So, tonight I really truly finished my pragmatics assignment. And I suppose I ought to happy that my biggest problem these days seems to be finding interesting titles. I used to give my papers cool titles like "Did you say 'beets' or 'beats'?" and "From ignorance to expertise". Now those are intersting titles. But no, right now all I can come up with is the boring stuff that really ought to be in the subtitle. So for now, at least, my pragmatics paper has no better title than "Pragmatics and humor in an extract from The Jack Benny Program". How boring is that?! Doesn't exactly jump out at you and make you want to read it, huh? Sounds like "chloroform in print", to quote a famous American humorist (let's say ... 20 points for the person who said it, and another 10 for what they were referring to).
So, any ideas? Let me know. I'm getting desperate about this. Especially as I don't want to send two papers to UNT with my grad school application that have practically the same title.
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Mark Twain and Book of Mormon!! Is that 30 points for Paul??
Can you use one of Jack's jokes? I mean, if you were using Stan Frieberg (or whatever) you could use something like "What's That?" "French Hornes, Sir".
Oh wait, that's not a very good title. But anyway, the point is that you might be able to take one of the funny references from Jack's program (that you discuss in your essay) and use that for the title.
That is actually what I ended up doing. I had been trying to think of something like that for some time, and got frustrating that I couldn't come up with anything, which is when I wrote the post. Afterward, I decided to listen to the whole episode that I took the extract from, thinking that maybe if I just enjoyed it for what it is, without trying to analyze it, that I would be able to find something, and I did. It's not really *funny*, but it's much better than what I had before. It's now called "Making the best of an awkward situation: Pragmatic mechanisms of humor in an extract from The Jack Benny Program", in case anyone wanted to know.
Oh, and congrats on making it on the scoreboard, Paul. :) I'm still waiting for someone to answer the "J-E-L-L--OOO!" one, which I thought would be a little more obvious than it seems to be.
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