Nokamura
n.— «“A Nokamura”: When a large number of jokes are all predicated on a single, earlier joke. This can entail great risk. Based on a Cheers episode. A day-player was named “Nokamura.” A vast chunk of the second act’s jokes were based on people mispronouncing, repeating, etc. the name “Nokamura.” But the problem was, on tape night—the first mention of “Nokamura” didn’t get a laugh. This meant the rest of the jokes wouldn’t work. The rest of the show was shanked.…(Note: We have recent e-mails suggesting the origin of this term was actually The Bob Newhart Show. We are investigating)» —“Writing: Jargon Preservation” by John Rogers Kung Fu Monkey Apr. 15, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been busy writing sequels to famous novels inspired by changing the tense of verbs in their titles. For example, what might be his new iteration of a classic Gabriel García Márquez tale about two romantic youths who became...