A
couple of recent articles about the episode of Seinfeld where
Elaine takes on the sacred monster that is the New Yorker cartoon got me
thinking about what counts as a joke, and how jokes succeed or fail. Thus
begins an occasional series within an already rather occasional blog, about the
nature of The Joke.
(A
caveat: we’re definitely heading for the kind of territory dismissed by EB
White in his quotation which provides the title of this blog. Readers
with little patience for such phrases as ‘The beauty of the joke is how the
expectation is built up through the mapping of each of these terms onto its
counterpart in the other sentence’ might want to stop at this point.)
I
assume a joke must involve some incongruity or the confounding of an
expectation, very often one which the joke itself establishes (Robert Mankoff’s
comments about jokes involving contrasting frames of reference are
relevant here). This isn’t much use as a definition of a joke (it also applies
to whodunnits and surprise parties), but it does allow us to think about how
jokes might work, and how one joke might work better than another.
As
a starting point, consider a recent exchange I had with a friend (of mine). He
asked me for an example of what I considered a good joke, and I offered him the
following, which as far as I know comes from Groucho Marx:
‘Time
flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana’.
My
friend offered me the following (unattributed):
‘How
did Darth Vader know what Luke Skywalker got for his birthday? He felt his
presents’.
For
what it’s worth, I’m not crazy about my friend’s joke (sorry Simon). I’m
reluctant to say it’s not funny, or even that it’s not as funny as Groucho’s.
If someone said they preferred the Darth Vader joke, I’m not sure I could say
that they were wrong, any more than they would be wrong to prefer Jack Daniels
to Talisker, or vanilla to mint choc. But I think there are objective criteria
on which we can judge jokes, and I think that Groucho’s joke works better as a
joke than the Darth Vader one.
Each
of these jokes is a pun, and each involves a pun on two words (‘flies’ and
‘like’, and ‘felt’ and ‘presents’/‘presence’, respectively). One involves a
reference to a pop cultural phenomenon (though the other does involve reference
to a cliché). I don’t think this makes much of a difference, though – many
finely-wrought jokes require familiarity with a specific framework or set of
assumptions.[i] What
does make a difference, I think, is that the Groucho joke establishes and
subverts the expectations of the audience in a more efficient and subtle
manner. To see how it does this, work backwards. The joke (the confounded
expectation) is revealed in the juxtaposition of the two sentences, which have
the following respective structures:
First
sentence: noun-verb-preposition;
Second
sentence: adjective-noun-verb.
The
beauty of the joke is how the expectation is built up through the mapping of
each of these terms onto its counterpart in the other sentence.[ii]
‘Fruit’ is actually used as an adjective in the second sentence, but it is
often used as a noun, and its position after the first sentence creates the
assumption that this is how it’s functioning here. Because of that assumption,
‘flies’, which is actually used as an adjective, is assumed to be functioning as
a verb; and because of those two assumptions, ‘like’ in the second sentence is
understood as setting up a comparison. It’s only when this assumed comparison
goes awry that one rolls back these assumptions and uncovers the joke. This
sounds extremely pedantic, and of course it is. But it’s a tribute to the joke
in question that to appreciate how it works one must go into this kind of
detail.
The
Darth Vader joke works differently. There’s no expectation confounded, just the
incongruity of Christmas in the Star Wars universe. This requires a more
cumbersome setup than the Groucho joke; the two frames of reference are yoked
together before the punchline, so we’re immediately confronted with the
incongruity rather than being allowed to figure it out. This diminishes what is
left to be revealed, and signposts what the joke is going to be like. We’re all
familiar with jokes of this form, and know that the punchline will be a pun on
something from Star Wars.[iii]
Again, this isn’t to say the resulting joke will be bad, just that it won’t
have the sophistication of Groucho’s. While we can hardly say that someone is
wrong to think it funny, I think we can legitimately question their appreciation
of how jokes work – their appreciation of wit – if they deny this.
[i]
E.g.,Dorothy Parker’s timeless line ‘If all the girls at the Yale prom were
laid end to end, I wouldn’t be surprised’, which is not timeless insofar as it
relies on its audience being familiar with the ‘If all the such-and-such were
laid to end to end…’ convention.
[ii]
I did warn you.
[iii]
E.g., ‘What do Titanic and The Sixth Sense have in common?’ ‘Icy
dead people’ (for my money, that’s a better joke than the Darth Vader one). See
also innumerable sketches featuring Jesus shopping for a cross in Ikea, etc.
