On 11/30/05, Davdi Silverrock <davdisil at gmail.com> wrote: > On 11/30/05, Howard Brazee <howard at brazee.net> wrote: > > Davdi Silverrock wrote: > > > > >Speaking of "should be"s, well, there *should be* some way of > > >signalling facetiousness and humor. > > > > > > > I'm not sure I agree. Well, we have our Internet equivalences of > > winking, but I loved it when I read my first Hiaasen book. I started > > off reading, then saying to my self, "is this funny?", for a while > > before deciding "yes, it is very funny indeed". > > > > Do you want Steve to tell us all of his jokes? Or do you want to > > discover some of them during one read, more in another? > > > > I think that sometimes it would help if he would drop the poker face, > once in a while, when confusion has in point of fact resulted rather > than amusement, and just say that he was joking. Although, to the left, I have just recently [1] found Mark Twain's essay: http://www.boondocksnet.com/twaintexts/how_story.html Where, among other things, he writes: [Begin Cite] The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through. And sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy that he will repeat the "nub" of it and glance around from face to face, collecting applause, and then repeat it again. It is a pathetic thing to see. [End Cite] I have to admit, given the option of only those extremes, that the deadpan and wry does appear to be prefereable to the overly-emphatic. But I simply hope that there is a happy medium that can be found. __________________ 1: (actually, via Crooked Timber's " Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Seminar", http://crookedtimber.org/2005/11/29/jonathan-strange-mr-norrell-seminar-introduction/) Which has some interesting points of discussion about all sorts of things, including some sketches of servant depicition in Dickens that made me think of the Paarfi when he is portraying his Teckla characters. There's also two words by Ms. Clarke herself, which is nice.