Joke Construction
I love my daughter.
When she laughs really hard she will give herself the hiccups. Now that’s not always a good thing. Because of my background as a comedian, I see an audience like that and it makes me want to paralyze them with laughter. I know at bedtime I can get her. Of course then it will be an hour before she calms down enough and the hiccups go away so she can sleep.
Because she loves to laugh so much, she wants to make me laugh too. She makes up her own jokes and they don’t necessarily all make sense. The joke goes something like this:
Knock, knock. Who’s there?
Fan. Fan who?
Fan is spinning around and blowing into other people.
The form of the joke is there but the substance is missing. She’s not familiar enough with language to see that the humor comes from multiple definitions of the same word. I guess the real joke there would be:
Knock, knock. Who’s there?
Fan. Fan who?
Fanny’s as big as a house and she can’t sit down.
My daughter was telling a story with her joke. She’s lying in bed and watching the fan spin around on the ceiling. Then she imagines a fan powerful enough to blow over other people. That’s her story. If you think of people sliding around all over the floor like it was a banana peel because of the fan, it’s a funny story.
My joke (no critique of the joke please, it’s just a quick example) is a story too. It changes the fan to somebody’s name and then gives them an impossibly large rear end. You’re thinking of the fan and it surprises you with Fanny. My daughter’s joke leaves you with the fan the whole time.
So the elements of this joke are:
1. Form (knock-knock joke)
2. A pun
3. A surprise