Page 36 - The Language of Humour

‘I SAY, I SAY, I SAY’ 23

There is a further ambiguity between the active verb ‘found’ and the
passive verb ‘[were] found’.

Syntax and deixis

The next two jokes rely on the fact that ‘serve’ is a di-transitive verb, i.e.
you serve something to someone. As you can omit either the direct or
indirect object, this can cause ambiguity.
‘We don’t serve coloured people! (meant as indirect object)
‘That’s fine by me. I just want some roast chicken’
(understood as direct object)
‘Do you serve frogs’ legs?’ (meant as direct object)
‘We serve anyone who’s able to (understood as indirect object)
pay.’

Another cause of ambiguity in the English language is the fact that the
conjunction ‘that’ can be omitted. This rarely leads to ambiguity, but it
can be exploited for such in humour, as in ‘We all know [that] disco
rules’. A poster advertisement for insurance companies uses a picture of
the musician Jools Holland, and creates an attention-catching
ambiguity:

‘Do you know two insurance companies have merged?’
‘No, but you hum it and 111 play it’

This is similar to the older joke: ‘Can you sing very softly, faraway’,
where the listener may understand part of the sentence structure as the
title of a song and therefore the object, rather than as adverbs or the
adjunct.
In all these examples, listed as syntax, the important thing is to be
aware that there is no single word that has two meanings, but that it is
the structure that can be interpreted in two different ways. There is one