"Pray my Dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?"

[scarfman]

In Mr. Daly's A.P. English, senior year of high school, we were to pick a literary work from a provided list and do a report on it in front of the class. I don't recall whether it was compulsory or optional that we work in teams but I did my report with Noel Anderson. The list consisted exclusively or nearly so of works I knew nothing of, so for the vague Arthurian connection I chose Lawrence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and read that. Well, I say I read it... The edition I found had an introduction by Christopher Morley, who contended that no one but the proofreader has ever read all of Tristram Shandy, and I did not prove him wrong.

When Noel and I did our presentation I introduced it: "Most humor consists of a chain of logic with one bad link. People may think the form of humor consisting of all bad links but one originates with Woody Allen or the Marx Brothers, but it goes back at least as far as 1767. In order to incorporate this facet of Tristram Shandy into our presentation on it, my partner and I have commited our presentation outline to index cards and have painstakingly put them in order in a stack ..."

Meanwhile behind me Noel was shuffling the index cards.

Comments

[tinuvielberen.livejournal.com]

Haha! I didn't read Tristram Shandy either, despite multiple attempts. It's still in my bookcase, inexplicably.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Once, for a freshman level English course on "Comedy, Wit, and Humor" (That was a fun three hours, every week!), I read an Encyclopedia Britanica article on humor, trying to explain what it was... That very concept is one I find slight surreal.

Anyway, that article (probably written in the 1970s or earlier), had a slightly different take on idea of a bad link. The author claimed that the human mind can switch back and forth between logical threads of thought, but cannot follow two parallel threads at the same time (i.e., we can search by subject, or alphabetically by author's last name, but not simultaneously). A joke, according to this article, is a very short story about a very tense situation, and, just when the story reaches its climax, the punchline comes along and knocks our brains from one logical thread to the other. The sudden incongruity releases all the tension in the "plot," and all that pent up energy is released as laughter.

So, according to this theory, rather than being a "bad link" in the logic, the punchline is a very artful and deliberate switch.

...Sorry. I'm in my "English Major B.S Mode." I'll stop, now.