Page 31 - The Language of Humour

18 ‘I SAY, I SAY, I SAY’
verb+a preposition and a phrasal verb. I ran up a hill./I ran up a bill.
This becomes a source of ambiguity in jokes.

When is a car not a car? When it turns into a garage. (When it
turns into a garage.)

The meaning of phrasal verbs cannot be worked out from the meaning of
their parts, i.e. the verb+preposition. To ‘turn up’ does not mean the
opposite of to ‘turn down’. Jokes like the following make this lack of
logic apparent. (A phrasal verb may contain more than one preposition.)

The trouble with Ian (Fleming) is that he gets off with women
because he can’t get on with them. (Rosamond Lehmann)

Idioms are groups of words that should be regarded as a single unit, as
their meaning cannot be worked out from the constituent parts: ‘go
bananas’. There is ambiguity, if the group of words can be interpreted
both as an idiom and as individual words:

(miserable) (resulted)
When down in the mouth, remember Jonah. He came out all right.
(in mouth of whale) (out of mouth of whale)
(Thomas Edison)

Words can be grouped as belonging to a field of meaning (‘firm,
obstinate, stubborn’), but they have different connotations: ‘I am firm,
you are obstinate, s/he is a pig-headed fool.’ The words ‘skip, gambol,
scamper, toddle’ all describe a type of lighthearted, perhaps shaky
movement, but their collocations are different: ‘gambol’ is a verb
usually collocated with lambs. People can use the phrase ‘I must be
toddling off’ but not ‘I must be scampering off’. In the following
witticism ‘snow’ is in a similar lexical field to ‘slush’, but the former has
connotations of purity and the latter has connotations of unpleasantness
and dirt:

I’m as pure as the driven slush. (Tallulah Bankhead)