Here’s something Davis and I wrote many years ago:
Two brothers, Daniel and Stanley, started playing music together. They tried out a variety of styles, and eventually got a hit with a high-concept album. The lyrics described the mythology of absurd realms: for instance, in one nation, the most important legend detailed Morpheus falling asleep on a beach with his arm over his chest.
The musicians developed a loyal group of listeners and concertgoers, who organized their own activities. As the brothers and their admirers tended towards nerdery, the community regularly got together to play computer games (this was before “online multiplayer” was common).
Seeing an opportunity, a businessman pitched the brothers on merchandising. He said they should develop branded sodas and beers to sell at the parties. The musicians were willing to hear him out, so the entrepreneur wrote up a full proposal:
“Dan and Stan’s Sandman Hand-Tan Land Band Fan LAN Can Plan”
If you know me, you’ve probably heard me tell similar jokes. I often wake up in the morning with a new one in my head (to my partner’s chagrin). My favorite joke adheres to… whatever this form is.1
Is this a joke, though? It’s not a pun; there’s no homophonic, homographic, or semantic doubling. It’s a tongue twister, not a punch line, just wordplay.
The form I’m thinking of is a kind of shaggy dog story: “an extremely long-winded anecdote…terminated by an anticlimax”.
In the specific form I enjoy, the terminator – what I call the “payoff” – relies on repeated sounds. The rules are:2
The story/setup is long-winded, but not excessively so. Ideally, each detail in the story sets up some meanng for the payoff.
The payoff uses few sounds.3 It consists mostly or entirely of entirely of rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and/or consonance.
The payoff summarizes or concludes the story.
The setup does not contain any of the “key words” in the payoff.
By “key words”, I mean those participating in the wordplay; it’s okay for the payoff to include non-participating words, e.g. articles, conjunctions, etc. That said, I think doing so limits the payoff’s quality:
The pop musician is faster at finding the cheapest disposable dust pads.
The Scissor Sister’s a swifter Swiffer sifter.
It’s much better to include the articles in the wordplay.
There’s a tradition in my family of repeating names on the patrilineal line. A little too strong of a tradition, if you ask me: one summer, I hung out with my cousins who had both been named after their grandfather, so one of them had to start going by a nickname.
That was an interesting summer. The whole family had gathered at my mom’s sister’s house on the beach. She was an entomologist, and had a whole set of ant colonies she was studying. She had labelled the colonies after characters from children’s literature: a Stuart Little colony, a Cheshire Cat colony, and so on.
We boys were playing around and knocked one of the experiments over. It happened to be some kind of fire ant. I managed to get away scot-free, but my cousins got stung –
Andrew and Drew rue Aunt Ruth’s ant Roo.
Often, the payoff winds up being a tongue twister.
The Cool Coral TV series really went big this year. The producers made a big show at the awards, too: they brought in some of “the cast” to the ceremony, in a dozen big salt-water tanks.
They weren’t very responsible about it, though. The tops were all open, and I caught the start of a prestige streaming show tossing candy in, trying to land a chocolate in the mouth of a big polyp.
Did you see a sea anemone eating M&M’s with an enemy Emmy nominee?
The payoff can pun, but the distinguishing feature of this form is the sound, not the pun.4 The Buffalo sentence would be a good payoff not because it uses “buffalo” in multiple senses, but because it only consists of the sound-set “buffalo”.3
I don’t know of a name for this kind of wordplay. If you have a good term for it, let me know! In the absence of an alternative, I have to name it after the most famous example.
I won’t repeat that joke here due to the vulgarity, but suffice to say: it’s a long-winded story involving two beloved cartoon characters engaging in bestiality while investigating mysterious occurrances in England. That is, the story is a “Shaggy shagging dog” shaggy dog.