Tipping Point
Inside the twitterworld a few days ago I alluded to an old joke I half remembered. One of those sucker punch jokes referred to as Shaggy Dog stories. This one ended with the line "Transporting Dolphins across state lines for immoral Porpoises." The point of joke like this is to string the audience along, weave the story for several minutes before pulling the punch-line rip cord on them. I didn't remember it that well, so I thought I'd take a moment and draw up a blueprint of the elements. I remembered another as I thought about this on, and I heard a third just recently. Essentially these are all ad-lib performances with an emphasis on performance.
The Porpoise
There are actually two variants to this one, that I know. The first is "dolphins for immoral porpoises." The second is "dolphins for immortal porpoises." Both play on the similarity of the punch line to the language of the Mann Act. This made it a federal crime to to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes. It allowed the FBI to tackle mob prostitution rings. This will be funny only to people old enough to have taken in large amounts of the Untouchables, Dragnet, The FBI, and the like. The two versions require slightly different stories but many of the elements remain the same. The porpoises are at a research facility in Florida. The dolphins at any other aquarium or facility in any other state. Woods Hole, the Baltimore Aquarium, even in the wild. Naming specific facilities builds verisimilitude. One facility is trying to run a breeding program and it isn't working. In the first scenario the narrator emphases that the breeding isn't working because the porpoise are not mating with the special prepared local population, but the researchers have noticed they go after any and all bits of strange tail that swim by. The researchers need dolphins with a particular set of characteristics and these can only otherwise be supplied by animals the other facility can obtain. In this version the researchers are merely trying to breed clever or useful dolphins for the Navy or Seaworld perhaps. In the second scenario the researchers are trying a daring medical genetic breakthrough that would produce porpoises that could live for hundreds of years or longer, with the possibility that this could be extended to humans. This breeding will be the last critical step. Eventually after difficulties it is arranged to transport the dolphins by truck down to Florida, they set off and everything looks good, but they are arrested by the Pennsylvania State Police as they cross over from New Jersey. Why? -- transporting dolphins across state lines for Immortal / Immoral porpoises.
The Sultan's Yee The next story involves a British expedition in a Bring 'em back alive or Indiana Jones mode. They have gone to and through the Atlas mountains and beyond hunting the legendary flame-plumaged desert cockatoo, the Sultan's Yee. This is the least well known and difficult to obtain of the Yee Cockatoos They finally obtain one and start back driving through the mountains along winding narrow roads cut into sheer cliff faces. At some point the truck the caged bird is in develops a flat tire or some other difficulty and it becomes necessary to jack the truck up on one side. The repairs are almost complete when the truck slips off the jack and tips over the cliff rolling over and over hundreds of feet down to the bottom. The two heads of the expedition rush to the edge and look over. The truck has landed upright and is still in one piece. One of the men says to the other (perhaps one should have an Australian accent, the other British) "Do you suppose the bird is all right?" The other says "I don't know, it's a long way to tip a rare yee" Possibly I learned both these preceding stories from one of my high school teachers, (Capt.) Jack Curboy, who somehow is one of the people who turns up on my facebook page.
Jehovah and Finnegan
This one is something I heard on the radio a couple of weeks ago. I think it best if I provide a link to the archive and let the story tell itself. This was on WFMU dj Doug Schulkind's World Series baseball special WFMU RADIO: Give the Drummer Some 11/02/10. The piece is by Lord Buckley from a WERE-FM aircheck
(Produced by Bill Randle 1957) and is called Jehovah and Finnegan. It starts at the 13:40 mark sharp in the archive, you'll have to advance the slider manually. Lord Buckley, Lord Buckley - Wikipedia, I should note died fifty years ago this week, 12 November 1960. Less than a month after his Cabaret Card was churlishly pulled leaving him essentially unable to earn a living.
The coal plant
I also have one of my own which is still a work in progress, and is a homage to the Brothers Marx. There is a town a remote town on a river a few miles up from a rocky mountainous seacoast. They have their own coal burning power plant and there is a problem. The bridge into town has washed away and they can't pay for a new one. The coal truck comes across that bridge to get to the power plant, it is the only road into town. Faced with this emergency as winter approaches they initiate some studies and hold a fractious town meeting to discuss them. The main plan is to dredge the river from the coast so they can bring a coal barge up to the plant; however their environment impact study shows this will overwhelm the flow of the river and bring salt water and tides up past the town, essentially turning their little river into an arm of the ocean. This will have a desultory effect on several species in the local ecosystem, but the state government will pay for it. At one point a man gets up and says "My cousin drives trucks for a contractor in Afghanistan. They don't have bridges over there, and think nothing about driving trucks through water lots deeper than the spot where the bridge stood. You have to rig the trucks up a bit, bigger tires, shocks, re-jigger the engine - to get the battery and electrics to stay above the water. It isn't cheap but it's doable. It's like winterizing a house, we riverize that old Ford truck we use, it'll be full of coal it ain't going to float away." The debate continues for another several hours until two in the morning. Finally the Mayor brings it to a vote. "All right people we have to decide: decide whether we are going to Fjord the river, or river the Ford!"
At this point I just want to add that there is an early teleplay, thought lost for years by, British Playwright Dennis Potter, BBC NEWS | Entertainment | 'Lost' Dennis Potter drama found. This is the man who wrote Pennies from Heaven and the Singing Detective. It is called Shaggy Dog and is about a man who tries to to tell a shaggy dog story during a job interview. Prevented by circumstance from ever getting to the punch line, he goes, at end, postal and kills everyone "The Company of Five" Shaggy Dog (TV episode 1968) - IMDb.
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