This Is America, When Ordering Please Speak English

The Cheesesteak Sticker

It's been making the news rounds recently that Joey Vento who has a cheesesteak joint in Philadelphia put up a sign saying "This is America. When Ordering Please Speak English". Sure, you can look at the political issues of this, but we're here to look at words and what they mean about people.

The phrasing has been getting people's dander up, and the question is not only why but what's behind it.

The sticker has two parts, and the first one isn't really necessary. Mr. Vento could have easily phrased his sticker without it: "When Ordering Please Speak English".

Or he could have put a totally different first part to the sticker, like "Be Kind, When Ordering Please Speak English", or "Be Civil, When Ordering Please Speak English". He probably would have gotten better results, and certainly not have gotten on anyone's bad side.

Which means that the phrasing is not there to get people to speak English when ordering. The phrasing is not there to get people to comply with the idea it seems to suggest. Which means that the sticker was not put there to get people to cooperate. It was put there for a different reason.

"What Is It?"

In Storytellers we try to do what actors and directors and playwrights in the theater usually do. They look at human behavior that seems obvious and ask: "What is it? What is it really?"

A while ago, we talked about "what is it really" when people in an argument say things like: "I believe in the United States of America". We came to the conclusion that people who invoke this kind of argument care more about being right than anything else. You can't say that and be wrong. No one can tell you you're wrong when you say "I believe in the United States of America!" or "I support the troops!". And of course it has the added advantage of automatically putting the person you're speaking to on the wrong side of the argument.

But the sticker says something slightly different. "This is America. When Ordering Please Speak English". What is it? What is it really?

It seems, at least to me, that only a person who needs a lot of positive feedback from anyone, even strangers, a person who needs a lot of pats on the back, a person who needs to constantly be told how right and okay he is, would put up a sticker with that phrasing. If you don't see why, think about it about it backwards. Start off imagining a person who constantly needs positive feedback, who needs to be patted on the back by strangers. Then ask yourself, would that person not put out a sticker that says this? Would the sticker not then invoke exactly that kind of response?

The reason we do things? It's rarely the principle; it's almost always personal.

Patriotism

Speaking of patriotism, check out our old post about the patriotic and pro-military Donald P. Bellisario. We explored the idea that patriotism, as it is usually practiced now, has both limits and borders. Honor and truth have no limits and no borders.

The Comedy-Off: Colbert

The Comedy-Off

After posting the last entry about humorous writing and timing, one Nir Yaniv asked me why I didn’t use excerpts from more popular sources, like Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. I said that I wanted to quote from things that the readers are less likely to have read, something that will feel new. But, I added, why don’t you do it on your blog? As the conversation continued, we decided to have a comedy-off. Here’s his first salvo.

So far there are only three rules:

1. Entries must be in English, so that both our readers can enjoy them.

2. There must be at least 4-5 excerpts. Anything less is cheating.

3. The loser’s name starts with ‘N’.

More rules may crop up as the game continues.

Timing

What Jerome K. Jerome did in the excerpts Nir brought is build a comic situation, which certainly requires great timing. The point in the last entry in Storytellers, though, was about a different sort of timing.

We’re going to get to it in a roundabout way.

Laughter, like humor, is a sure-fire way to weed the more intelligent from the less intelligent. This is how laughter does it: Laughter almost always starts off with a powerful ‘ha’, in which our diaphragm (read: stomach) hits the bottom of our lungs. Laughter clearly marks the milli-second you got the joke. There is never a doubt about who laughed first, who laughed second, and who laughed last if at all. Laughter shows us how fast someone understood something.

In the Jack Vance and Dorothy Parker excerpts I’ve quoted in the last post, everyone who does laugh (not everyone will laugh) laughs at the same time at the same word. To do that, the author needs to set up one set of expectations in a very clear way and then offset it in a surgically-precise manner to produce the same result in everyone’s brain with one word. Try reading those excerpts again, and see how you’re always surprised at the same spot and want to laugh at the same spot. Check out if you can see how we were set up one way then taken another.

In the Jerome K. Jerome excerpts, meanwhile, it’s the situation that’s comical. The comic situation builds and builds and becomes more and more absurd, and therefore more and more funny. People who listen to or read it will start laughing at different spots and their laughter will keep on rolling as the situation grows more comical.

“We’re at war, sir. How can you ask us to make sacrifices?”

Speaking of having one set of expectations, then being taken another way, there’s a subset of that category, in which the writer already knows what we think, so he doesn’t bother building up the premise, he just knocks it down. That is one neat trick, and one man and his writers do it time and time again on television.

Stephen Colbert

Colbert, in his program, The Colbert Report, makes it a point to again and again appear to say one thing but actually say another. He never tells you he doesn’t believe what he’s saying. He never tells you that what he’s saying is absurd. He is relying on the audience’s set of presumptions to already realize that he couldn’t possibly mean what he’s saying.

Here are a few examples:

“Folks, everywhere you look these days, there are signs our great American traditions are disappearing. Look at this,” he shows a newspaper headline, “ ‘The great American swing set is teetering’. The wear-a-helmet-first Gestapo would have you believing that playgrounds are dangerous. And they are. That’s exactly why we need them. To thin the herd.”

As before, explaining why something funny works really takes the punch of it. See if you can tell how he assumes you’re thinking one thing and preys upon it.

Here he continues his rant:

“Sadly enough, even the weather page is in a state of moral decay.” Colbert pulls out a colorful weather map from USA Today, filled with red zones, orange zones and red zones. “What’s wrong with red, white, and blue, USA Today? This rainbow weather map is just another example of the homo-meteorological agenda. Folks, I don’t care what their forecast is, I will not turn partly gay with a chance of a reach-around.”

Another time, he took on the policy of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’, by suggesting the Pentagon adopt an even stricter policy: “ ‘Don’t know, don’t think’. Under the new policy, it will be against regulations for a soldier to know what homosexuality is. If a fellow soldier tells you he’s gay, it’s your duty to assume he’s filled with joy. If you see two naked guys oiled up and rolling around, just assume they’re wrestling. And if someone starts soaping you up in the shower, say thank you and salute. Because the only way we can have a cohesive fighting force is if there is never a question about a comrade’s sexual orientation. And we can no longer count on gay soldiers refusing to answer the question we’re too afraid to ask.”

Colbert on competition:

“Competition improves everything. After Home Depot opened down the block, service at my local hardware store got a lot better!” He pauses a second, then feels a need to add, “Until it closed.”

Colbert takes on education:

“Oprah Winfrey recently spent over 40 million dollars to start a school in South Africa. She said Third World kids were more desperate to learn than our kids. Yes, Oprah, that’s exactly why we have to hold the Third World kids back!”

Later on, he adds:

“And, hey, don’t the liberals always say, ‘who are we to judge these people’? Maybe dysentery and guinea worms are part of their culture? I don’t know.”

Here Colbert takes a stand on capital punishment:

“Most disappointingly, my own Catholic Church is against capital punishment. Well, that’s pretty hypocritical considering they wouldn’t even have a religion if it weren’t for capital punishment.”

The danger, of course, in phrasing things like this is that some people will take you at your word. President Bush's people, for example, who invited Colbert to the Press Corps Dinner. Then again, maybe they were fooled by the red, white, and blue colors that pervade the show.

In a recent ‘meet the author’ that can be found somewhere in podcast-land, Colbert says that some of the people he grew up with tell him, Now we agree with what you’re saying.

On the other hand, of course, if you add ‘... Not’ at the end of every sentence, you won’t be as funny.

Over to you, Nir.

Some Dry Humor

Timing

Sometimes dissecting things that are funny takes the fun out of them. I wanted to talk about timing and how timing is not just something musicians or dancers or actors have. Timing is something writers have as well.

Here are a few examples of some very dry humor. We’re not going to talk about them, because that will take the fun out of everything. But, if you can, after you read each excerpt, think about the author’s timing.

Jack Vance

Here’s what you need to know about Jack Vance for the purposes of this article: He used to write about the far, far future, in which mankind populated galaxies, and each planet was a social framework with its own characteristics and its own subcultures, each also with its own unique social framework.

The first excerpt is from the novella Freitzke’s Return, which I found reprinted in the book called Galactic Effectuator. ‘Effectuator’ is to the denizens of the galaxy what ‘private investigator’ is to us. Here, our hero is hired to investigate a case in which, a-hem, well, it’s like this: The bad guy is a jealous man who can’t accept the smallest failure. When the client ends up marrying the woman the bad guy was interested in, the bad guy kidnaps the client, knocks him out, and operates on him. The client slowly begins to suspect that his sperm-making ‘apparatus’ has been replaced by the bad guy’s sperm-making ‘apparatus’. Thus, if the wife gets pregnant, she gets pregnant by the bad guy. The client hires our hero to find the bad guy and have his original ‘equipment’ re-placed.

That is neither here nor there, because the quote from the novella is Vance’s explanation, in a footnote, how the Arsh race, which is now slightly different from the human race, came into existence:

The legendary starmenter Yane Cargus contracted with the all-male fugitives. He agreed to deliver one hundred young females for a fee of five hundred red sarcenels, the sarcenel being a jewellike object taken from a Flamboyard’s sensorium. Cargus raided the Convent of the Divine Prisom at Blenny, on Lutus, capturing two hundred and thirty novitiates. Upon delivering his cargo, he required a thousand sarcenels or nothing, emphasizing the volume discount. The fugitives in their turn pointed out that sarcenels were rare, that the Flamboyards ferociously resisted attack, that, for eighty-six men, two hundred and thirty females were redundant by more than a factor of two, and, more importantly, that the females were members of that ill-favored and swarthy race known as Gettucks: not at all what the fugitives had in mind. In the ensuing fight, Yane Cargus took thirty-four wounds from the sneezewood lances, but miraculously survived. The fugitives acquired two hundred and thirty females free of charge, and the Arsh race came into existence.

Notice that part of what makes it funny is the fact that Vance borrows a set of phrases from one world and uses it in the context of another that has nothing to do with the first (“emphasizing the volume discount”, for example, has nothing to do with slavery or rape).

He does it again in the following two examples, from Night Lamp. Here a schoolboy and a schoolgirl are talking.

It was Tatninka, rather than Skirlet, who bore the news to Jaro. “Did you hear what Hanafer called you?”

“No.”

“He said you were a moop!”

“Oh? What’s that? Nothing good, I suspect.”

Tatninka giggled. “I forgot; you’re really off in the clouds, aren’t you? Well, then!” She recited a definition she had heard Hanafer use only the week before: “If you come upon a very timid nimp who wets the bed and wouldn’t say ‘peep’ to a pussycat—you have found a moop.”

Jaro sighed. “Very well; now I know.”

“Hmf. You’re not even angry,” said Taninka in disgust.

Jaro reflected. “Hanafer can be carried off by a big bird, for all I care. Otherwise, there is no return message.”

Later, his mother sees Jaro moping and gets to the bottom of things.

“That is not acceptable conduct, and I shall have a word with his mother.”

“No!” cried Jaro in panic. “I don’t care what Hanafer thinks! If you complain to his mother, everyone will laugh at me!”

Althea knew that he was right. “Then you’ll just have to take Hanafer aside and explain in a nice way that you mean him no harm and that he has no reason to call you names.”

Jaro nodded. “I may do just that—after punching his head to attract attention.”

Of course, on different matters, the mother and the father, have their own disagreements.

From the first Hilyer had felt deeply suspicious of Maihac. When Althea scoffed, Hilyer claimed darkly that his instincts were never wrong. He felt that Maihac, if not a blackguard had much to hide, to which Althea said: “Oh piffle. Everyone has something to hide.”

Hilyer started to declare, “Not I!” in a decisive voice, then thought of one or two shrouded episodes in his past and merely gave a noncommittal grunt.

Dorothy Parker

In a collection of her book reviews which I found in The Penguin Dorothy Parker, she reviews a book by one Margot Asquith. It’s called Re-enter Margot Asquith – A Masterpiece from the French, dated October 22, 1927.

I think it must be pleasanter to be Margot Asquith than to be any other living human being; and this is no matter of snap judgment on my part, for I have given long and envious thought to the desirability of being Charles A. Levine. But the lady seems to have even more self-assurance than has the argumentative birdman. Her perfect confidence in herself is a thing to which monuments should be erected; hers is a poise that ought to be on display in the British Museum. The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

In another review, The Professor Goes In for Sweetness and Light, dated November 5, 1927, she reviews a book by Professor Phelps in which he gives us his wisdom on the key to happiness. She is now in the middle of quoting from the beginning of the book regarding the definition of happiness.

We might just as well get on along to the next statement, which goes like this: “One of the best” (we are still on definitions of happiness) “was given in my Senior year at college by Professor Timothy Dwight: ‘The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.’” Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzsche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Poe. One wonders, with hungry curiosity, what were some of the other definitions that Professor Phelps chucked aside in order to give preference to this one.

The Point

The point? The point is that writers have timing. That includes authors of prose, whose work is not meant to be read aloud, not meant to be heard, and when read in one’s head is not read to a rhythm. There are still authors with perfect timing.

If you disagree, please read the excerpts again.

I reserve the right to bring more examples, and I hope you may feel like adding a few excerpts yourself in the comment, if you feel like sharing.

---

For more posts on humor, check out the one analyzing David E. Kelley's humor as well as the one that takes on racism. Then we've got some nice funny excerpts from Rescue Me and from the Gilmore Girls.

There's No Place Like Home

A small, small thought about the last line in the first part of Tin Man, where the land of Oz is now called 'The O.Z.' (pronounced 'Oh-zee').

The last line is delivered by the evil sorceress to this story's 'Dorothy' (called D.G.), after D.G. and her friends have been defeated: "Welcome back, little sister. There's no place like the O.Z."

Now, couldn't the last line have been: "Welcome to the O.Z., bitch. There's no place like home."

I mean, you get a two-for-one.

I'm just saying.