Of the form
V1 ya, wouldn’t wanna / shouldn’t hafta V2 ya (where V1 and V2 rhyme)
In a One Big Happy strip from the backlog on my desktop:
(#1) Ruthie and the tough neighborhood kid James trade taunts, until Ruthie’s mother drags her away from the encounter
This is a competitive performance of verbal skills, designed to insult without wounding. James’s first move is a pre-existing model, and then they go on from there.
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.
(#1) From “Treehouse of Horror III”, The Simpsons S4 E5 (first aired 10/29/92)
(I posted a version of this under the heading “The opossum” on July 30th, but by a WordPress glitch the link to that posting was later re-directed to the next posting in line, “Ralph at the Port Authority” (here), so that my earlier posting disappeared completely. I lamented this loss on Facebook, and eventually archivist and quote investigator Garson O’Toole magicked up a Google Cache version of the text for me. Thanks to Garson, here’s a reconstituted version.)
(Totally baffled addendum. WordPress has published this revised posting with the date 7/30, though it was actually posted on 8/1.)
A very sweet One Big Happy from 6/30: Ruthie and her grandfather:
(#1)
A granddad joke — well, actually, two of them in sequence, the first sledgehammer simple (a classic dad joke), the second delightfully subtle (a meta-joke in which the audience response becomes a crucial part of the joke).
Following on my 7/7 posting “GN/BN”, about the Good News Bad News joke routine, which the hounds of ADS-L traced back to the early 19th century (at least). Other commenters offered formuations of the idea that there’s a good side and a bad side to everything, the bad comes withthe good, and lots of other things that, however interesting, are not instances of the joke formula (in any of its variants). But 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 we’re off!
From Michael Thomas on Facebook yesterday, a link to a CNN travel story, “Pair of penguins waddles into New Zealand sushi spot” by Isabela Espadas Barros Leal on 7/19/19. Mike, knowing of my (separate) interests in sushi and in penguins, asked, “Does your local sushi joint have any of these?”
To which I replied, “Sadly, no. But pair of penguins waddles into New Zealand sushi spot sounds like the beginning of an exotic Walk Into Bar joke.”
Let’s take this one bit at a time, starting with the news story.
A reference to the Good News Bad News joke routine that was illustrated in my 6/27/19 posting “The Desert Island Reaper” — seen below in its BN/GN variant, which is often dark or nasty:
From Cyanide and Happiness, a strip that specializes in dark BN/GN jokes
Now: a survey of the BN/GN discussion on this blog, leading to a guest posting by Larry Horn on the topic (which I have edited and amended.
Today’s Rhymes With Orange, combining two familiar cartoon memes:
(#1) A compound, Desert Island + Grim Reaper
Also incorporating a joke formula, the Good News Bad News routine. The good news is verbalized in the cartoon, the bad news is implicit in the figure of the Grim Reaper.
As an extra, the boat that the Grim Reaper is steering towards the little island looks a lot like a gondola, so evoking Death in Venice and Charon the boatman of death, and possibly more indirectly, a Viking funeral boat with an animal-head prow.
