Blog Post #2

1. The Shaggy dog Stories were really entertaining for me. When each story was coming to an end, I wondered what the next punch line was going to be. One feature that I think was a large part of the stories being humorous, was the randomness of the story itself! For example, in story 1, about the friars, I was so confused at first. Not because it was hard to read, but because I had no idea what I was reading. In my mind I kept thinking "Whats the point?" with no idea that it was going to have such a clever punch-line in the end. I feel this added to the humor because once you got through the story you're left with a little giggle, not only because of its cleverness but because of the "oh now I get it!" feeling.
2. My favorite of all the Shaggy Dog Stories was the last one about the lawyer and his Czechoslovakian friend. In order to "get" the joke in the end, "Would you believe a lawyer who told you the Czech was in the male?", one would need to be aware of the stigma on lawyers being dishonest prior to reading this. You would also need to know that "Czech" sounds just like "check" and "male" sounds just like "mail" and then connect that to literally not trusting a lawyer when he says a check is in the mail. Basically, the audience for these stories would have to have prior knowledge on homonyms and even some stereotypes (like the stereotype on dishonest lawyers
3. I think that the Shaggy Dog Stories can connect to other written forms such as magazine headlines. we always see a play on words on the cover of magazines that catch our attention and pull up in. Sometimes those headlines are catchy punch-lines in the beginning rather than in the end (like in the Shaggy Dog Stories) that make us want to know more about the story that follows and how it can be connected to something so clever and cute. Another written form I thought of was a comic book, or some kind of illustration. For example, when reading the 3rd story about the string who couldn't find anyone to serve him a cold beer, I envisioned a cartoon. I could see this being in a newspaper or something rather than just in a written story form that we read it in.
4. A pattern I noticed throughout the stories was they were all in the form of a joke. Instead of a typical story were characters are introduced, or a back story is given, these just start off abruptly and then progress until you are left guessing what the punch-line may be. For example the 2nd story about the panda the first sentence is "A giant panda escaped from the Zoo in New York". I can almost hear this in the tone of a joke. Then the problem progresses and we have no idea where this is going because it makes no sense why the panda is killing everyone until the punch-line is delivered in the end.