Does the title mean anything to you?
The world is currently being taken in by Sasha Baron Cohen's Film - Borat: etc with a hideously long name. Without seeing the film, I can guarantee based on reviews and what I saw on The Ali G Show that the Borat film will derive it's humour from a few main sources, none of which I will divulge here.
The question then is what do I find inherantly funny. The answer surprisingly is mainly in the realms of innuendo.
See what I did with that one statement? Immediately one half of the audience reading this will have turned their minds immediately to smut; that's the beauty of innuendo. Innuendo relys on an allusion being made to something without saying what that something is. You people should get your mind out of the gutter.
The reason I make mention of this is partly due to the fact that I happen to prefer radio to television as a medium. Radio requires by the very nature of the beast that the people delivering the comedy have to create the word pictures and let the dear listener produce all sorts of things in their imagination.
In The Goon Show, some of the sound effects we are told of include Eccles driving a wall down the street or the entrance of Bloodnok with the sound of a chicken and some remark like "I must get that looked at", the innuendo produced is virtually impossible to actually imagine what the scene might look like.
In the antidote to panel games I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, this concept is taken to several extremes at once. Chairman Humphrey Littleton will at the end of his opening monologue usually make some reference about the lovely and sexy Samantha getting ready to score on the desk with him during the show. This is a piece of radio innuendo at its finest.
1. The double entendre of Samantha getting ready to "score on the desk"
2. That Humphrey Littleton is now 85 years old and adopts a persona on the show of deadpan, apathetic, disgruntled and occasionally bewildered style of chairmanship.
3. The actual fact Samantha who is frequently described in bawdy near-the-knuckle terms, does not actually exist.
Another few features of Clue is references to the Laser-Display Board or some other high-tech device when clearly the BBC would never fund such a thing.
One of the greatest examples of innuendo is in the film Duel. People find this film irritating because they never ever see the truck driver or find out his intentions are; yet this is the point of the film: to play on people's emotions to make them annoyed.
Frequently in court and parliament where the rules of etiquette demand dignity, you'll hear people speak of "my learned friends" which implies that such a person they actually think is stupid, and that in reality they're actually veiled enemies.
Innuendo is the art of making people imagine something without actually telling them what to imagine. It's a step above sarcasm, and possibly one below surrealism. A lady walked up to a bar and asked the barman for a Double Entendre, so he gave her one. You people should get your mind back in the gutter now.
No comments:
Post a Comment