The Senses of Humor by Daniel Wickberg

Author:Daniel Wickberg [Wickberg, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Nonfiction, History, Americas, United States
ISBN: 9780801454370
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2015-06-18T04:00:00+00:00

One can almost hear the rimshot marking the punch line, a convention also derived from vaudeville.

By turning the joke into a dialogue form, Masson and his generation of literary editors removed literary style and manner, narrative voice, and other potentially idiosyncratic elements from their product. The joke was viewed as an objective representation of a moment of dialogue, accessible to all without the intervention of a mediating narrator. The difference between Twain’s construction of humor and Masson’s is thus not merely the difference between an oral and a written form, between how to tell a story and how to write a joke; rather, there is a difference between two models of orality, one narrative and the other theatrical, and their representation in writing. Twain’s most famous stories, like “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “Jim Baker’s Bluejay,” are, after all, written representations of the oral mode defined in “How to Tell a Story”; they are utterly dependent upon the manner in which they are narrated. What the joke editors of Masson’s generation sought was a form independent of the manner of telling, and they found their model in theatrical dialogue abstracted from its performance. To rely on the idiosyncratic narrative was to personalize the joke, to make it much more difficult to mass-produce, and to create problems in marketing and distributing a nonuniform product. The uniformity of jokes in which there was no narrative intervention, and only the simplest representation of a single incongruous idea, best served the joke market of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The dialogue form was ideal because it removed the irregularities associated with individual authorship, while providing a condensed narrative through immediately recognizable stock characters and situations.

One of the greatest benefits of the dialogue joke to the joke writers and editors of that era was that it made jokes all that much easier to produce. As Masson put it, “There are only two ways of writing it. The first way is to get an idea that is worth joking about and then to have two characters make the joke. The second way is to have some character say something, and then get another character to reply in such a way that the joke is made.” In other words, one could approach the joke via the punch line or the straight line, and those were virtually the only ways to approach it. The simplicity of the form allowed for infinite variation within an extremely limited framework. “As long as you have the architecture of a joke firmly fixed in your mind,” advised Masson, “newer conditions are always arising to which the old form can be adjusted.”60 This idea of the joke form as a kind of template on which new jokes could be struck would receive more sustained treatment in the hands of the radio gag-writers of the 1930s, who came to depend upon it for their livelihoods. By insisting on the structure of the joke in vaudeville dialogue form, joke writers

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