Long ago I made public two variations, one baroque and one relatively simple (and older), on the same idea, in which—basically—something worked on very finely in parts is subsequently worked on further in such a way that the original fineness remains but cannot be seen, and cannot even be accessed without ruining it. A further variation might be: executing a painting and then affixing to the front and back of the canvas thin sheets of lead, with a strong adhesive—one that does not itself affect the paint, but strong enough that one could not remove the lead without effectively destroying the painting. (Lead is chosen to prevent sneaky persons from viewing the painting with fancy technology, though I admit I have no idea how thin a sheet of lead can be if it is still to block such things.) One would be, basically, forced to take the creator's word—the painting could actually be terrible and uninteresting, or for that matter the canvas blank.
Why do I mention this? I mention this because of the following joke, which owes its form but not its unseen qualities to me:
Jones: Did you hear about the explosion at the cheese factory?
Smith: No, what happened?
Jones: Several workers were killed and more were seriously injured.
One might of course think that this is just another exercise in expectation-manipulation, that the joke is that although it has a joke's setup it lacks a joke's punchline, suddenly becoming incongruously serious. (A nice variation on this kind of joke is exhibited by shaggy dog story A30 in the classification linked earlier: "The Shaggy Dog Collector Searches for a Better Specimen. After a long search, he finally finds it." This strikes me as fantastic, very subtle, way better than A30.1 (the collector says "sorry, too shaggy"), because it lacks anything that even remotely smacks of a punchline, a placeholder that would let you know that the humor was at least supposed to be here. It just peters out into nothingness.) But that's simply a diversion; it's a joke like any other, only the person to whom it's told isn't told enough to be able to tell this. For, as the teller of the joke knows, but must not let on to the audience, what killed those who died and injured those who were wounded was de brie, which fell upon them, and the whole episode could only take place because the safety inspector wasn't very gouda her job.
Had a long comment before, viz.
I like how you explained the joke!
(Which I wouldn't have otherwise seen.)
it reminds me a bit of one variation of the "young woman of Ulva" limerick, the one where she keeps a dead bee in her handbag, so that her lover, named Jock, is stung in the finger, but soothed with Turkish Delight.
In The 39 Steps, one of the ladies-underthings traveling salesmen begins telling the other a "young woman of Ulva" limerick, but we don't hear the rest of it, because Hannay must skedaddle.
And in Strangers on a Train, Bruno crashes a diplomatic party and is very charming with a French group. We hear him say to them, "Mais biensûr je connais l'histoire de la fille du croque-mort," which is a pretty risqué histoire.
Counterfactual mugging seems relevant here, and therefore: Newcomb's!
Posted by: Guy Lionel Slingsby | June 26, 2015 at 09:04 PM
That's a whole style of non-rhyme, as I recall. Of course they only work because, having heard the bubbles in the pot, we can be surprised when we look in and find it's not water about to boil at all. We have to know what it is we're not getting. (And in the books/movies you cite, we have to know what's being intimated and not fully given.)
The joke in the post couldn't actually be successfully told, but I think the (admittedly rather conceptual) artworks in the linked post could be successful. Or, as I've occasionally described (though maybe nowhere online), I think a successful and admirable bookcase could be one visually indistinguishable from the utterly plain, undecorated ones that I own—except these bookcases would contain, on the surfaces that are joined to one another and thus not exposed (the interface between the shelves and the containing case, for instance), detailed filigrees and carvings. You can't see them and ideally they'd be constructed in such a way that taking the case apart would destroy them or render them unrecognizable. I think such a thing would be (again) successful, and pleasing to contemplate, and pleasing to own (though I've been made aware that this is not a generally held opinion). You'd have to take the creator's word for it—and it would have to actually be like that; if you were lied to, though you couldn't tell, it would be a sham. So there would have to actually have been this craft or artistry or whatever, just totally concealed from view. I don't think that can be what enables such a furnishing to be worthwhile while no telling of the above joke could possibly work, though, because the teller of that joke really does have in mind the further description of the scenario that contains the punchlines. In both cases the thing that makes it not just a serviceable case/pointless story does exist. In both cases the thing is unavailable, so why is it that in only one the thing doesn't avail?
Posted by: ben w | June 26, 2015 at 09:48 PM