The Lawyer and The Mosquito

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Howdy, Grant. Hi, Martha. This is Jacob Williamson from Austin, Texas.

Hi, Jacob.

Hi, Jacob.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

How can we help?

Well, there is a type of joke, or maybe a joke structure, that seems to have been making the rounds lately on radio ads.

It might be a perception bias, but the joke might go something like, what’s the difference between a lawyer and a wolf?

One’s a ravenous predator that preys on the sick and the weak and the old and the dying, and the other’s a wolf.

If you’re doing it as an ad, and I’ll try to do the voice, what’s it like driving the new Sunday Omega 4 versus the other top-selling car?

One is a 3.6-liter V6-speed transmission, 360-degree moving object detection system, and built-in waffle iron sandwich grill, and the other is just a car.

So what I’m wondering is, what I learned from my English degree is that in rhetoric, there’s a word for everything, every turn of sentence structure or argument type.

So I’m wondering if there’s a word for this sort of bait-and-switch joke.

Well, the term I was going to use was bait-and-switch joke, actually.

Oh, what? That’s easy.

I don’t know that there’s anything more technical than that.

I mean, it’s sort of, Grant, a version of a paraprosodokian.

Are you familiar with that one, Jacob?

You mentioned it recently, but I don’t quite remember it.

Yeah, it comes from Greek words that mean contrary to expectations.

And it’s, you know, it’s lines like, I wonder why the baseball was getting bigger, and then it hit me.

Or Einstein developed a theory about space, and it was about time, too.

Which is, you know, oh, good, we got Grant on that one.

Well, hello. Hi, I’m here.

Yeah. So I would say it’s a version of a paraprosstoken, but bait and switch is the only term I’ve ever really seen for that.

And at a higher level, like a lot of jokes, what happens is at the very end of the joke, you are forced to reinterpret what you’ve just heard.

So it’s called a forced reinterpretation.

Forced reinterpretation.

Yeah, and so many kinds of humor and comedy fall into that.

And when you take joke writing classes, and they exist, or humor classes, if you’re a public speaker or a comedian or a script writer, they’ll talk to you about this, trying to find that pacing so that you force that reinterpretation at the right moment when your audience is best primed to laugh at what they’ve just come to understand.

Right, and the short, short story works like that, too.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

It’s a variety of parapro-stokean, that’s what I would say.

But you’re right, rhetorical terms exist for just about everything, don’t they?

Yeah, there’s always a wonderful Latinate word for just that turn of phrase.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, maybe some attorney listening knows this and will call us.

I just want more attorney jokes.

Okay, what’s the difference between a mosquito and a lawyer?

One is a blood-sucking parasite and the other is an insect.

I mean, you know, a little of that goes a long way, I think.

Yeah, it’s true.

Okay, well, thank you.

I appreciate it.

Sure, thanks, Jacob.

Okay, sure thing.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Grant, I have one more example of a bait-and-switch joke.

How about this one? You’ll appreciate it.

There are two novels that could change a bookish 14-year-old’s life, The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.

One is a childish fantasy that often engenders lifelong obsessions with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world.

The other, of course, involves orcs.

Okay.

Some people will find that funny.

I’ll buy that.

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