Double entendres

There is a common class of joke in which a final passage of the joke (the punchline, essentially) allows more than one interpretation. If the joke is narrative, this multiply interpretable text is usually in the mouth of one of the characters. A typical example is (67).

(67) An English bishop received the following note from the vicar of a village in his diocese: ‘Milord, I regret to inform you of my wife’s death. Can you possibly send me a substitute for the weekend?’

(attributed by Raskin (1985) to Pocheptzov) This is not an FR joke, as there is no punchline which imposes a hitherto unobvious reading on a prior portion of the story. The humorous effect results from a story character uttering the phrase with one intended inter-pretation, while the audience perceives another.

1

1

1

11

11

11

Similar non-narrative versions are possible, such as (68).

(68) It so happens that if there is any institution which is not susceptible to any improvement whatsoever, it is the House of Peers.

(W. S. Gilbert cited by Kelly (1971: 6) ) (Oddly, Kelly seems to be offering this as an example of a pun.)

In (67), the punchline does not serve to reveal hidden ambiguity in the preceding text, but it could be argued that such jokes work better if the audience momentarily perceives the reading which is not INAPPROPRIATE, and only later notices the other interpretation. It is interesting to consider why the audience should seek a further meaning, as (in contrast to FR jokes) there is no ill-fitting punchline (no CONFLICT) to trigger a search for a less OBVIOUSmeaning. It may be that the joke-telling ritual, coupled with the fact that this is the end of the text, prompts the hearer to seek a hidden meaning (cf. Section 5.3, in which the algorithm checks whether the text has ended). Attardo (1994: Ch. 3) proposes that there is reinterpretation, although he does not view this as a separate class of joke.

His position (following the SSTH – see Chapter 6) is that all jokes have this reinterpretative process underlying them, even where there is no closing text to stimulate the reanalysis, and he analyses (29) in these terms (see Section 9.2).

Some jokes consist of protracted double entendres, by having a narra-tive which sets up a radical misunderstanding by a character who then utters a sequence of remarks open to more than one interpretation, with one interpretation usually being ^TABOO. There is a joke, somewhat on the long side, in which a character writes a letter giving details of the WC in the village, under the impression that ‘WC’ means ‘Wesleyan Chapel’, not realizing that the letter-reader (and the joke-audience) interpret ‘WC’

to mean ‘toilet’. This leads to a succession of interlinked double entendres about matters such as seating arrangements and regularity of attendance.

Notice that such a joke has some similarities to the class of joke outlined in Section 8.6.2, in that the joke-audience is invited to be amused at the plight of a character who has misinterpreted something. Unlike the joke in Section 8.6.2, this style of double entendre operates by having the char-acter manifest this misunderstanding by producing text in which the joke-audience can perceive two meanings.

Even though a double entendre may not have the existence of a double meaning signalled by a punchline, the set-up/punchline division can still be applied to this class of joke, if we take the punchline to be the final, multi-ply interpretable, segment. In (67), the final clause Can . . . weekend? consti-tutes the punchline. In (68), the whole text is ambiguous, but this could be viewed as having a null set-up (as in non-double-entendre ‘one-liners’, such 11

11

11

111

111

111

11

as (10) or (115) ). The long joke based on the ambiguity of WC has a set-up consisting of the initial story, and a long, multi-sentence punchline consist-ing of the ambiguous section of text.

There is a closely related form in which there are two interpretations, but where the potentially amusing reading is the more OBVIOUS. Such a form typically occurs in maladroit phrasings of mundane statements.

Examples found in newspaper reports or advertisements are often seized upon and reported, or collected into anthologies (e.g. Parsons (1953) ).

(69) Save time and cut fingers with a parsley mincer.

(This Week quoted by Parsons (1953: 40) ) (70) Imported Bedspreads by Glomar: Leaf design embroidered on fine

polyester voile. Machine washable in champagne.

(The Seattle Times quoted by The New Yorker, re-quoted by Latta (1999) ) Structurally, these are almost identical to a more conventional double entendre, in that there is another meaning, presumably intended by the writer. In (70), for example, the alternative reading has in champagne describ-ing the colour of the items. In contrast to a typical double entendre, the prosaic interpretation, for this example, is less ^OBVIOUSthan the ^ABSURD one. Such a difference is a very fine nuance, and might (for some examples) vary from audience to audience (as noted earlier, both the jokehood and the funniness of a text is dependent on the knowledge and attention of the audience). It may be that examples where the INAPPROPRIATE

interpretation is more OBVIOUShave their full humorous effect only when the audience can also see the other interpretation: if the text seems simply to state baldly an absurd idea, that is not as funny, and may not even be seen as humorous. What can be concluded is that both forms can operate humorously: the INAPPROPRIATE element can be located in either the more OBVIOUSor the less OBVIOUSinterpretation. (There is also the question of whether an accidentally humorous text counts as a joke, even when it is re-told for humorous purposes, but we will not digress into that here.)

It is straightforward to describe the structure of a double entendre in our formal framework (Appendix A.2.1): there is, either for the whole text or for its ending, an OBVIOUS interpretation and a less OBVIOUS

interpretation. To make this more than simply an ambiguous text, the interpretations must have some further properties, such as INAPPROPRI

-ATENESS, as discussed in Section 8.6.4 below.

1

1

1

11

11

11