by Tim Ferguson
Look for ideas associated with the proposition. For example, God created the universe, so why not live there? And where does Satan live? Everywhere else?
Look for inconsistencies and gaps in the proposition. For example, If He’s everywhere, why do people spend years trying to find Him? If He’s in my house, He should help with the rent. If God is everywhere, how did He get there?
Look at the components of the proposition separately and in reverse order. For example, ‘God’ and ‘everywhere’. Hence, ‘Everywhere is where God is’. So, ‘Where exactly is everywhere?’
Look for exceptions to the statement. For example, God is not in Parliament. And He had better not be at the Playboy Mansion.
Look for connecting ideas. For example, What’s next to everywhere? Does ‘everywhere’ include Wagga Wagga? Can’t He make up his mind and pick somewhere to live? Is He in my eyeballs? Why?
Link the proposition with the funniest or quirkiest result of your searches.
EXERCISE
Here are some party starters:
Bad people go to Hell …
0.02% of grandmothers are convicted of murder …
Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get—
Absurd Humour
Absurd humour mocks detailed analysis. Typically, each absurd joke or scenario is a world unto itself and has few specifics in common with other jokes in the genre. But there are some general guidelines to the art. It’s arguable that all comedy is absurd. All humour points to the absurd in life, in that it generally turns on a logical contradiction or defies a logical expectation. But absurd humour seems to ignore contradiction and neutralising expectation in favour of a kind of negation—an entirely distinct concept.
Absurd comedy such as appears in the work of Monty Python portrays largely intelligent and rational characters reacting in realistic ways. It’s simply the situation that’s absurd. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Black Knight believes he can still put up a fight, even though his arms and legs have been hacked off. Once we accept that he genuinely believes it, we accept that he’s behaving rationally.
Absurd or nonsense humour pushes accepted norms to nonsense extremes, presenting the audience with a fresh perspective. In Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life a Catholic mother and father have followed the dictates of the Vatican by breeding dozens of children. They have bred so many that when a baby plops out of the mother she is completely indifferent. The Vatican’s view that ‘every sperm is sacred’ is taken to its logical extreme and then given a nudge: the parents have so many children that they are forced to sell them for scientific experimentation.
Through the juxtaposition of incongruous entities, personalities, values or behaviours, absurd humour creates scenarios in which the characters have nonsensical manifestations, aims or perspectives. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Knights of Ni shout the word ‘Ni!’ to dominate their foes. Before the terrified King Arthur can pass them, they demand he bring them, of all things, a shrubbery.
The use of random elements like ‘a shrubbery’ pervades this type of humour. Yet absurd comedy can make a reasonable point. In each of the examples of absurd humour above, even though the action is absurd, something is being satirised. It might be the ideal of valour and the impossible quests in medieval epics, or the dictates of the Catholic Church. The target isn’t random.
Anthropomorphism is common in absurd humour. And it’s not just animals that can have human characteristics. In the absurd world, even a lunchbox can have a personality and a driver’s licence, and a human being can think they’re a lunchbox.
Absurd humour can play upon the absurdity within a joke itself, either reversing, neutralising or furthering that absurdity for a laugh.
Absurd humour has been around at least since the Middle Ages. In ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ from The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) tells of a fox chasing a rooster round a barnyard, but describes it in lofty, heroic language more suited to a grand epic. This absurd technique raises animals to the level of humans, but also implies that the feats of man may not be as grand as we like to think.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland is similarly anthropomorphic—the animals in Wonderland talk and have largely human concerns.
Absurdism as we know it came to prominence during World War I, when ‘Dada’ artists began seriously questioning institutions, language and culture. Perhaps the most famous example from the period is Duchamp’s inverted urinal (‘Fountain’ by ‘R. Mutt’). The art world and society at large were rocked by the idea that anything could be art if the artist said it was.
The Dada influence remains in absurdist TV sketch humour today. A Dada literary technique was to throw words inscribed on scraps of paper into a hat. The Dadaists would randomly remove some of the words and devise poems based on them. Some modern British sketch shows (e.g. Big Train) preserve the spirit of this apparent randomness in sketches such as Ming the Merciless vacuuming his suburban home, or a dozen jockeys trying to put out a house-fire.
Randomness is a component of much absurd humour:
Q: How many absurdists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: An orange.
—Unattrib.
This joke defies our expectation of a logical connection to the punchline. Once the key element ‘absurdists’ is mentioned, the substance of the punchline is almost irrelevant. It could be ‘An elephant’ or indeed ‘A urinal’. The choice of a seemingly random punchline or element is typical in absurd comedy.
Haikus are easy.
But sometimes they don’t make sense.
Refrigerator.
—Unattrib.
All the final line of the haiku needs is the traditional five syllables.
For ten years, Caesar ruled with an iron hand. Then with a wooden foot, and finally with a piece of string.
—Spike Milligan
Milligan’s punchline satirises the grand language used by historians.
Having posed an absurd reality, some jokes extend and develop that reality:
A dog goes into a hardware store and says: ‘I’d like a job, please’.
The hardware store owner says: ‘We don’t hire dogs; why don’t you go join the circus?’
The dog replies: ‘What would the circus want with a plumber?’
—Steven Alan Green
Once we accept that the dog can talk and that it needs a job, the gag goes a step further. A pattern is established by the first two propositions, but the absurd punchline still takes us by surprise even though it’s consistent with the reality of the joke.
Other absurd gags extrapolate from their premise to an absurd conclusion:
My friend George is a radio announcer. When he walks under a bridge, you can’t hear him talk.
—Steven Wright
Absurd jokes can rely on a punchline that plays with absurdity itself:
Two racehorses are in the stables. One horse says, ‘The strangest thing happened in my last race. I was coming around the bend and heard a buzzing in my head. I got such a shock, I ran like mad and won the race’.
The other horse is amazed. ‘The same thing happened to me—I was coming around the bend and heard a buzzing in my head. I ran like mad and won my race.’
A greyhound approaches them. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing you. I must say that I, too, was coming around the bend and heard a buzzing in my head. I ran like mad and won my race.’
The first horse looks at the other and says, ‘Bugger me—a talking dog!’
—Unattrib.
Here, the absurd premise itself, talking horses, subtly establishes a convention: in this joke, animals can talk. It goes on to create an expectation that the substance of the joke is to do with buzzing heads, and we’re blindsided by a punchline that instead simply violates the talking-animal convention. The premise is used against itself.
Shifting perspective from the absurd to the realistic is a good way to throw an
audience off-balance. The following obvious-absurd two-part joke is an example:
Q: How do you fit two elephants into a Mini Minor?
A: One in the front and one in the back.
Q: How do you fit four elephants into a Mini Minor?
A: Look, you’ve already got two elephants in there. There’s no way a Mini is going to seat another two.
—Unattrib.
The laugh in the second joke comes from the absurd premise of the first. In the second joke the absurd premise is first accepted (‘You’ve already got two elephants in there’) and then contradicted (‘There’s no way a Mini is going to seat another two’).
Like most jokes, the absurd premise is initially accepted as part of the joke’s ‘reality’ by the characters in the joke. In a joke, when a man walks into a bar with a crocodile, the barman sees it as a nuisance, not a sudden and shocking threat.
Absurdity can highlight everyday human concerns: in the Monty Python ‘Argument Sketch’, a customer has paid a professional arguer for an argument. The arguer, however, proceeds by simply rejecting everything the customer says. The customer feels ripped off.
MAN: …This isn’t an argument.
MR VIBRATING: Yes it is.
MAN: No it isn’t. It’s just contradiction.
MR VIBRATING: No it isn’t.
The customer’s frustration at the intransigent arguer reflects that of all customers who feel they haven’t received what they paid for.
Wordplay
English is organic, and is subject to all the breaches, redundancies, inadequacies, anomalies, paradoxes, contradictions and oddities found in any system that has grown through practice rather than design. Thankfully, this leaves the English language wide open to comic exploitation. Rather than exploiting the meaning of words, wordplay exploits the words themselves.
RHYTHM
You can create funny, tongue-twisting lines simply by exploiting rhythm and alliteration.
HAWKINS: Did you put the pellet with the poison in the vessel with the pestle?
GRISELDA: No! The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon. The vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true.
HAWKINS: The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon; the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true.
GRISELDA: Just remember that.
—The Court Jester, (Norman Panama and Melvin Frank)
The dodo died. Then Dodi died, Di died and Dando died … Dido must be shitting herself.
—Colin and Fergus
Nonsense words can bring a smile to any face. Try singing this classic Goons’ song with gravitas:
Ying-tong ying-tong ying-tong ying-tong ying-tong tiddle-i-po, Ying-tong ying-tong ying-tong ying-tong ying-tong tiddle-i-po!
The more serious your delivery, the sillier it becomes.
Lewis Carroll’s poem, ‘Jabberwocky’ (Through the Looking-Glass), plunges us into a world of nonsense words that nonetheless seem to convey meaning.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
‘Jabberwocky’ seems meaningless, but its outgrabe mome raths spark the reader’s imagination.
Repeating and shuffling key words can obfuscate a simple truth. In the following soliloquy from Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby explains an administrative quandary to a hostile committee. He makes sense and tells the truth but lays bare the tendency of bureaucracy towards pointless complexity:
There is a real dilemma here, in that while it has been government policy to regard policy as the responsibility of ministers and administration as the responsibility of officials, the questions of administrative policy can cause confusion between the policy of administration and the administration of policy, especially when the responsibility for the administration of the policy of administration conflicts or overlaps with responsibility for the policy of administration of policy.
—‘A Question of Loyalty’, (Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn)
As you might imagine, Sir Humphrey baffles the committee into submission.
It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.
—Stephen Fry
If you’ve noticed this notice, you’ll notice this notice is not worth noticing.
—Unattrib.
HAWKEYE: I had a dream last night that I was asleep and I dreamed it while I was awake.
—M*A*S*H (‘Bananas, Crackers and Nuts’ by Burt Styler)
Offensive language has a power that comedy can exploit. As comedian Lenny Bruce said, ‘It’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness’. This suppression of usually familiar terms and expressions allows a comedian to flirt with danger:
The word ‘blow’ is fine by itself. The word ‘job’ is okay too. But put them together and you get … ‘job-blow’, which is still okay.
—Ben Elton
The lyrics below are derived from dialogue in The Sound of Music.
What is it you can’t face? What is it yo-o-o-ou can’t face?
—The Doug Anthony All Stars
TRANSPOSITIONS
Transpositions can make for revealing gags:
I’m not as think as you drunk I am.
—Unattrib.
Splitting up words can reveal linguistic anomalies:
I’ve been overwhelmed and underwhelmed. When do I get to be just whelmed?
—Michael Scott
All men are not homeless, but some men are home less than others.
—Henny Youngman
Freebase? What’s free about it?
—Richard Pryor
There are many words we use every day that, if bisected, reveal amusing anomalies, e.g. ‘I felt discombobulated earlier, but I’m totally combobulated now; I’m in a state of total combobulism’.
EXERCISE
Here are some words to play with:
Fundamental
Postmodern
Respond
Decapitate
Henchmen
LIMERICKS
These five-line joke poems are the most popular humorous rhyming pattern. The oldest limerick on record was written by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), but they achieved broad popularity when the English absurdist writer Edward Lear, recognising that a rhyme can make a so-so punchline more satisfying, produced his Book of Nonsense in 1845.
There was an old man who supposed,
That the street door was partially closed;
But some very large rats,
Ate his coats and his hats
While that futile old gentleman dozed.
—Edward Lear
Many popular limericks are ribald.
In the Garden of Eden lay Adam
Complacently stroking his madam
And great was his mirth
For in all of the Earth
There were only two balls and he had ’em.
—Unattrib.
The limerick pattern is so well known that in itself it offers an opportunity to subvert audience expectation:
There was an old lady from Pucker,
And that’s all I’ll say about that.
—Richard Fidler
There was a young man from Japan
Whose limericks never would scan.
When asked why this was
He answered ‘Because
I always try to fit as many syllables into the last line as I possibly can’.
—Unattrib.
ANAGRAMS
I realised I was dyslexic when I went to a toga party dressed as a goat.
—Marcus Brigstocke
Is it true that dyslexic atheists believe that there is no Dog?
—Unattrib.
These gags should be built around simple words that the audience can easily reassemble. A joke about being grabbed by a poltergeist at an anagram convention by
saying, ‘Let go, sprite!’ will leave the audience scratching their heads.
ACRONYMS
For the best examples of humorous (i.e. rude) acronyms, contact the Defamation And Mortgage Negotiation Lawyers In Associated Repossession Settlements.
SPOONERISMS
The Oxford Don, Reverend William Spooner (1844–1930), was prone to transposing vowels and consonants in a most unfortunate way.
Let us glaze our asses to the queer old Dean!
‘Let us raise our glasses to the dear old Queen!’
The Lord is a shoving leopard.
That may be, but He probably prefers to be known as a ‘loving shepherd’.
A simple reference to Spooner invites the audience to apply a new meaning to an otherwise innocuous remark:
As the Reverend Spooner would say, you are a shining wit.
—Unattrib.
REPETITION
Repetition by itself can have comic value.
A customer asks a waitress what’s on the menu.
WAITRESS: Well, there’s eggs and bacon; eggs, sausage and bacon; egg and Spam; egg, bacon and Spam; egg, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon and Spam; Spam, sausage, Spam, Spam, bacon Spam, tomato and Spam.
VIKINGS: (singing) Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam …
—Monty Python
You realise you’re an alcoholic when you repeat yourself. You realise you’re an alcoholic when you repeat yourself. You realise you’re an alcoholic when you repeat yourself.
—Robin Williams
Concepts, rather than words, can also be repeated to comic effect. Dogberry is a watch constable prone to verbosity and malapropisms:
DOGBERRY: Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.
—Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare)
In Shakespeare’s time, a comic actor named Will Kemp was famous for his portrayal of Dogberry. Kemp was a renowned comic improviser so it’s possible he stretched the above list further than six. Who knows how long Kemp could have continued to say the same thing? How long could Robin Williams or Billy Connolly continue?