Benita Bendon Campbell wrote me yesterday to report a Monty Python (setup / payoff) formula pun joke that had come up on her Facebook feed, thus providing me with a moment of comic relief from my posting about — here we cheer — being saved from death by the skill and caring of others and then — here we weep — finding that my previous life was entirely gone, to be replaced by one of isolation, disability, and pain, which I had to negotiate by reinventing myself as best I could. Meanwhile, I embrace joy, playful delight, and (I know of no better term) moral purpose, to steer me through the swamp of despair. I have recently celebrated moral purpose (in my 7/20 posting “Days of memory”, with a section on the Good Trouble National Day of Action); today, it’s playful delight.
The joke. As it came to Bonnie:
I was staying at a small family owned hotel in Madrid when I suddenly became ill, nauseous with a fever. My Spanish language skills are limited, so I called the front desk. The concierge told me that the inn had an English speaking doctor on call, and they would send him up to my room. Twenty minutes later the doctor had treated me and my fever and nausea were subsiding. I mentioned to the doctor how lucky it was that the inn had an English speaking doctor on call. Without missing a beat, the doctor smiled and said:
No one expects the Spanish inn physician
Here you groan. You really are expected to groan; that’s the canonical response to a setup / payoff formula pun — the formula in this case being the tagline from a Monty Python routine (slightly misquoted in the version Bonnie came across):
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition
(The joke is an imperfect pun, the pun having /f/ where the model has /kw/.)
The genre. From my 7/6/22 posting “Toad away, groaning”:
Outrageous elaborate set-up puns, based on formulaic expressions, are a genre in themselves, often treated as a kind of shaggy dog story (because of their complexity), though classic shaggy dog stories are anticlimactic, while these formula puns culminate in a complex pay-off [so I sometimes call them set-up / pay-off puns]. I learned the elaborately transpositional boyfoot bear with teak of Chan in high school, and then the elaborately punning crossing staid lions for immortal porpoises not long after — both, faute de mieux, under the shaggy dog label.
In any case, some cartoonists are especially drawn to the formula-pun genre. Stephan Pastis, in particular.
Monty Python as a formula mine. The works of the comedy troupe (Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin) provide a rich lode of formulaic expressions to play with. A small sampling of these:
and now for something completely different
blinkered, philistine pig ignorance
bring me a shrubbery
my hovercraft is full of eels
spam, spam, wonderful spam
pining for the fjords
if you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies!
THIS IS AN EX-PARROT
Marcel Proust had an haddock
Biggus Dickus
nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition
the Lupine Express
time for the penguin on top of your television set to explode
I’m a lumberjack and I’m ok
I hadn’t fully divined your attitude towards the tenants
I’ll have a slice without so much rat in it
I could be arguing in my spare time
I’m sorry, but this is abuse
word association football
crunchy frog
nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more, say no more.
Arthur ‘Two Sheds’ Jackson
Doug and Dinsdale Piranha
I had transgressed the unwritten law
a giant hedgehog (whom he referred to as ‘Spiny Norman’)
all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and… satire
Imagine a story of vacuuming up rubbish composed largely of gears. You could then be reporting that
my Hoover cruft is full of wheels
Yes, you have to groan.
July 24, 2025 at 5:57 am |
Is there something wrong with me in that, rather than groaning, I laughed out loud at the doctor’s quip?
July 24, 2025 at 6:23 am |
No, nothing wrong; you were appreciating its cleverness. Another response.