Dinosaur Comics takes on a class of jokes insulting particular groups, and supplies some joke templates for them:
(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)
Some readers will identify these most strongly with the rich vein of “lawyer jokes” that put lawyers down (“What’s the difference between a lawyer and an X?” and the like).
Note that when PROFESSION MEMBER is expanded to take in members of social groups, then T-Rex finds the jokes no longer “all in fun” (“just jokes”, as some people say), but instead sees them as X-ist, in particular racist.
Erin O’Connor has picked up this cartoon on the Snowclone Database, in an entry for 7/20/09, where she connects the joke templates to snowclones. Granted, they are both types of formulaic language (as are riddle templates, poetic forms, and much else), but I see them as significantly different. Templatic jokes and riddles (and so on) are routines embedded within larger texts — they are, in a sense, digressions — while snowclones, like idioms and clichés, are expressions fully integrated into their texts.
However, the lines are by no means clear, and there are many problematic cases (not all jokes are templatic, and there are short non-templatic digressions, like proverbs). There’s isn’t necessarily a bright line separating interruptive from fully integrated material.
July 27, 2009 at 2:53 pm |
I appreciate your input on this. I had the instinct that they are something different, too, but they tickle my snowclone sense (not that that’s hard, hehe), so I thought I should note them.
I am always looking for shorthand ways to describe what snowclones are–people always want them to be any fill-in-the-blank phrase–so I’m definitely using this: “Templatic jokes and riddles (and so on) are routines embedded within larger texts — they are, in a sense, digressions — while snowclones, like idioms and clichés, are expressions fully integrated into their texts.”
July 31, 2009 at 11:08 pm |
The problem I have with snowclones is that the supposedly canonical example, eskimos-have-N-words-for-snow, has a lot of features, and it’s not clear which of them relate to snowclonehood. Even the LanguageLog elite seem to disagree among themselves over what the relevant properties are.