Catherine, do you know the medieval Pharoah riddle? I think it
qualifies as a level 3 joke in your schema.

Q: How many men pursued the Israelites with Pharoah?

A: I don't know about that, but there were 60 chariots when
they drowned.

The contemporary audience for this riddle would have known
that each chariot held 3 men.

An early instance of "guess you had to be there," I guess--

Candice


At 11:48 AM 7/17/00 -0700, you wrote:
>here in the hollywood house of comedy writers, we work with a few assumptions:
>
>there are "levels" to jokes
>there are "levels" to poetry
>
>A first level joke is generally a dick joke or a fart joke.  It exists on
the surface, and is
>(male) physical.  These we put in movies for 14 year old boys.  I say "we",
though only the
>boys here are writing movies.
>
>A second level joke is based on an established context.  Generally, these
are funniest when
>existing in a context of first level joke.  Ex., in _There's Something
About Mary_ (not written
>by the boys, but by friends), the yappy dog dying joke is old, old, old.
The context is first
>level.  But the sequence of jokes about the dog becomes second level.
Since the scene
>persists, and in two levels, the audience "gets" the second level.  This is
funnier than a
>plain yappy dog/sex joke
>
>but is not ambiguous, which second level jokes can be to those who are not
paying attention.  A
>solid pun is a second level joke.  This is why so much objectivist &
language poetry is funny
>-- tons of puns.
>
>A third level joke involves information the audience must have and put
together with the other
>levels of the joke.  Again in poetry, this can be something like the form,
traditional or not.
>Shakespeare's funny bits are generally third-level funny as well as being
first and second
>level funny.
>
>Since poetry stresses "levels" here, and since jokes become more ambigous,
appealing to a
>smaller audience, with each level, except where there is a sort of
"persistence", then poetry
>is bound to be less funny.  The funniest poems I write have extended
metaphors and lots of puns
>and first level jokes while they are making a larger joke.
>
>But truly hilarious, unambiguous poems are hard.  If the form is making a
third level joke, it
>is going to demand someone who can _hear_ form or get the joke on the first
read -- a prosody
>expert, someone who has unravelled your puzzle poem, etc.  Extended
metaphors are generally
>seen to be bad in poetry right now, and I think, at least, they're kind of
necessary for jokes.
>
>Working on a riddle unit for the class I'm teaching,
>Catherine Daly
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