 |
|
Extended parallelism: non-literary examples
Task A - Clinton joke: our commentary
This joke is one in a long universal tradition which debunks important
political figures. The parallelism in the joke is of two basic kinds.
First of all there is a non-linguistic parallelism of story episodes -
what happens when, in turn, each of the people meet God. Secondly, each
of the story episodes contains lexical and grammatical repetitions and
parallelisms within each 'line' of the episode. For example, the first
line/sentence has a name of one of the characters as subject, the verb
form 'goes' and a time adverbial as part of an ordered sequence. The first
two story elements lead us to see what happens to Al and Bill as equivalent
(and in a 'rising' sequence of importance), and because this pattern for
jokes is a common one, once we have perceived the pattern we will expect
what happens to Hillary also to be equivalent, rising still further, but
with a ...
at the end.
The joke comes in the punch line, in this case the last line of the third
(and therefore climactic) episode in the story. And this comes about because
(a) this line is internally deviant and (b) the change is seen to be humorously
appropriate to the stereotypical assumptions many of us have about Bill
and Hillary Clinton (Hillary is often said to be cleverer, more ambitious,
more controlling, and so on).
If we consider (a) above in more detail, we can see that the last, climactic,
episode has three lines, not four, and that consequently Hillary, not
God, has the last word. It is clear as we go through the joke that once
Al and Bill are sitting on either side of God there is no place for Hillary
to sit. Part of the pleasure of the joke comes from trying (and failing?)
to work out, before we are told, the puzzle of where she is going to sit
and how where she sits will be parallel and yet contrastive and, at the
same time, also beat Al and Bill. Of course what she says also presupposes
that she is more important than not just Al and Bill, but also God himself,
which in terms of an ascending pattern is presumably about as high as
you can get.
|
