The best way to kill a joke is by explaining how it works. Another way is by exploring and investigating its origins. In this treatise I intend to murder several of the English language’s most stalwart rib-ticklers.
“My wife has gone to the West Indies.”
“Jamaica?”
“No, she went of her own accord.”
This joke has its roots in the Victorian Age. As is well known, there was a fad at the time for carting habitual recidivists off to the Antipodes. However, what is less well known is that female criminals, such as those who had committed the heinous crimes of showing an ankle, failure to use a parasol in public, or attempting geometry in polite society, had a different destination. Such forthright and brazen women were seen as a threat to Victorian sensibilities. The Johnson Act – a law proposed by Sir Belvedere Johnson – meant that any act that was seen to subvert the natural order of society would result in the perpetrator being deported to the Caribbean. The phrase ‘my wife has gone to the West Indies’ became slang for a woman acting shrewish. The joke, originally performed by Dan Leno in a production of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, gained its humour from the absurd proposal that such a rebellious woman would ever volunteer to be deported.
“Why did the chicken cross the road?”
“To get to the other side.”
During the lean years at the height of Puritanism, when theatre was banned and the noble sport of cockfighting too, several entrepreneurial Londoners had the clever idea of combining the two ‘art forms’ to navigate around the legal restrictions. Thus ‘poultry theatre’ was born. This ‘joke’ is taken from a poultry version of the Orpheus myth. The ‘road’ here is a metaphor for the River Styx. Most eyewitness accounts at the time are fairly unanimous in describing ‘poultry theatre’ as being ‘bloody awful’. A young John Dryden wrote about his experiences seeing such performances: “The trouble beeth that these foul creatures had been bredeth for to fight, to gouge the eyes out of opponents and dismember unto death. I saweth not one performance that did not end in a gore-festooned bloodbath. It completely failed to capture the romantic and comic nuances of ‘A Comedy of Errors’. However, the furious feathered fiends did put on the best ‘Titus Andronicus’ I am yet to see.” (Dryden ‘A Commentarie on Avian Culture’ 1656).
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Little old lady.”
“Little old lady who?”
“I didn’t know you could yodel.”
This joke first appears in ‘Joe Miller’s Jests or, the Wits Vade-Mecum’ collected by John Mottley (1739). This structure for jokes started with Joe Miller becoming bored whilst playing the Porter in ‘Macbeth’ on a six month run. To alleviate the tedium, Miller kept improvising different lines each evening for the actor playing Macduff to react to. Acting against him proved too much of a strain for several actors with Henry Morris punching him in the face for the ‘interrupting cow’ version of the joke, before storming offstage and screaming ‘moo!’ at the director, William Pinkethman, until his ears bled.
“Doctor, Doctor, I feel like a pair of curtains.”
“Well pull yourself together then.”
Like many jokes, the ‘doctor, doctor’ format has its origins in the works of Shakespeare. The only remnant that we have left of Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Won’ is one such ‘doctor, doctor’ joke told by the character Costard:
“Physician, quoth I, Physician, for I warrant the bookish knave was a learned man, well-knowledged in the function of spleen and blood-gorged kidnae. And then did bade him such, ‘my ague is such that my mind perceiveth my own form to be unto like the hanged curtain, forever entwined with rail by circled hoops that in Summer shutteth out Helios’ golden orb, and by Winter’s ravages protecteth the inhabitants from horned frost and the iced fangs of Master Jack. What sayeth thou?”
“Then pull yourself together then.”
“When is a door not a door?”
“When it is ajar.”
This is, of course, the opening of a Socratic dialogue found in Plato’s ‘The Comedian’, where the dialectic structure takes place between ‘Socrates’ and ‘Aristophanes’. I have reproduced part of the extended dialogue below:
“Socrates: When is a door not a door?
Aristophanes: When it is ajar.
Socrates: How so? I speak neither as a comedian nor as a joiner.
Aristophanes: Then I can answer as one or both or neither. As a comedian, the door is staging to facilitate the entrance of the unwanted guest, to bar the disgruntled mob, it is a metaphor for the peace-motivated celibate Lysistrata to deny entry, it is Cleon’s wide-flapping mouth spouting noxious fumes and Tartarean gasses that needs nailing shut with wise Athenian olive wood. As a joiner, it is a craft, a piece of art, the pinnacle of my skill, four pieces of wood shaped into one entity, my livelihood, bread upon my table, wine in my cup. As both, when it is ajar. As neither, when it is a jar.”
“My dog has no nose.”
“How does it smell?”
“Awful.”
This joke was of course, famously invented by the early science fiction writer, H.G. Wells. He first tried it out at the Garrick Club at the turn of the twentieth century. Thankfully for posterity there exists an account of one of these ‘try-outs’ written down in his diary by the actor and theatre manager Sir Beerbohm Tree who witnessed a conversation between Wells, the novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie, and barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall. I reprint the account below verbatim:
“My dog has no nose.” Wells piped up, apropos of nothing.
“How awful! Was it some form of accident or a kind of genetic mutation?” young Barrie, that sentimental fop responded.
“Er . . .” This seemed to flummox Wells, who just sort of burbled.
“Well? Which is it that the poor creature has had to endure?” Barrie was quite insistent. Wells burbled some more.
“My learned friend, Master Wells, wishes you to ask him how his nasally bereft hound smells,” explained Sir Edward Marshall Hall, looking up from behind his copy of The Times. Being a man of law and learning he’d swiftly espied the thorny nub of the situation.
“Really?” Barrie seemed astounded. “That would seem a most callous question given its state. Of all the organs a dog could ill-afford to be without, surely that which contains its olfactory system is the cruellest blow of them all. It would be like the feathered woodpecker being without its beak, or the termite-vacuuming anteater it’s slender tongue.” Barrie, not for the first time in his life, got lost in his analogies.
“You misunderstand,” retorted Sir Edward, “Master Wells does not in fact own a dog, it is merely a phantom, a construct created purely as the basis for a humorous pay-off.” He had it, like Hamlet, in a nutshell.
“Then I am most perplexed,” confessed Barrie. “What kind of twisted vagabond would gain pleasure in hypothesising about a disfigured canine? I seriously question the character of Master Wells and feel it ill advised to have admitted him to the Garrick Club.” I have to confess that I too had pondered on the wisdom of this decision.
“The humour is not derived from the disfigurement of the beast, but from the ambiguity inherent in the feeder line he wishes you to respond with,” Sir Edward persisted.
“But how am I to predict what Master Wells is to utter let alone be precognisant of what he desires me to say in response. When a man declares his dog is without a nose, a feature so entwined with the creature’s identity, I am honour-bound to respond in sympathy and compassionate distress both on behalf of Wells and also his hound – that I now learn is a mere figment of his imagination. An imagination that not only conjures up hypothetical maimed dogs but also the contributions of all other interlocutors in any conversation he initiates.” Barrie by this time had clearly become roused and was in danger of disturbing the stately slumbering forms of some of our more senior members.
“Even so, that is the predicament we find ourselves in, and the only possible exit from it is that you utter those words that Wells, rightly or wrongly, assumed you would say for the construction of his humorous dialogue.” Sir Edward, recognising the precarious state of those members’ rest, sort to seek a swift conclusion to the dialogue.
“But to be held to ransom thus by some deluded poltroon with a God complex is simply unacceptable. My contributions to a conversation cannot be dictated by the whims of a fantasist whose fevered brain postulations would be enough to ignite the ire of even the most ambivalent of naturalists.” Barrie was not to be so easily assuaged it seemed.
“And yet that is the cold reality. And I beg you, Barrie, humour the poor fool.” Sir Edward insisted.
“I’m still here, you know,” said Wells, and sure enough, he was.
“I know, a fact that we all regret, nay, resent,” Sir Edward stated what many of us now felt. “Now speak, Barrie, or we shall forever more be plagued by this man’s piteous presence.”
“How does he smell?” asked Barrie and what sweet relief it seemed!
“Awful.” Wells’ joy was not easily masked and burst out from beneath his moustache.
“Is that through a lack of bathing or is his odour a result of something in the make-up of his pedigree?” asked Barrie. “For fuck’s sake, Barrie!” Sir Edward boomed, dislodging the 1st Viscount Astor and leading to his own temporary expulsion.
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