The hearer tries to anticipate where the joke is going and is still surprised, just as we know where the limerick is going (in most cases) and are still surprised. Jokes are a challenge and in a good joke the winner is always the teller. It's like what happens in jokes or riddles: the poser lets the hearer take a shot, and wins if the hearer gives up (the very phrase is telling). This is where the trick is - where there's a kind of competition between poem and reader to see who can make the rhyme work first. Thrale, which he points out, not quite accurately, rhymes in the alphabetical order suitable to a dictionary maker and Tennyson's poem "The Skipping Rope," written in response to the semi-insulting gift of a rhyming dictionary.) Pope knew well that readers could spot the upcoming rhymes and made a joke of that too.īecause the part you don't see at a glance is the busier, denser middle of the line that gets you to the rhyme word you might see or guess at once. Johnson and Tennyson both wrote poems which were basically expositions of given rhymes (Johnson's birthday poem to Mrs. ![]() Generally the trick isn't rhyming: it's getting to the rhyme. My metaleptic reversal brings out the rarity of surprises in rhyme. So with the limerick, its first line of the limerick announces its last rhyme. What does the limerick have to do to surprise us? What did the magician have to do? Tristan Bernard wrote, "In the theater the audience wants to be surprised but by things that they expect." Gilroy elaborates: "How do you write a reversal that uses the audience's expectations in a new way? You have to write to their accumulated knowledge." We expect the rhyme. As the audience gets more sophisticated, so does the writer, who must play to that sophistication - which is a good thing. Max in The New Yorker) between viewer and writer. This is an example of what the screen-writer Tony Gilroy ( Duplicity) is after in his relation to the audience. Penn & Teller were sure the cup was empty, and they were wrong. He'd tricked them into thinking that he was doing the standard trick pretty well. the hidden ball! They got it immediately, as he knew they would. The magician gave them a beautiful smile as Teller picked the cup up to find. Since this was on TV, they did the right thing, affected to be fooled, and pointed to the empty cup. ![]() (They'd looked him and his town up because his grandfather had been a huge hit on the Ed Sullivan show forty years earlier.) The magician performed a shell-game trick on them pretty well, but, well, you know, they're Penn & Teller. It's my minor version of the great trick pulled on Penn and Teller by a local small-town Indian magician. The point of my little variation is what Harold Bloom would call metalepsis. They know what they're expecting (the promised rhyme), and it's not that. When it comes up in class and they ask for the whole thing, I give them my revision, above. But all you really had to do was add the obvious rhyme the limerick promises to the search window and you'd find yourself Bob's nephew or niece. If you only googled the first line you got dozens of references to T-shirts and knowing smirks. And you used to need a little google-fu to find it - just a little. My students all know the first line of the famous limerick, but it turns out that only one in thirty knows the whole thing. The spume of the fate he'd once struck at.
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