If this blog were the New Yorker, this posting would be a Talk of the Town piece (after the first one, which is an editorial), a sketch of some intriguing person. Today’s eccentric character on this blog (other than me) is Mark Saltveit. In brief, from Wikipedia, much extended:
Mark Saltveit (born 1961 [Harvard ’83]) is a Vermont-based [but Oregon native] stand-up comedian, palindromist and writer, known for being the first World Palindrome Champion [AZ: also chronicler of the San Francisco 49ers (that’s American football, for my readers around the world) and scholar of Daoism (aka Taoism); and, he now — 4/28 — tells me he’s also interested in ancient coins].
MS (photo from him)
In more detail, from his WiX site:
Staff writer, NinersNation.com (leading San Francisco 49ers website)
Professional standup comedian, since 1999
Editor, The Palindromist Magazine
The first ever World Palindrome Champion (2012-2017)
Editor, Taoish.org (a website of contemporary, secular Daoism)
But why, you wonder, am I writing about him today? Because he wrote me yesterday about the TG/TB (“That’s Good” / “That’s Bad”) joke routine that I first talked about here in a 7/22/19 posting “Oh that’s good” — citing an ancient Chinese forebear of the routine. So: TG/TB back in the mists of time, though it came up on this blog through the American tv show Hee Haw.
What came before. The highlights, in four postings from 2019.
— in my 7/22/19 posting “Oh that’s good”:
Following on my 7/7 posting “GN/BN”, about the Good News Bad News joke routine, which the hounds of ADS-L [the American Dialect Society mailing list] traced back to the early 19th century (at least) … then on 7/16, Bill Mullins posted about an entirely different joke formula hinging on the opposition of good and bad.
Bill wrote:
Are you familiar with Archie Campbell’s “That’s Good/That’s Bad” routines? He used to do them on Hee Haw.
And then we were off!
— in my 8/25/19 posting “Exception-triggered alternation”:
Exhibit A: the joke routine That’s Good / That’s Bad from an Archie Campbell comedy sketch — discussed in my 7/22/19 posting “Oh that’s good”.
Exhibit B: the principles that predict when a N + N compound in English has primary accent on the first (modifier) N (front stress, or forestress) and when that accent falls on the second (head) N (back stress, or afterstress) — discussed in my old paper “Forestress and afterstress”, (OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, 1986, viewable on-line here).
From a sufficiently abstract point of view, these two phenomena can be seen to be manifestations of a single scheme, which I’ll refer to as exception-triggered alternation.
— in my 8/26/19 posting “Revisiting 31: That’s Good / That’s Bad”:
My 7/22 posting “Oh that’s good” looked at Archie Campbell’s That’s Good / That’s Bad joke routine from the tv show Hee Haw. Now Tim Evanson points out a somewhat later appearance of the routine, in an episode of The Simpsons.
— in my 8/27/19 posting “Revisiting 32: “Exception-triggered alternation”:
“More specific overrides more general” is a familiar principle, known by many names; what [my 8/25/19 posting] emphasizes is that this overriding can cascade, through a number of iterations.
… Now, as an addition to [the two examples in that posting] Larry Horn (Laurence Horn of Yale Univ.) offers another, from formal semantics: Sobel sequences. Here I’ll turn the floor over to Larry, for a guest posting on them.
MS on “The Zen Master and the Little Boy”. Our e-mail exchange yesterday:
— MS: The Hee Haw story of “That’s Good/That’s Bad” has a more modern incarnation in the film Charlie Wilson’s War, where it’s called “The Zen Master and the Little Boy” (film clip here; strong language warning) [AZ: in a nutshell: boy gets a horse — GOOD; later, boy falls off, breaks his leg — BAD; still later, war breaks out, boy can’t go off to fight because of his leg — GOOD]
— AZ: Here there’s a question about when the joke form has been culturally transmitted, versus being invented afresh, rediscovered. Both things happen, and the issue arises for pretty much all cultural practices, not just the linguistic ones.
— MS: In fact, it’s much older than Zen itself. The story originated in chapter 18.7 of the Huainanzi (Wikipedia article here), c. 2nd c. BCE. It’s a text that draws a lot on early Daoism (aka Zhuang-Lao thought), as opposed to the more religious syncretic religion formed on the arrival of Buddhist missionaries c. 150 CE that morphed into Chan Buddhism and moved into Japan as Zen Buddhism.
— AZ: That question is vividly illustrated here. There is an ancient attested occurrence of a story that’s structurally parallel to TG/TB. That is apparently the first recorded attested occurrence. But it isn’t the origin of the TG/TB joke form, since there’s no reason to think there’s a chain of cultural transmission from early Taoism through to Hee Haw.
Instead, this is an idea that is likely to be invented again and again, independently, in a number of variants. And invented in the spoken language, and then (very occasionally) written down. Note: the Hee Haw variant was disseminated orally, not in writing; we have a record of it only because of video recordings.
The written record is fragmentary, composed of a small number of things that happen to get written down. And it’s more fragmentary the further back you go.
— MS: The story is generally known as “The Old Man Lost His Horse” (Wikipedia article here) [AZ: in a nutshell: man’s horse runs off into barbarian territory — BAD; horse comes back with excellent barbarian horses, man enjoys riding them — GOOD; man falls off one of these horses, breaks his leg — BAD; barbarians invade, wipe out defensive forces, man survives because his leg prevents him from going into battle — GOOD]. I’ll be telling it as part of a one-person show on Daoism I’ll be presenting at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. (Ego Tourism).
— AZ: Oh, long-ago recollections of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival!
The horse stories have nothing to do with Archie Campbell’s routine, beyond the whipsawing back and forth between “That’s bad” and “That’s good” (which seems endless in the Campbell routine); the similarity is at an abstract level. But the Charlie Wilson’s War story is clearly a variant of the ancient “The Old Man Lost His Horse”, with differences in details.
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