A common joke form exploits an ambiguous expression E. Prior likelihood or the preceding context in the joke favors one understanding for E, but then fresh context (in the joke) brings out another, more surprising one. The effect is that the sense of E has shifted as the joke proceeds. It’s a pun, son. Used in a sense-shifting pun joke. (Puns get used in all sorts of jokes: knock-knock jokes, one type of riddle joke, and more.)
I now offer two examples that especially tickled me, to show how such ((phonologically) perfect) puns work. Then some comments on a different joke form, formula pun jokes, which can turn on imperfect puns and involve a different kind of set-up / pay-off from sense-shifting pun jokes.
Example 1. A joke passed along to me on Facebook on 10/16, from who knows what original source. Its initial line:
I threw a ball for my dog.
This we understand prosaically, as involving the very high-frequency lexical items:
verb throw: 1 [a] [with object and usually with adverbial] propel (something) with force through the air by a movement of the arm and hand: I threw a brick through the window.
noun ball-1: 1 [a] a solid or hollow spherical or egg-shaped object that is kicked, thrown, or hit in a game: a soccer ball.
(All definitions here come from NOAD.)
But then the joke-teller provides a new context:
Extravagant, I know.
But he looks amazing in a tuxedo.
The dog in a tuxedo makes us realize that threw a ball could involve a different verb throw and a different noun ball, a ball to which someone — even, absurdly, a dog — might wear a tuxedo:
verb throw: 6 [with object] give or hold (a party): he threw a huge farewell party for them.
noun ball-2: a formal social gathering for dancing: the social season was highlighted by debutante balls | [as modifier]: a ball gown.
The dog in a tuxedo makes us shift our understanding of ball to the event sense, and then throw must shift too, since you can’t propel an event through the air with your arm. The mental image we get as a result is, as I said, preposterous, but delightful.
Compare this shift with what happens to many people when they’re confronted with the optical illusion known as the Goblet Illusion:
(#1)
Because of several perceptual predispositions, we’re inclined to see #1 at first as a white goblet against a black background, but we can then be nudged to shift our interpretation of what we’re seeing to the outlines of two black faces against a white background. And after that we go back and forth between the two understandings.
Example 2. This time our initial understanding of a sentence is conditioned by context supplied in the telling of the joke. The teller explains to us that this is a story about a US Army sergeant who commands a platoon of black soldiers. In the story, he’s asked (by a young black woman) about his place in the Army. The sergeant, who is white, explains:
Well, I’m white, but my privates are black.
Using the
noun private: 1 a soldier of the lowest rank, in particular an enlisted person in the US Army or Marine Corps ranking below private first class.
The young woman then mischievously takes the sergeant as having used the euphemistic
noun private: 2 (privates) informal short for private parts [that is, genitals].
and her response to the sergeant — the punchline of the joke — assumes that understanding:
Then you must be a mighty sporty-lookin’ fella.
A white man commanding black men is hardly worthy of note, but a white guy with black genitals, well, that’s a freak show.
With this response, our understanding of what privates means in the story has abruptly shifted. Guffaw.
(I learned this sense-shifting pun joke from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky in the distant past (she died almost 40 years ago); she maintained that it was the only dirty joke she’d ever heard that she actually found funny.)
And now for something completely different. The formula pun joke, designed as an (often absurd-sounding) puzzle with with a surprising solution. A vehicle for both imperfect and perfect puns; based (like snowclones) on a formulaic expression of some sort; and always the punchline of the joke, the pay-off of a set-up story that assembles the parts of the pun. Seen most recently on this blog in my 8/30/23 posting “herd it / heard it”, in which a little set-up story about regularly taking a cow through the plants in a local vineyard assembles the parts of the pun pay-off
I herd it [the cow] through the grapevines [in the vineyard].
(a pun — almost (phonologically) perfect — on the song title “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”).
Puns are often presented in the comics as jokes, either directly, or by having one character tell another the pun joke — a device that allows longer and more complex jokes, especially formula jokes, to be developed in print (as well as orally). Which brings me to my 5/30/20 posting “Force Cor”, with this bravura performance by cartoonist Stephan Pastis:
(#2) Pig composes a pun on the first sentence of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (of 1863)
The model, from Lincoln:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation.
The pun, from Pastis, speaking through Pig:
Force, Cor, and seven ears ago our fathers bought fourth on this continent a gnu nation.
— the nominal four score ‘eighty’ vs. the one-word answer force + the address term Cor; these two two-word expressions differ in word division and in prosody
— years vs. ears
— bought vs. brought
— for some speakers (I am one) new [nju] vs. gnu [nu]
By far the most outrageous elaborate pun I’ve seen from Pastis (others can be found in the Page on Pearls Before Swine on this blog). Set up bit by bit, accreting the components of the monstrously complex result. In a different order from the final result, of course, so you can’t appreciate where it’s going,
And then Pastis’s usual meta move in the last panel, in which the characters recognize that they’re in a cartoon. In this case, Rat produces Abraham Lincoln (and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) to berate Pastis for his word play.
A resting place. A little bit about what I’m doing here, which is to investigate the world of puns and their uses by discerning particular cultural forms that I can analyze, with no pretense to developing a general theory of puns or some other grand idea. Just trying to make sense of little islands of organization here and there. Then that might lead to somewhat larger things, maybe for investigation by other people. That’s always been a congenial way of working for me, and it’s a sensible approach for someone of my age and rocky health.
Now, it’s been a long and vexing day, but this posting is a small achievement, so I will forage for dinner and embrace sleep.
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