single word requests - Is there a term for the type of misleading joke comedians such as Stephen Colbert often use?

The Late Show host, Stephen Colbert (an American talk show host, don't mind that, just think of him as some random guy you don't have to care about) quite often uses a type of joke whereby he describes one thing to mislead you, then name the other thing that you've thought the preceding description described but in fact didn't. For example:

Is there a term for this kind of joke?

Answer

On Chris Head's site, a page called "Stand-up Comedy Fundamentals: Part 2, Misdirection" (July 28, 2016) uses the term misdirection for this type of set-up-based joke:

Having explored set-up/ payoff in the first blog we now turn out attention to a particular kind of set-up/ payoff: misdirection. I would unconsciously have laughed at misdirection for years, but I first became consciously aware of it watching Have I Got News For You in the 90s. (A formative decade for me.) I didn't yet have a word for it, but I began to notice that host Angus Deayton would often make the audience assume he was talking about one news story and then, at the last moment, would reveal he was talking about another.

...

Once I had picked up on the technique I began to notice it everywhere. But I didn’t have a word for it until I read veteran US stand-up coach Greg Dean’s book [Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy (2001)] and found that comedians (like magicians) used the word misdirection. Now, twenty years later, when teaching misdirection I often use a list of example gags that I compiled from a range of sources online. Three examples from the list will suffice here:

A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day. She said, "Can you spare a few minutes for Cancer Research?" I said, "All right, but we're not going to get much done." (Jimmy Carr)

I hate people who think it's clever to take drugs...like customs officers. (Jack Dee)

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is. (Ellen Degeneres)

Part of the funniness in all of these is the attitude, namely a flippant attitude to a cancer charity, a rebellious attitude to drugs and a couldn't-care attitude to the elderly. A student on the joke class once described the payoffs as transgressing social norms, and there is some truth in this.

Again though, thinking solely about the mechanism, in all three jokes the set-up creates assumptions. Greg Dean talks about the "target assumption". Then the payoff, the rug-pull as comedians sometimes say, subverts those assumptions.

As Head notes, misdirection is an established term in magicians' terminology. Don Wilmeth, The Language of American Popular Entertainment: A Glossary of Slang and Terminology (1981) has this entry for the term:

Misdirection: The magician's art of diverting the audience's attention from some secret maneuver or device involved in making an illusion or trick work.

The absence here of any discussion of misdirection in the context of stand-up comedy suggests that the term was not well-establish in that sense on 1981. Google books searches for "misdirection joke[s]" turn up eight verifiable matches (not including Greg Dean's book, which is not previewable). Seven of those are from 2010 or later, but one rather skimpy reference (previewable in snippet view only) is from 1981.

etymology - Origin of the greeting "Sweet dreams".

Does anybody know the etymology of the phrase "sweet dreams"? I tried googling but did not find anything satisfying. Is this a relatively new phrase of the modern world or has this been in use for some time? I think it's the latter one. Answer The OED has the interjection as "a farewell to someone going to bed" from the 20th century: 1908 Sears Roebuck Catal. 198/1 Tenor Solos..Good Bye, Sweet Dreams, Good Bye. But it goes back until at least the 19th and possibly 18th centuries. John Wolcot, writing under the pseudonym of Peter Pindar, used it in his poem "Orson and Ellen; A Legendary Tale" published in 1801: Also from 1801 in The infernal Quixote (Page 287) by Charles Lucas: In the March 1776 of The Universal Magazine was published "The Serenade. A Pastoral Tale. From the German of Gesner" , where the shepherd Daphnis watches over his beloved as she sleeps and sings: The same tale appears in 1776's as Idyl XI, " Daphnis ...

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...

What are the similarities between the relationships of the characters in The Outsiders and Romeo and Juliet?

At first glance, it might appear as if the characters in The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton and Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare do not have much in common; however, when one isolates the core of the conflicts, it becomes clear that the relationships in both stories are rooted in rivalry and secrecy. In both The Outsiders and Romeo and Juliet , an overarching theme is rivalry. While socioeconomic status separates the greasers from the Socs in The Outsiders , last names separates the Montagues from the Capulets, who appear to be relatively equal in terms of socioeconomic status. Due to these rivalries, there are instances of deadly interactions in both stories. In The Outsiders , Johnny kills Bob (whether his actions were justified or not is debatable). In Romeo and Juliet , Romeo kills Tybalt and Paris, and Tybalt kills Mercutio. These deaths have profound effects on the main characters. In Ponyboy's case, the Johnny's death and other events in the novel inspire h...

Notes

Search This Blog