Jokes, Conjuring Tricks,

 

 

A seaman met a pirate in a bar.

The pirate had a peg-leg, a hook and an eye patch.

"How'd you end up with a peg-leg?" asked the sailor.

 "I was swept overboard in a storm," said the pirate. "and a shark ate it."

 

"Wow!" said the seaman. "What about the hook?"

 

"We was boarding an enemy ship, battling its crew with swords. One of ‘em cut me hand clean orf."

 

"Incredible!" remarked the seaman. "And the eyepatch?"

 

"A seagull crapped in me eye," replied the pirate.

 

"You lost your eye to a poop from a seagull?" the sailor asked incredulously.

 

The pirate sighed.

 "First day wiv me ‘ook."

 

 

OK. Swap it for a better one if you want, but why does it work? Look for:

 

  1. the piratical pathway you are being led down:

pegleg/storm/shark; enemy ship/battle/sword;…

 

  1. the obstacle/portal

(the pathway you thought you were following now blocked by an incongruity): seagull crap!?

 

  1. which hides a secret we have to guess at

 

  1. but the obstacle has an inbuilt ambiguity –

we assume it was the poop that did it

(literal interpretation of the metonym)

and want to know how,

but the truth was that it was the metonymic referent of the poop - the hook.*

 

  1. the reappearance of an earlier element –

the hook – another delaying tactic, because for a brief moment

we then wonder what the hook has to do with it – it’s another secret, but easy to solve

 

  1. then we ‘jump the gutter’

(see Scott McCloud  “Understanding Comics” Kitchen Sink Press 1993)

and imagine the act of wiping the eye (that’s not there – we have to provide that,

 just as we create for ourselves the link between two frames in a cartoon!)

 

  1. lastly, we realise the pathway has reversed

from the expected swashbuckling image (shark, sword, …),

to something less enhancing of piratical kudos. The pirate’s image has reversed. He’s lost status.

Surprise.

 

  1. ha ha

 

….and conjuring tricks? Work it out for yourself. I’m exhausted.

 

* This posing a metonym as its referent is a classic delaying morpheme.

Barthes refers to this as an equivocation (see below)