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[NABOKOV-L] {QUERY} Nabokov's "shaggy dogs"
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Whenever I thought about Nabokov's skye terriers and shaggy dogs, the first thing that came to my mind was a woofing canine,* sometimes metamorphed into a formless vanity bag or resembling a weeping willow. Last week, googling after punch lines, I was led to a different kind of shaggy dog.
Inspite of Nabokov's occasional show of being as pleased as punch about wordgames, Hermann's misadventures in Despair or Kinbote's pat sense of humor (as in the episode of the two ping-pong tables he kept in the basement), I have the impression that Nabokov did not intend to allude to any "shaggy dog joke" or figure.** When he brings in a small puppy or a running Floss his mood seems to be predominantly ecstatic and nostalgic, not humoristic. Any ideas?
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* In a 1965 interview in Montreux, with Robert Hughes, Nabokov states: ".I'm especially fond of its weeping cedar, the arboreal counterpart of a very shaggy dog with hair hanging over its eyes." although Nabokov has already been been enslaved by a phantom dog whose shaggy presence is felt, in RLSK, Lolita and, long before that, in connection to Collete, his pup love.
In RLSK we learn that Clare possessed "that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier." In Pale Fire Kinbote informs us that skye terriers belong to "the breed called in our country 'weeping-willow dog'." (we must remember Aunt Maud's Skye terrier's empty basket flying about the house). The theme of squatting child and a formless pup is present in TOoL: "I'll drug him next time said Flora, rummaging all around her seat for her small formless vanity bag, a blind black puppy. Here it is, cried an anonymous girl, squatting quietly." In A Nursery Tale, Erwin "chooses the same girl twice (a nymphet)" for his first and, inadvertently his last addition to a hellish wishing list, thereby bringing about the dissolution of his serial imaginary conquests. His first choice had been a young girl who "squatted down to tousle with two fingers a fat shaggy pup..." Later, by having "recognized the girl who had been playing that morning with a woolly black pup" ...he "immediately remembered, immediately understood all her charm, tender warmth, priceless radiance."
** - Shaggy dog story - excerpts copied from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"This article is about the joke. For the television program of the same name, see Shaggy Dog Story (TV). For other uses, see Shaggy dog (disambiguation). In its original sense, a shaggy dog story is an extremely long-winded tale featuring extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents, usually resulting in a pointless or absurd punchline. These stories are a special case of yarns, coming from the long tradition of campfire yarns. Shaggy dog stories play upon the audience's preconceptions of the art of joke telling. The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner. The archetypical shaggy dog story: The commonly believed archetype of the shaggy dog story is a story that concerns a shaggy dog. The story builds up, repeatedly emphasizing how shaggy the dog is. At the climax of the story, someone in the story reacts with, "That dog's not so shaggy." The expectations of the audience that have been built up by the presentation of the story, that the story will end with a punchline, are thus disappointed. Ted Cohen gives the following example of this story: "A boy owned a dog that was uncommonly shaggy. Many people remarked upon its considerable shagginess. When the boy learned that there are contests for shaggy dogs, he entered his dog. The dog won first prize for shagginess in both the local and the regional competitions. The boy entered the dog in ever-larger contests, until finally he entered it in the world championship for shaggy dogs. When the judges had inspected all of the competing dogs, they remarked about the boy's dog: "He's not so shaggy."" [Cf. variations by Eric Partridge and by William and Mary Morris in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins.]
A lengthy shaggy dog story derives its humour from the fact that the joke-teller held the attention of the listeners for a long time (such jokes can take five minutes or more to tell) for no reason at all, as the story ends with a meaningless anticlimax.An example of this type of joke is "The Purple Box", "The Purple Doughnut", "Purple Spaghetti" or "The Purple Passion". In this joke, with much detail and narration, a young boy overhears a group of older kids talking about a "purple box/doughnut/spaghetti/passion". When the boy asks the kids what a "purple box" is, they beat him up. The story continues with the boy meeting other people (teacher, school principal, parents) throughout the day; they each ask what happened to him, causing him to repeat his entire story which always ends with the question: "What's a purple box?"... Each time, the person questioned takes great offense and punishes the boy; the teacher sends him to the principal, the principal expels him, and so on. Later, he runs across the street and gets hit by a bus. The audience is then told that the moral of the story is that you should look both ways before you cross the street.Another example takes the form of a mathematics puzzle. In general, the story begins "See if you can answer this puzzle, you are the driver of a bus that picks up x people at its first stop". The story continues with the person assuming that they must keep track of the number of people on the bus to answer the question. So then the story goes, "At the second stop,y people get off and z people get on. How many people are on the bus now?". With every stop the bus makes in the story, the other person must add the number of people that get on and subtract the amount of people that get off to find the remaining total on the bus. The calculations usually become more difficult as the journey progresses, for example, "At its eighth stop, 25 people get off and 37 get on". At the end of the bus journey the other person is finally asked something unrelated to the calculations, such as "Now, what is the color of the bus driver's socks?", making the entire puzzle meaningless and a humorous[citation needed] waste of the other person's time. Having expended much effort in calculating the number of people on the bus, the person concerned often forgets that he or she is the bus driver, so that the answer to the last question would be the color of the socks of the person hearing the joke. The shaggy dog story has come to also mean a joke where a pun is finally achieved after a long (and ideally tedious) exposition. This is also called a feghoot. The humor in the punch line may be due to the sudden, unexpected recognition of a familiar saying, since the story has nothing to do with the usual context in which the phrase is normally found, yet the listener is surprised to discover it makes sense in both situations. Therefore, if the audience is not already familiar with the phrase used in the punch line, or is not aware of the multiple meanings of the words in the phrase, the surprise ending of the joke cannot be recovered by explaining the joke to the audience. Another variation is used to play on the emotions of the audience. The teller of the joke puts on a slow, scary but also concerned tone of voice and tells a drawn-out story of a simple, non-scary event to build tension and make the other person feel sympathetic for teller of the joke. ...Isaac Asimov, whose specialties included both science fiction and humor and who was a self-described "punster", wrote a short story called "Shah Guido G.", referring to the story'sAtlantean ruler. As expected, the story ends on an anticlimax."
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Inspite of Nabokov's occasional show of being as pleased as punch about wordgames, Hermann's misadventures in Despair or Kinbote's pat sense of humor (as in the episode of the two ping-pong tables he kept in the basement), I have the impression that Nabokov did not intend to allude to any "shaggy dog joke" or figure.** When he brings in a small puppy or a running Floss his mood seems to be predominantly ecstatic and nostalgic, not humoristic. Any ideas?
.................................................................................................................................
* In a 1965 interview in Montreux, with Robert Hughes, Nabokov states: ".I'm especially fond of its weeping cedar, the arboreal counterpart of a very shaggy dog with hair hanging over its eyes." although Nabokov has already been been enslaved by a phantom dog whose shaggy presence is felt, in RLSK, Lolita and, long before that, in connection to Collete, his pup love.
In RLSK we learn that Clare possessed "that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier." In Pale Fire Kinbote informs us that skye terriers belong to "the breed called in our country 'weeping-willow dog'." (we must remember Aunt Maud's Skye terrier's empty basket flying about the house). The theme of squatting child and a formless pup is present in TOoL: "I'll drug him next time said Flora, rummaging all around her seat for her small formless vanity bag, a blind black puppy. Here it is, cried an anonymous girl, squatting quietly." In A Nursery Tale, Erwin "chooses the same girl twice (a nymphet)" for his first and, inadvertently his last addition to a hellish wishing list, thereby bringing about the dissolution of his serial imaginary conquests. His first choice had been a young girl who "squatted down to tousle with two fingers a fat shaggy pup..." Later, by having "recognized the girl who had been playing that morning with a woolly black pup" ...he "immediately remembered, immediately understood all her charm, tender warmth, priceless radiance."
** - Shaggy dog story - excerpts copied from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"This article is about the joke. For the television program of the same name, see Shaggy Dog Story (TV). For other uses, see Shaggy dog (disambiguation). In its original sense, a shaggy dog story is an extremely long-winded tale featuring extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents, usually resulting in a pointless or absurd punchline. These stories are a special case of yarns, coming from the long tradition of campfire yarns. Shaggy dog stories play upon the audience's preconceptions of the art of joke telling. The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner. The archetypical shaggy dog story: The commonly believed archetype of the shaggy dog story is a story that concerns a shaggy dog. The story builds up, repeatedly emphasizing how shaggy the dog is. At the climax of the story, someone in the story reacts with, "That dog's not so shaggy." The expectations of the audience that have been built up by the presentation of the story, that the story will end with a punchline, are thus disappointed. Ted Cohen gives the following example of this story: "A boy owned a dog that was uncommonly shaggy. Many people remarked upon its considerable shagginess. When the boy learned that there are contests for shaggy dogs, he entered his dog. The dog won first prize for shagginess in both the local and the regional competitions. The boy entered the dog in ever-larger contests, until finally he entered it in the world championship for shaggy dogs. When the judges had inspected all of the competing dogs, they remarked about the boy's dog: "He's not so shaggy."" [Cf. variations by Eric Partridge and by William and Mary Morris in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins.]
A lengthy shaggy dog story derives its humour from the fact that the joke-teller held the attention of the listeners for a long time (such jokes can take five minutes or more to tell) for no reason at all, as the story ends with a meaningless anticlimax.An example of this type of joke is "The Purple Box", "The Purple Doughnut", "Purple Spaghetti" or "The Purple Passion". In this joke, with much detail and narration, a young boy overhears a group of older kids talking about a "purple box/doughnut/spaghetti/passion". When the boy asks the kids what a "purple box" is, they beat him up. The story continues with the boy meeting other people (teacher, school principal, parents) throughout the day; they each ask what happened to him, causing him to repeat his entire story which always ends with the question: "What's a purple box?"... Each time, the person questioned takes great offense and punishes the boy; the teacher sends him to the principal, the principal expels him, and so on. Later, he runs across the street and gets hit by a bus. The audience is then told that the moral of the story is that you should look both ways before you cross the street.Another example takes the form of a mathematics puzzle. In general, the story begins "See if you can answer this puzzle, you are the driver of a bus that picks up x people at its first stop". The story continues with the person assuming that they must keep track of the number of people on the bus to answer the question. So then the story goes, "At the second stop,y people get off and z people get on. How many people are on the bus now?". With every stop the bus makes in the story, the other person must add the number of people that get on and subtract the amount of people that get off to find the remaining total on the bus. The calculations usually become more difficult as the journey progresses, for example, "At its eighth stop, 25 people get off and 37 get on". At the end of the bus journey the other person is finally asked something unrelated to the calculations, such as "Now, what is the color of the bus driver's socks?", making the entire puzzle meaningless and a humorous[citation needed] waste of the other person's time. Having expended much effort in calculating the number of people on the bus, the person concerned often forgets that he or she is the bus driver, so that the answer to the last question would be the color of the socks of the person hearing the joke. The shaggy dog story has come to also mean a joke where a pun is finally achieved after a long (and ideally tedious) exposition. This is also called a feghoot. The humor in the punch line may be due to the sudden, unexpected recognition of a familiar saying, since the story has nothing to do with the usual context in which the phrase is normally found, yet the listener is surprised to discover it makes sense in both situations. Therefore, if the audience is not already familiar with the phrase used in the punch line, or is not aware of the multiple meanings of the words in the phrase, the surprise ending of the joke cannot be recovered by explaining the joke to the audience. Another variation is used to play on the emotions of the audience. The teller of the joke puts on a slow, scary but also concerned tone of voice and tells a drawn-out story of a simple, non-scary event to build tension and make the other person feel sympathetic for teller of the joke. ...Isaac Asimov, whose specialties included both science fiction and humor and who was a self-described "punster", wrote a short story called "Shah Guido G.", referring to the story'sAtlantean ruler. As expected, the story ends on an anticlimax."
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/