“I am fiercely defending middle earth from a corner table. All I am actually conquering is a blueberry muffin.”
“My favourite writer is the guy on the corner table. He wrote a whole blog post about the wifi password.”
Thank you, Google AI. We’ll let you know.
During lockdown, there was a New Yorker cartoon depicting a man in his bedroom working on a laptop: he had lined up various stuffed toys and teddy bears, and pinned up a handwritten notice saying “Coffee Shop”. The caption read “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am a writer. Why do you ask?” That made me smile: I felt, in a quite harmless way, “seen” by the cartoonist. The AI gags have the outward form of jokes, but lack any discernible humorous quality.
The simplest kind of joke is the pun. An algorithm could very easily spot that “big of me” sounds a bit like “bigamy” in certain dialects. But that is not very funny in itself.
There are a number of joke-formats which are pretty much context-free pun-delivery systems. I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue has an "Uxbridge English Dictionary" round, in which contestants propose false definitions of words.
Condescending : A felon in an elevator
Senile: What a tourist does while they are in Egypt.
It would be possible to create a narrative wrapper in which some confusion or misunderstanding gave rise to those wordplays: but the “Dictionary” conceit means we don’t need to bother.
The same is true of children’s Knock-Knock jokes: they are just a formula for pointing out that some first names sound like the beginnings of meaningful phrases. “Isabella...legal Requirement on a Bicycle”. “Amos...kito”.)
Interestingly, the only way to get children to actually laugh at these kinds of jokes is to intentionally subvert the formula.
Knock-Knock
Who’s there?
Europe.
Europe who?
No, you’re a poo!
See also "A little old lady", "Doctor" or simply "Doo-up".
In the traditional format, the person who started the joke delivers the punchline by adding some words to the knocker’s name. In the subverted versions, the respondent is tricked into supplying the punchline by adding the “oo” sound. There is something rather post-modern about subverting a form before you appreciate what is being subverted.
So, in Animal Crackers, Groucho Marx is making conversation with Margaret Dumont and another society matron:
“Let’s all get married.”
“You can’t marry both of us. That’s bigamy!”
“It’s big of me too. It’s big of all of us. Let’s all be big for a change.”
It’s a fairly feeble pun, so why is it funny? Because it is being told by a man with a funny walk, a false moustache, an over-sized cigar and a slightly exaggerated New York Jewish accent? Because we have agreed in advance to find it funny—because Groucho is universally recognised as the wittiest repartee-artist America ever produced? Might it not even be that it is funny because it is not funny; the joke is really that a comic genius is stooping to such slender material? Later in the movie, after an impenetrable remark about a Prince Albert velvet coat, he breaks the fourth wall and announces “Well, all the jokes can’t be good!”
But what do we even mean by “Groucho Marx”? Do we mean what we can see on the screen: the accent, the eyebrows, the cigar—or do we mean “the knowledge of Groucho that we bring with us to the movie?” Is the line funny because we know that Groucho was an immigrant, grew up in impoverished tenements, was forced to drop out of school to become an errand boy, gradually worked his way up through Vaudeville….? And, indeed, because of what we know of the Great Depression, the Jewish diaspora, 1930s Germany, the Upper East Side….?
Rowan Atkinson said that Sir Charles Chaplin, despite his obvious comic genius, is just not funny any more, because the world in which the jokes were made no longer exists. But then, why do we laugh, some of us, at Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, whose historical context is arguably more specific and more essential?
Two arguments diverge: and I am sorry I cannot accept both.
Down one path is pure formalism. The joke is funny because it is funny and it would still be funny if we had generated it by pulling letters at random out of a bag of Scrabble tiles.
Down the other is something much more context-related: the joke is funny because a New York German Jew is telling it to some posh ladies in the 1930s. And it is funny because it is a very old film which I remember watching with Daddy, in the “midnight movie” slot, on a school night; and he thought it was funny because he remembered laughing at it at the Truro Plaza before the War.
But if we take the road less argued, we have to confront an even bigger question. What if it turned out that Groucho was not a second generation New York German Jew after all, but an English aristocrat who got into Vaudeville in his spare time, to finance his love of fox hunting? We contextualists would have to say that the joke is suddenly worthless: where the formalists would be free to say that Groucho-on-the-screen is a construct. It doesn’t matter if it is an actual man named Julius Marx, an entirely different man impersonating him, or, for the sake of the argument, a computer generated animation or an animatronic simulacrum.
If it’s funny, it’s funny.
To which I can only see two responses.
Either we have to say that its a silly question because a robot, an animator, or an impersonator could not in any world have created Groucho Marx: Groucho is the product of his unique biographical circumstances.
Or else we have to become very extreme subjectivists and say that now we know that Groucho is not real, we just feel, in our hearts and our guts and our humour glands, that we can no longer laugh at him.
Which is a very good answer. But I can think of a very good refutation of it: “You may no longer laugh at him, but I do.”
To which the only possible reply is “Well, you shouldn’t.”
There is really no pressing need to let me know that you don’t think that it is a very good joke and you never found the Marx Brothers especially funny. You can by all means substitute Bernard Manning or Bernie Clifton or Wee Jimmy Krankie and the argument will be exactly the same.
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