I just found this article on Wikipedia about nonsense jokes, those kinds of jokes that don't have real punchline, just something ridiculous that doesn't have anything to do with the joke, like "None! Elephants don't eat ice cream!" or in this case "No soap. Radio!" We used to tell each other these jokes when I was little and just about fall down laughing, even if we all knew where the joke was going. The first one I heard was this:
“So you’re driving along and you’re canoe springs a leak, how many pancakes will fit into a dog house?”
“None! Elephants don’t eat ice cream!”
Then there were other ones, more along the lines of the “no soap, radio” ones, like this:
“So there was a big penguin and a little penguin and they decided to have a race to an iceberg. They dive off the cliff and start swimming and first the big penguin is ahead, then the little penguin and then the big penguin really picked up speed, but just a the last minute the little penguin got ahead, jumped up on the iceberg and shouted ‘Radio!’”
These remind me vaguely of this rhyme we used to chant when I was little in Scotland, although there’s probably an American version of it too:
“Early in the morning in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight,
Back to back they faced each other,
With their swords they shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
Got up and killed those two dead boys.”
That’s just theatre of the absurd. This is why I love Ionesco (although don’t watch the version of Rhinoceros with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel. I know it sounds like a good idea, but it’s really not.), he manages to pull off this kind of nonsense humor in a way that points out the inherent ridiculousness of life. It all comes around to meta-jokes and destroying the fourth wall and self-reference. It’s kind of a flip-flopping of what you thought was real and what you thought was a joke that plays on the whole nature of joking.
Along other lines, I tried looking these jokes up on Google and I found several forums where the people carry on about these jokes for awhile then conclude "Well, we've finally lost it, not that we were ever sane to begin with." There seems to be some kind of trend, maybe it's been around for a long time, to treat insanity like some kind of in-group (covert) prestige. This is similar to the in-group prestige of "geekiness" or, to get even more general, "randomness." But why? What’s so cool about being crazy and chaotic? I think what bothers me about these people is that they are trying to imitate the humor that comes from turning reality on it’s head without knowing why they’re doing it. It’s kind of the “false understanding” that the “No Soap Radio” article talks about. They don’t get the joke, but they’re still laughing. Or maybe it's a joke that you don't have to understand to get it. Maybe it's more instinctively rooted in whatever part of ourselves produces humor in the first place.
Hey, Linnea, I was listening to Restaurant at the End of the Universe whilst my family was driving along the Pacific coastline and came across a brief paragraph that nevertheless reminded me of you:
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85\% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian "chinanto/mnigs" which is ordinary water server at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan "tzjin-anthony-ks" which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.
Posted by: funke at June 9, 2007 11:03 PMIs that last paragraph from the book too? or is that you, either way it reflects an existing world, only it's the older linguists who buy into this kind of thing (i.e. the dead ones: Sapir, Whorf, etc.). The only case I know of like this concerns the words for "mother" which usually begin and/or end with a voiced bilabial consonant (m or b). The way this is explained is that this is one of the first sounds a child makes and the mother is usually the one it is addressed toward.
Posted by: linnea at June 10, 2007 8:14 PMI wish I could claim credit for the second paragraph, but all I did was place the html code in the wrong spot.
I've heard the "mother" theory before because Leonard Bernstein gave a few lectures on structuralism in music (i.e. why the descending third is such a common gesture in music and can be found in so many "real life" examples, such as a child's chant on the playground...) I think musicologists have a geek complex from being locked indoors practicing their instruments ad naseum and so they look wistfully at their hipster linguist friends for guidance in how to be academically sexy.
Posted by: funke at June 11, 2007 12:29 AM