🌱 Slapstick Humor Is Not Just Visual It Can Be Linguistic As Well

Unsorted thoughts on what I’ve decided to call “linguistic slapstick” or “slapstick sentence structure.”

Slapstick: “Slapstick is a style of humor involving exaggerated physical activity that exceeds the boundaries of normal physical comedy.” Source: Wikipedia

All humor to some degree relies on exaggeration and cleverness. Humor is truth + surprise. The surprise can be how you’d never thought about that particular truth before, it can be an extreme hilarious exaggeration of a situation, or it can be a framing or wording you’d never expect.

But slapstick is…goofy, both in its physical form and in sentence structure. Linguistically, it stretches the bounds of how you think the author “should” speak to you. There’s a larger tonal shift, a certain openness that a joke is being made. But while physical slapstick often relies solely on goofiness to make you laugh, linguistic slapstick seems most successful when part of the surprise is how brilliantly the joke speaks the truth.

Here’s Terry Pratchett, as an example:

But magic has a habit of lying low, like a rake in the grass.

source: [[Pratchett, Terry]]: Equal Rites

what’s brilliant (and what makes this sentence funny) is the abrupt tonal shift. The start: “magic has a habit of lying low” creates a mysterious atmosphere. Then you’re literally hit with a rake in the face like Charlie Chaplin.

And here’s a Douglas Adams quote that made the rounds in a big piece on Tumblr:

If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn’t exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar.

Source: [[Adams, Douglas]]. [[So Long and Thanks for All the Fish]]. London, Pan Macmillon, 2016. (Book 4 of [[The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy]])

The image itself: stacking multiple David Bowie’s on top of each other is slapstick in nature.
The idea that…the way someone moves can remind you of another person: not just the way someone looks. It’s a searing level of insight that contrasts the slapstick nature of the image. The intelligence makes you laugh even more.

Granted, it’s not always a clear genre to define. Here’s another Adam’s quote:

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

source: [[Adams, Douglas]] [[The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy]]

does this qualify as slapstick? It’s unexpected and goofy. It might be a stretch to say that it conjures a slapstick image in one’s mind, though in a way it does invite you to imagine Wile E. Coyote hovering briefly in the air on a pile of bricks before plummeting to the ground.

What do you think? Does it make sense to describe any genre of written humor as “slapstick”? Do other authors come to mind for you? I’d love recommendations.

Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.