Page 49 - The Language of Humour

36 THE SHOCK OF THE NEW
scene. Examples of incongruous mixes were: Billy Bunter in the last
scene of Hamlet; and the heroin addict, Sick Boy, from the film
Trainspotting being introduced to Elizabeth Bennet by Darcy in Pride
and Prejudice. Creating impossible situations can be done in stand-up
comedy, where a single person speaking can create flights of fantasy in
the mind. One of Eddie Izzard’s triumphs was a piece about a bird on a
jumbo jet, gradually getting used to the strange sensation of being a
flying creature flying, then playing with all the gadgets, while his jealous
mate was peering in through the porthole.
Some contemporary humour pushes the boundaries of language
beyond a strange but conceivable idea, as in the next example from Vic
Reeves and Bob Mortimer introducing a Blue Peter type of activity:

And a boy from Eton will be ripping the guts out of a monkey and
showing us how to make a saxophone.

to the line which caps it, which is hard to find sense in at all:

Yes, Bob, and I’m going to be making a cello out of Andre
Agassi.

Children also appreciate this form of surreal humour. In the series of
‘elephant jokes’, there is sense in the punchline only if you assume that
elephants both paint their toenails and hide in jam:

When do elephants paint their toenails red? When they want to
hide upside-down in strawberry jam.

It has been suggested (Wales 1989) that children can cope with
these surreal images because they are familiar with the world of fairy
tales and cartoons, where such personification is common. Absurd and
surreal elements have a much wider appeal than that, certainly since the
Goon Show, but it is not a twentieth-century phenomenon.
So far this unit has examined ways in which humour makes unusual
semantic connections in apparent tautology or contradictions. As well as
using language creatively, humour can also refer to the nature of
language, especially any pre-packaged phrases—idioms or clichés:
They’re head over heels in love.’ As someone commented—all of us do
almost everything head over heels. If we are trying to create an image
of people doing cartwheels etc, why don’t we say they’re ‘heels over
head’ in love? This sort of self-reference to language itself draws