Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Country names, take me home
To the place at the table where I belong

(with apologies to John Denver and his collaborators)

This posting is, first of all, about bare-bones pun jokes, typically a one-line set-up followed by the pun in a pay-off line.

In this case, on a theme (food and eating), with the puns all from a domain (of country names); the classic pun name on this theme from this domain is Hungary (punning on hungry). I will illustrate with three Hungary-based bare-bones jokes.

Then, name-domain + theme puns (in this case, country + food puns) can be arranged in a cascade, which can be performed by a single joke-teller or framed as repartee between two performers. The classic country + food cascade is triggered by Hungary (Greece, Turkey, and Chile are other possible triggers); I’ll call it the Hungary For Food Riff, HFR for short. HFR comes in many variants; here I give two repartee versions: one relayed to me by Probal Dasgupta on Facebook on 12/9, the other I found in net collections of puns on Hungary later that day.

Three bare-bones country + food pun jokes. All based on Hungary.

(#1) Here as single-performer jokes, but also performable as a two-person routine: the teller performs the first, set-up, line; a straight man (not necessarily male, or adult) queries the teller, asking “Why?” or “So what did you do?” or another appropriate question; and the teller then delivers the punch line, the pay-off

Two cascades. So much for the one-offs, on to the cascades. First the HFR that Probal Dasgupta found, then my find. There are more.

(#2)

Cascades are (as here) inclined to stick to their name-domain but wander from their content theme onto more general topics (in this case, the meta-theme of producing puns).

(#3)

Again with the wandering.

Other cascades. Just one example. From my 10/20/14 posting “Abbott and Costello’s band”, a Pearls Before Swine comic strip doing a version of a famous comedy routine that’s a cascade of puns that are (very unlikely) names for baseball players (Who, What, I Don’t Know: the name domain), the model expressions for these puns being English answer-response vocabulary (who, what, I don’t know: the content theme):

(#4)

Rat and Goat reproduce a famous Abbott and Costello routine, “Who’s on First”, which has baseball players named Who (on first), What (on second), and I Don’t Know (on third). Another version in my posting “Chinese Abbott and Costello” of 3/18/11, with a play on the Chinese names Hu and Xi (the government figures Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping), and then a real-life baseball player named Hu (the Taiwanese infielder Hu Chin-Lung, playing in Major League Baseball as Chin-Lung Hu) appears in the posting “Hu on base” of 3/30/14, with a video of the A&C routine. Now [in the Pearls strip]: bands (The Who, with drummer Keith Moon and guitarist Pete Townshend) and musicians (Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones; Bob Weir, guitarist for The Grateful Dead; Steve Howe, guitarist for the band Yes; and [AZ: then, sticking to the rock-music name domain, but wandering from the answer-response content theme] Steve Winwood, guitarist for the band Traffic). An elaborate riff on the A&C original.

This entry was posted on December 11, 2023 at 9:14 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Jokes, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Puns, Routines and rituals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.