormat and a bottle of medicine?

A less than serious answer is expected because of the nonsensical

nature of the question itself. There are, of course, dozens of differ-
ences between doormats and medicine, just as there are between bath
salts and conductors of orchestras. The absurd question is itself an
indicator that we are in the field of humorous discourse.
A. One’s taken up and shaken and the other's shaken up and taken.
The recipient clearly knows what to expect; if in his/her childhood the
answer to such questions involved a common denominator which
consisted of a symmetrical transposition of initial word sounds, then
it must surely follow that if Radox backs up the feet . . . then Fre’maux
fucks up the beat.
The kind of knowledge required to get these Spoonerisms is quite
complex. What chance would a non-native speaker have of ‘getting’
the following example:
 Inside word play 33
J14
I 'm ash nished as a pewt.

Even if they were au fait with the idiom to be as pissed as a newt, will
they also see the cleverness of the added III sound? In other words do
drunkards slur their ‘s’s universally?
The transposition of sounds/syllables can occur anywhere within a
word, as in the amendment to a name plate on a Paolozzi sculpture at
Euston station, where ‘Piscator’ is transformed into Pis-tacor.
Somehow, the recipient must know that the joker requires them to
make a mental somersault and pronounce it Itelkar/ as opposed to
Itazkorl. Here too knowledge of all three subsystems (see p. 13) is
required.

Manoeuvring phonology

One step further from play on individual sounds, we find play on

supra-segmental features such as stress:

J15
0. How do you make a at drink?
A. Easy, put it in a quidizer.
J16
I thought Wanking was a town in China until I discovered Smirnoff.
The rather cruel riddle of 115 demonstrates that by giving promi-
nence to the item drink (‘cat DRINK’) the recipient is led to imagine
that the answer will have something to do with ways of feeding a
feline. By switching the prominence to ‘CAT drink’, the riddler
invents a rather nasty cocktail.
In slightly more technical terms, we could say that an axial clash
has occurred. In the question the item cat is a noun and drink is a
verb, while in the answer the two items are interpreted as a single
item, a compound noun cat drink:

LION
(a) How do you make a CAT drink?
\DOG
(b) How do you make a CATDRINK?
MILKSHAKE?
COCKTAIL?

In J16 we see that prominence can also be spread differently within

a more complex lexical item. The reader — reader rather than listener
34 The Language of Jokes
because this example aims at tricking the recipient into misreading
what would be otherwise disambiguated if heard - will understand
‘WanKING’ mainly because of the misleading upper case ‘W’. Only
on reflection will he/she realize that the referent is a verbal participle
and not a proper noun. In other words, according to the versions we
wish to accept, the items in the first half of the riddle and the first
syllable of wanking occupy different slots along the syntagmatic axis.
When the wrong filler (accidentally or otherwise) is placed in the
wrong slot, the paradigmatic invades the syntagmatic. Unlikely items
invade territory which is not normally theirs. Joel Sherzer defines a
pun as ‘a projection of the paradigmatic onto the syntagmatic’
(Sherzer, 1978: 341), thus rejecting the common interpretation of a
pun as a word with two meanings.
In this light puns are seen as items which occur outside their
expected habitat. Sherzer goes on to add that such an interpretation
of a pun is ‘precisely the Jakobsonian definition of poetry’. We can
now, perhaps, consider the link between this and Hockett’s definition
of jokes as ‘Iayman’s poetry’. As we saw previously, Hockett argues
that, like the poet, the punster has a variety of options within the
language at his or her disposal with which to create a certain effect.
The fact that poetry presents greater difficulty than prose in trans-
lation is one of Hockett’s strongest arguments in his pun = poem
equation. However, so-called prosaic jokes, with heavy culture-
specific content, present the translator with equally complex prob-
lems. While it is undeniable that poetry exploits linguistic features
inherent in a language — sometimes to the point of exasperation, as in
concrete poetry, for example - to imply that the opposite is true of
prose (and consequently of prosaic jokes) is somewhat oversimplify-
ing matters. Hockett’s definition of poetry thus finds itself in oppo-
sition to Jakobson’s, which is not confined to ‘high flown’ poetry
alone (and consequently seen in terms of features such as alliteration,
paranomasia, dactyl metre and so forth), but also includes occur-
rences in the referential function. Prose itself is thus seen as a
continuum in which the referential function and the poetic function
are intertwined to varying degrees, with ‘Iiterary’ prose closer to the
‘poetic’ end of the cline than ‘practical’ prose. As jokes are examples
of the creative use of language which breaks pre-established patterns
of clearly referential prose, in Jakobsonian terms, any joke by defi-
nition is poetic whether linguistically or socioculturally inclined.
 Inside word play 35
Playing with word boundaries
Many jokes create axial clashes by generating more than one item
from what was a single item in the first place by means of the
elimination of original word boundaries.
J1 7
Knock knock . . .
Who’s there?
Felix
Felix who?
Felix-ited allover!
(Feel excited allover)
Needless to say, the joker is doubly cheating the recipient as he/she is
combining the formation of new boundaries with a form of distant
homophony. Stretching the name Felix to feel excited, while showing
considerable imagination, at the same time appears incongruous in
the environment of the joke as a whole and thus results in being
irritating rather than funny. This type of play is a traditional chil-
dren’s favourite; let us consider ‘Batty Book Titles’:
J18
Keep Fit by Jim Nastics
Keep it Up by Lucy Lastic
Wcton‘an Transport by Orson Cart
Hospitality by Collin Anytime
The Arthur Negus Story by Anne Teaks
(School Magazine, 1970)
What takes place in these examples is that first the joker thinks of a
word within the same lexical field as the book title and then extracts a
name from it. This name should, of course, be linked in some way to
the subject matter of the title. For example Jim Nastics, two items
which are easily extracted from the single item gymnastics, provide a
fitting author for a book on keeping fit; just as Anne Teaks aptly
authors a book about a popular antique dealer, and so on. Of course,
all such examples cross-cut two word-play techniques by exploiting
homophony (or, at least, a distant type of homophony, see p. 38) and
word boundaries at the same time.
The tendency in English to link words together to form a single
stream of sound, a single phonological word, lends itself perfectly to
this type of play:
36 The Language of Jokes
J19
BE ALERT!
Your country needs Ierts!
This classic graffito commonly found scrawled beneath wartime pos-
ters transforms the adjective alert into the determiner a + nonce noun
lert. Here too we can consider these examples in terms of axial
clashes. Unlike J15 and J16 where whole words invade syntagmatic
slots which in ‘normal’ contexts would be reserved for different
choices, in 117, 118 and 119 the reverse happens as entire words
aredeconstructed to accommodate more syntagmatic slots. Any ad-
jective beginning with ‘a’ could thus be expanded in the same way:
Don't be afraid! Your country doesn't need fraids!
Of course deconstructions are often more complex. Consider the
transformation of transcendental meditation in the following aside:
J20
Is a Buddhist monk refusing an injection at the dentist’s trying to transcend
dental medication?
The adjective transcendental ‘contains’ the verb transcend and the
adjective dental. The author has to create a situation which is apt for
both a monk and dentistry. By changing meditation to medication,
he/she is able to transfer the monk to the dentist’s surgery and can
thus create a situation in which he/she can toy with the two new
words.
Buddhist monk —->—->—->—>—H—»—>—>—> transcendental meditation
1 T
l T
l T
l T
l T
Buddhist monk at dentist’s —>—>—>—> transcends dental medication

Playing with word formation

A common game amongst children is for one child to ask: ‘What’s
a baby pig called?’ The response is of course ‘piglet’. ‘So, what’s a
baby toy called?’ and the stooge says ‘toilet’. As in the ‘Knock
knock’ joke, the recipient is deliberately set up to fall into a
linguistic trap, which in this particular case consists of saying
something ‘rude’.
Another interesting example of pseudo-English morphology is
provided by the Goons’ classic exohange:
 Inside word play 37
J2 1
Seagoon: A penguin please.
Sellers: Certainly, I'll look in the catalogue.
Seagoon: But I don't want a cat, I want a penguin!
Sellers: Then l1! look in the penguin-logue.
Of course, correct morphology can be exploited too, like in one-
liners such as:
J22
Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Somehow, however, ‘silly’, pseudo morphology is more appealing:
J23
lf Typhoo puts the ‘T' in Britain, who puts the ‘arse' in Marseilles?
There is no answer because the fact that tea happens to be a homo-
phone of a letter of the alphabet, does not form a symmetrical whole
with the combination of letters which form the word arse.
Typhoo —)—>—>—>—> brand of tea —>—>—>—>—> tea = /tl:/
Britain -—>—>——>—>—> a place name -—>——>—>—>—> contains letter ‘t’ =
/ti:/
l
l
i
Advert: Who puts the ‘T’ in Britain?
Answer = Typhoo
Similarly:
Marseilles —>—>—>—+—> a place name —)—»—»—>—> contains word
‘arse’
‘arse’ = o
i
i
l
Who puts the ‘arse’ in Marseilles?
Answer = ?

Playing with lexis

Three closely related word-play options, which are however quite
distinct, are: homophones (words which sound the same but have
different meanings); homonyms (words with the same form but with
different meanings); and polysemes (single words with different
meanings). The similarity of these options lies in the duplicity each
one possesses which is inherent in the language itself. This quality is
38 The Language of Jokes
absent in the comic options examined so far in which the joker has had to
intervene in some way with the item which is at the focus or punch of
the joke. As we have seen in the examples, word boundaries needed
to be tampered with or syllables manoeuvred from outside the text in
order to imitate a slip. When it comes to lexical play using the options
mentioned above, the joker has simply to find an environment in
which to place an item which is already two-faced in its own right. In
other words, rather than render an item ambiguous by meddling with
the item itself, it is the situation around the item which has to be
adapted to contain the duplicity already inherent in the focus item.

Homophones

J24
0. What's black and white and red allover?
A. A newspaper.
The colour adjective red and the participle read are both pronounced
/red/ and thus provide perfect material for a classic riddle, which,
since the items concerned are not also homographs, is not as success-
ful when read as opposed to heard. A successful adult version of the
above riddle could well be:
J25
The three ages of man:
Tri-weekly
Try weekly
Try weakly

Homophones in jokes and quips are not, however, always pure in

nature. Very often, in fact, homophony is merely alluded to:
J26
All men eat but Fu Manchu.

Fu Manchu can vaguely sound like ‘few men chew’ when set beside
all men eat. The aside is neat, the word groups on either side of but
contain the same number of syllables and mirror each other lexically:
all/few, men/man, eat/chew. In more technical terms, such distant or
allusive homophony is known as alliteran‘o;2 two ‘words’ in which the
beginning and/or the end are phonetically the same. Needless to say,
in this example, word boundaries have also been disrupted.
Allusive homophony may also be a combination of alliteratio with
the homeoteleuton, a word in which the substitution of one or more
syllables for another occurs:
 Inside word play 39
J27
Are eskimos God’s frozen people?

These two techniques occur in ‘bilingual’ puns, although the sounds

alluded to are anglicized versions of the ‘foreign’ sound. Copywriters
working on the Perrier mineral water advertising campaign have
successfully exploited the tendency of English speakers to pronounce
the word eau laul, in slogans such as Who put the ‘eau’ in bottles?,
Eau-la-la and Picasseau, below a cubist version of a Perrier bottle.
J28
0. What do Frenchmen have for breakfast?
A. Huit-heures-bix! (Weetabix)
This children’s riddle combines (a) a French (supposedly) pronun-
ciation of a popular breakfast cereal, which (b) in a French accent just
happens to mean ‘eight o’clock’, with (c) a common tendency in some
regions of Britain to insert an /r/ after the [9/ in the item Weetabix.
French is not the only target for bilingual punners:
J29
Arno, amas, amatit again.

Homonyms and polysemes

The distinction between homonymy and polysemy is extremely sub-
tle. Leech quite rightly asks himself:
Why should we decide that there are two separate nouns ‘mole’
rather than two separate meanings of the same word?
(Leech, 1969)
However, as was pointed out previously, puns (whether phonetic or
semantic) are two-faced. Their hidden meaning is brought out by the
environment in which they occur, where a more ‘obvious’ meaning is
usually expected.
J30
There was a record number of births in Kilbum this week. Apparently, it was
due to the Irish sweep. He has now moved to Camden town.
(The Two Ronnies)

The item sweep is a homonym. At first sight, it appears to mean

‘raffle’ or ‘lottery’, but as we read on and the text unravels, we see
that the meaning ‘chimney sweep’ is intended instead. Although the
surprise pronoun he on the one hand disrupts the text, on the other
hand it also adds to its overall cohesion in the same way as the
40 The Language of Jokes
unintentional lexical slips presented by Sacks and Sherzer do (E4 and
E5). However, ambiguity which depends on polysemy is more subtle
than homonymic play:
J31
Bloodnok: You can't come in, I’m in the bath.
Seagoon: (off) What are you doing in the bath?
Bloodnok: I'm watching television.
Seagoon: (off) What's showing?
Bloodnok: My dear fellow - nothing. I’ve got a towel round me.
(The Goon Show)
In contrast to the item sweep which can represent two separate lexical
words, the item showing is one word which can have more meanings.
In this case, Seagoon’s question in which he wants to know what is
showing on television is deliberately misinterpreted by Bloodnok as
wanting to know which parts of his anatomy are showing. The
openendedness of the following graffito leads jokers to generate
several jokes:
J32
Jesus saves!
(sign outside church)
— with the Woolwich!
- he couldn't do it on my salary!
- but Bremner scores on penalty!
— Green Shield stamps!
— he’s a redeemer too!
(graffiti below)
While being lexical in nature, the type of play exploited verges on the
syntactic as the item save occurs without an object, thus paving the
way for manipulation. The final polysemic reference to redeeming
generates from both Jesus and Green Shield stamps.

Playing with syntax

J33
A Scotsman takes all his money out of the bank once a year for a holiday;
once it's had a holiday he puts it back again.
J34
Child: Mummy, can i go out to play?
Mother: With those holes in your trousers?
Child: No, with the girl next door.
 Inside word play 41
Both examples play on an ambiguity which can easily occur in the
English language when sentences contain rank-shifted prepositional-
groups. In J33 the group for a holiday could refer back to both the
Scotsman and his money. The recipient’s common sense will naturally
lead him/her to suppose that Scotsmen go on holiday rather than sums
of money. However expectations are defeated when presented with
the subject it in the second half of the sentence. The same thing occurs
in J34 when the child misinterprets the prepositional opening with the
item with. Rank-shifted prepositionals in the nominal group can only
be disambiguated by examining their deep structure. By modifying J33
to something like ‘. . . once a year so that he can go on holiday . . .’,
and J34 to ‘Wearing those trousers with holes in?’, any ambiguity
would be avoided. However, although this would indeed create a more
economical form, it would do so at the expense of a potential joke.
J35
Tn‘mmets treacle puddings have caused several people to be taken to
hospital with badly scalded feet. It seems that the instructions read: ‘Open tin
and stand in boiling water for twenty minutes.’
Ambiguity is caused by the absence of an object after the verb stand,
further strengthened by the absence of a specific subject in the
imperative form.

SENTENCE

VERBAL GROUP 1 VERBAL GROUP 2 PREPOSITIONAL GROUP

‘Open tin and stand [tin 95] in boiling water for twenty minutes.‘
42 The Language of Jokes
Such a joke must surely be a descendant of the traditional ‘gaffe’
seen in church halls:
Ladies are asked to rinse out teapots and stand upside down in the sink.
Once again the subject of the second imperative is missing together
with its object; an examination of the sentence’s deep structure ls
necessary in order to disambiguate it:

SENTENCE

W
NOUN GROUP VERBAL GROUP 1 VERBAL GROUP 2 PREPOSITlONAL GROUP

Ladies are asked to rinse out teapots

upside down in the sink

J36
Advertising slogan:
Nothing acts faster than Anadin
Traditional response:
Then take nothing!
The fact that items like ‘nothing’, ‘nobody’, etc. do not need to be
preceded by a negative particle when they act as subjects, creates
ambiguity. ‘Nothing’ may thus become a name for ‘something’ as it
gains tangible qualities and materially exists due to its syntactic
positioning. Following this logic, take nothing can therefore be inter-
preted as ‘take something’.
The ambiguity of the indefinite article which can be used as an
 Inside word play 43
indicator of both specific reference and generic reference can also be
exploited for humorous ends:
J37
During 3 statistics lesson, the teacher says:
‘In Tokyo a man gets run over every five hours.’
‘Oh, poor thing!’ remarks a pupil.

Playing with the rules of conversation

As we have seen so far, in order to play with language, there must be
something linguistically ambiguous about the text, or else the joker
has in some way to render it so. We have seen how features such as
sounds, words, parts of words and even syntactic structures can all
become two-faced; yet over and above the traditional hierarchy of
the language system (i.e. graphology, phonology, morphology, lexis
and syntax) lies a supra-structure, pragmatics, which can be as am-
biguous as a discrete item. Choices and restrictions which a language
user encounters in conversation can become two-faced when seen in
relation to form.
J38
At the customs:
Customs officer: Cigarettes, brandy, whisky. . .
Girl: How kind you are in this country. l’II have a coffee please!
This joke illustrates how form and function may well clash when a
single form covers more functions. In this case a request for infor—
mation is misunderstood to imply an offer.
Conversational markers can be taken literally, rather than the
pointers which they are supposed to be:
J39
‘You know your great great great great great great grandfather?’
‘Yeah ?'
‘No you don 't, he’s dead!‘
The words you know are merely indicators which draw attention to
something which is about to be said. They stand for something like:
‘Hey, I’m going to talk about x . . . are you concentrating on x?’ In
the following example they are deliberately misinterpreted at face
value.
J40
‘Oh Nigel, i hear you buried your mother-in-Iaw last week. '
‘Had to. She was dead. '
44 The Language of Jokes

A stock way of introducing a certain subject with the aim of getting

the interlocutor to develop it is, here too, interpreted at face value.
Instead of talking about the death and funeral of his mother-in-law,
discreetly alluded to with I hear you buried . . ., the recipient
explains why she was buried.
We can now see that the area in which serious discourse ends and
humorous discourse begins is not necessarily well defined. At first
sight it may appear, for example, that the manipulation of discourse
markers can mislead an interlocutor into thinking we are being
serious when we are joking or vice versa. In such an example, what is
happening is not so much that certain markers (or functions) are
simply multifarious, but that Grice’s co-operative principles are not
being totally respected.
J41
Constantinople is a very long word, can you spell it?
Whether the recipient answers by spelling out ‘Constantinople’ or ‘it’,
he/she will be wrong because it can refer to both Constantinople and
it. Amongst Grice’s maxims of manner we find: ‘Avoid ambiguity’;
so, ifI really want someone to spell IT (i.e. the word ‘it’) and not (the
word) CONSTANTINOPLE, I make sure that my intonation is such
that inverted commas are clearly heard around the ‘it’; this will also
stop me from breaking another maxim: ‘Avoid obscurity of ex-
pression’. What is more, by not being as informative as might perhaps
be required, a maxim of quantity is also being broken. As all linguis-
tic play is ambiguous, it follows that all exchanges containing play are
deliberately flouting one or more of Grice’s principles. Nevertheless,
in the field of pragmatic play, rule-breaking is more subtle than in
other areas. Another answer to J41 could be an equally uncoopera-
tive ‘YeslNo’, which would counterbalance the ambiguous posit.
(Consider also: ‘Have you got the time/a light/a cigarette?’ ‘Yes’.)
J42
Where did King John sign the Magna Carta?
Here the recipient is faced with a question and not unreasonably tries
to respond to a request for information by remembering his/her
history. However he/she will soon find that no city or town is the right
one because King John signed the Magna Carta at the bottom. The
question is intentionally misleading, not only because of the many-
sidedness of the item where, but above all because of the insufficient
information given (quantity maxim), its obscurity (manner maxim),
and its deception (quality maxim). Of course, the sender could
 Inside word play 45
equally well have asked ‘On which part of the Magna Carta did King
John sign his name?’, but that would have been playing fair, which, as
we have seen, is not always the intention of our interlocutors.

INEXPLICABLE PLAY ON LANGUAGE

Much word play cannot be catalogued according to the traditional
labels considered so far, yet, at the same time, does not necessarily
play on sociocultural features either.
J43
Kenneth Home: Do you know anything about Professor Cornposture?
Stooge: Oh, he’s the world’s leading expert in ballistic missiles; he won last
year's Nobel Prize in Physics and he's head of the science department at
Yale. Why do you ask?
Kenneth Horne: He asked me to lend him five shillings.
(Round the Home)
Why this short text should be funny is quite baffling. Undoubtedly it
can be explained in terms of a let-down of the recipient’s expec-
tations; after the build-up regarding the Professor’s curriculum, we
find that Kenneth Horne merely wants to make sure that if he lends
him five shillings he can be certain of getting it back. However, is this
really sufficient to trigger off the amount of laughter which this
exchange actually manages to achieve? The recording of the pro-
gramme in which this particular joke occurs contains no canned
laughter and yet it raises an enormous amount of authentic laughter.
To suggest that it is funny only because the recipient is let down or
because western society tends to joke about meanness seems unsatis-
factory. On the other hand, it is worth noting that the audience begin
giggling as soon as they hear the Professor’s surname. Here too, we
cannot help but ask ourselves, why should the name Cornposture be
funny per se? Yet it is. Could it be that names containing words
pertaining to the lower regions of the body are inherently funny just
because they are reminiscent of something ‘rude’? The surname
‘Higginbottom’, for example, is certainly considered funny by some
people, as is the inventor of Toad in the Hole, Robert Capability
Lackwind (another name which gets a laugh) (Round the Home).
Together with diverse aspects connected with ‘bottoms’, perhaps a
reference to feet and consequently ‘corns’ is funny too.
Other banter can be considered funny because of indirect impli-
cations to subject matter outside the text.
46 The Language of lakes
J44
Nurse: Have you had any of the diseases on this list?
Hancock: Show me. . . (pause) How dare you! No l have not and especially
not that one!
(Hancock's Half Hour)

The more quick-witted members of the audience laugh at Hancock’s

first How dare you! They have already caught on to the fact that at
least one of the diseases on the list is venereal, before Hancock gives
them a complete confirmation with his indignation at being suspected
of having that one. So, on the one hand, Hancock is playing on the
universal of the sexual innuendo, while, on the other hand, he does
so through oblique allusion and, of course, clever use of timing. Let
us not forget that Hancock’s Half Hour was originally intended for
radio and that Hancock could only depend on language, without any
visual help, to raise a laugh. In this light, we can now see just how
much of the text depends on the listener’s interaction.
J45
The answers to last week’s quiz. . . the answer to question one was in three
parts: the three thirty from Paddington, the Wheeltapper’s daughter and not
while the train is standing in the station.
(Round the Home)

What is it that should not be done while the train is standing in the
station? At first the mind boggles, yet we instinctively feel that it must
be something ‘naughty’. Then we recall the warnings in lavatories on
trains and find that our instinctive suspicions are confirmed.
However, it is not only the implied reference to toilets which pro-
vokes laughter. Surely it is something which is missing from the text,
which is unsaid, that makes us laugh. In fact, the audience begins to
laugh as soon as they hear the three thirty from Paddington, and the
laughter increases with the subsequent answers, thus demonstrating
that the idea of a link between the three answers must contain the
source of laughter. What silly, nonsensical links these may be remains
a mystery.
J46
Whenever there’s any honi-soiting, there you 1! find them maI-y-pensing.

This aside by Kenneth Williams refers to the activities of the board of

censors at the BBC. Once again it is hard to establish exactly why it is
funny. Here, of course, the language has been manipulated, yet it is
probably fair to say that the transformation of the quotation alludes
 Inside word play 47
to something ‘naughty’. One possible interpretation could be that
honi-soiting alludes to some kind of ‘carrying on’ while mal-y-pensing
remains a witty anglicization of ‘thinking evil’.

NOTES
1 The origins of this genre of graffiti are not very clear. The most probable
explanation for it is that it is a direct descendant of the football slogan, X
Rules UK, where ‘X" stands for the name of a football club, e.g. Chelsea
Rules 0K. From the late 19605, such slogans have been sprayed on walls
throughout the British Isles as the territorial war-cry of a rather violent
category of young supporter. It would appear that these slogans were then
emulated by graffitists in forms like Saliva Drools 0K, Matadors Rule,
Ole, etc.
2 These definitions are my own translations of those quoted by Heinrich
Lausberg in Elemente der literarirchen Rhetorik, Munich, Max Hueber
Verlag, 1967.
3 Framing word play

Jokes come in numerous shapes and sizes ranging from very long and
highly structured ‘shaggy dog stories’ to short, almost spineless one-
liners. Depending on the length of a joke, the recipient’s attention
may be engaged for several minutes to hear a complex plot unfold
before the narrative explodes into a pun, or else she/he may be
suddenly surprised by a clever quip casually thrown into an ordinary
conversation. Whatever the type of joke, however, for it to qualify as
such, what is commonly known as a punchline or a punch must always
be present.1 The punch is the point at which the recipient either hears
or sees something which is in some way incongruous with the linguis-
tic or semantic environment in which it occurs but which at first sight
had not been apparent. If the incongruity met with appears in the
form of a pun, a new and unexpected meaning of the form in question
will suddenly become apparent; if it implies a situation, it will be
equally new and surprising.

There was an Irishman an Englishman and. . . BANG!!!

The recipient of the above joke expects the words a Scotsman to

follow the ritualistic opening to what appears to be a classic Irish
joke. Instead the punch occurs in an unexpected position thus dash-
ing our expectations. There will be no symmetrical succession of
similar events acted out in a similar way by three stereotypical
characters. What is more, there will be no incongruity performed by
the Irishman which will finally act as a punch. All this is pre-empted
by a sort of premature punch in the word Bang! The recipient is
aware of what sometimes happens in real life when certain Irishmen
and Englishmen come together, and the frame of a put—down Irish
joke serves as a front to express deeper goings on. Over and above
this, however, the joke makes fun of itself by playing with a conven-
tion of which the recipient is well aware.
 Framing word play 49
The punch is the pivot around which a joke is centred. Provided
that the pragmatic signals telling them that a joke is on its way have
been received, recipients expect a punch sooner or later. The Irish
joke above is a particularly good one because the recipient does
indeed expect a punch much later on than it actually occurs. Now,
despite the fact that recipients usually know that a punch is on its
way, the joke will still tend to create a certain amount of unexpected-
ness. Even if the joke is not a particularly good one, the anti-climax
of the punch itself will be sufficient to create a feeling of surprise. It is
the very mixture of expectancy and surprise which makes up the
punchline.
Before going into more depth regarding the breaking or twisting of
the unspoken rules of jokes in order to create a better joke, let us see
what the rules of a typical or ‘normal’ joke may be. Let us begin by
considering a more predictable Irish joke.

THE JOKE AS A NARRATIVE FORM

There was a Scotsman, an Italian and an Irishman. They wanted to watch

the Olympic Games but they didn’t have tickets, so they decided to go as
athletes.
The Scotsman pulled a bollard out of the ground, put it over his left
shoulder, went to the ticket office and said: ‘Jock McTa vish, Scotland, Caber
Tossing. 'And in he went.
The Italian found an empty plate, put it under his left arm, went to the ticket
office and said: 'Giovanni Bianchi, Italy, Discus Throwing. ’And in he went.
The Irishman scratched his head and thought. Then he put some barbed
wire under his left arm, went to the ticket office and said: ‘Paddy Murphy,
Ireland, Fencing.’
Goldilocks would not be quite the same if she had not sat on three
chairs, tasted three plates of porridge and Iain down on three beds
while the Big Bad Wolf had to huff and puff three times over in order
to be-taken seriously by the three little pigs. Similarly, things in Irish
jokes happen in multiples of three. First, the joke needs three charac-
ters, who are usually English, Scottish and Irish, but nationality
variants, as in the example above, do exist if they are necessary to the
plot. Second, the joke typically consists of three symmetrical events
in which the three characters mirror each other in some way. Finally,
the third event, in which the Irishman is the protagonist will contain
an incongruity. The Irishman will do something stupid, something
very wrong, and this is the punch of the joke. Everything which has
gone before it is merely a build-up for the final resolution.
50 The Language of Jokes
A common discourse pattern of clause relationships in English is
the Problem—Solution pattern. Texts can be seen to hang together
according to a surface pattern which can be labelled:
SITUATION
l
PROBLEM
l
RESPONSE
l
RESULT/EVALUATION
We can easily imagine how different texts ranging from the purely
referential to the literary can be analysed according to these criteria.
Advertisements, for example, frequently present readers with an
explicit problem (which they often never knew they even had), only
to be given a solution in the product being advertised. An example of
this can be seen in the 19603 advert: ‘Headache? Tense, nervous
headache? Take Anadin‘ in which the Situation/Problem/Solution
paradigm is resolved in the few words of a brief slogan. Fairy-tales,
romantic novels and situation comedies also present the reader/
viewer with a problem which is resolved by the end of the tale when
we are told or left to presume that the protagonist ‘lives happily ever
after’. Jokes, like advertising texts, frequently present an explicit
problem. Let us see what happens if we analyse our Irish joke from a
‘problem/solution’ viewpoint (see Figure l).
The first two episodes act as successful attempts at resolving the
initial problem of getting into the stadium:
‘Jock McTavish, ‘Giovanni Bianchi,
Scotland, Italy,
Caber tossing.’ Discus throwing.’
And in he went. And in he went.
The result of the Irishman’s actions are not successful and are not
verbalized with a matching And in he went:
‘Paddy Murphy,
Ireland,
Fencing.’
What does or does not happen is simply understood through the
pun on the word fencing. As it is not spelt out explicitly, the recipient
has to work out the underlying implication of the result, partly by
linking it back to the caber tossing and the discus throwing mentioned
by the other two protagonists. Automatically, and at the same time
 SITUATION

V
V
V
V
PROBLEM

v r ----------------------1
V E but they didn’t have tickets 5
v L _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .l

1
lI
.l

V V
V
V V
V V
detailed solution 1 ; detailed solution 2

V V V
V V V
V V V

x
V
'
detailed solution 3
lV
V V V
RESULT l V RESULT 2
V 9 V
V ' V
And in he went ??? And in he went

EVALUATION SUCCESS SUCCESS EVALUATION

Figure l
1 There was a Scotsman, an . Opening containing three
Italian and an Irishman. stereotypical characters.
Recipient expects to hear
2 They Wanted to go to the the narration of three
Olympic Games but they didn't events regarding each of
have tickets. the characters in tum.
Incongruity is expected at
3 So they decided to go as event number 3 and will
athletes. inVOlve the third man, i.e.
the Irishman.
4 The Scotsman pulled a bollard
out of the ground, put it over his Problem presented.
left shoulder, went to the ticket
office and said: Response to problem
presented in previous
5 ‘Jock McTavish, Scotland, clause.
Caber Tossing.’ And in he went.
Verbalization of details of
6 The Italian found an empty problem/solution
plate, put it under his left arm, presented in second
went to the ticket office and said: sentence. Each solution
mirrors the other
7 ‘Giovanni Bianchi. Italy, rhythmically, lexically and
Discus Throwing.’ And in he syntactically.
went.
Third solution not
8 The Irishman scratched his explained. Recipient
head and thought. expects punch.

9 Then he put some barbed wire Symmetrical patterning of

under his left arm, went to the 4/5 taken up again with
ticket office and said: exact mirroring of formal
features.
10 ‘Paddy Murphy, Ireland,
Fencing.’ Last utterance missing. To
be inserted and understood
ll? by recipient.
 Framing word play 53
silently, the recipient puzzles out the punch. In contrast to the more
‘serious’ forms of narrative mentioned previously, we could say that
joke narrative differs because of what is implicit within the punch. It
is this very implication, this cryptic element which differentiates the
joke from many other texts. The advertising slogan was obliged
explicitly to spell out the solution to a tense, nervous headache. A
joke cannot do this. Typically, the text leading up to the punchline is
detailed and explicit while multiple meanings are packed into the few
words contained in the verbally contracted punch. Our Irish joke
could well have finished in the following way:
'Paddy Murphy, Ireland, Fencing.’ And he didn't get in because you don ’t
fence with barbed wire, even if it is used for the building of fences.

However this detailed verbalization of the result is, of course, un-

necessary and transforms the joke into a non-joke by the very expli-
citness of the finale. Let us see if the same is true of other ‘story’-style
jokes by examining another type of joke, the ‘Shaggy Dog Story’:
Once upon a time there were three rabbits, Foot, Foot-Foot and Foot-Foot-
Foot, and they all lived at the bottom of Fanner Brown‘s garden. (8 1)
One day the rabbits were feeling very hungry, so Foot-Foot said to
Foot-Foot-Foot:
"ere, l'm n’arf ’ungry, why don’t you go and nick a lettuce out of Farther
Brown ’5 garden ?' (82)
'You must be joking, Foot-Foot,’ said Foot-Foot-Foot. ‘l’m the eldest, why
don ’t you go?’ (83)
So Foot-Foot said to Foot: ‘Listen Foot, you ’re the youngest, we're
starvin’, nip into Farmer Brown’s garden and nick us a lettuce. ’ (S4)
'OK’says Foot. (85)
So very quickly, Foot runs into Farmer Brown’s garden, pinches a lettuce
and is just about to run back into his own garden, when . . . BANG! (86)
Farmer Brown is out with his rifle . . . but. . . phew! He just misses Foot
who manages to scurry back with the lettuce. (87)
'Well done Foot'says Foot-Foot. (88)
‘Well done Foot'says Foot-Foot-Foot. (89)
‘It was nothing’says Foot. (8 10)
And they all eat the lettuce. (811)
Two weeks go by and the rabbits are feeling very hungry again, so
Foot-Foot says to Foot-Foot-Foot:
"ere, I'm n’arf ’ungry. why don ’t you nip into Farther Brown's garden and
nick us a lettuce?’ (812)
'You must be joking, Foot-Foot, ’says Foot-Foot-Foot. ‘I’m the eldest, why
don’t you go?’ (813)
S4 The Language of Jokes
So Foot-Foot says to Foot: 'Listen Foot, you ’re the youngest, we 're
starvin‘, nip into Farmer Brown‘s garden and nick us a lettuce. ’ (814)
‘OK' says Foot. (815)
So very quickly, Foot runs into Farmer Brown‘s garden, pinches a lettuce
and is just ab0ut to run back into his own garden, when . . . BANG! (816)
Farmer Brown is out with his rifle . . . and . . . this time he’s got Foot,
who’s lying dead on the ground. (817)
‘Oh dear’ says Foot-Foot. (818)
‘Oh dear’ says Foot-Foot-Foot. (819)
And they both cry for Foot. (820)
Two weeks go by and the rabbits are feeling extremely hungry. (821)
They‘ve lost a lot of weight and are feeling very weak so Foot-Foot says to
Foot-Foot-Foot:
“ere l’m n'arf ’ungry, why don‘t you go and nick a lettuce out of Farmer
Brown's garden?’ ($22)
‘You must be joking, Foot-Foot, ' says Foot-Foot-Foot. 'We 'Ve already got
one foot in the gravel' (823)
This shaggy rabbit story provides us with an even more marked
example of cohesive symmetry than the Irish joke (see Figure 2).
Like the Irish joke, this joke too is structured in threes; there are
three symmetrical episodes involving three rabbits whose redundant
names when repeated at frequent intervals three times over result in a
multiple of three ‘Foots’. Furthermore, the text presents a problem
and attempts to resolve it.
81 defines the situation: we are given information about the partici-
pants and we are told where the story will take place. This infor-
mation is correlated with the traditional surface formulaic aperture
Once upon a time there was . . . Then in 82 we find the first inciting
moment in which the story gets going. This inciting moment2 contains
the problem — the rabbits’ hunger — and as the story continues we
learn of the rabbits’ plan to solve the problem until in 86 and 87 we
find that the situation intensifies as they are almost thwarted in their
attempt to steal a lettuce. This paradigm of ‘Situation/Problem/
Solution/Negative solution’ is then repeated twice over in the two
episodes which follow. In fact, 81 to 811 is the structural blueprint for
the second episode.
The situation/problem depicted in 82 is repeated with a variant two
weeks later in 812. After this we find that the first and second episodes
mirror each other perfectly as the dialogues between the rabbits are
repeated almost identically; S3 is reflected in 813, S4 in 814 and SS in
SIS. However, although S6 mirrors 816, S7 is only partially copied by
817 because the farmer manages to kill Foot and consequently the
 Framing word play 55
previous chorus of joy (SS and S9) becomes a funeral dirge in 818 and
819 when the trio is reduced to a duet:
‘Well done Foot’ says Foot-Foot. ‘Oh dear’ says Foot-Foot.
‘Well done Foot’ says Foot-Foot- ‘Oh dear‘ says Foot-Foot-
Foot. Foot.
‘It was nothing’ says Foot.
The plot reveals an added tangle with Foot’s unexpected death and
thus comes to a climax. As in any well-respected plot, everything has
come to a head. The recipient knows that some sort of confrontation
will be inevitable. The initial problem has been resolved but at Foot’s
expense.
When the plot embarks on the third episode, the symmetry begins
in $21 with a reminder of the situation which has now worsened. The
recipient is informed about the rabbits’ health and expects something
to happen which will resolve the situation and take it either to a
happy ending or, at least, to a way out. Suddenly, in reply to
Foot-Foot’s suggestion (822) we get to the final moment of suspense,
as the symmetrical pattern is broken with a punchline (823). The
problem is not resolved but the story concludes with a decent (inde-
cent!) ending.3 Once again we have an expected solution replaced by
a pun. As in the Irish joke, nothing explicitly happens and the
recipient is left to unravel the pun.
Looking at the breakdown of the joke (Figure 2), we can see how it
is that the recipient expects something important to happen to the
storyline in the third episode. It is here that the plot deviates most
from the norm lain down by the matrix given in the initial episode.
Although, of course, the perfect mirroring had begun in the first part
of 817, Farmer Brown is out with his rifle . . . the utterances which
follow in the second episode still match those of the first:
S7 He just misses Foot —>—>—»—) Sl7 he’s got Foot
88/9 ‘Well done Foot’ says Foot-Foot —>—>
—>—> 818/19 ‘Oh dear’ says Foot-Foot
‘Well done Foot’ says Foot-Foot-Foot —>—>
—>—> ‘Oh dear’ says Foot-Foot-Foot
811 And they all eat the lettuce —>—>
—>—> 820 And they both cry for Foot
When we are reminded of the rabbits’ hunger in the third episode it is
in a more elaborate way than in the previous episodes. We are
informed of the details of their weight loss and general health. The
narration is expanded for a while only to be contracted again, this
time to a synthetic extreme in the punchline.
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58 The Language of Jokes
The recipient knows the joke will be poor and that most of the
narrative is inessential to the plot, yet, at the same time, she/he is
game and listens to it. The superfluous, redundant information is vital
to the performance. It serves to spin the story out; without all this
information it would no longer be a shaggy rabbit story. When the
punch arrives, what has been spun out will be quickly contracted and
shrunk down to form a pun of some sort.
Such a joke relies on performance and, told by the right person, the
corny punchline will usually be forgiven. An experienced joker can
captivate an audience. The continual crescendo of the rabbits’ names
which are repeated over and over is pleasing to the ear and the
cockney accents will add an extra dimension to the story. Let’s face it,
Foot-Foot would just not be funny in RP; told in a standard accent,
the audience would probably get bored. On the other hand, the
expert joker can exploit silences (S6, S7, $16, 817), add gesture
(Farmer Brown pointing the rifle, Foot with a hand on his heart as he
falls to the ground, etc.) and exaggerated intonation. In a joke,
disbelief is suspended, rabbits speak English and plan robberies and,
if the person telling the joke can put the audience under a spell
through use of accent and good timing, the groan produced through
the painfully bad punchline may well be repaid by a sense of catharsis!
The length of the joke is important and is part of the listener’s
enjoyment. The irrelevancies are interesting, the more information is
included, the better the final effect. The joke works intertextually as
the listener tries to store all the information given; it is somehow
reminiscent of the ‘cul-de-sac’-style children‘s jokes like the one in
which we are asked ‘If a train is going at 150 mph. and the wind is
blowing at 30 mph. in an easterly direction, which way does the
smoke blow?’ Of course, the train turns out to be electric. Similarly,
the listener has no idea where Foot-Foot-Foot, Foot-Foot and Foot
are going to lead him/her. Literally, up the proverbial garden path.

THE JOKE IN VERSE FORM

A ‘story’-style joke can also occur in verse form. Instead of prose,
rhyme and rhythm are exploited to humorous ends when used as joke
frames.

Alfred de Musset
Hated his pusset
When it mieu‘d
He mondieu'd.
 Framing word play 59
This is a clerihew, a short verse devised around four identical rhymes
with a punch in the final couplet. The opening couplet sets the scene
by introducing the participant and the situation/problem, while the
second and final couplet resolves the problem with a punch. In a way,
the clerihew is like a one-liner. Unlike the typical Irish joke in which
the narrative is greatly expanded and then quickly contracted into a
punch, the clerihew might be compared to the ‘condensed’ Irish joke
(p. 48) as it contracts situation and punch into a single utterance.
Did you hear about the Irishman who bought a zebra and called it Spot?
This clerihew can, in fact, easily be transformed into a one-liner:
Did you hear about the Frenchman who mandiq each time his cat
mieu’d?
Although both one—liner and clerihew work on the same concept of
‘bilingual’ punning, which plays as much on the poor English pronun-
ciation of the various ‘French’ elements as on the invention of
portmanteaux, the attraction of rhyme makes the clerihew version a
more appealing joke.
Another typical verse frame is the limerick. As Walter Nash puts
it:
Two short stanza types used exclusively for framing jokes are the
clerihew and the limerick (possibly the only two wholly British
contributions to the art of versifimtion).
(1985: 52)
Limericks usually follow a rigid scheme regarding rhyme, rhythm
and content:

There was a young lady of Hyde,

Who ate some green apples and died;
The apples fermented
Inside the lamented,
And made cider inside her inside.

The two opening lines introduce the protagonist of the limerick and
the situation , while the item which occurs at the end of line 2 defines a
‘problem’ which is expanded upon in the shorter lines 3 and 4 and
then finally solved with the punch in the final line. Of course, the
place which the protagonist comes from is of vital importance as it
determines the rhyme scheme of the whole limerick, since the punch
must rhyme with it.
60 The Language of Jokes
Line 1 There was an old/young woman/man/girI/boy from . . .
(place name) (RHYME A)

participant
Line 2 Who had . . . /was/with . . . (RHYME A)
l
situation/problem
Lines 3 & 4 (When) he/she said . . . (RHYME B)
l
expansion of previous situation
Line 5 PUNCH + SOLUTION (RHYME A)

Most people would probably agree that Edward Lear’s original limer-
icks were not particularly funny, and nowadays most limericks have
become obscene:
The limerick is furtive and mean.
You must keep her in short quarantine,
Or she sneaks to the slums
And promptly becomes
Disorderly, drunk and obscene.
However, outside the limerick and the clerihew, poets are inclined
to invent their own rhyme schemes.
God made things which creep and crawl
But British Rail, it beats them all.
A quick dig at the punctuality of British Rail in two lines which imply
that BR trains move more slowly than snails.

God made things which creep and crawl -> beetles, spiders, snails,
etc.
1 l l
SLOW MOVING
British Rail (made things) it beats them all.
1
SLOWER THAN

Parodying songs, hymns, advertising jingles and nursery rhymes is

a popular children’s pursuit.
 Framing word play 61
Hey Diddle Diddle,
The Cat and the Fiddle,
The Cow blew up
On the launching pad.
This version of a children’s nursery rhyme defeats the listeners’
expectations but remains a puzzle to non-native speakers of English
who need to know that in this rhyme the cow is supposed to jump
over the moon rather than come to a nasty end.

THE JOIQE AS FORMULA

There must surely be as many joke formulae as there are people to
tell them, so in this section we will limit ourselves to considering only
a couple of the most popular, shorter formulae. Let us begin with
formulae in which the senders ‘imitate’ or rather act out a dialogue
point-blank — that is not within the frame of a longer narrative
structure.

‘Mummy, Mummy, can Iplay with Grandma?’

‘No dear. you 've dug her up twice this week already!‘
‘Waiter, waiter, there's a fly in my soup! '
'Don't worry sir, there '1! be no extra charge!’

he sender does not embed the exchange within a longer stretch of

text, neither does he contextualize it in any way. The dialogue is simply
recited out of the blue with the assumption that the recipient will
recognize the opening appeals to Mummy or Waiter as being joke
signals. These joke types may well stem from the old music hall formula
acted out between comic and stooge which went something like:
'I say, I say, I say, my dog has no nose!‘
‘Really! Then how does it smell?‘
‘Awful!’
The opening frame I say, I say . . . is simply substituted with
Mummy, Mummy or Waiter, waiter, to signal that a joke is on its way.
What is more, the modern exchange is recited by a single speaker
who takes on the part of both comic and stooge.
However, dozens of joke types, particularly written graffiti, are
structured in terms of a single sentence or utterance. This normally
acts as a matrix and serves as the blueprint from which other jokes are
62 The Language of Jokes
generated. For example, from the idiom (of unknown origin) Old soldiers
never die, they just fade away, we can recognize the following jokes as being
its daughters:
Old lawyers never die. They just lose their appeal.
Old DI Y enthusiasts never die. They just get plastered.
Old TV directors never die. They just fade to black and white.
Old hippies never die. They just take a trip.
Now, the old + profession/never die/they just + pun formula has
generated from a pre-existing idiom, but it is sometimes the case that
the reverse occurs and that a joke form injects a new idiom into the
language. This is so in the case of ‘Smirnoff’ jokes. In the mid-19703
the Smirnoff vodka company began using the ‘before and after’
technique to sell its product. The advertising campaign consisted of
escapist photographs accompanied by slogans such as I thought the
Kama Sutra was an Indian restaurant until I discovered Smirnoff.
(The slogan originally had the additional rejoinder The effect is
shattering which was eventually banned probably due to the allusion
to ‘getting smashed’.) The slogan turned out to be the inspiration of
the graffitists of the nation as catchphrases such as the following
began appearing on walls around the country:
I thought innuendo was an Italian suppository until I discovered Smimofl.
I thought cirrhosis was a type of cloud until I discovered Smimofl.
However it was not long before the graffitists began to abandon the
formula, first by substituting the word Smirnoff with other items:
I thought Nausea was a novel by Jean-Paul Sartre until I discovered
Scrumny.
Soon, the caption began to move more radically away from the
matrix, as more items were changed. In the next example there is no
allusion to drink whatsoever:
l used to think I was an atheist until I discovered I was God.

Although Smirnoff jokes are now practically obsolete, the I

thought A was B until I discovered C formula has now frozen into the
English language as a semi-idiom. Today we can find graffiti (or
indeed hear asides) such as:
l used to talk in cliches but now I avoid them like the plague
in which the original matrix is barely recognizable.
 Framing wordplay 63
The ‘OK’ formula
Some formulae, for no apparent reason, suddenly become extremely
popular and are not only consequently quoted and heard everywhere,
but also manage to survive for several years. The ‘OK’ graffiti
previously mentioned (p. 47) are a good example of how a slogan,
inthis case originating from football culture, can be twisted and
turned in order to accommodate a joke form.
Anagrams rule - or Luke?

Synonyms govern, all right.

Roget‘s Thesaurus dominates, regulates, rules, 0K, all right, adequately.
Examples rule, e.g.
Dyslexia rules, KO.
Rooner Spules, KO.
Stemming from the matrix Chelsea rules 0K (where of course
‘Chelsea’ can be substituted with the football team of one’s choice),
jokes are generated which set out to parody the original form. The
examples above are all to do with the world of language and metalan-
guage, so in order to ‘get’ them the recipient must be au fair with
certain linguistic conventions such as synonymy, the way in which a
thesaurus is used, etc.
In order to get these jokes, their recipient must (a) recognize that
they are the parody of the ‘OK’ matrix; (b) possess a certain amount
of knowledge regarding dyslexia, Spoonerisms, anagrams, etc.; and
(c) recognize that the language itself is being played with.

What it takes to get an ‘OK’ joke

Knowledge of the matrix
Recognition of subject matter RECOGNITION OF JOKE
played upon
Linguistic ambiguities of English

Anyone who possesses all these prerequisites is also capable of

generating his own ‘OK’ joke. If we want to invent another example of
the same formula we know that we must somehow accommodate the
matrix to whatever element we have chosen to play upon. Let us
remain within the field of language and use the famous linguist
Chomsky as the subject for a new example.
We can begin by considering the first half of our joke, which has to be
64 The Language of Jokes
‘Chomsky rules . . .’; after which we must ask ourselves what it is that
Chomsky might ‘rulc’ which can be compressed into two upper-case
letters; Chomsky’s name is linked with language acquisition, universal
grammar and transforrnational-generative grammar, so it won’t be
long before we come up with:
Chomsky rules, TG.
At this point I may well be accused of having chosen a convenient
example; after all, how many other linguists can be so easily linked to
an abbreviation. In reply, all I can say is that all jokes work on
opportunity, and surely part of the inventor’s skill is to seek out the
unseen traps of the language and then exploit them for humorous
means. Let us try and see if the sphere of language contains any other
material for graffiti of this genre:
Tree diagrams rule, NP.
Clarification rules, Le.

Rather like the ‘Smirnoff’ construction, the ‘OK’ formula has almost
become an unthinking part of the English language. For example, at
the ‘Solidarity with Solidarnosc’ demonstration in Hyde Park, London
on 20 December 1981, a banner was seen which read ‘Solidarity ruled
OK’, while a ‘War on Want’ advertising campaign of the mid-19805
adopted a brick wall with the graffito: ‘Poverty rules OK?’

The ‘doing it’ formula

A form of word play probably imported to Britain from the United
States consists of catchphrases which mildly allude to sex. As we have
already discussed, western society finds sex amusing and so conse-
quently it often becomes the subject of jokes and word play. The
catchphrases in question, which often appear on car stickers and
T-shirts, play on the euphemism of doing it, in which do is a pro-form
clearly standing in for an activity when combined with the pronoun it.
Undoubtedly, in English, such a combination refers to the sexual act.
The typical car sticker will read:
WINDSURFERS DO IT STANDING UP
Unlike the traditional dirty joke, such catchphrases are never sexist
and consequently unlikely to offend. However they are rigidly formu-
laic and must adhere to the following pattern:
 Framing word play 65
SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT + ADJUNCT
I I I I
(professional category) (do) (it) (adverb or preposi-
tion + noun phrase)
TEACHERS DO IT WITH CLASS
ACCOUNTANTS DO IT CALCULATINGLY
CLOWNS DO IT FOR A LAUGH
LINGUISTS DO IT WITH THEIR
TONGUES
As we can see, the adjunct can either take the form of an adverb or of
a prepositional phrase. Whichever the chosen variable, the punch,
realized through the adjunct, must contain a widely shared associ-
ation with the profession named in the subject. However, variants of
the catchphrase exist in which the subject is no longer a professional
category but some other social group or even an individual:
PARENTS USED TO DO IT
OSCAR DID IT WILDLY
EINSTEIN DID IT RELA TIVEL Y
As with the ‘OK’ graffiti, here too it is not difficult to invent our own
jokes. How, may we ask, did Mrs Thatcher do it? Conservatively?
With an iron fist? With Dennis? There are sure to be those who
probably think she doesn’t do it at all. And Gorbachev? He must
surely do it transparently.

THE JOKE AS ASIDE

The one-liner is an extremely slippery category to classify because so
many examples are indeed ‘original’ in structure and thus impossible
to group together with others. What is more, being literally ‘one-
liners’, they are often casually embedded within a conversation and
consequently harder to pin down. Unfortunately, many one-liner
joke types have been omitted by nature of their very elusiveness;
nevertheless, what follows is a rough attempt at categorizing those
asides which have allowed themselves to be captured.

Definitions

These are one-liners which normally consist of either an affirmative

or an interrogative sentence containing the verb ‘to be’, in which the
definition contains a pun.
66 The Language of Jokes
An X is someoue who . . . = punch + pun
A vegetarian is someone who gives peas 8 chance.
A romeo is someone who ends all his sentences with a proposition.
When definitions are formed in the interrogative they are posed as
na'ive rhetorical questions:
Is a red-light district an erogenous zone?
Are eskimos God's frozen people?
Sometimes the pun/punch may occur in the subject:
Is a polygon another name for a dead parrot?

pun = pally (parrot) + gone (dead)

Another variation in form is a noun phrase followed by a dash and
another noun phrase which defines the first:
Richard Coeur de Lion - first heart transplant?
However, it is not always the case that such definitions include a pun
— they can take the form of cynical comments which are funny to the
extent to which they ring true:
The chance of bread falling with the buttered side down is directly pro«
portional to the cost of the carpet.
Beauty's only skin deep, but ugly is ugly to the bone.

Exhortations

These jokes are usually found in the form of graffiti which typically
consist of an imperative inviting the recipient to do something. The
exhortation may include a rejoinder containing a pun.
imperative rejoinder + optiOnal pun

Join the hernia society. It needs your support.

Blow your mind — smoke dynamite.
Save water - bath with a friend.
Help stamp out philately.
A variant of the above is of course the negative imperative in which
the reader is invited not to do something. The popular ‘down with
. . .’ graffito can be considered a subcategory of this group of jokes.
 Framing wordplay 67
Don’t let them cut hire education.
Don't vote, the government will get in.
Don 't complain about the beer. You‘ll be old and weak yourself one day.

Down with gravity!

Comments and complaints

These graffiti are more moderate in tone compared with the previous
group.
The first group is couched in the third person and posed obliquely,
thus giving the impression of not being aimed at anyone in particular.
Such comments simply grudgingly declare:
It‘s not the work that gets me down - it's the coffee breaks.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away but an onion 3 day keeps everyone
away.

A variant of the comment/complaint graffito consists of a name of a

famous character followed by a verb and sometimes a noun phrase as
well. This time the writer obliquely accuses:

Pablo Picasso paints by numbers.

Andy Warhol stencils.
Cinderella married for money.
Shakespeare eats Bacon. (traditionally followed by the rejoinder: It can't be
Donne.)

THE JOKE AS RITUAL

As we have seen, jokes are identifiable by the frame around which
they are constructed. Some are built upon the long and complex
framework of narrative in which, in order to accommodate a punch-
line which in itself is a kind of compression of multiple signals and
meanings, the text preceding the punch is elaborately expanded. In
other cases, a joke can be embedded into a verse form, built around a
pseudo-exchange or else generated from the blueprint of a popular
catchphrase. In all these cases, the recipient of these funny stories is
not expected to interact but simply to listen and finally, it is hoped, to
laugh.
However, some jokes do not only depend on the narrator but also
68 The Language of Jokes
require more active participation on the part of the recipient. Instead
of just listening, the recipient may actually have to collaborate with
the initiator and say something. Interactive jokes range from those
which are highly ritualistic in nature, like the ‘knock knock’ joke, to
those made up of a simple question and answer exchange. The
archetype of the ritualistic joke must surely be the riddle.

Riddles
A riddle is a brief question and answer eXChange between two
people, but unlike most question and answer routines the riddle is
always answered by the person who posed it in the first place.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that the recipient cannot participate
actively. At the very least, in answer to the question she must shake
her head or say she does not know as a signal to the sender that she is
willing to hear the answer.
It is worth remembering that the riddle did not start out as a comic
form at all, but rather as a word game in the literal sense of the term.
The question posed by the riddle would originally be formulated in
rhyme:
Little Nancy Ettiooat
In a white pettiooat,
And a red nose,
The longer she stands
The shorter she grows.
(1650)
This deliberately elaborate code represents quite simply a candle. A
riddle can, in fact, be defined in terms of a cryptic description of an
ordinary object. Nowadays riddles are no longer delivered in rhyme
but the cryptic questions still remain. Let us consider the children’s
classic:
0. What's the difference between a jeweller and a jailer?
The formula What's the difference between an X and a Y is fre-
quently eXploited in riddles. Of course, there are dozens of differ-
ences between jewellers and jailors; in fact, they are two very odd
choices of items to be put up for comparison in the first place. The
combination of the What’s the difference . . . format/opening plus an
odd choice of items put up for comparison tells us that we are dealing
with humorous discourse. Had the question been something like
What’s the difierence between a camel and a dromedary? then it could
 Framing word play 69
well have been taken seriously and at face value. However, the
absurdity of the question in this particular frame is an indicator of
word play. If the recipient is game she will answer that she does not
know what the difference is, and, in fact, there is no way she can
know unless she has heard the riddle before. The answer is: One sells
watches and the other watches cells. Needless to say, the conundrum is
solvable by finding a common denominator which either unites or
divides the two items being compared. Once a quality is found which
is suitable to one of the items presented in the question, it is then
deconstructed in some way to produce a term which can represent a
quality inherent in the other item in the riddle. What is interesting
about riddles is that their recipients automatically know what their
role in the exchange is going to be as soon as they hear the question.
Riddles come in a number of structural variants:
Why is (an) Xlike (a) Y?
Why did theZ. . .?
When is a K n o t a K?
What did the big I say to the little J?

Why is the Tory party known as the cream of society?

Because it's rich and thick and full of clots.
Why did the viper wip 'er nose?
Because the adder 'ad 'er 'andkerchiet.

When is a door not a door?

When it is a jar.
What did the big chimney say to the little chimney?
You're too young to smoke.
Independently of what linguistic options the punch may play on, it
will characteristically occur in the answer to the riddle. The half
containing the question merely acts as a signal to the recipient that
the question is to be taken as an invitation to ‘play’ and, at the same
time, contextualizes the punch itself:
Why did the window box?
The recipient knows a riddle is coming. If he 1s a native speaker he
should also recognize t h e ‘ genre' to which it belongs. In a certain
sense, the question itself contains a semi-punch because of the way in
which the stress deliberately falls ‘wrongly on the ‘verb’ box which
70 The Language of Jokes
for the purposes of the riddle has been extrapolated from a com-
pound noun.
signal that riddle is coming
T
T
0. WHY DID THE WINDOW BOX? —-> —> —-> linguistic ambiguity
T
T
A. BECAUSE IT SAW THE GARDEN FENCE.
l
l
punch
There are riddles in which the question itself, rather than the
answer, more obviously contains the punch:
0. What’s brown and comes steaming out of cows backwards?
A. The Isle of Wight feny.
Of course the riddle is meant to be told rather than read, so that the
recipient is led to think of a ruminant and not a port. The answer in
this example, rather than resolve the conundrum at once, points
straight back to the question. The recipient has to then elaborate the
homophone lkaus/ and the items ‘steaming’ and ‘brown’ in the light of
a ferry:
Signal that riddle is coming
& punch
T T T T
0. What's brown and comes steaming out of COWS backwards?
A. The isle of Wight Ieny.

‘Knock knock’ jokes

The recipient of a ‘knock knock’ joke has a more active part to play
than the recipient of a riddle. The whole ritual is longer and more
complex; the joke adheres, in fact, to a rigid five-move exchange
between the two participants. Each person knows exactly what to say
and when. The recipient’s part is indispensable as his role is that of a
stooge. The sender of the joke creates a sort of linguistic trap for the
recipient to walk into, thus setting up the context for a punch.
Such jokes open with the initiator saying:
 Framing word play 71
1 'Knock, knock!‘
The recipient recognizes this as being the initiation of a form of play,
therefore, if he or she is game, the obligatory response is:
2 ‘Who's there?’

As in all opening rituals, the new information is given in the third

move:
3 ‘Mary.’
The rules of the ‘game’ next oblige the recipient to repeat the name
with the addition of the word who:
4 'Mary who?’
The punch occurs in the fifth and final move:
5 ‘Mary Christmas!’

THE JOKE AS REJOINDER

Jokes can even interact with each other. This is the case with the
graffito which comments on a graffito which appears above it, which
may in turn comment upon one which appears above it. It is not at all
uncommon to find long, almost never-ending columns of graffiti in
different handwriting which all stem from a single graffito.
Home rule for Wales!

This exhortation containing the homophone iueilz/ has prompted

another graffitist to scrawl below it:
and Moby Dick for King!
However, rejoinders are not always prompted by a wish to pun.
Many, while witty, are simply comments, usually about sex or
politics:
When the revolution comes we 7/ all drive Flo/ls Royoes.
- what if we don’t want to drive Rolls Royces?
— when the revolution comes you won’t have any choice.
The presupposition contained in the first graffito is the concept of
equality which would follow a revolution. The second graffitist misses
the point of the egalitarian revolution but plays on the all-
inclusiveness of the item all, while the final writer puts his finger on
72 The Language of lakes
the reality of revolutions and comments on the lack of freedom which
they inevitably bring about.
Many rejoinders stem from famous quotations:
To do is to be - Rousseau

Tobeistodo—Sartre

The graffitist who decided to show off her knowledge by quoting

Rousseau was quickly followed by another graffitist who quotes
Sartre. Both comments are strikingly similar as they contain the same
words but arranged differently. A third graffitist was able to follow
both quotations with a more down-to-earth, yet equally apt rejoinder
— apt in phonological and lexical terms not only because of the play
on do and be, but also because of the handy assonance of Sartre/
Sinatra:
Do be do be do — Sinatra

While the written replication is rather limited, since it must adhere

quite strictly to the first graffito, the spoken rejoinder can actually
expand away from the ‘matrix’ and keep just a shadow of the original
as the text moves on. The Two Ronnies, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie
Corbett, frequently used this formula in the pseudo-news broadcasts
of their comedy shows.
(. . . and then we'll talk to the man who crossed. . .)
RC: A skunk with a koala - and got a poo bear.
RB: Then he crossed a truss with a polo mint and got a Nutcracker suite.
RC: — And a morse code transmitter with a sennapod and got dot dot dot
and a very quick dash.
RB: He even crossed a food mixer with a nymphomaniac with a lisp - and
got a girl who1! whisk anything.
RC: And a leather with a lady oontortionist and got a girl who could tickle
her own fancy.
RB: And he actually crossed a table tennis ball with an extremely tall
chamber pot and got a ping pong piddle-high poe.
RC: Then we talk to a man who crossed a Gordon Highlander with a
mousetrap and got a squeaky jockstrap.
FlB: And to a scientist from Kuwait who's bred an ostrich with a cockscrew
head. You give it a fright and it drills for oil.
The leitmotif of the sequence is the idea of creating silly hybrids
from two unlikely objects. The text is made up of eight jokes and each
joke works on the principle of the riddle. In order to create the hybrid
 Framing word play 73
product of two objects, its author has to find a common denominator
of both:

A skunk with a koala - and got a poo bear.

0. What happens it you cross a skunk with a koala?
A. You get a poo bear.

A skunk is an animal which gives out a powerful stench; a koala is a

bear and so is Winnie the Pooh; and the word poo expresses a bad
smell. We have all the necessary elements for a joke.
However, each joke which follows replicates the idea of the hybrid
and at the same time tries to better the joke which went before it by
inventing a hybrid which is more unlikely than the one which pre-
cedes it. The total effect of the text is that of a crescendo of silliness
based on a single motif. As the text is performed by two people the
final result is not unlike that of a rap.

TWISTING THE FORMULA

Most jokes are predictable, not in the sense that the recipients
already know or can easily guess the punch, but because they auto-
matically know that they are about to hear a joke. The recipient
knows exactly what to expect apart from the punch itself. However,
sometimes these expectations can be foiled if the joker decides to
play with the convention itself:
There was an Englishman and an Irishman and. . . BANG!

This joke can be considered qualitatively ‘better’ than the predictable

Irish joke because of this extra element of surprise which it displays.
It is doubly clever (or funny) because, as well as the punch, it seems
to make fun of itself too.
Often riddles play on the convention of the riddle itself. The classic
Why did the chicken cross the road? is a perfect example of play-
ground guile, in which the sender of the riddle is tricking the recipient
into thinking that they are in the realms of humorous discourse,
whereas, in fact, they are not.

Sender: What’s the difference between an elephant and a letter box?

Recipient (thinks: Two improbable items are put up for comparison and one
of them happens to be an elephant . . . this is a riddle.)
ldon’t know, what is the difference between an elephant and a letter box?
Sender: l shan't ask you to post a letter then!
74 The Language of Jokes
The recipient is fooled into thinking that this is a riddle, having been
led astray by the opening format and by the content (an elephant
being compared to a letter box) of what had seemed to be a riddle.
However, the sender wants the question to be taken at face value, as
a genuine request for information. The recipient should have ans-
wered something like: An elephant is a huge mammal with a long
trunk and ivary tusks, and a letter box is a slit in the door for the
delivery of letters.
There is, of course, no way that the recipient can know whether his
interlocutor is being serious or not. As far as he is concerned, he has
received all the signals telling him that he is going to be told a joke
and that he is in the field of humorous discourse. Then he suddenly
finds that he is not.
In the ‘knock knock‘ joke in which Mary is turned into Mary Christmas,
the recipient knows from the start that the initiator will manipulate the
word Mary in the final move. However, better ‘knock knock’ jokes break
away from the set formula and trick the recipient twice:
'Knock knock!’
'Who ’3 there ? '
‘The Avon Lady. Your bell's broken.’

The recipient's expectations are defeated as she falls into a pragmatic

trap. The normal five-move ritual has been cut short, yet, due to the
opening which is recognized as belonging to the original matrix, the
recipient is easily deceived into thinking that the initiator wants them
to play. Similarly, one child will challenge another with:
'Will you remember me in one day’s time?‘
The answer will, of course, be ‘yes’, but then the initiator continues:
'Will you remember me in two day's time?’
('Yes. . .’)
'Will you remember me in a week’s time?‘
('Yes. . .')
The initiator continues increasing the time span until the recipient
suddenly hears ‘knock knock’, the only response to which can be to
ask ‘Who ’s there?’, only to be told: 'There you are, you’ve forgotten
already!‘
As we have seen in the previous chapter, the point at which serious
discourse ends and humorous discourse begins is not necessarily well
defined. The combination of axial ambiguity together with the ma-
nipulation of discourse markers can mislead our interlocutors into
 Framing word play 75
thinking we are about to joke when we aren’t and vice versa.
However, what is happening at a macroscopic level is that the sender
is breaking one or more of Grice’s co-operative principles. Amongst
his maxims of manner we find ‘Avoid ambiguity’. All jokes are
ambiguous per se, so, in a certain sense, every time we tell a joke we
are being uncooperative with our interlocutor. If then we joke within
the convention of the joke we are surely being doubly ambiguous.
Constantinople is a very long word, can you spell it?
The recipient has no chance of giving the correct answer. If she
answers Constantinople she will be told that she can’t spell 'it’. On the
other hand, if the recipient sees the trick and spells the pronoun, the
sender will then decide that it was the spelling of the city which was
required instead. Of course, if I really want you to spell
CONSTANTINOPLE and not IT, I make sure that my intonation is
such that inverted commas are clearly heard around the IT. This will
also stop me from breaking the ‘Avoid obscurity of expression’
maxim. What is more, such an example is also breaking a maxim of
quantity by not being quite as informative as might perhaps have
been required. Jokes wantonly throw Grice’s maxims to the wind by
their very nature, but usually the recipient will know what is coming
from the frame. Have you heard the one about . . .? Why is an X like
a Y? — these openings give the listener some warning to momentarily
suspend disbelief. As we have seen, some examples are doubly
cruel/clever because they arrive without warning — or rather, they
give a ‘false’ warning. In the example just quoted we are faced with a
normal question frame. There are no Irishmen, no elephants and no
odd comparisons. Not unreasonably, the recipient tries to test his
knowledge of spelling, yet soon finds that no spelling is the right
spelling.
Playing with or twisting the pragmatic or social rules of language so
as to confuse our interlocutors into not knowing whether we are
being serious or asking them to ‘play’ could well be labelled verbal
‘guile’. This could be considered a verbal stratagem, the aim of which
is to trap the recipient into saying something wrong so that the laugh
will be at his expense. In fact, such forms of word play are particu-
larly popular amongst schoolchildren, who from a very early age
realize that getting one up on their chums makes them (a) feel good
and (b) look clever in front of their peers.
Children’s verbal tricks cover every possible linguistic option
imaginable.
76 The Language of Jokes
If frozen water is iced water, what’s frozen ink?
Do you learn Guzzinta at your school?
No doubt we all recall the embarrassment of saying something stupid,
of falling into a trap while our interlocutor gains points.
The openings of children’s catch questions are innocent sounding:
You know your great-great-great-great-great grandmother?
In no way does this question contain a joke frame so the recipient is
bound to interpret you know as the pragmatic marker it normally is in
conversation, i.e. ‘I’m drawing attention to something I’m about to
say.’ The retort:
Ha, ha, he, no you don’t because she's dead!

plays on the face value of the items you and know and not on their
functions as text markers. The joke is not introduced within its
normal or expected frame. A question and answer style joke is
presented as a direct challenge; it will contain signals informing the
recipient that she will hear a conundrum and it will probably also be
defined by an absurd question like:
What’s green, with four brown legs, twenty-two balls and if it fell on top of you
out of a tree would kill you?
It would be clearly out of the question to expect anyone to know that
the answer is:
A snooker table.
On the contrary, if a child is told:
I know what you’re going to say next . . .
she may well answer ‘What?’ because of the lack of any signal indi-
cating that the remark does not belong within the realms of serious
discourse. Naturally, she will then be told: ‘I knew you’d say “what”.’

NOTES
1 There appears to be no technical term for the punchline; however it has
been previously labelled both paesis (Hockett. 1977) and locus (Nash.
1985).
2 Labels regarding surface and notional structure are those of Longacre
(1983: 22).
3 Longacre (1983: 21) writes, ‘Conclusion, ‘Wrap it up’, brings the story to
some sort of decent - or indecent - end.’
4 Translating word play

Anyone who has ever tried to translate an English joke into another
language will know that it is no easy task. No matter how well the
translator knows the target language, cultural references and polyse-
mous items may well involve them in longwinded explanations, after
which the recipient rarely reacts with a laugh. Similarly, when a joke in
a foreign language is translated into English, results tend to be equally
disastrous. Jokes, it would seem, travel badly.
In the opening chapter we considered what, if anything, was funny
intra-culturally. Slapstick, for example, was seen to be funny in all
western cultures, and transcultural problems reared their heads only
when language became involved. Nevertheless, to suggest that a
common linguistic code is all that is needed in order to appreciate jokes
and word play would be extremely naive. One only has to consider the
numerous American situation comedies which have had little or no
success in Britain, and vice versa, to see that a shared code is only half
the story. Language and culture seem to be indivisible and, without
shared sociocultural knowledge between sender and recipient, a
common linguistic code will be of little help.
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf claimed that each language
together with its individual sounds, words and syntax, reflects a
separate social reality which is different from that which is reflected in
another. Consequently, translation is not simply a matter of substitut-
ing the words of one language with those of another and adapting the
syntax to suit it. For a translation to be successful, the translator has
also to convey a whole store of added meaning belonging to the culture
of the original language.
No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as
representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different
societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with
different labels attached. (Whorf 1956, 69)
78 The Language of Jokes
The intertwining of formal linguistic features and sociocultural
elements contained in a joke is often so specific to a single language
community that, beyond its frontiers, the joke is unlikely to succeed.
This is why speakers of British English do not necessarily ‘get’ jokes
told in American or Australian English and vice versa.

SHARED CODE AND SHARED CONVENTIONS

If two cultures possess categories of jokes which play on similar
subject matters — in other words, if parts of both worlds somehow
match — then it ought to follow that translating jokes into the two
reciprocal languages should be a fairly easy task.
Let us begin by examining ‘underdog’ jokes. Most cultures have a
tradition of jokes which poke fun at a minority group of some sort. In
many French jokes, Belgians are depicted as witless underdogs; in the
United States, the imbeciles are the Poles; and their place is taken by
the Portuguese in Brazil and the Irish in England. Consequently, any
‘underdog’ joke should be able to be translated quite easily by simply
replacing the underdog of the original joke with the underdog of
one’s choice.

1
Recently heard over the loudspeakers at Heathrow airport:
Air France — Flight 106, departing 2.30 pm, Gate 12
British Aimays - Flight 22, departing 2.35 pm, Gate 10
Polish Air — Flight 157, when the little hand is on the four and the big hand is
on the twelve, Gate 5.

It would be quite sufficient to substitute Polish Air with Aer Lingus to

obtain the English version of this American joke. However, minority
groups do not necessarily have to be of the ethnic variety. In Italian
society, for example, England’s thick Irishman is replaced by a
carabiniere, a member of one of Italy’s three police forces.
2
Did you hear the one about the lrishman/carabiniere who went water-skiing
and then spent the whole holiday looking for a sloping lake?
3
Perche’ i carabinieri lavorano sempre in coppia ?
Perché Ci vuole uno per leggere ed uno per scrivere.
(Why do carabinieri/Irishman always work in twos?
So that one can read and one can write.)
 Translating word play 79
Even when the minority group is not of the ethnic variety, the
underdog can still be replaced by the underdog normally found in
similar jokes told in the target language. It is almost as though the
underlying message of these jokes is identical; what varies is simply
the surface elements. Thus it would seem that it is simply a question
of being au fair with the cultural joking mores of each language
community to translate efficiently.
However the worlds of two cultures do not always match quite so
easily. When dealing with another joke ‘universal’, sex, there are
rather more complex difficulties to be faced when attempting to
translate. Despite the fact that most western cultures see sex as
humorous subject matter, they do so in slightly different ways.
Within the category of the dirty joke there are dozens of variations
and they do not necessarily match transculturally. Many dirty jokes
do indeed have in common features such as female degradation and
male sexual prowess, which are identical deSpite geographical bound-
aries, yet this universal double standard becomes multi-faceted
according to each individual culture.
4
Due bambini iitigano:
— Mio padre é migiiore dei tuo!
— Non é vero!
— Mio fratello é migiiore del tuo!
— Non e vero!
— Mia madre e piu buona deila tua!
— Beh . . . questo Io dice anche Papa!

(Two boys are arguing:

- My Dad’s better than yours!
— Oh no he’s not!
— My brother’s better than yours!
— Oh no he’s not!
— My mother's better than yours!
— Well. . . I suppose that’s true ’cos my Dad says so too!)

Although most English speakers see what the joke is getting at, it
does not quite work. First, there are problems regarding the trans-
lation of the item piz‘t buona. In this context, the English version
really requires post-modification with in bed, but this would have
spoilt the effect of the triple re-iteration of better. Second, the
sexuality of men’s mothers is not seen as a form of filial cuckoldry in
Britain in the same way as it still is in Italy (see Chapter 1, p. 10).
80 The Language of Jokes
Thus the joke works on (a) the cleverness of the successful male
adulterer (and his complice son) and (b) the one-upmanship of the
boy who can now accuse his antagonist of being the son of an
adulteress. An English version of the same theme can be seen in the
following joke:
5
‘Mummy, Mummy, does the au pair girl come apart?’
‘No dear, why do you ask?’
'Because Daddy says he's just screwed the arse off her!’
Apart from problems deriving from the translation of screw and come
apart this joke would present no real difficulties in comprehension to
the foreign recipient. Here too, as in the Italian joke, a child is
responsible for letting out the truth. In British culture the degraded
female becomes an au pair girl, who together with the cuckolded wife
becomes the object of the joke. Both jokes prize the successful
adulterer, yet, while the Italian recipient would recognize the theme
of male prowess in the au pair joke, the British recipient of the
translated Italian joke is not going to see the joke in its entirety.
Similarly, the force of the French retort Et ta soeur? scribbled
beneath the graffito Froggies go home! is bound to be lost on its
recipients. Literally translated And what about your sister?, it would
mean very little to most people. Although it would probably be best
translated with something like Why don 't you go to hell!, the source
version is actually insulting the recipient through his sister by sugges-
ting she is sexually active. As in Italian culture, reference to sisters’
and mothers’ sexuality can be insulting.
These three examples back up the Sapir—Whorf hypothesis regard-
ing the intertwining of language and social reality. In one culture we
find the verbalization of the disapproval, and, above all, the filial
shame involved in a mother’s illicit sexual behaviour being so strongly
ingrained that it can become the basis for a put-down joke, while in
another the same concepts are non-existent. The English joke sup-
ports the adulterer and the recipient laughs at him simply becaUSe he
happens to have been found out. In other cultures he can be ridiculed
through the sexuality of female members of his family.

DIFFERENT CODES AND ABSENCE OF REFERENCE

As we have seen, when the two languages involved in the translation
of a joke possess even a little shared cultural ground with each other,
although the target version will not always be perfectly clear to the
 Translating word play 81
recipient, it will at least bear some resemblance, content-wise, to the
message in the original text. Nevertheless, not all jokes are about an
underdog or sex. Many play on events, states and situations which are
peculiar to their culture of origin. Naturally such jokes create serious
problems, not as far as the technicalities of translation are concerned,
especially if no punning is involved, but for the recipient’s
understanding.
The Chinese cartoon in example 6 is by Gang Zhie Ye.
6

359'

II //a firm

from The People’s Daily

‘Used to it'
After saving money for quite some time, the family has finally bought a
washing machine. Days later, the son comes home from school to find his
middle-aged mother standing on a small stool and handwashing clothes with
a washboard inside the brand new washing machine. Puzzled, the son asks,
'Why don’t you use the machine, Mama?’ ‘I am just used to doing it this
way. ’
The translation is more than adequate, yet, to a European audience,
it can hardly be considered as being funny. The analyst (and transla-
tor) of the joke, Yan Zhao, explains that it plays on the influence of
old traditions and the confusion caused to the Chinese by moderniza-
tion. The recipient’s amusement lies in the mother’s fusion/confusion
of new and old, technical and manual (Zhao, 1988).
Of course, not all westerners will be able to read between the lines
of the joke and see it in its entirety. In fact, the analyst himself points
out that the translation above is, at the same time, an expansion of
82 The Language of Jokes
the original text. While, on the one hand, to the westemer it conveys
new information about modern China, it is still not easy to see why it
should be funny, without prior knowledge of Chinese attitudes.
Similarly, those of us who are not totally on fair with German
culture will remain slightly perplexed when trying to come to terms
with the nation’s political jokes.

7a
Following a scandal in West Germany, Genscher and Kohl are condemned
to death. Genscher, the first to be executed, when given the choice between
the electric chair and hanging, chooses the electric chair. The electric chair
is out of order and Genscher is set free. As he leaves the execution chamber
he whispers to Kohl, 'The electric chair is broken!’
Kohl enters the execution chamber and, when given the choice between the
electric chair and hanging, chooses hanging.
7b
Following a scandal in Germany, Genscher, La Fontaine and Kohl are facing
a firing squad When Genscher is about to be shot he shouts out 'Earth-
quakel' and the firing squad drop their guns and run away.
When La Fontaine is about to be shot he shouts out ‘A flood!'and the firing
squad drop their guns and run away.
When Kohl is about to be shot he shouts out ‘Fire!’

Naturally, the non-German will recognize Kohl as the underdog, but

a translation in which he is substituted with an Irishman could hardly
be considered wholly satisfactory. Both are political jokes which
express some Germans’ view of their premier. The substitution of
Kohl with the British premier would be equally inadequate since,
though he may be considered many things, he is not generally con-
sidered to be an imbecile. Furthermore, as with the Chinese joke,
these jokes too convey to the recipient new information about their
country in the 19905: in this case Germany’s embarrassment and fear
of political scandals.
Shared knowledge is not only restricted geographically. Shortly
after the violent earthquake which took place in southern Italy in the
winter of 1980, there was a sudden fashion for earthquake jokes. The
one which follows is now just as meaningless in Italian today as it is in
English, because the earthquake has now become a distant memory.
The joke plays on the scandals which came to light after the earth-
quake regarding the embezzlement of funds which were supposed to
have been used for building materials. Damaged caused by the
earthquake itself was heightened due to the quality and quantity of
reinforced concrete used in many of the city’s buildings.
 Translating word play 83
8
Cosa rispose il cemento armato quando il pilastro gli chiese come si sentiva
dopo il terremoto?
- Come sempre, tanto, io non c‘ero!
(What did the reinforced concrete say when the iron beam asked him how he
felt after the earthquake ?
— Fine, after all, I wasn ’t there!)
Without the explanation given above, the joke would have made little
or no sense to most non-Italians; with the explanation, it can hardly
be considered a joke. Similarly, the graffito at Orly airport which
reads: De Gaulle est pire qu’I-Iitler. Mais plus con (De Gaulle is worse
than Hitler but more foolish) is now out of date. It was probably witty
in the 19605, but today the only element which could be mildly
amusing about the quip is the double meaning of the taboo item con.
Thus, the success of translated jokes does not necessarily depend
upon the quality of translation. In many cases what may appear to be
a poor joke may exclusively depend on gaps in the recipient’s world
knowledge — or rather in her knowledge of the day-to-day affairs of
the ‘translated’ culture. It is worth bearing in mind that Italian young
people, for example, would not have understood the earthquake joke
either, owing to the fact that, in the joke, the strength of sociocultural
knowledge overrides the importance of linguistic competence.
Naturally, the same problems can occur when translating from
English into other languages. If we consider a joke from the 19505
which is equally as meaningless today in Britain as the earthquake
and De Gaulle jokes in Italy and France, we will clearly see that we
are faced with similar problems.
9
0. If Christie had two sons what would he call them?
A. Ropem 'n Chokem
Now we can see that trickier problems regarding the translatiOn of jokes
begin when linguistic features create a further obstacle to the kind of
culture-specific difficulties previously suggested. If we try to produce an
Italian version, the punchline becomes Legale e Strozzale, two names
with feminine endings which are grammatically incompatible with the
masculine plural ‘subject’, Christie’s sons. On the other hand, the
alternative ‘i’ ending would be just as incorrect, since Christie’s victims,
to which the terms refer, were exclusively female. Both solutions
therefore create havoc with Italian rules of concord.
A more extreme example can be found in the title of a medieval
parody of courtly love, the French fabliau: Guillaume et le Falcon.
84 The Language of Jokes
The hypothetical translation ‘William and the Falcon’ would only be
acceptable on one level. Falcon is indeed a falcon, but, in French,
falcon is pronounced Ifaukol, which, when deconstructed, becomes
fans can = ‘false cunt’. In modern Italian we find:

10
Qua! e la ston'a d’ItaIia In tre parole?
Dux. Crux, Crax.
(The history of Italy in three words: Dux, Crux, Crax.)

The punchline consists of two Latin words: dux = ‘leader’ and crux =
cross. As is well known, Mussolini was [I Duce, ‘The Leader’, and the
cross is the symbol of the Christian Democrat party which has
dominated Italian politics since the Second World War. The item
Crax is the focal point of the joke; it is a pseudo-Latin word formed
from the name Craxi, which neatly fits in with the rhyme and rhythm
of the preceding two items. Bettino Craxi is the leader of the Socialist
party and has played a leading role in recent parliamentary affairs.
The conclusion to be drawn is quite clear: when sociocultural
restraints are combined with linguistic restraints, translation can
become an arduous task. Roman Jakobson (1959) is more drastic in
his claims when he states that full equivalence in translation is
impossible. Undoubtedly, although the translations of the jokes con-
sidered so far are perfectly adequate, none of them are truly
equivalent.
Even the first group of jokes analysed (i.e. the ‘underdog' jokes),
which had an equivalent category in English culture, involved slightly
falsified translations. Although it was possible to substitute one min-
ority group for another, real equivalence is actually lost because
Poles and Irishmen and carabinieri cannot be substituted for each
other if the aim is true equivalence. Conversely, as was seen in
examples 4 and 6, when true equivalence remains after translation, a
joke can then become a non-joke due to lack of cultural references.

PARTICULAR PROBLEMS INVOLVED IN JOKE

TRANSLATION
The linguistic problems inherent in the translation of jokes, and the
questions regarding language/society and equivalence considered so
far are problems which exist in the interlingual translation of all texts,
whether humorous or not. However, jokes and word play do present
some extra difficulties not encountered in translating straight referen-
 Translating word play 85
tial prose, which, as we shall see, compare with the difficulties faced
in the translation of literary texts and especially poetry.
If it were not for the cues given by canned laughter, many jokes
and humorous quips occurring in foreign versions of imported
American comedies could easily pass by unnoticed. Despite signals
which indicate that someone has just said something funny, it is not
always the case that the audience is going to be amused by the
translated quip. It would appear that translators are often afraid of
moving away from the text and replacing an untranslatable joke with
another one which would work in the target language, even if it is
completely different from the original. They are reminiscent of the
famous translation scholar Lévy who believed that the translator had
to handle all problems in a text no matter how difficult, while at the
same time, respecting both style and form. Consequently, in the
Italian version of The Big Chill, the puzzled glance which Kevin Kline
gives to his jeans when asked to father the leading lady’s child
because of his good genes is totally lost because the translator has her
declare ‘Hai dei buoni geni . . .’ (‘You've got good genes’), where the
Italian item geni is purely monosemous and bears no phonological
resemblance to the word ‘jeans’ (geni = ldgenil).
Eugene Nida (1964) suggests that the translator analyses the source
language text and then restructures it when transferring it to the
target language. In other words, the source text should first be
decoded and then recoded in such a way that will make perfect sense
in the target language.

SOURCE LANGUAGE TEXT TARGET LANGUAGE TEXT

genes ldginz/ =
unit of hereditary
chromosome
1
(homophone of jeans =
casual trousers) --> —9 --> —> _, —’ jeans ldgind =
casual trousers

geni ldgeni/ =
units of hereditary
chromosome

NO EQUIVALENT ITEM
????????????????
86 The Language of Jokes
As we can see from this attempt at restructuring the joke into the
target language, there is no way of retaining source meaning. Once
the translator had realized that the same homophony of the English
items jeans/genes was non-existent in Italian, her best ploy would
probably have been that of abandoning the joke altogether and
perhaps substituting it with a completely different Italian one. In
exchange for the loss of equivalence she would have gained some sort
of functional equivalence by having replaced a joke with another
joke. As the text presently stands, the audience is faced with a non
sequitur.
Of course, it is easy for speakers of more than one language to be
hard on translators when their task is indeed near-impossible, yet
their fear of substitution is not easily understandable. Even a totally
different comment, in place of an untranslatable joke, would often be
preferable to translation ‘gaffes’. In the film Space Balls, when a
gigantic jar of jam comes hurtling through the sky, it is clearly seen as
a ‘space traffic jam’; ‘una marmellata di trajffico spaziale’ does not
have the same meaning at all in Italian, where a traffic jam is simply
an ingorgo and nothing to do with conserves of fruit and sugar,
marmellata. Of course, there are dozens of similar examples which
can be found in screen comedies in translation. Many exchanges in
the Italian version of Stephen Spielberg’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit
appear quite meaningless, yet suspicions that such non sequiturs were
merely instances of utterances in which either the translator had not
seen the joke or had decided to translate it at face value were proven
to be well-founded each time an odd sounding remark was mentally
translated back into a more likely sounding original. For example,
when Roger Rabbit asks Bob Hoskins what he thinks of show busi-
ness, and, in the original version of the film, he replies ‘There's no
business like it’, we can safely bet that it was intended as a witty
remark. Italian has neither a song of that title nor a saying which
echoes it, so a one-to-one translation of the remark not only is not
funny but has no cultural referent either.
These examples from the cinema present the translator with a
dilemma, since in both cases she needs to find a remark which
conveys a similar meaning, with the additional problem that it should
be witty too. Susan Basnett-McGuire (1980, 22) supplies the transla-
tor of a play with the following guidelines:
(1) Accept the untranslatability of the source language phrase in
the target language on the linguistic level.
(2) Accept the lack of a similar convention in the TL.
(3) Consider the range of TL phrases available, having regard to
 Translating word play 87
the presentation, status, age, sex of the speaker, his relationship to
the listeners and the context of the meaning in the SL.
(4) Consider the significance of the phrase in its particular con-
text — i.e. as a moment of high tension in the dramatic text.
(5) Replace in the TL the invariant code of the SL phrase in its
two referential systems (the particular system of the text and the
system of the culture out of which the text has sprung).
Let us try to apply these criteria to the translation of ‘There’s no
business like show business. ’ Once we have accepted that there can be
no linguistic or cultural equivalence, we must begin examining the
range of target language phrases available. If we accept the item (and
concept of) business as the invariant core of the target language
phrase, a likely candidate picked from the array of Italian idioms
which include the word business/affari, could be 611' affari sono affari
(‘Business is business’). While not particularly witty, it is a more
natural Italian phrase than an oblique reference to an idiom which
does not exist at all.
Jokes which are too culture-specific are not easily understood
beyond their country of origin. Although translation is possible, it
is not necessarily going to be meaningful. Similarly, jokes which are
too ‘language-specific’ are doomed to suffer the same fate as those
in the film examples mentioned above. However, jokes in which
sociocultural references cross-cut play on language are the most
difficult of all to render in another language. As we saw previously
(cf. Charles Hockett, p. 124), some jokes can be seen as being
formally similar to literary prose and others as being similar to
poetry. One of the most convincing arguments to support such a
division is that so-called ‘poetic’ jokes, those which are ‘language-
specific’, present many of the same problems as poetry when they are
translated.
The following joke apparently presents no particular linguistic
idiosyncrasies or ambiguities and thus could be compared to a short
piece of prose:
11
‘Mummy, Mummy, I don't want to go to France!’
“Shut up and keep swimming!’
Such a joke does not rely on language for its punch and would present
no particular problems in translation or understanding to a member
of any culture which adopts modem means of transport for travelling.
On the other hand,
88 The Language of Jokes
12
Nothing succeeds like a parrot
would be considered as more ‘poetic’ in nature. It relies on the
duplicity and deconstruction of one particular language item for its
punch, so, for a perfect translation to be achieved, the target language
would need to possess a word for ‘succeeds’ which, when taken apart,
can become both verb and noun which refer to the eating habits of a
parrot (or any other seed-sucking animal). As such close linguistic
similarity between two languages is highly unlikely, a good translation
is difficult to achieve. Like the punster, the poet, too, has at her
disposal a variety of options within the language which she can exploit
to create a humorous effect. As these options tend to be typical only of
the source language, it follows that poetry and puns tend to encounter
similar difficulties when an attempt is made at translation. Traditional
poetry involves rhyme, rhythm and metre and the visual schemes
adopted in more contemporary forms are features which by their very
nature cannot find exact equivalents in another language. Therefore,
in no way can a perfect mirroring of a poetic form be achieved.
Naturally, the translator of a Shakespearean sonnet is likely to have to
deal with a greater number of features which are idiosyncratic to the
source language than the translator of joke 12 who only has to
overcome the problem attached to the item succeeds. Yet some jokes
are worth comparing to poetry in terms of the density of translation
obstacles to be overcome and, whether easy or difficult to translate,
like poetry, they are not exactly mirrored in their translated form.
A brief glance at an example of comic verse in Russian is sufficient
to demonstrate an extreme example of untranslatability, or rather the
numerous compromises which translators must sometimes make:
13 CBEPXY Monor
CHHBY CEPl‘I
3T0 — HAIII
COBETCKI/IFI I‘EPB
XOYEIIIB — )KHIFI,
AXO‘IEIIIB Km,
BCE PABHO
nonwnms
XYIFI!
Below — the sickle
Above — the hammer:
This is the seal on our Soviet banner.
Whatever in life
 Translating word play 89
you choose to do,
It's all the same:
You still get screwed.
The target version is qualitatively good, yet, by the very nature of the
different alphabets and sound systems involved, the result is a differ-
ent poem.
It is undeniable that poetry exploits the linguistic features inherent
in a language, sometimes to the point of exasperation as, for
example, in the case of concrete poetry, and consequently trans-
lations of jokes which rely heavily on linguistic exploitation, as the
example above docs, are more of an interpretation than a translation.
However, to imply that the opposite is true for prose (and conse-
quently ‘prosaic’ jokes) is to oversimplify matters. Poetic language
cannot be restricted to ‘high-flown’ poetry alone; in other words, it
cannot only be seen in terms of alliteration, paranomasia, dactyl
metre and so forth. Such a view is quite the opposite of Jakobson’s
more elastic interpretation of poetry, which goes as far as including
the poetic function within the referential function. According to
Jakobson, prose itself is a continuum in which the referential function
and the poetic function are intertwined to varying degrees. Seen in
such a light, jokes which rely on linguistic manipulation would occur
at the poetic extreme of our imaginary continuum.
If literary prose and jokes are closer to the poetic end of this
hypothetical cline than ‘practical’ prose, then the question could be
seen in terms of differentiation between playing with language and
playing through language; we could say that, roughly speaking, the
former occurs in poetry and the latter in literary prose. In either case
a deviance from ‘pure’ referential prose occurs. Since jokes are
indeed examples of creative use of language which, like literature,
breaks pre-established patterns of clearly referential prose, then, in
Jakobsonian terms, any joke by definition could be seen as being
‘poetic’, whether linguistically or socioculturally inclined. While
some jokes play with language, others simply play through it.
Let us consider ‘OK’ jokes (see p. 28), which belong to a grapho-
logical convention which does not exist in non-English-speaking
countries. Owing to the fact that these jokes acquire their meanings
through reference to other examples of the same type of graffiti,
speakers of other languages would need to possess prior knowledge
of the genre of graffiti in order to understand and appreciate them.
Outside the context created by the genre itself, clever as the play may
be, it will remain meaningless. Clearly, the parallel with ‘real’ litera-
ture can now be taken a step further as the aspect of intertextuality
90 The Language of Jokes
inherent in these jokes becomes evident. Someone who is well-read is
more likely to recognize the multitude of historical and literary
references included in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose than a
reader who has read less widely. Such recognition adds to the plea-
sure of the text and gives a new dimension to what would otherwise
have been no more than a detective story. Something similar occurs
in a good joke. ‘OK’ graffiti are clever rather than funny; at a glance
the ‘expert’ recipient recognizes the text type and links it to its
previous counterparts and then connects the graffito to his or her
world knowledge. The pleasure of such a text is gained through the
author’s skill in playing with the language plus the reader’s ability to
extract the inner meaning of the text. Due to the idiosyncratic
graphological elements involved, ‘OK’ jokes only work when they are
seen. Their translation is impossible without the loss of their full
significance. A translation would require a complex explanation of
how they have derived from a slogan and developed into a joke form.
After such an explanation the text would cease to function as a joke.
The visual features exploited in each ‘OK’ joke are specific to
English and English alone. As well as having to cope with difficulties
inherent in the matrix itself, the translator would have to cope with
the unavailability of one-to—one graphological equivalents.
14
Apathy ru
Dyslexia rules K0
Similar difficulties occur when trying to translate examples of
humorous/clever graffiti which occur in other languages. It would
appear that the ‘OK’ genre, and in fact joke genres in general, only
occur in English-speaking communities, so the difficulty of dealing
with graffito type does not seem to apply in other languages.
15
LIBERTE - EGALITE ~ FHA TERNITE
— Matemité!

This graffito appears outside a hospital in Paris and the word

Maternité is a rejoinder to the first scrawl. A translation into English
of the rejoinder would be self-evident and, since the revolutionary
slogan is well known in its source form, in the same context in both
languages we thus produce a witty remark. Conversely:
16
Je suis Marxiste - tendance Groucho
 Translating word play 91
causes problems as ‘I’m a Marxist with Groucho tendencies/leanings]
sympathies’ hardly sounds English, although most people could
clearly see what the writer is trying to play on. Similarly the Flemish
graffito,
17
Kan een professor in de hemel komen?
Ja, want God is oneiiiiidig goed.
(Can a professor get to heaven? Yes, because God is infiniiiiitely good.)
while conveying the unpopularity of university dons, leaves the non-
Belgian wondering why the ‘i’ is lengthened.
The following graffito was scribbled in the proximity of a stall
selling strawberries in Naples on the first Mothers’ Day after the local
football team had won the league cup. It plays on a combination of
language (Neapolitan dialect) and a visual cue:
18
P’a mamma e Maradona 3%
accattateve '0

(Buy some strawberries for your mothers and Maradona.)

The recipient has to add the word fraqné’ (Neapolitan for ‘straw-
berry’; standard Italian: fragolone) to rhyme with Maradona, which
in Naples is pronounced with a final Isl. Furthermore, the non-
Neapolitan recipient will need to understand the significance of the
term mother matched with the name of a famous football star.
Maradona has been put on a pedestal on a par with Italian mothers,
who are venerated in Italian culture. What the joker is suggesting is
that Maradona is as much loved as a mother. The English equation of
‘mother + Maradona’ has no such c0nnotati0n.
My poor translation speaks for itself. It has neither the rhyme, the
rhythm nor the dynamism of the original and is consequently unpoe-
tic, unfunny and not in the slightest bit clever. Of course, a pro-
fessional translator could have done the quip more justice by
replacing the original with a different rhyme, but in no way could
they have kept the integral form and meaning and at the same time
given all the necessary information to allow the foreign reader to
appreciate it fully.
The question of untranslatability has been brought up by many
theorists (e.g. Jakobson, 1959 and Popovic, 1976) and their argu-
92 The Language of lakes
ments can be seen very clearly when it comes to jokes like the ‘OK’,
‘Maradona’ and Russian examples we have just considered. Clearly
any translation is by its very nature an interpretation of the source
text rather than its perfect reflection. Translation seems to be a
necessary evil, never quite right but indispensable all the same.
While graffiti may seem to present the translator with especially
difficult problems, oral jokes are certainly no less exacting. A perfect
interlingual translation of the playground classic:
19
What's black and while and red (read) allover?
is, technically speaking, impossible. Unlike the ‘OK’ graffiti which
had to be read, this riddle has to be spoken, since, visually, it cannot
work because of the fact that although red and read are homophones
they are not also homographs. In French, Italian and German the
items rouge, rosso, rot have no meaning other than ‘red’ and neither
do they possess a homophone. The translator, in this case, is forced
to sacrifice what Eugene Nida (1964) defines ‘formal’ equivalence, for
‘dynamic’ equivalence. In other words, the text is seen as a process,
the function of which is to amuse and stimulate laughter. Since, in
this case, the text is an attempt at being funny or clever, what the
translator can do is to substitute the text with another which serves an
identical purpose. However, not any joke will do. If we consider the
newspaper as being the invariant core — in other words the piece of
information which is vital to the source text and thus has to remain in
the target version — we could rely on a metaphorical use of the item
red to keep the target joke in line with the source joke. In French, we
could then come up with:
Cu ’93! qui/Ouel journal est tout rouge et noir et blanc?
L 'Umanité.
L'Umanité is the newspaper which represents the French Communist
party, and the item rouge possesses the same political connotation as
it does in English. Unfortunately, however, native French speakers
neither see the joke as being funny nor even clever. Such a translation
would have to be revised.
Conversely, if we use the same metaphorical use of red to produce
an Italian translation, the result is more satisfactory:
Qua/e giornale é rosso, bianoo e nero?
L 'Unita.
In translation, formal equivalence is lost on several levels. First, as
 Translating word play 93
in the French version, the word-order of the colour adjectives
changes as Italian prefers the order of bianco e nero (‘white and
black’) to the marked nero e bianco, and, for similar reasons of
prosodic naturalness, rosso (‘red’) must precede them both. Second,
the Italian conundrum asks ‘Which newspaper is black and white and
red?’; whereas the English riddle avoids any allusion to newspapers
until the anSWer (in the French version, mentioning the newspaper is
optional). If the Italian version had avoided including the newspaper
in the question, presenting it only in the punch, the punch itself
would have had no meaning because no item in the question refers to
reading, either through homophony, homonymy or any other kind of
duplicity. The choice of L’Unitd, the daily newspaper which is the
official organ of the Italian Communist party,1 conveniently fulfils the
need to satisfy the inclusion of Popovic’s ‘invariant core’, since it
unites both source and target texts by means of its connotation with
both ‘read’ and ‘red’. To a certain degree, dynamic equivalence has
been held, although the English riddle is a homophonic pun and the
target version plays on a metaphorical use of ‘red’.
If we try to produce a German version of this joke, the newspaper
must not appear in the question as this would render the conundrum
too obvious:
Was ist rot, schwarz und weiss?
Die Tageszeitung.
As in the Italian version, German prefers a different word-order
for the colour adjectives. A feasible solution to the choice of news-
paper falls on Die Tageszeitung which represents independent left-
wing politics.
The question of the ‘invariant core’ seems to be crucial to success-
ful translation. Once this core has been found, the translator’s job is
simplified. However, convenient ‘cores’ are not always at hand for
the benefit of interlingual translation. The Children of Dynmouth by
William Trevor provides us with many quips which are extremely
tricky to translate.
20
‘Well, have a plum'said the doctor in an effeminate voice. ‘If you swallow the
stone whole you 7! put on weight.’
The Italian translators2 decided that the ‘invariant core’ necessary to
both source and target texts was something inherent in the concept of
weight. In Italian, the word ‘stone’lpietra cannot refer in any way to
weight — and even if it could, an Italian plum contains a nocciolo/
94 The Language of Jokes
‘kernel’ and not a stone. In order to overcome this problem, the
Italian doctor offers a thrush instead of a plum.

— Manga i tordi, egli i disse in faisetto.

— Cosi ingrasso dottore?
- Cinguetti!

The substitution of ‘plum’ with tordi/‘thrushes’ gives the translators

an opportunity to use the verb cinguettare, which means ‘to chirp’. A
deconstruction of the second person singular of the verb, i.e. ‘you
chirp’, results in ltj'mguetli a homphone of cinque etti (an etto is a
measure of weight which is equivalent to a hundred grams).
A loss in formal equivalence has been accepted in the target
version in favour of a gain in dynamic terms. The translators retell the
joke in a completely different way, bearing in mind the lowest
common denominator, the invariant core. However, there still re-
main cases in which the chances of finding an invariant core which is
funny in the target language are extremely slim.

21
0. How do you make a cat drink?
A. Easy, put it in a quidizer.

Come si fa a far bere un gaflo?

E ' facile, mettilo nei frullaiore.

Comment faire boire un chat?

C'est facile, met-[e dans Ie mixer.

These literal translations cannot possibly function as joke forms in

Italian or French. In fact, in the two target versions, the utterances
become mere exchanges for gaining information. In the English
version prominence is given to the item drink which leads the recipi-
ent to imagine that the answer will have something to do with feeding
a feline. The prominence to which the answer alludes is switched to
the item cat, and produces a rather nasty cocktail. As the Italian and
French versions clearly show, syntactic differences in the two trans-
lations of ‘make someone do something’ mean that the same ambi-
guity cannot be created in the target languages. What is more, bere
and boire are monofunctional and can only function as verbs which
precede the noun group an gotta/an chat. Thus the target versions are
straightforward with no possibility of double-faced puns; they are
simply not jokes. (In English, the joke works better in written form
since the intonation has to be altered slightly when saying ‘cat drink'.)
 Translating word play 95
2
Patient: I 've got a peanut lodged in my throat!
Doctor: Then take a cup of drinking chocolate before you go to bed
tonight.
Patient: Will it get rid of it?
Doctor: No, but it’ll go down a Treet!
Italian has no equivalent idiom for ‘to go down a treat’ and, further-
ore, when Treets were on sale in Italy (their name has since been
changed to ‘M&Ms’), they were known as ltrets/ and not ltriztsl. One
alternative open to the translator is to find an Italian product with a
linguistically exploitable brand name with which to create a new joke
containing a shadow of invariability with the source version. This,
however, would be a practical rather than a linguistic solution.
Similarly, Pierino (the stereotypical protagonist of Italian jokes
presents a problem as English has no single person who functions as
an underdog, e.g. Iaimito, in Spain) goes to the grocer to buy some
jam and the grocer asks him if he wants Arrigoni, a well-known
brand. As Arrigoni can be deconstructed to a rigoni/‘striped’, it is
only natural that Pierino should refuse and ask for jam which is a tinta
unita or all one-coloured.
When translating comic plays or films, as we have already seen, it is
often preferable to replace a ‘difficult’ joke with a totally different one
in the target language, which, while bearing no relation to the source
joke, is, however, obviously a joke in the target version. This may well
be preferable to a non sequitur or a literal translation plus explanation.
By replacing one joke with another, the text still remains a dynamic
process. If the joke is to be recited, it may well include a ritualistic
element (e.g. riddles, ‘knock knock’ jokes, etc.) which involves the
active participation of the recipient; whether written or oral, the joke
will contain a punch which must create a defeat in cultural and/or
linguistic expectations. A translation should not ignore such
dynamism; therefore substitution with an ‘original’ target-language
joke is more likely to be successful (and run smoothly through the text
without jarring) than a faithful, but interactionally poor translation.
Dozens of examples of jokes could be considered and evaluated
according to their ease of translatability, but let us return to jokes
which do not blatantly play on language. It seems somewhat unfair to
suggest that ‘prosaic’ jokes are not without their problems with regard
to translation. While it is evident that heavily language-oriented word
play does indeed create peculiar difficulties in translation compared to
its less ‘poetic’ counterparts, it appears to be a question of type of
difficulty rather than degree of difficulty.
96 The Language of Jokes
We cannot claim that some jokes do not play with language, or
even that their translation would be any more straightforward than
the translation of jokes 18 and 19. Apart from the fact that all jokes
depend on language since this is the means by which they are trans-
mitted, such a claim ignores the importance of dynamism which is all-
important in a joke.
'Mummy, Mummy, I don't want to go to France!’
‘Shut up and keep swimming!’
Maman, Maman, est-ca que I’Angleterre est Iotn?’
‘Tais-toi et continue a nager!’
Apart from having to substitute England for France, the joke pres-
ents no real difficulties to the translator; it does, howeVer, play on
language. It forces the recipient to recontextualize the first utterance
and in particular the reference of the item go. If the joke wanted to be
clear (and no longer a joke!) the term go could have been replaced
with swim. Thus, a pretty unambiguous word like ‘go’ can acquire
duplicity from the linguistic environment in which it occurs.
The importance of individual linguistic items in jokes which at first
sight do not appear to play with language at all, should not be
underestimated. Each element contained within the surface realiza-
tion acts as a vital catalyst in the joke’s dynamic process even if the
text does not aim at linguistic exploitation.
The distinction between joke types in prosaic and poetic terms has
its limitations, since it overemphasizes the importance of the punch
and relegates all the other elements contained in the text to a
secondary position, rather than considering that they too are of vital
importance to the joke. Attempts at translation show that an unna-
tural choice in the target version practically anywhere in the text may
render a joke a non-starter. The choice of adjective in the following
joke, for example, is extremely important in giving it the semblance
of a joke rather than an ordinary question. It is the text as whole
which creates the joke and not simply a single isolated element.
23
Is rugby a game for men with odd shaped balls?
The tricky part of this translation lies in the substitution for the item
odd. In Italian, strano would appear to be the most obvious choice,
yet the effect is itself slightly odd:
Si pud dire che il rugby é un gioco con 90' uomini con def palloni strane?
When I tried this out on some native speakers they seemed not to
 Translating wordplay 97
recognize the quip as an attempt at word play. On the other hand, the
adjective ‘oval’lovale(i) teamed with the item palle (rather than
palloneli which refers more precisely to a ball used in sports) worked
better.
Si pub dire che iI mgby e an giooo per 9” uomini con la palle ova/i?

Apart from a preference for the declarative rather than interroga-

tive on the grounds of naturalness within the genre of the Italian aside
(the aside has been pre-empted by an interrogative, leaving the joke
proper in the declarative to keep some sort of formal equivalence
with the source text), the shape adjective preceded by a determiner
seems to be a better choice. A French version of the aside is untrans-
latable, since the word ballons can only be used to refer to hollow
spheres used in games. However, the same adjectival translation used
in the Italian version works in Spanish too:
El Rugby es un juego pala hombres con Ias pelatas ovalades

However, going back to the Italian, a double-take occurs in this

version due to the existence of the idiom avere le palle quadrate
(literally ‘to have square balls’), indicative of a person who is ex-
tremely able and astute.
Si puo dire che i! rugby é un gioco per i uomini con la palle quadrate?

It is tempting to use this version which is, in fact, more meaningful in

Italian than the other versions considered. Unfortunately, however,
rugby balls are oval in shape and not square, so the ‘ovali’ version
probably remains the best translation. Interestingly, the target ver-
sion is more meaningful than the source joke, since rugby is, in fact,
played with oval shaped balls, and whether an oval ball is odd or not
is merely a question of personal opinion.
As we have seen, in French an invariant core could not be found.
In German, too, the word Bellen/‘balls’ cannot refer to parts of the
human body, but the joke can work using the word Eier, meaning
both ‘eggs’ and an informal variant of the word ‘testicles’.
Ist das Rugby ein Spiel far Manner mit seltsam grossen Eiem?

FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS
The Irishman who is transformed into a Belgian and the tightfisted
Scot who becomes a Genoese for the benefit of successful translation
can be considered surface variants of the same underlying western
98 The Language of Jokes
universal. The introduction of the Italian/Spanish protagonists
Pierino/laimito is a signal to native recipients that they are about to
hear a joke. English possesses no such stooge: ‘Fred‘ would not be as
effective and ‘Paddy’ would alter the implications of the source joke.
The translator is therefore faced with the choice of leaving such
characters unaltered in the target version, or substituting them with
more easily recognizable stereotypes specific to the target culture,
thus rendering the joke more immediately meaningful. This criterion
of meaningfulness is equally valid for any joke, even when content is
less ‘obvious‘ than that of, for example, an Irish joke. Just as the
experienced translator of literary works rewrites the original, some-
times quite radically, so must the experienced translator of word play
totally reformulate and consequently ‘retell’ a joke ex nova.
Every text, whether it is joke or not, will produce a target trans-
lation which, by its very nature, will never be quite the same as the
source version. Aside from cultural lacunae and linguistic stumbling
blocks, a translated joke will tend to be in a language which is, in fact,
‘translationese’ rather than English, French or whatever target lan-
guage is required. A translation of some sort is easily, or with
difficulty, arrived at eventually, but always with some loss. From the
examples considered, it would appear that, in most cases, the best
solutions found to overcome difficulties in translation tend to be
pragmatic rather than linguistic ones. Replacing an English ‘stone’
with an Italian ‘thrush’, or substituting one joke with another, are
pragmatic ways out of a linguistic problem.
We have to thus reconsider the issue of impossibility of translation.
If we aim at the exact mirroring of discrete items, then translation is
indeed out of the question; on the other hand, if we are willing to find
a solution such as substitution in functional terms acceptable, then,
although not ideal, translation, or rather retelling, is quite feasible.

LANGUAGES IN CONTRAST
A very common type of humour involves jokes which play one
language off against another. For example to ‘get on’, or to ‘fare’ in
Esperanto is farti, thus “How are you’ becomes Kiel vi farms?
According to teachers of Esperanto, in reply to this greeting it is not
at all uncommon for wittily-inclined English speakers to reply with a
remark like ‘Very loudly’. It would seem that ‘false-friends’, words in
one language which sound like words in another, and which may in
some cases be misinterpreted, can also cause laughter. Thus Italians
are more than amused by unlikely German expressions such as Die
 Translating word play 99
Kiitze in der Kahle (meaning ‘the cats in the fridge’) because kc'itze
sounds like the Italian word for ‘prick’lcazzo and Kilhle sounds like
culo/‘arse’.
Not at all uncommon are graffiti which are followed by rejoinders
in another language. The Scottish camping site which boasts the
graffito Froggies go home! also possesses the retort Etta soeur? (see
p. 80). As we have seen, it is unlikely that the people at whom the
retort is aimed will have understood that the innocent sounding
comment Etta soeur was meant as a pretty strong insult.
Finally, let us consider the sort of typically English ‘intralingual’
quip in which Placido Domingo is referred to as Quiet Sunday.

NOTES

1 Since going to press the Italian Communist Party no longer exists as such.
It has now become the Partito Democratico di Sim'stra. At present it is still
unclear whether L’Unitd has abandoned its old ideology.
2 This refers to an unofficial translation by Lucia Sinisi and Chris Williams.
5 Word play in action

Jokes, quips and asides do not normally occur in isolation, but as an

integrated part of spoken discourse. Consequently, if someone
decides to be verbally witty, it is reasonable to suppose that some-
thing within the context in which the conversation is taking place has
triggered off this desire. Of course, it could equally well be that some
element in the preceding discourse has been the cause of a witticism.
If humour is generated from some kind of ambiguity, whether verbal
or physical, then the prompt for this duplicity is likely to have
occurred in the language/social context around the example of word
play proper. However, although there may be dozens of opportuni-
ties in life to pick up on an ambiguous word or situation and joke
about it, knowing when it is appropriate to do so is not always easily
discernible.

WHEN AND WHERE WORD PLAY IS ACCEPTABLE

While the stage and the television screen create both physical and
verbal contexts for well-known comics to display their witty reper-
toire, the rest of us must rely on invisible antennae, a mixture of
instinct and common sense, to tell us when it is safe to joke with
someone. Generally speaking, being on friendly terms with people
gives us licence to joke verbally at any given moment, while in the
case of people with whom we are less well acquainted, play is
reserved for conventionally relaxed situations like informal lunches
and parties.
More difficult than knowing when to tell a joke proper, is knowing
when to make a witty remark or a quip. In Britain it is permissible to
play with words in a myriad of situations which are considered out of
place in many other cultures, yet knowing when to do so is not solely
a cross-cultural problem. It may also happen that our antennae send
 Word play in action 101
back the wrong signals when we try to joke with our fellow country-
men and women. Most people have at some time or other made what
they thought to be a witty remark in the ‘wrong’ circumstances, only
to have then suffered the embarrassment of non-laughter or, worse
still, icy glares. Laughing with others is a sign of social acceptance.
Unless we know someone extremely well, we may give a polite, albeit
false, laugh in response to a witticism which we consider to have been
told at the wrong moment, in inappropriate circumstances, or that we
do not find particularly funny. Hypocritical as this may appear, it is a
social convention. Getting on socially and being polite are a cultural
compromise which is generally accepted. Often, witticisms are
attempts at establishing a jovial rapport with our interlocutors. Non-
laughter on the part of a recipient of a joke may well be interpreted as
a signal of social non-acceptance.
When is it, then, that it is perfectly appropriate to tell jokes and
play with words? One situation which immediately springs to mind is
the joke-capping session in which a number of participants recite joke
after joke.
How a joke-capping session begins is hard to say, but frequently
something in the preceding discourse serves as a springboard for
someone to tell a joke. For example, one participant’s account of an
event may remind another participant of a similar but humorous
event. Once the group begins to laugh, someone else may tell a joke,
after which the way is paved for all members present to tell one too.
Of course, these sessions do not have to occur in this way; for
example, it is not at all unusual for such sessions to begin with
someone actually asking the others to tell a joke.
No matter how they begin, what is interesting about joke-capping
sessions is that they tend to turn into verbal battles. Each participant
tries to outdo the joke told by another participant and, although
participants may comment verbally on each joke, laughter is the chief
criterion of evaluation. The principal arm in these verbal battles is
loudness of voice. Contrary to popular belief, before telling a joke,
participants do not necessarily politely ask the others whether they
have ‘heard the one about . . .’, but simply struggle for the floor by
shouting above the voices of other participants who are trying to do
the same thing.
Joke-capping sessions are particularly useful to the conversational
analyst as they reveal several aspects of the rules involved in joke
telling. As these sessions contain only jokes, pragmatic rules are
easily isolated without the trouble of having to disentangle joke
exchanges from the surrounding mass of conversation. The examples
102 The Language of Jokes
which follow are mostly taken from sessions recorded at parties with
the participants’ knowledge, others were recorded without (although
permission to use their conversations was acquired from them later),
and others still were jotted down soon after they took place. However,
all examples are authentic snippets of genuine conversation.

OPENINGS
Although it is not always the case, someone who is about to tell a joke
will often say that they are about to, or will ask permission to do so
first. One of the reasons for doing this is, of course, to make sure that
the recipient is in the mood to hear a joke; another is to check
whether he/she has or has not heard the joke before:

Initiator: Do you know the one about the Englishman who had an inferiority
complex?
Recipient: No, is it like the architect. . . ?
Initiator: A little bit like. . .
Recipient:0h dear, go on, tell me about the Englishman who had the
inferiority complex. . .

In the perpetual fear of the possibility of losing face, initiators seem

to require encouragement before embarking on a joke’s recital and
consequently pre-empt with some sort of face-saving device which
distances them from the content of the joke. What is more, a certain
amount of negotiation takes place before the joke is actually recited.
It is worth noting the recipient’s answer to whether or not she has
heard the joke: a second request for information which is then
followed by an attempt at mitigation by the initiator.
Often a joke will be pre-empted with a request for permission to
tell it so as to make sure it will not offend the recipient:
Can I tell you a Spanish joke about Italians?
In this instance, since the joke which followed was rather unkind
about Italians, the initiator felt the need to pre-empt it by asking
permission first, perhaps out of concern that it might have caused the
recipient some offence. The very fact that the question specified that
the protagonists of the joke would be Italians seemed to suggest that
it might not be to the recipient’s liking.
In the next example the speaker wonders if the others are thinking
what she is thinking:
John Parrot. . . (pause) . . . someone ought to tell him the parrot joke. . .
(pause). . . have you heard it?
 Word play in action 103
A surname has reminded someone of a joke. As the joke is obscene
the initiator does not in fact, as she suggests, tell the joke to the Mr
Parrot in question. However, before reciting it to an audience of
friends, she makes sure none of them has heard it before.
However, apart from such stock openings, many people will just
recite a joke point-blank. This can create pragmatic problems, since
the recipient may not have understood that a joke was coming, and
this can sometimes be a deliberate ploy on the part of the initiator
(see p. 74) who wants to trap her interlocutor into saying something
wrong and consequently funny. Nevertheless, normally a joke is pre-
empted in some way by the initiator himself. The following sequence,
for example, occurred before a feminist joke:
Why are women. . . (pause) . . . here's a sexist joke. . . (pause) . . . why
are women bad at parking? It's an incredibly good . . . (pause) bad at
parking . . .
Before telling his joke, the man in question evaluates it for his
audience. First he warns any women present that it is going to be
sexist (which is in fact deliberately tricking his audience because it is
sexist in an anti-male rather than anti-female way; see p. 8), and then
he blows his own trumpet about the quality of the joke which he
considers to be incredibly good.
Pre-empting with a positive or negative evaluation of the joke
about to be told is very frequent. As we have seen, often the person
telling the joke does not want to lose face if it falls flat. Thus, warning
their audience that it will be qualitatively poor, pre-empting with a
distancing evaluation of what is to come, may consequently help
them save face. In fact, just in case the joke is not successful, the
joker in the next example warns her audience that it is almost as bad
as the previous joke.
Do you want to hear an Italian joke? It’s almost as bad as that one . . .
The following exchange has been extrapolated from a longish joke-
capping session. The woman about to tell a joke is worried that her
audience will not like it because it follows a string of obscene
examples which has put them in a very jovial mood so that their
expectations of subsequent jokes are high.
Initiator: What about Mr and Mrs Cauliflower - this isn't rude . . .
Recipient: It's not rude?
Initiator: You don't want it?
Recipient: We don't want it — tell us!

She wants to be sure that her audience is willing to hear a ‘clean’ joke.
104 The Language of Jokes
In fact, she interprets her interlocutor’s first response — a surprised
It’s not rude? — as disappointment on his part, but, with his next
comment — in which he first says he does not want to hear it if it is not
‘rude’ - we see how he wittily manages to twist the exchange and
encourage her to tell the joke. Once more, negotiation has occurred
before the telling of a joke.
However, not only the initiator, but recipients too, are free to
evaluate an on-coming joke:
Initiator: What’s small and wrinkly and smells of ginger?
Participant 1: This is going to be awful. . .
Participant 2: . . . a tabby cat's . . .
Initiator: [thought this was an old one. . .
The two participants foresee a punch which is going to be near the
knuckle, and participant 2 even tries to guess the answer, but unsuc-
cessfully — at which point the initiator protests about the fact that
neither of her interlocutors has actually heard the joke before. In
fact, any opening which remotely smacks of bad taste will prompt an
evaluation by the recipient:
Initiator: What's red and sticky and lies in a pram?
Recipient: That's horrible!
Not only do sexual or ‘sick’ jokes prompt audiences to comment
before the punch, but politics, too, is another recipient-sensitive
area:
Initiator: Why is the Tory Party known as the cream of society?
Participant 1: I 've no idea.
Participant 2: [don't think I’m going to like this. . .
The second participant anticipates that the joke she is about to hear
will contain some kind of criticism of the party with which her
sympathies lie and voices her predictions.

INTERACTION
Many jokes are so ritualistic that recipients automatically know how
to react when faced with an initiation. In the same way as ‘knock
knock’ jokes, riddles too have set interactive rules.
initiator: Why is sex like snow?
Recipient: I don’t know, why is sex like snow?
The set response to a riddle is to repeat it, optionally pre-empted by
 Word play in action 105
something like ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I give up’. This repetition functions
as a request for an answer. Obviously, the intonation of the response-
question is very different from the intonation of the original question:
Initiator: //why is SEX like SNOW?//
//Recrpient: //I don"t know //why IS sex like SNOW?//
The initiator gives prominence to the items sex and snow because
they are the two main content words around which the riddle is
constructed; the other items in the question merely function as props
for them. The riddler draws attention to sex and snow as a signal for
the recipient to scratch her head and start thinking of common
denominators. 0n the other hand, in the response, prominence is
given to the verb is which signals a request to the initiator to be told
why the two objects are linked.
However, intonation can also be obliquely oriented in the echoed
response. This type of intonation occurs when the recipient immedi-
ately realizes that she has not heard the riddle before. She thus
adopts the ritualistic response without giving much thought to what
she is saying. She therefore recites it straight back to the initiator
quite flatly:
Initiator: What's the most painlul part of a sex change operation?
Recipient: Igive up, what's the most painful part of a sex change operation?
What the recipient is saying is of no informative value; it is recited
automatically almost like the rote recital of a prayer, football pools
results or a mathematical rule. Consequently there is no prominence
given to ‘new’ or ‘important’ information in the utterance and it
acquires an oblique or neutral tone.

SEQUENCING
During joke-capping sessions, jokes are not recited at random but in
clusters which are determined either by topic or by joke type. Clear
thematic grouping occurs as certain joke types tend to occur in
groups; an Irish joke, for example, is likely to spark off a series of
Irish jokes, a riddle a series of riddles and so on. In the following
transcript of part of a session, a joke about a cauliflower was followed
by a joke about another vegetable. This joke was then followed by
three obscene jokes which were in turn followed by a joke about a
cabbage. The session closed with another obscene joke. What had
obviously happened was that the person wanting to tell the third
‘vegetable’ joke did not manage to gain the floor in time to make his
contribution, while the woman telling the dirty jokes was usurped in
106 The Language of lakes
the process of telling a second one, in rapid succession to the first. As
we shall see, clustering relates to both joke type and joke subject
matter.
In the transcript, letters indicate different participants. The tran-
scription is as precise as possible but at some points people speak at
the same time and overlap each other, thus making understanding
impossible. For this reason, I have stated wherever the tape was
incomprehensible.
A. . . . er. . . did you hear the one about the man . . . did you hear about
the man . . . I saw the other day? He was walking through the streets
with a cabbage on the end of a lead and so i went up to him and so lsaid
’Why'lre you got a cabbage on the end of that lead? Why’re you taking it
for a walk?‘ and he says ‘You sure it’s a cabbage ?' so i says ‘Yes'and
he said ‘The greengrocer lied to me then, he said it was a cauli!’
(laughter)
B. OK this is cauliflower. . .
A. . . . talking about cauliflower. . .
B. There's a cauliflower walking down the street, right. . . and he's cross-
ing the road and gets run over. . . yes he gets mn over and there's bits
of cauliflower all over the place, right, so . . . er . . . the ambulance
comes down ‘da-da da-da da-da ' and takes him to the hospital and then
. . em . . . his parents are informed . . . so Mr and Mrs Cauliflower
come along, you know, and they're sort of really nervous in the waiting
room . . . while he’s in intensive care, you know, undergoing surgery
and a doctor comes out with a mask over his face and. . . you know. . .
the doctor takes his mask off and says ‘l’m sorry to inform you, Mr and
Mrs Cauliflower, he’s had a few problems and l’m pleased to say, em
. . . em. . . your son. . . er. . . will live but he’ll be a vegetable for the
rest of his life. '
(laughter)
How horrible!
Oh dear, never mind, er. . .
Can I tell you my one and only joke now?
Go on Sheila.
Why is sex like snow?
. . . because. . .
Everybody in chorus: We don't know, why is sex like snow?
D. Let's pretend we don't know. . .
C. Because you never know beforehand how many inches you’re gonna
get and how long it’s gonna last.
A. That's rude!
D. Why is Prince Charles‘prick blue?
 Word play in action 107
A. Because it's always in Di!
(groan)
D. Why do you always groan at my jokes?
A ‘cos they’re not funny . . .
B. . . . 'cos I heard it yesterday!
C. Why is sex like a bank account?
A Oh this is for me!
8 Yes.
C Because as soon as you withdraw you lose interest!

D Does anybody know any rude ones?

A er. . .shouldn’t thinkso. . .
E. What’s 250 yards long and eats cabbage?
D What’s 250 yards long and eats cabbage?
E Polish meat queue!
A. That's not rude!
(laughter)
A. There's a rude version of that!
E. What's brown and steams out of cows backwards?
B. I don‘t know, what’s brown and steams out of cows backwards?
E. The Isle of Wight Ferry!
The two opening ‘vegetable’ jokes are both similar in structure. They
are, in fact, story-style jokes in which the people telling them actually
act them out. Participant A recites her story in the first person, while
participant B caps it with a convincing performance complete with
blowing ambulance siren. Participant C interrupts the possibility of
another recital about a vegetable with the question Why is sex . . . ?
She thus shifts both the topic from cauliflowers to sex and the joke
type from narration to riddle. However, before she manages to cap
her own joke by reciting a matching riddle - Why is sex like a bank
account? — participant D comes in with another obscene riddle. The
riddle which separates the two Why is sex like . . . ? riddles is a
variant which has a different structure — Why is Y's . . . ?
Interestingly enough, the last ‘cabbage’ joke - What's 250 yards
long . . . ? is a riddle too. This time the joke combines the topic which
opened the sequence, vegetables, with the frame which had devel-
oped out of it, the riddle. While previously vegetables had been
presented within the frame of narrative, and sex within the frame of
the riddle, now vegetables are being joked about through the
question/answer format of the riddle. The final riddle is childishly
lavatorial, thus loosely linking back with the three previous, more
obscene riddles.
108 The Language of Jokes
The overall effect of the sequence is one of neat thematic and
structural cohesion. See Table 1.

Table 1

Order of joke in
conversation Topic 1 Topic 2 Frame

1 CABBAGE NARRATIVE

2 CAULIFLOWER NARRATIVE

3 SEX RIDDLE (type 1)

4 SEX RIDDLE (type 2)

5 SEX RIDDLE (type 1)

6 CABBAGE RIDDLE (type 3)

7 SCATOLOGY RIDDLE (type 3)

The next sequence displays similar features regarding thematic

grouping:

A. Mummy, Mummy, there's a man at the door with a bill! Don't worry
chuck, it's probably only a duck with a hat on! ( 1)
B. . . . (unclear speech). . . the one about licking the bowl?. . . Mummy,
Mummy, can I lick the bowl? (2)
C. No darling, pull the chain like other children.
A. Yes. Mummy, Mummy, can I play with Grandad? No, you 've dug him up
three times already this week. (3)
B. Mummy, Mummy, what's a vampire? Shut up and eat your soup before
it clots! (4)
C. . . . (unclear speech) . . . have to go to France? Shut up and keep
swimming! (5)
D. Mummy, Mummy, ldon't like Daddy! Leave him on the side of your plate
and eat your vegetables. (6)
!TI

Mummy, Mummy, does the au pair girl come apart? No darling, why do
you ask? Because Daddy says he's just screwed the arse off her! (7)
. . . How do you make a cat go ‘woof'? (8)
Dunno. How do you make a cat go 'wool'?
Douse it in paraffin, chuck it on the lire and it goes ‘woooot’!
How do you make a dog go ‘Miaow’? (9)
What’s red and sticky and lies in a pram? (10)
 Word play in action 109
A. That’s horrible!
C. A baby with a razor blade.
A. How do you make a dog go ‘Miaow’?
E. Dunno. How do you make a dog go ‘Miaow’?
A. We its tail to the back of Concorde and it goes 'Miaaaaow'.
E. How do you make a cat drink?
A. A eat drink?
E. Yeah.
A. Dunno. How do you make a cat drink?
E. Put it in a liquidizer.
The first six jokes, which are recited in rapid succession, are all
structured around a ‘Mummy, Mummy’ frame. Each pseudo-
dialogue is capped by another until at the eighth joke we get a rather
sick riddle about a dog. Influenced by the How do you makea cat. . . ?
joke, participant A next takes the floor and begins to recite a match-
ing riddle about a dog, but he is interrupted by participant C who
manages to cap it with a sick riddle about a baby. Not only does
this riddle create a shift in topic but also in riddle type. Instead of
How do you make . . . .7 we have What’s X and Y and . . . ? Once
participant C has told her joke, participant A regains the floor and
this time is encouraged through participant E’s response to ask her
joke about the dog. Participant E closes the sequence with another
sick cat joke which matches the other two animal jokes, i.e. How do
you make a cat/dog + verb?
Once the participants had run out of ‘Mummy, Mummy’ jokes,
they quickly replaced them with a group of ritualistic riddles with the
result of both thematic and structural clustering. See Table 2.
It is interesting to note how thematic similarity occurs. It would
seem to be sufficient for someone to hear a word remotely connected
with another to trigger off a joke containing elements from the same
lexical field. Notice in the next sequence how the word constipation
triggers off two other jokes loosely connected with health.
Initiator: Did you hear what happened to the mathematician with
CONSTIPA TlON? He sat down and worked it out with a pencil!
Participant 1: That's an old one.
Participant 2: That reminds me, the DR FINLA Y jokes. ‘DH CAMERON, why
are you writing with an ANAL THERMOMETER?’ ‘Some
BUM's got my pencil jammed up it!’
(laughter)
Participant 3:. . . (unclear speech) . . . out of AIDS, SYPHILIS, HERPES,
Skoda and a Barratts House?
initiator: I don't know.
110 The Language of Jokes
Table 2

Order of
joke in
conversation Topic Frame

1 SILLY
MISUNDERSTANDING ‘MUMMY, MUMMY’

2 TOILETS ‘MUMMY, MUMMY’

3 NECROPHILIA ‘MUMMY, MUMMY’

4 CANNIBALISM ‘MUMMY, MUMMY’

5 ABSURD TASK ‘MUMMY, MUMMY’

6 CANNIBALISM ‘MUMMY, MUMMY’

7 SEX ‘MUMMY, MUMMY’

8 CAT RIDDLE

9 SADISM (?) RIDDLE

10 DOG RIDDLE

11 CAT RIDDLE

Participant 3: SYPHILIS has it’s the only one you can get rid of!
Initiator: Why do BEES hum?
Participant 3: Because . . .
Participant 1: Is that it?
Initiator: It's quite old, it’s quite nostalgic that. . . what's the last thing
to go through a BLUEBOTI'LE'S mind as it hits the winds-
creen of a car?
Participant 1: Idon’t know.
Participant 2: Dunno. The wipers?
Initiator: It’s ARSE!
The word constipation in the initiator’s one-liner prompted partici-
pant 2 to recite a ‘medically’ oriented Dr Finlay joke and participant 3
 Word play in action 111
to tell a modern-day Which is the odd one out? riddle, in which
syphilis is seen as the best of several evils. The initiator then shifts the
topic to a traditional riddle involving bees, which then reminds him of
yet another concerning an insect, this time a fly. The punch of the
final joke includes an anatomical reference which links it back to the
first two jokes in the chunk of conversation.
Quite unconsciously the people taking part in this conversation
have created a stretch of spoken text which coheres perfectly. It
opens with constipation and closes with arse. In between we find
other words pertaining to the same anatomical area, i.e. bum and
anal. Apart from the three diseases, aids, syphilis, herpes, the ‘medi-
cal’ jargon is juxtaposed with a brief entomological interlude involv-
ing a bee and a bluebottle.
Initiator—> CONSTIPATION (joke 1)
Participant 2 —> DR FINLAY —> DR CAMERON —> ANAL
THERMOMETER» BUM (joke 2)
Participant 3 —> AIDS —» SYPI-IILIS —’ HERPES (joke 3)
Participant 3 —> SYPHILIS
Initiator —> BEES (joke 4)
Initiator —» BLUEBOTTLE (joke 5)
i
ARSE

EVALUATION
Someone decides to tell a joke and, we hope, the audience will laugh.
Of course, there may be an interval before the joke is actually told
because the initiator may want to make sure that the recipients have
not heard the joke before or that it will not offend them; thus, after
negotiation, laughter should follow - should because if the joke is an
old one or the pun excruciating, it may well be followed by a groan.
However, whether through laughter or a groan, the joke will be
evaluated.
The dynamics of joke interaction
1 PRE-EMPTING/NEGOTIATION
(e.g. A. Sh . . . Sh . . . can I do my skinhead one?
B. Go on then . . .
A. It’s really quite sweet . . .)
2 OPENING
(e.g. Do you know the one about . . .)
112 The Language of Jokes
3 JOKE
(e.g. Why did the chicken cross the road . . .)
4 INTERACTION (optional)
(e.g. I don’t know, what is the difference between a light bulb and a
pregnant woman?)
5 RECITAL OF JOKE
6 LAUGHTER/GROANS and/or VERBAL EVALUATION
The flow diagram illustrates the typical dynamics of a speech event
in which a joke is told. The joke may be preceded by an utterance
which serves to reassure the initiator, or it may be preceded by a sort
of pre-exchange, after which the joke is presented, told, interacted
with and finally evaluated. Frequently, however, together with, or
instead of, laughter or a groan, verbal evaluation will occur in the
form of some kind of comment regarding the recipient’s opinion of
the joke. In fact, what occurs most commonly is the concurrence of
laughter and/or groans plus a verbal comment.
The quickest way to make the initiator of a joke lose face is to
withhold laughter, or, worse still, not to comment at all. A final
evaluation seems not only to tie up the loose ends of the speech
event, but also to encourage the joker.
Initiator: Why is sex like a bank account?
Because when you withdraw you lose interest!
Participant 1: That's good!
Participant 2: That's. . . (unclear). . .
Participant 3: That's very good, I like that.
Initiator: Yes.
This particular joke prompts three positive evaluations plus a self-
satisfied evaluation from the initiator herself; but, of course, not all
jokes are so successful:
Initiator: Why is the Tory party known as the cream of society?
Participant 1: I 've no idea!
Participant 2:! don‘t think I'm going to like this.
Initiator: Because it’s rich and thick and full of clots!
Participant 3: Ha, ha, ha. Not very good.
Participant 1:I like it.
The initiator of the ‘Tory’ joke loses face slightly because of
participant 3’s sarcastic Ha, ha, ha followed by a straightforward
negative evaluation. While participant 2 passes no comment since she
 Word play in action 113
has already warned the initiator that she does not expect the joke to
be to her taste, participant l closes the exchange with an appraisal.
The next exchange illustrates how an unexpected punchline can
both please and disappoint different recipients:
Initiator: What's green with 22 balls and 6 brown legs and if it fell out of
a tree would kill you?
Participant 1:. . . green, & balls and 6 brown legs . . .
Participant 2:. . . 6 legs and 2 balls . . .
Initiator: A snooker table!
Participant 1: How clever!
Participant 2: Disappointing!
The response which so disappoints participant 2 renders the joke
clever to participant 1. Clearly, the comment Disappointing reveals
that one recipient had expected a more obscene answer. The point of
the riddle was indeed to trick recipients into expecting an obscene
solution, which is precisely why participant l sees it as being a ‘clever’
joke.
Just as an initiator may pre-empt the quality of the joke she is
about to tell, so may she also comment on it after it has been told:
Initiator: . . . Have you ever kissed a parrot?
Audience: No.
Initiator: But I bet you 've kissed a cock-acme!
(laughter)
Whenever i hear the word ‘parrot' now I must tell that joke!
(laughter)
A participant: That's wonderful, I like that!
This joke occurred in informal company but on a fairly formal
occasion. The initiator seems to be trying to justify her witty outburst
and to explain why a joke should cross her mind on such an occasion.
Audience evaluation closes the exchange.

‘PING-PONG PUNNING’
What occurs during a joke-capping session is extremely convenient
for the analyst. If he happens to have a tape recorder on him. he will
be able to record a good number of jokes and examine pragmatic
features such as openings, closures and interaction without having to
deal with the intrusion of any discourse which is non-humorous.
However, joke-capping sessions are not an everyday occurrence and
when they do occur it is probably fair to say that they are not
114 The Language of Jokes
necessarily indicative of where, when and how jokes normally hap-
pen. Furthermore joke-capping sessions, as the label suggests,
specialize in jokes, while it is likely that word play will more often
occur within the bounds of an everyday conversation, the aim of
which is not to tell jokes.
Joke-capping sessions are competitive manifestations of feats of
memory. As far as linguistic events go, they are indeed odd. In a
certain sense, no new information is actually communicated as in
‘normal’ transformational discourse (unless we consider each quip or
story as world-changing pieces of information for its recipients), nor
is the interaction which takes place merely phatic. Each participant in
such an event is showing off verbally and demonstrating her clever-
ness while at the same time evaluating the repertoire of fellow
participants. A joke-capping session can best be compared to a verbal
game like rapping, in which topping or capping through the quality of
jokes substitutes for the adjectival capping of the rap.
Outside such sessions, a joke or aside is likely to disrupt a ‘normal’
or ‘serious’ conversation (i.e. a conversation which is not composed
solely of jokes). Evaluation following the joke, whether verbal or
non-verbal, will distract participants from whatever discourse had
preceded the witty interruption. It is also fairly likely that the joke
will provoke a chain reaction by subconsciously inviting others to
follow suit with a recital of their own jokes. An exchange made up
mainly of jokes is thus born, serious interaction breaks down and
humorous discourse replaces it.
However, humorous discourse is not only made up of a stretch of
conversation made up of strings of jokes. Another form of comic
discourse may occur in the form of what can be described as ‘ping-
pong-punning’. ‘Ping-pong-punning’ is a term used to describe what
happens when the participants of a conversation begin punning on
every possible item in each other’s speech which may contain the
slightest ambiguity. A game (or battle) comparable to ping-pong in
which each participant tries to outdo the others’ cleverness results.
This form of word play probably occurs more frequently than full-
blown joke-capping sessions.
The next two examples are interludes which occurred within a
joke-capping session and illustrate this type of word play. The partici-
pants move away from the crescendo of jokes being recited and begin
to concentrate on a more interactive form of joking.
Initiator: What’s small and wrinkled and smells of ginger?
Participant 1: This is going to be awful. . .
Participant 2:. . . a tabby cat’s. . .
 Word play in action 115
Initiator: Fred Astaire ’s cock.
Participant 1: It's an old one!
Participant 2: 1930!
Participant 1’s evaluation was certainly referring to the joke and not
to part of the famous tap-dancer’s anatomy; she had heard the joke
before and obviously found it distasteful. On hearing the punchline,
participant 2 immediately picks up on the ambiguity of one and plays
on it by punning on the man’s, and consequently his anatomy’s, age.
The whole exchange coheres perfectly and the previous discourse is
replaced by the cohesive coherence of the new humorOUS stretch of
discourse.
Initiator: What's the last thing that goes through a bluebottle’s mind as it
hits the windscreen of a car?
Participant 1:I don't know.
Participant 2: Dunno. The wipers?
Initiator: It’s arse!
Participant 1: Cruel. I’m a bluebottleist myself.
Participant 2: No flies on you Sheila!
Together with her evaluation, the first participant invents a nonce-
term, biuebottleist, to demonstrate wittily her disapproval of the joke.
This remark is then picked up by the other participant who throws the
ball back into her court by topping the portmanteau with an idiom
which includes the term flies. Here too, the text coheres smoothly.
It should, however, be pointed out that exchanges of ping-pong-
punning do not necessarily stem from jokes, nor do they only occur in
joke-capping sessions. In fact, such instances of punning tend to stem
from more serious utterances. Consider the following exchange
which was prompted by someone who had their arm in plaster:
Initiator: No 'arm in it, eh Peter?
Participant: Yeah, got to hand it to you. . .
Peter: That’s not funny!
Initiator: Put my finger on it have I?
Participant: 'armless enough!
The exchange revolves around four idioms which can all be seen to
joke on Peter’s injured limb. The initiator starts punning and the
other participant puns straight back at him. Peter’s appeal for a truce
is taken as a signal to continue battling. The concatenation of puns
stems from an initial pun on harm/arm which generates punning on
the items finger and hand.
Possibly better examples of this type of interaction stem from an
116 The Language of Jokes
unambiguous item which crops up within a conversation. Ping-pong-
punning is frequently reported by the writer of popular romances,
Jilly Cooper. In her novels, characters will tend to be brought
together at dinner parties at which she allows them to practise witty
repartee:

‘Hi Jake. Congratulations. I was so excited when I heard you were

in.’
‘As the actress said to the Bishop,’ said Rupert. ‘You’re prive-
leged, Jake. You must be the only person who’s excited my dear
wife in years. I certainly don’t.’
(Riders, p. 494)

Rupert takes his wife’s congratulatory remark at face value and

‘frames’ it in music-hall style, ‘As the actress said to the bishop . . .’ -
a classic frame for sexual innuendo, to bring out the double entendre.
Furthermore he also picks up on the double meaning of the item
excited. Similarly, in real life we find the following exchange:
Participant A; . . you have to see the arras.
Initiator: (giggles) such a lovely ar-ras [lam/1
(laughter)
Participant B:Has it got a hole in it?
In the middle of a serious conversation on art someone finds the word
arms reminiscent of the word arse, corrupts it to the target word,
which in turn prompts another participant to joke about it too. In this
way the same joke is developed and expanded as it crosses single-
speaker boundaries.
In the next example, something similar occurs: a participant in a
conversation hardly manages to gain the floor, when she is interrup-
ted by a pun generated from the topic on which she was about to
speak.
Participant A:0ur farmer
Participant 3: Who art in heaven . . .
During a conversation about a car accident, drivers were said to be
‘weaving’ through the traffic, at which the participant concerned
protested that
I wasn't weaving, I was knitting.
This particular remark simply disrupts the prior conversation which is
then replaced by laughter.
Sometimes, a whole utterance in a conversation. as opposed to a
 Word play in action 117
single item, is picked up and joked upon. Consider the following
example which cropped up in a recording of a dinner party:
A. I can't remember the last time I was on a London bus . . .
B. Think of a conversation leading up to that remark.
Participant B’s comment disrupts the flow of conversation by provok-
ing a great deal of laughter. What he has done is to decontextualize
A’s comment, thus depriving it of any coherence with regard to the
surrounding conversation, and attempt to stimulate the other partici-
pants’ imaginations by encouraging them to think of another, perhaps
more humorous context, in which it may have occurred.

HUMOROUS DISCOURSE VERSUS SERIOUS DISCOURSE

The types of humorous discourse examined so far — joke-capping
sessions and stretches and ‘ping—pong-punning’ - could well be seen
as rather extreme habitats in which jokes may occur. Artificial situ-
ations such as the screen, the stage and books possibly contain
equally unusual occurrences of word play too, especially if we con-
sider the quantity and density of jokes and quips humorous films and
plays may contain. In real life, jokes may, of course, occur anywhere
and at any moment. Furthermore, they do not always necessarily
generate other jokes. Convenient as stretches of jokes may be for
analysis, most jokes probably do indeed occur in isolation. It is also
worth bearing in mind that humorous discourse does not only occur
in joke form, nor as punning or quipping. The narration of amusing
events and comic anecdotes is also part of the comic mode.
Jokes and quips, as we have seen, can interrupt serious conver-
sation, as can ping-pong-punning. Both phenomena may provoke a
chain reaction which will allow other participants to follow suit and
recite their own jokes or puns, so that an interlude of humorous
discourse replaces the serious discourse which had been going on
previously. The same thing occurs when someone tells a funny story;
thematic grouping is such that funny stories tend to occur together.
Someone who tells an amusing tale is likely to cause someone else to
follow suit.
Participant A:Do you know that there's a factory between Home and Naples
called 'Arsole'? lt's spelt A-R-S-O-L-E.
Participant B:And . . . and Delia laughs every time we go by it on the train
and the whole train turns round. . .
Participant 0:. . . Genoa . . . c’e‘ una scn'tta cubitale: F-A-R-T.
[In Genoa there’s a neon sign which spells out 'Fart’]
118 The Language of Jokes
Participant B:E la gente che ta . . . ubbidisoe? [does everyone obey?) Oh
look! Genoa . . . it gives a whole new dimension to the Achille
Laura!
The participants, who all speak fluent English and Italian, code-
switch continually and with ease, picking up on accidental meanings
which do not exist in the reciprocal source languages (see Chapter 4).
Participant A sets out by narrating something which she considers
funny. Participant C recounts a similar example, while Participant B
expands and jokes upon the last ‘story’.
Seen in these terms it would seem that humorous discourse and
serious discourse are two discourse types which are neatly separated
from one another. However, if we examine matters more closely, we
find that on the interface between serious and humorous discourse
there lies a whole shady area of discourse which can be defined either
by both or by neither of the two terms. Real-life stories can, of
course, be narrated in more than one way. Depending on the stance
the narrator wishes to take, the verbalization of a single event can
present a very different aspect, depending upon whether it is told
seriously or humorously.
Let us consider the following transcription of a story narrated
during a dinner party:
I went to Florence one very hot weekend in June and, as l was walking
around waiting for the appointments I had, I thought I‘d go and buy some
talcum powder to dry myself out a bit and then to find somewhere . . . to go
. . . and put it on. After a while I came to a bookshop so I asked where the
English books were and they told me they were upstairs. So I trotted upstairs
and, when I got there, there was a young boy who was looking at some
books and he eventually left so I was left alone on the upstairs floor so I
thought that that was a good moment to put my talcum powder on. So there I
was shooshing [sic] talcum powder down my blouse, up my skirt etcetera.
Finally, I felt better, chose my books, walked downstairs. When i went to pay
at the cash desk I saw that they had a closed circuit television camera which
had been pointed exactly where I'd been sitting and all the staff were
standing around the television camera. I've never been so embarrassed in
my whole life. I went bright red, paid and rushed out of the shop and I shall
never go there again.
What happened to the lady concerned understandably caused her
acute embarrassment. However, she chooses to recount her experi-
ence in a humorous, rather than a serious fashion. The event itself is
indeed funny. We tend to laugh at people who make fools of them-
selves and lose face, and, here, the narrator plays the role of the ‘fool‘
M
Word play in action 119
Q

who joins in with her audience by poking fun at herself.

A

How is it that she renders the event amusing? Interestingly enough,

M

in this text, the speaker’s intonation is deadly serious, at least at the

beginning. Perhaps this is some sort of subconscious interactive ploy
Q

to trick her audience and thus render the ‘punch’ — when she realizes
that she has been seen by several people with her blouse undone and
skirt up - even more surprising and consequently funnier. However,
she only starts being funny at the word trotted, not a word one would
normally use to render the meaning of ‘to go upstairs’ unless one
wanted to add some kind of comic texture to what one was saying. In
this case, the choice of item changes the tone of the text and begins to
render it lighter. The speaker also adopts the nonce-term shooshing
which conveys the idea of someone covering themselves with clouds
of talc perfectly. Furthermore, the speaker uses euphemisms such as
. to dry myself out . . .; and listeners are left to work out for
themselves what ‘etcetera’ might stand for.
Discourse markers are of an informal variety too. Consider the
effect of the syntactic inversion of So there I was shooshing myself
with talcum powder. . . as opposed to something like ‘I was using the
talcum powder to cool myself a little . . .’. Consider also the match-
ing pair down my blouse and up my skirt. Of course, intonation,
gesture and comic expressions add to the overall comic effect; the
speaker deliberately stresses the items all and exactly, thus turning
them into intensifiers. The whole text is exaggerated and almost
hyperbolic. To render it serious the text would need to be ‘toned
down’ and ‘formalized’ by substituting the words and expressions
used with more neutral, more denotative ones.
It is worth noting, however, that the narrator knew beforehand
that she was being recorded, which may be the reason for the
unusually neat ending, complete with an implicit moral; she obvi-
ously felt that the story had to have a formal ending.
The following account of a road accident is reported below in two
versions; an inflated, comic version and a serious version.

Version 1
So there I was lying in hospital . . . all my ribs broken, collar bone
broken, no knee left and my face all scarred when my stomach started
to swell! Well . . . all these doctors round my bed talking about peritoni-
tis . . . I suppose they thought I was stupid or something and couldn't
understand what they meant! Anyhow, they told me I had to have a
sonda rettale. ' Well. . . have you ever seen a sonda rettale ? It's a piece

* An anal probe.
120 The Language of Jokes
7 of rubber tubing about this long . . . (gesticulation) . . . well. . . along
8 comes this nurse. . . and I couldn't move you see. . . 'oos all me ribs
9 were broken and I had to lie flat . . . and she starts fiddling about
to somewhere in my lower regions. After a few minutes she looks up and
11 says: ‘l’m afraid you'll have to do it yourself, signorina, because lcan't
12 find the right hole!‘
Version 2
l was lying in bed with all my ribs broken, a broken collar bone and
apparently a totally smashed up rotula. l was in a dreadful state when my
stomach began to swell visibly. What was particularly frightening was that
the doctors stood raund my bed and talked about the chances of my having
contracted peritonitis in front of me! The situation was terrifying enough as it
was, but I got more frightened still when l was told I would have to have a
sonda rettale. In order to distract me while a nurse started inserting the
are tube, a doctor gave me a few extra stitches on my left knee. Funnily
enough, it wasn't as painful as I thought. . . and no wonder. . . the nurse
didn't know how to insert the tube and asked me to do it myself.
The first version is funny. The narrator seems to have a preference
for the anecdotal style marker: So there I was . . . ; the style is
informal, with a marked absence of finite verbs (lines 1 to 3). This is a
particularly common feature of informal story telling in English. The
story is acted ‘up’ as the narrator interacts with her audience and asks
for their reactions: Well, have you ever seen a . . .? The style is casual
and chatty (e.g. you see and the use of the personal pronoun me
instead of ‘my’ and the contracted ’cos). The casualness reaches its
climax with the nurse’s comment, introduced, once more, with an
anecdotal use of the present tense: she says instead of a more formal
‘she said’. Finally, the story is topped by the choice of lexis for the
voicing of the nurse’s fears; she does not want, in fact, to insert the
probe in the euphemistic, brutal yet comic wrong hole.
The second version is less dramatic, more objective and more
formal. Apart from the syntactic correctness of the text, which could
just as easily have been written as told, feelings are described in
subdued terms without the emotional involvement of her listeners.
By ‘playing down’ lexical choices the serious version of what had
previously been told humorously is obtained.
A division between serious and humorous discourse is not always
so clear-cut, so it would perhaps be more exact to consider these two
labels as the poles of a cline. If at one pole we find word play, in terms
of unexpected occurrences of paradigmatic choices, and at the other
pole clearly referential uses of language, in the centre we find a vast
 Word play in action 121
zone which belongs to neither pole, yet at the same time has many
points in common with both. Humorous stories are good examples of
the point at which the two poles meet.
Conclusion

To echo the words of Samuel Beckett, ‘In the beginning there was the
pun’ (Murphy).
It would indeed appear that all natural languages contain ambi-
guities which can be deliberately exploited to create verbal duplicity,
yet, as has been suggested in this book, word play may well be more
pervasive in Britain than elsewhere. The exclusiveness of humorous
discourse to those who are part of a particular group of people can
easily create a barrier between those who are unaware of the com-
plexity and quantity of linguistic options available to the punster.
Despite the fact that English has now become an international lan-
guage, its expressions of humour remain a mystery to all but its most
proficient speakers. What is more, in British society, verbal play
tends to be ubiquitous. It seems to be acceptable to play with words
in a myriad of situations in which it would be considered out of place
in many other cultures. Thus a foreigner could be confused by the
occurrence of a joke, or else find that his attempt at punning is met
with disapproval, not only because he has chosen the wrong moment
or place to play with words, but above all because his audience is
unwilling to accept him as part of their ‘group’.
Nowadays the teaching of English as a foreign language embraces
practice in several linguistic skills and sub-skills, while at the same
time it develops the appreciation of literature. Word play could
provide both teachers and learners with a wealth of authentic
material which, as well as being readily available, could also be
enjoyable once made accessible. Such accessibility does not come
naturally. The foreign speaker needs to be guided towards the under-
standing and subsequently ‘ the appreciation of British humour.
Furthermore, a knowledge of British humour and its pervasiveness is
a central part of British culture, possibly more important, for
example, than a national preference for tea over coffee. Yet, while
 Conclusion 123

learners of English are forced to learn about the importance of tea

and fish and chips they are very rarely exposed to examples of English
humour.
This book presents a brief overview of verbal play in English and
has touched upon various aspects of the subject. If we are willing to
accept that word play can be considered a form of ‘layman’s poetry’,
then what has transpired is that playing with language can bring out
the poetic side of the layperson who is able to distort words and texts
and thus manipulate that multifaceted entity which is the English
language. The form of ‘poetry’ — jokes — which is generated by these
‘poets’ is accessible to anyone who understands the language and the
culture. Not only are the authors of these texts comic poets, but they
are also actors who through their use of accent, pauses and timing
often produce magnificent performances in which weak jokes can be
transformed into everyday but none the less noteworthy master-
pieces.
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Index

advertising 39 ‘knock-knock’ 34, 70-1; political

alliteratio 38—9 82—3, 104; ritualistic 67, 105—11;
anagrams 30—1 sick 7
asides 65—6
laughter 4—5
‘bilingual’ puns 46-7, 59, 98—9 limerick 59—60
blends 18-20
malapropisms 20
catchphrases 58 metathesis 18—19, 32—3
clerihew 64—5
comments, humorous 67 narrative, joke form 49—58
non-verbal humour 25—7
definitions 65-6
one-liners 59—65
evaluation, of jokes 111 openings, of jokes 102-5
exhortations 66—7
palindromes 31
formulaic jokes 61-7 ‘ping-pong-punning‘ 113
Freudian slips 17-19 polysemy 15, 37, 39
pragmatic play 43—5
gaffes 21—4 problem-solution. text structure
graffiti 25, 28, 35 50—4. 58
graffiti. ‘OK’ genre 28, 47, 62—3, prosaiclpoetic jokes 24, 28—30. 34.
71-3 87-90, 95-9
graphology, exploitation of 28 punchline 48—9, 59
Grice’s maxims 44-5, 74—5 puns 34, 39, 65

homeoteleulon 38 rebuses 27
homonymy 37, 39 rejoinders 71-3
homophony 35, 37-9, 85 riddles 32, 33, 68—70

jokes: ‘absurd’ 9; anti-female 8; sequencing, of jokes in

derogatory 7-8; ‘dirty‘ 8—9; conversation 105—11
formulaic 61—7; Irish 48—53, 73; sexual humour 8, 10. 64—5
 Index 129

shared knowledge 10—16, 31, 78 tongue-twisters 31

situation comedy 6 translation of jokes 23-4, 77—99
slapstick 6
Spoonerisms see metathesis universality of laughter/humour 4,
syntax, exploitation of 40-3 6, 18, 20
 HOW LINGUISTICALLY
CREATIVE ARE JOKES?
WHAT DO JOKES REVEAL
ABOUT SOCIOCULTURAL
ASSUMPTIONS?
In this highly readable and thought-provoking book, Delia
Chiaro explores the pragmatics of word play, using
frameworks normally adopted in descriptive linguistics.
Using examples from personally recorded conversations,
she examines the structure of jokes, quips, riddles and
asides. Chiaro explores degrees of conformity to and
deviation from established conventions; the ‘tellability’ of
jokes, and the interpretative role of the listener; the creative
use of puns, word play and discourse. The emphasis in her
analysis is on sociocultural contexts for the production and
reception of jokes, and she examines the extent to which
jokes are both universal in their appeal, and specific to a
particular culture.
The book argues convincingly that jokes have been
neglected as rich sources of patterned creativity in language
use. It is of considerable interest to students of both
language and literature.
Delia Chiaro is Lecturer in English Language and
Linguistics at the University of Naples, Italy.
The aim of the INTERFACE series is to build bridges
between the traditionally divided disciplines of language
studies and literary studies.
The IN T E R F A C E Series: Language in Literary Studies
Series Editor: Ronald C arter
Linguistics/English Studies/Literary Studies

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