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/.)
