by Alex Horne
12
I’m no longer ashamed to say that the radio station I choose to listen to above all others is BBC Radio 2. And like many new Radio 2 fans, my favourite show in their schedule is Chris Evans’s drivetime extravaganza. Wogan comes a close second, just above Ken Bruce, but Evans is just lively enough to make me still feel respectably young.
Soon after sneaking my mum’s text onto Five Live I was driving down to Devon, drawing breath after singing lustily along to ‘All I Want for Christmas’, when a particular festive feature caught me completely by surprise. Chris had spent the week talking to the stars of various pantomimes around the country. This evening, the following exchange was broadcast to every one of his 5 million listeners:
That’s my joke! One of my (fit for Christmas) crackers! Now finding its natural home in a pantomime in Norwich being told to Adam Ricketts from (of course) Coronation Street! I was stunned and drove the rest of the way in bewildered silence, failing even to join in with The Pogues’ ‘Fairytale of New York’.
Now I know there’s a chance that someone else also came up with the joke; as an intellectual creation it’s not quite on the scale of Hamlet, E = mc2 or the word ‘bootylicious’. It isn’t necessarily a work of genius. But I still believe I was and am the originator of the line. The fact that it was now being spoken every night onstage in Norwich, and on this particular night live on BBC Radio 2, meant that my creation, my offspring, had succeeded. It had flown the nest and, indeed, found work in Norfolk. I felt extraordinarily proud. I may not have got a word in the dictionary yet but I had got a joke on the radio and was now sure I could emulate this feat with my new words.
Like most of my jokes, it was conceived in mundane circumstances. I was absent-mindedly reading a newspaper article about the environment when my gaze was caught by the phrase ‘counter-productive’. After years either trying to spot anagrams, palindromes* and charades or trying to squeeze jokes out of apparently ordinary sentences, my mind immediately registered the fact that ‘counter’ has several meanings: ‘opposed’, ‘playing piece’, ‘one who counts’, ‘paying area’, to name but four. Skipping excitedly on to ‘productive’, I saw that ‘producing playing pieces’ was both a very different meaning to ‘more of a hindrance than a help’ and an incongruous enough idea to have at least some amusement value. By suggesting that my dad (always a useful character to insert into a humorous situation) didn’t like working in a tiddly-wink factory, I was able to open up possibilities for both meanings to apply. The ‘resolution’ of ‘he found it counter-productive’ would then trigger similar recognition of the double meaning in the listeners’ own minds, which just might produce laughter as a side-effect, if I was very lucky.
The first time you tell a joke is a nerve-racking experience. It’s bad enough if you’re trying to amuse your mates in the pub with a gag you heard someone else tell on TV. You miss a crucial detail, time it all wrong or realise at the last minute that you can’t actually do a South African accent, and all of a sudden it doesn’t seem funny in the slightest. But if you’re trying out a joke that you yourself have come up with, you have no idea if it’s amusing at all, or if it is, just how weak or powerful any reaction might be. You should know that the mechanics are reliable: ‘counter-productive’ does have these two meanings, it’s not too complicated or subtle, and the logic of the set-up is fine. But is it too simple? Your joke-recipient’s brain has to do some work in order to generate the longed-for laughter, otherwise they’ll just groan (which, I have to say, I do happily take as a reaction).
So when I first told an audience about my father’s experience in a plastic playing-piece production plant (which, I’d imagine, would be quite a trying occupation. If you yourself do have this exact job, I apologise for making light of your situation. But I am also curious. Does your factory only produce counters? Surely it would be a good idea to diversify? How about making some of those cheap and slightly tawdry* earrings you sometimes see? Or poker chips? Or buttons? We all use buttons!) I was pleasantly surprised when it elicited at least a couple of guffaws: reluctant guffaws, maybe; the sort the guffawer instantly regrets, clapping their hands over their mouths, ashamed that they’d so openly found such a simple line amusing; but definitely audible chortles.
The next time, there were only smiles and a few shakes of the head. Perhaps it was just too obvious. Or perhaps it was just too much of a pun. Wordplay is, unfortunately for me, rather unfashionable in these modern days of satire, sex and sarcasm.
But rather than disposing of it in my failed-joke bin, I decided to plant it for now in the middle of some other similar lines about my apparently job-jumping father: ‘He used to work as a colonic irrigator,’ I’d say, ‘but found the work tiring. After all, it does take a lot out of you.’ ‘He then got a job in a shop selling waterbeds but he got the sack, even though he did try very hard: he pulled out all the stops.’ ‘He worked in a milk factory, packaging the milk into tetrapaks, but he got scared. He bottled it.’ And then, bang: ‘He worked in a tiddly-wink factory! And guess what? He found it counter-productive!’ That way the first unwilling smile was able to mature into a smirk and finally emerge as some sort of snort by the third punchline. The quality of the jokes might not have been all that high, but the build-up was long enough to necessitate a release and suddenly the counter-productive line seemed hilarious.
Not content to quit while ahead, I usually tried to milk the laughter further by saying that my dad’s last job was in a pet-shop selling cages for rabbits to exercise in: ‘People said he wouldn’t be able to make a living doing that. But he gave them a run for their money.’ That was nearly always enough to put out any brief flames of mirth.
So a year after its conception, the joke won a part in my set. For a good few months I used it whenever I performed. Perhaps a couple of thousand people heard it. But buried in the middle of my one ‘bit’, which itself came in the middle of three or four other stand-up sets, I didn’t think that one line would have stood out enough for anyone to remember it over any others when they went to work the following morning. I can’t imagine audience members excitedly retelling that one tiddly-wink joke round the water cooler.
It was, however, pithy enough for a journalist at the Evening Standard to jot down in his pad one night, and to replicate it whilst recommending a gig I happened to be performing at the following week: ‘Horne usually comes up with elaborately geeky shows for Edinburgh,’ he wrote accurately, ‘but here he’s in one-liner mode: “My dad worked in a tiddly-winks factory. It was counter-productive.”’ So now the joke was in print, albeit tucked away in the entertainment listings of a regional evening newspaper. An easily pleased Londoner might potentially be tickled enough by the line to attempt to pass it on.
But then, after I’d crowbarred it into that year’s elaborately geeky Edinburgh show about Latin, the joke found its way into a national paper, the Observer, whose generous reviewer reasoned that ‘quoting individual lines, such as “working at the tiddly-winks factory was counter-productive”, can’t really do it justice’.21 Now it was, in theory, in the hands of the whole country. Sure, five times as many people read the Sun, but the Observer readers now had my joke at their disposal and, I like to think, dispose of it they did.
For not only did the great Adam Ricketts deliver it on the fine Theatre Royal stage in Norwich, but a couple of months later I was reading another London daily, the unnecessarily spelt London Lite, when it leaped out and surprised me again. This particular paper has a section entitled ‘Get it off your txt’ in which readers can text in anything they think worthy of publication. Whether or not this warrants a place in a periodical describing itself as a newspaper is debatable, but people do seem to appreciate the offer and everyday scrabble to send in their own insightful messages.
This particular morning’s selection was typical in its variety and pointlessness. The first was from ‘Sonya, Gravesend’ who asked, ‘Am I the only one who HATES the gorilla advert? Makes me cringe!’ Clearl
y Sonya didn’t know anyone in Gravesend with whom she could share her aversion to the highly successful Cadbury’s campaign and so she disclosed it to the capital’s population and a million commuters were able to read of her incredulity, agree or disagree, and text in to either reassure Sonya that no, she was not alone in her feelings, or to further alienate her by explaining that they actually found the rhythmic simian strangely hypnotic.
A few texts below Sonya, a ‘Mr G’ from London reassured a previous correspondent called ‘Kelly’ by saying, ‘Going commando should solve your dilemma!’ Is this the sort of exchange the most cosmopolitan city in the world should really be privy to?
Finally, at the very bottom of the page was written: ‘My friend left his job at the tiddly-winks factory. He found the work counter-productive’, signed by ‘Le Prov’, from Dartford. Le Prov had tinkered with the original, changing ‘dad’ to ‘friend’, which I think adds nothing to the overall impact of the line, but again, I felt pride that my joke was flourishing – although this pride was coupled with anger that this man from Dartford had claimed it as his own, then joined by outrage that he hadn’t dared use his real name. It’s not that bad a joke!
So the gag was now an independent entity. I no longer have control over its usage. But, like a spur-winged goose, I would dearly love to at least try to track its progress and, every now and again, check it’s still alive and well. I’m intrigued by how far and how fast a joke can travel. In the space of a couple of months, it seems, mine travelled the 116 miles from Norwich to London. Where would it head next? If you happen to spot it on the move, please get in touch. If there’s a big response I promise I’ll set up some sort of webcam-tracker site so we can all follow and cheer on its migration round the country and, maybe, the world.
What excites me most about this whole verbal journey is that if a joke can travel so far and so quickly around the country, surely a simple word can make similar or better progress. Le Prov’s message was proof that our aims were attainable, our project possible.
Keen to test this migration theory further, I embarked on a Verbal Gardening side project. Whilst continuing to edge my way into the language, I would also attempt to spread a rumour as far and as wide as possible. Which would travel further, a joke, a word or a brand-new urban myth? Determined to find out, I concocted a pair of anecdotes I felt I could spread with little suspicion. The first was this: ‘I, Alex Horne, got into comedy after writing a joke for a supermarket Christmas cracker competition.’
I’m sorry about this. I know I told you that earlier in good faith. But I lied. The thing is, whenever comedians are interviewed, as I’ve already explained, they are always asked, ‘How did you get into comedy?’. I needed a good answer. And so I opened Pandora’s box once more, adding the following line to my own entry on Wikipedia:
Horne managed to secure his first gig on the comedy circuit by winning a Cracker Joke Writing Competition whilst working as Deputy Head of Dairy at Budgens in Midhurst, West Sussex.
Within weeks the story started to spread. At the Edinburgh Festival various publications copied the ‘fact’ without confirming it with me or the Head of Dairy at Budgens in Midhurst, West Sussex. It was then lifted into various publicity documents about other events I was performing at and mentioned on two radio programmes I had contributed to. After this prompt dispersal, several comedy listings websites picked it up and it’s now used as an interesting titbit to brighten up the blurb* of almost every event at which I appear. Once more, I apologise if you’ve been misled. But the story is still featured on Wikipedia so it is still, sort of, fact.
The second rumour I started was that the newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky is six foot two inches tall. There. That’s it. Barely an anecdote, I suppose, but with a bit of imagination it could easily provide the basis for an anecdote. ‘You’ll never guess who I saw in John Lewis this morning’?’ you might begin. ‘That Natasha Kaplinsky. She’s much taller than I thought she’d be.’ Being a simple visual idea, it is easy to spread and could, I hoped, be tracked over the coming months.
The eventual outcome I was hoping for was Kaplinsky one day opening an edition of Five News by saying, ‘Right, before the serious stuff, I’ve got to get one thing off my chest. There’s a rumour I need to put to bed. I’m not nearly as tall as you all think I am.’ I could certainly see it cropping up on Radio 2 as one of Steve Wright’s ‘factoids’, a word invented by Marilyn Monroe’s biographer Norman Mailer to describe exactly this phenomenon: ‘facts which have no existence before their publication’. In their book To Coin a Phrase, Edwin Radford and Alan Smith continue, ‘he had in mind particularly the sort of item which appears in film publicity handouts, and then continues to be repeated in the media as accepted fact, never being checked, and often being uncheckable’. Me too, Norman.
I’m not sure if Kaplinsky’s height is strictly ‘uncheckable’ – some insist she’s only five foot four – but it is, I think, believable enough to become ‘accepted fact’. And if it really takes off, if I could make the name Kaplinsky famous not only for news-reading but for height as well, there was a chance that her name too might make it into the dictionary. ‘As tall as Kaplinsky’ would first be heard whispered when someone particularly tall entered an establishment, then simply ‘My my, he’s rather kaplinsky’.
There is precedent. Take the word ‘jumbo’, originally someone’s name, but now an adjective used automatically when describing Boeing 747s. In fact, it wasn’t just someone’s name, it was some elephant’s name. Brought from Sudan via Paris to London Zoo as a baby, the creature in question was named ‘Jumbo’ by his keepers, a word chosen either because it was short for mumbo jumbo, a West African term for a witch-doctor, or as a play on the Swahili jambo meaning hello, or jumbe meaning chief. Either way, this previously unheard-of word spread around the world as Jumbo grew to become the largest animal ever kept in captivity before being bought and shown off by P. T. Barnum (often with the sort of misleading advertising that could today slam the doors of the BBC shut for ever: a coach and horses charging through Jumbo’s legs, for example, despite the fact that he was actually only five foot and five inches taller than Natasha Kaplinsky). It may seem unlikely now, but ‘kaplinsky’, meaning ‘tall’, might just catch on too.
21 In which case, I think, don’t quote individual lines!
13
Saving me from a lifetime ban and further recriminations that could well have included prison and torture, it was Mr Bookman who started spreading the Kaplinsky rumour via the medium of Wikipedia.
Having made the addition to the lofty newsreader’s article, Bookman settled in to monitor any queries or confirmations that were then made to his claim. But instead of such addenda, there followed eight days during which she was left standing at six foot two, before her height was removed altogether with the explanation that it wasn’t ‘relevant’. What? Of course it’s relevant! If Kaplinsky is eight inches over the average height of a woman, that’s absolutely worth including on a page dedicated to her life. If you don’t think it’s accurate, that’s a different matter, but not relevant? I’m afraid that just doesn’t cut the mustard.* Still, the fact that her enormous stature had been on the site for just over a week meant that a record was set that my Rare Men have continually tried to break ever since.
One of the very few but well-documented problems with Wikipedia (apart from me) is that its word is so often taken as gospel. As I discovered, its editors do work hard to ensure their content is as close to the truth as possible, but there will always be people (like me) who try to ‘have fun with’ or ‘exploit’ the medium (although, in my defence again, I would like to say that the insertion of new words was not ‘lying’ and Natasha Kaplinksy’s height was merely an exaggeration) and this can (hopefully) lead to some ‘mistakes’ further down the line.
But such difficulties affect all reference works. False information will always find its way into dictionaries, encyclopaedias and maps, and that false information will always be c
opied wholesale by other unscrupulous people. In fact there’s an obscure unofficial system in place to deal with just this situation. In a bid to track their facts and prevent plagiarism and copyright infringement (as well as having a bit of a laugh), editors of some such publications will sometimes insert their own deliberately fictitious entries: ‘mountweazels’.
The word ‘mountweazel’ itself can be found in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopaedia under the full name ‘Lillian Virginia Mountweazel’. According to this volume, L. V. Mountweazel was a fountain designer from Bangs, Ohio, who found fame taking photos of American mailboxes but then died in an explosion while on an assignment for Combustibles magazine. As fun as that all sounds, it isn’t in any way true. The editors made it up to protect their information (any other publications who printed the story could be proved to have simply nicked it from the encyclopaedia) and the surname came to describe all such fabrications.
The New Oxford American Dictionary has also indulged in a spot of mountweazeling (as far as I can tell, that’s the first ever usage of the noun as a verb in print), including the word ‘esquivalience’ in one edition with the definition, ‘the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities … late 19th cent.: perhaps from the French esquiver, “dodge, slink away”,’ which the editor-in-chief, Erin McKean, explained was made up by an editor called Christine Lindburg to safeguard the copyright of the electronic version of the dictionary. ‘It’s like tagging and releasing giant turtles’, she said in an interview with the New Yorker magazine, the publication that ultimately coined the term ‘mountweazel’.
‘Esquivalience’, McKean explained, was chosen as a reflection of how diligently the team had grafted; they wanted to catch people who displayed ultimate esquivalience by simply copying all their hard work. The plan sort of worked. ‘Esquivalience’ made it into onto the site www.dictionary.com, for instance, which quoted Webster’s New Millennium dictionary as the source of the word. But while that appearance may cast some doubt over the quality of that particular website, it also lends weight to the validity of the word itself. If enough people discover and start using it, ‘esquivalience’ must at some point become a legitimate word and an ineffective mountweazel.