The only thing I would venture to add from attempting to diagnose my own 
laughter (perhaps not ever a good idea) is that the physical activities 
conjured up by hoovering and hovering are such as to reinforce all of 
this:  even hovering is a bit demeaning to ghosts, but hoovering creates 
for me a mental image of busy to-ing and fro-ing, pushing the snout of a 
machine into corners and so forth, an almost dance-like motion that 
comes to epitomize the kind of silly busy-ness we resort to when the big 
picture is beyond us--if we can't do anything about that, we can at 
least make the living room presentable.  There is a gender as well as 
class dimension, perhaps: Ghost as Nervous Nellie.  But in any case I 
think puns are sometimes, though not always, powerful because of the 
incongruous physical images that accompany the meanings of the conjoined 
words:  "doggie dog world" gets me thinking of the way dogs shake 
themselves when they're wet.

JH

James C. Nohrnberg wrote:
> Prof. Hedley:  You're welcome.  Perhaps I failed to make the point you 
> wanted, though, which would have been about what's usually called "comic 
> relief," whether internal to the play, or external to it (on the 
> student's paper).  Inside the play, this relief is supplied by the 
> grave-digger, who remembers the avuncular jester Yorick, who is almost 
> outside the play: like the verbally naive student who was quoted.  The 
> grave-digger is doing the present hoovering (menial tasks: entertaining 
> with schtick, burying corpses), and he's in the foreground; the 
> entertaining practical joker Yorick is dead -- yet abiding in the 
> grave-digger's memory, and therefore like the ghost, hoovering in the 
> background.    -- Jim N.
> 
> On Mon, 12 May 2008 17:38:37 -0400
>  Jane Hedley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Oh, my!  I'm so glad I asked--this is vintage.  And thank you for 
>> appending the poem, whose first stanza is indeed eerily a propos.
>>
>> Jane Hedley
>>
>> James C. Nohrnberg wrote:
>>> On Mon, 12 May 2008 11:59:15 -0400
>>>  Jane Hedley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>  Professor Nohrnberg, I'd be grateful if you could take a run at the 
>>> Ghost
>>> of Hamlet's father hoovering in the background--which I think you 
>>> haven't
>>> yet commented on.  It's the one of all of these wonderful bloopers 
>>> that has
>>> me erupting into giggles every time I think of it--and yet, I can't 
>>> figure
>>> out how this approach can be used to account for its risibility.
>>>
>>> Prof. Hedley:
>>>
>>> Well of course the niave and child-like reduction of the "doggie dog 
>>> world" one was easier, given its departure from the Mondo Cane / 
>>> dog-eat-dog world of the opening lines of the Iliad and its 
>>> comparison of Achilles to the Dog-star near the opening of Bk. 22 
>>> (note the scavenger-like demon that gapes for a warrior at his death 
>>> -- Hector says it's these same death-spirits that bore the ships of 
>>> the Greek 'dogs' in their sweep against Ilium in the first place).
>>>
>>> But the Hamlet one is much funnier (or, in my terms, strikingly 
>>> pertinent): because it reduces the ghost to night-time help -- after 
>>> hours, they come in and try to clean things up.  The arc of Hamlet's 
>>> experience of the ghost seems to take the (former) Majesty of Denmark 
>>> into the same area of experience as represented by the endless menial 
>>> task.  Why does that matter for the King formerly known as Hamlet?  
>>> Well, classically,  "tragedy" denominates classical plays created in 
>>> the image of a protagonist’s desperation, blinding, physical or 
>>> psychic maiming, mania, or borderline state—e.g., Fury-haunted 
>>> Orestes.  Its universally acknowledged mask shows eyes out, hair 
>>> standing on end, face twisted in a Gorgonical or Caravaggio-esque 
>>> grimace of pain or rictus of terror. Quasi-religious or 
>>> quasi-Jungian, Macbeth presents this apotropaic image when the 
>>> frightened and rapt murderer is unmanned by the blood-boltered Banquo 
>>> with no speculation in his zombie-like eyes. Lear’s naked, wretched 
>>> Edgar quails before the sockets of the blinded Gloucester wandering 
>>> in limbo around Dover before reconnoitering with the mad king.  
>>> Hamlet’s Ghost tells stories contrived to unnerve the listener and 
>>> turn him into the same image — he transfigures Hamlet’s visage in 
>>> Gertrude’s bedroom.  But as these plays progress the image of blasted 
>>> ecstasy and tragic appallment devolves into dismay at the merely 
>>> quotidian.  The Ghost armed with hair-raising stories contracts into 
>>> an old mole knocking under the boards like a drunken janitor in the 
>>> basement.  In the play's late graveyard Hamlet laments not his 
>>> father’s appalling death or his uncle’s outrageous crime, but the 
>>> insensitivity of a singing gravedigger — he lacks feeling for his 
>>> occupation, while Hamlet voices the pathos of the common lot and 
>>> indistinction:  the ghost hoovering in the background.  Similarly, at 
>>> Lady Macbeth’s suicide, Macbeth represses any sorrow over her demise, 
>>> or horror at their crimes; his "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" 
>>> speech despairs over a garden-variety workaholic’s numbing careerist 
>>> exertion, mocked by its own futility.  At Dover Edgar reviews 
>>> existence from a theatre seat reserved for the gods.  They see us as 
>>> miserable flies — or samphire-gatherers who manage to eke out 
>>> subsistence in an ecological niche on the edge of an abyss.   When 
>>> Hamlet handles Cain’s jawbone "that did the first murder," his 
>>> viewpoint is virtually forensic or archeological — hardly Claudius’ 
>>> raw distress at offenses that smell to heaven and re-enact the first 
>>> murder. This routinization takes us quite through the 
>>> horror-mongering genre.  Its protagonists lose a stature sovereign 
>>> and remarkable, and we acquire it vicariously.  That's us, hoovering 
>>> in the background.   Meanwhile exhaustion reduces the tragic heroes 
>>> named to a level of mundane incapacities merely our own:  no one is 
>>> ague-proof, none can be made right — or anything perfect — and 
>>> everyone’s had bad dreams.  Hamlet Sr. dies sharing in common 
>>> depravities and decrepitude:  something happens in midlife that turns 
>>> any male body from Hyperion to a satyr. It needs no ghost to tell us 
>>> this – yet it’s ungrateful news, hoovering in the background.
>>>
>>> Or, that's one way of reading it.*    Yours, Jim N.
>>>
>>> (*But my personal associations, in this season of presidential 
>>> ambitions, are with the ghosts noisily hoovering in the background of 
>>> the first stanza of the following aging poem, in which my now late 
>>> father appeared.  The poem was read to class on the occasion of 
>>> President George H.W. Bush's visit to Jefferson's Rotunda at UVa in 
>>> Charlottesville for the Education Summit.  A member of that class is 
>>> now a prof. in the Dept. here.)
>>>  
>>>
>>> Presidential Special
>>>
>>> My maternal grandfather looked like Orson Welles.
>>> He sat in the darkened living room of his house
>>> After a cataract operation.  Inside the noise
>>> (The cooler in the window roaring,
>>> The water cascading the barrier wall)
>>> The older man was saying to my father,
>>> "The country made a terrible mistake,
>>> When they abandoned Mr. Hoover."
>>>
>>> He’d been introduced to A.P. Giannini,
>>> First president of the Bank of America,
>>> Because of a letter he’d written once, in behalf
>>> Of a beginning bank-clerk, for doing his job well.
>>> Something in this democracy must have worked.
>>>
>>> Years after Mr. Gibbs had died,
>>> My grandmother said that it was wrong,
>>> To put That Man on the dime.
>>> Stuck into the edge of her bedroom mirror,
>>> Where she might have had a picture of Jesus,
>>> Was a postcard from Eisenhower-Nixon
>>> Thanking her for the five dollars.
>>>
>>> I myself saw Truman; when I was seven,
>>> In the middle of ’Forty-Eight.  My father
>>> Lifted me up onto the hood, at the SP station.
>>> The windows of the train’s last car
>>> Were loaded with floral displays
>>>  From the President’s well-wishers.
>>>
>>> I stood inches from Estes Kefauver reaching out his hand
>>>  From a Rushmore height with a Barrymore voice
>>> On the steps of the Presbyterian Church.  It was impossible
>>> For my mother to say anything bad about a good man
>>>  From Tennessee, and of course he was an Elder’s guest.
>>> But my father probably felt it wasn’t right,
>>> Even on vacation
>>> He wouldn’t fish on Sundays.
>>>
>>> In Nineteen Fifty-Three,
>>> Last night of the National Jamboree,
>>> The Vice-President of the United States—
>>> Was scheduled to address the Boy Scouts
>>> Of America.  The troops had lit the way
>>> With candles by the thousands.  In the flickering bowl
>>> The voice of vigilance echoed from the loud-speakers,
>>> Recording for posterity.
>>>
>>> Stevenson was almost apologetic:  ironical, shying away
>>>  From Adlai, in a small dark-gray
>>> Three-piece suit, with a white, button-down
>>> Shirt.  Something seemed to be already over:
>>> There were very few of us around:  my best friend,
>>> Who was intellectual, I who wished to be,
>>> And maybe five others.  The candidate gamely waved
>>> Himself on, on to the next.  But it wasn’t clear
>>> How many people might have heard where it was
>>> That he was supposed to be.
>>>
>>> John F. Kennedy came out of University Hall
>>> Into the bright New England fall,
>>> After the Board of Overseers;
>>> I was leaving owl-eyed Sever,
>>> After Homeric Greek.
>>> He was areté and dios,
>>> Large, without a coat or hat:
>>> Turning toward us he made sure to say,
>>> In his give-and-take way,
>>> "I’ve been looking at your grades."
>>> (Mine were mired at Troy.)
>>>
>>> LBJ roared vaingloriously down a wide Manhattan avenue,
>>> Top down, standing up, hair slicked back, sirens flying,
>>> Like a Flying Dutchman in a Batmobile,
>>> That black Cadillac charger
>>> Bolting into irrelevance.
>>>
>>> I liked the President in his sweater on TV:  Jimmy Cardigan.
>>> He was hostage to more than oil,
>>> But he sometimes made a point:
>>> "Inflation is like watching an event
>>> Where everyone in the audience wants to see better,
>>> So they all start standing up."  He was five foot eight.
>>>
>>> My children can see nearly all of this
>>> On endless instant replay.
>>> They scarcely need a parent’s anecdotage
>>> To lift them up.
>>>
>>> .)
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Jane Hedley
>>>>
>>>> James C. Nohrnberg wrote:
>>>>> I don't say the student actually has had the more difficult thought 
>>>>> in mind, or known both discourses, only that these things were 
>>>>> implicit in the language he/she ended up using, and which he or she 
>>>>> may have mismanaged to telling effect ("dozing wit"):  guilelessly 
>>>>> unsuspecting, for the most part, the possible relevance (or violent 
>>>>> questioning or flouting of usage), like Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop, 
>>>>> or earlier, Shakespeare's Dogberry.  But we remember these mistakes 
>>>>> because we suspect that they are not altogether mistakes, but 
>>>>> potentially ingenious in either how wrong they are, or how right: 
>>>>> like new inventions, striking interferances of one word with 
>>>>> another one seemingly phonetically twinned with it, or like verbal 
>>>>> experiments serving as probes, or as ironic deconstructions.  Of 
>>>>> course the question raised is perhaps being treated in Pyramus and 
>>>>> Thisbe in Midsummer Night's Dream, where Theseus is charitable to 
>>>>> those bent on entertaining and honoring him, and Hippolyta reacts 
>>>>> somewhat snobishly to the earnest bumpkins and thickskins who 
>>>>> unkowingly mangle the proper words:
>>>>>
>>>>> Thes.  The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are not 
>>>>> worse, if imagination amend them.
>>>>>
>>>>> Hipp.  If must be your imagination, then, not theirs.   (V.i.18)
>>>>>
>>>>> -- But the last words in the play are therefore critical:  "restore 
>>>>> amends." E.g.:
>>>>>
>>>>>  
>>>>> "It's a doggie dog world out there!"  (I.e., it's a world gone to 
>>>>> the dogs, good dogs or bad dogs.)
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> 'This idea "has subcutaneously seeped into the minds of African
>>>>> Americans today."'  (I.e., 'I may have a subconscious problem with 
>>>>> dark-skinned people.')
>>>>>
>>>>>   "... or in lumens terms,..."   (This one I don't get, or only 
>>>>> dimly:  is it "luminous/human terms"?)
>>>>>
>>>>> 'The Prioress' Tale is a satire of "such violently anti-semantic
>>>>> attitudes."'  (This one almost declares 'I have trouble with some 
>>>>> big words that seem suspiciously like other ones.")
>>>>>  
>>>>> "When I was a baby still in the wound..."  (This one is two 
>>>>> discourses, or perhaps three:  babe in the woods / babe in the womb 
>>>>> / babe causing an injury to the mother.)
>>>>>
>>>>> "If I put my mine on what I am doing and consecrate, I can do a better
>>>>>  job on writting."  (This one may perhaps possess -- "mine/mind" -- 
>>>>> a vocation as a priest, and perhaps takes us from script to 
>>>>> scripture.  Words sufficiently intensely attended to do seem 
>>>>> consecrated.)
>>>>>  
>>>>> "This play is actually quit entertaining and mind-bottling."   
>>>>> ('This play quit entertaining me quite early, but I've nonetheless 
>>>>> gotten trapped in it.')
>>>>>  
>>>>>  "... we see this when Hamlet says: You cannot, sir, take from me
>>>>> anything that I will more willingly party withall."  (This gets at 
>>>>> something Hamlet is to say later -- in so many words -- that the 
>>>>> party ends, so far as you are concerned, whenever it is that you 
>>>>> leave it, and stop partying.)
>>>>>
>>>>>  "The old woman in the Wife of Bath's tale is actually kind and
>>>>> genital..."  (The older meaning of 'kind' [gens] sticks out here; 
>>>>> the phrase "kind and genital" has got to be in Finnegans Wake 
>>>>> somewhere.)
>>>>>
>>>>> My dear typist, not always able to read my handwriting, guessed the 
>>>>> title Fables of Green Fields for Tables of Green Fields, and I 
>>>>> stuck to it.  Restore amends.
>>>>>  
>>>>> -- Jim N.
>>>>>  
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Perhaps the question is not really the blooper's source, but it's
>>>>>>> interest, its tellingness, insofar as the blooper might also be 
>>>>>>> said to have
>>>>>>> let a cat out of a bag.  Interest actually means, here, 
>>>>>>> relevance, or stake
>>>>>>> in meaning.  The interference of the "mis-take" or "mis-stake" 
>>>>>>> seems to
>>>>>>> emerge through the dozing wit of 'bloopers' that somehow seem made
>>>>>>> accidentally on purpose, i.e, that are really metaphors, 
>>>>>>> translations
>>>>>>> between different discourses: as in the example of the student who
>>>>>>> substituted the first act of Hamlet for that of Othello.  For 
>>>>>>> both tragic
>>>>>>> protagonists want proof.  If Hamlet had been an Othello, there 
>>>>>>> would have
>>>>>>> been no second act of Hamlet, Claudius wouldn't have stood much 
>>>>>>> of a chance;
>>>>>>> if Othello had been a Hamlet, Desdemona would have had a rather 
>>>>>>> better one.
>>>>>>>  Cleopatra's "naval" looks like both her navy in the discourse of 
>>>>>>> battle,
>>>>>>> and her navel in the discourse of bedrooms.  As that example 
>>>>>>> shows, the kind
>>>>>>> of condensation of two discourses we are talking about is 
>>>>>>> regularly achieved
>>>>>>> in the pun. For the mind that is allegorically or hermeneutically 
>>>>>>> inclined,
>>>>>>> a pun is a more difficult thought that has found a way of 
>>>>>>> breaking through
>>>>>>> or condensing itself with a less difficult or familiar thought:  
>>>>>>> the pun is
>>>>>>> a primitive form of polysemy.  For the rationalist, of course, 
>>>>>>> puns are
>>>>>>> merely discourse behaving badly, and turning thought -- that is, its
>>>>>>> linguistic distinctions and discriminations -- back into static 
>>>>>>> or noise,
>>>>>>> that is, back into the babble they have originally emerged from.  
>>>>>>> The
>>>>>>> 'telling' blooper is the telltale one that makes one laugh, but 
>>>>>>> then causes
>>>>>>> us to look again.  -- Jim N.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>>> James Nohrnberg
>>>>> Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
>>>>> Univ. of Virginia
>>>>> P.O Box 400121
>>>>> Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
>>>
>>> [log in to unmask]
>>> James Nohrnberg
>>> Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
>>> Univ. of Virginia
>>> P.O Box 400121
>>> Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
> 
> [log in to unmask]
> James Nohrnberg
> Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
> Univ. of Virginia
> P.O Box 400121
> Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121