About

Welcome to MADDOGS&ENGLISH. The idea for the comic is very simple – English is a strange language where we communicate things which could be interpreted in completely different ways.

It may seem disingenious to take comedy too seriously, but that’s exactly what I’m about to do. What I’ve written below amounts to a sort of essay-in-progress about how patterns in English make for “funny” situations like those you see in MADDOGS&ENGLISH. Feel to browse down in the following headings.

1 The inspiration for the comic – Gary Larson, the Two Ronnies and Victor Borge.

2 The theoretical bit – why we find things funny (maybe).

3 Who writes MADDOGS&ENGLISH?

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1 The inspiration for the comic – Gary Larson, the Two Ronnies and Victor Borge.

English is a funny old language and I guess comedians, writers and cartoonists have played around with English’s loopy nether regions for years.

In terms of MADDOGS&ENGLISH, the direct inspiration comes from Gary Larson’s one-panel syndicated cartoon the Far Side. He had an innate ability to notice some of the surreal and topsy-turvy language that we take for granted in English. The following Far Side cartoon is an example of exactly what MADDOGS&ENGLISH is trying to do. It plays with the idea that “threatening” is a word that can be used to describe storm clouds OR how one person behaves towards another.

Equally, this popular T-shirt design does the same thing.

Both the examples of Larson and the T-shirt above are instances of homographs and homophones – words , respectively, written the same and sounding the same when spoken which have different meanings. Or, to put it differently, words where confusion is inherent because various generally related, occasionally opposing, meanings exist in the same lexical pattern.

Similarly, this confusion exists in idioms – phrases where the separate meanings of words cannot help you interpet an overall alternative meaning. For example, he kicked the bucket = he died. Or, the achilles heal of so many students of English, phrasal verbs – normally a verb and a preposition together which create new meanings. For example of a possible scenario of confusion: the plane took off / the boy took off his shirt. Both sentences revolve around the verb “took” and preposition “off” but have nothing to do with each other.

In spoken English the confusion increases because we aren’t blessed with the spelling of words to help us. This gives rise to a type of homophone called an oronym – combinations of words which when said together generate various meanings. For example, ice cream / I scream or grey tapes / great apes.

The classic comedy example of this must be The Two Ronnies Four Candles sketch. The transcript for the sketch is here and is a video of it pulled from YouTube:

The Two Ronnies frequently experimented with the English language, in particular in Swedish Made Simple, Hieroglyphics, News at Ton, Round of Drinks (my favourite) and Pismronunciation. If you like this sort of thing, I recommend watching every one of them, although the last one is just the script – I couldn’t find an online video.

Another hero of experimenting in English isn’t English, he’s Danish. The late great Victor Borge, concert pianist and comedy genius also played around with the English language, in particular in Phonetic Pronunciation and, below, in Inflationary Language – a bizarre invention of Borge’s where every mention of a number in a word is increased by one (before = befive, wonderful = twoderful). Generally, when I’ve shown this to students of English the reaction has been “why?” but I find it hilarious.

The ‘uninflated’ script for the sketch is available here.

There are other interesting patterns in English that produce comical moments. Wikipedia has a good series of articles about them. For example:

Eggcorn – replacing a word or phrase with a more modern or more common alternative in the speaker’s dialect. For example: Old-timers disease (instead of Altzeihmers disease)

Holorime – like an oronym but even longer.

Malapropisms – replacing a word for another with a similar sound, usually to comic effect. For example: What are you incinerating? (instead of insinuating?)

Mondegreens – a mis-heard section of prose or song. The original example: And lady Mondegreen (instead of And laid him on the green).

Spoonerisms – named after Rev Spooner who lived in the C19th, a Spoonerism is a mistake made by swapping vowels, consonants or morphemes in the same sentence to create new meanings. For example: crate of plums, plate of crumbs.

The links to those articles will lead you to many, many more…

Related to all this, I recommend seeing also this famous poem on problems in pronouncing English and scroll to the end of my friend Ross Wintle’s blog entry for a good piece on how tough English can be to pronounce correctly based on the odd way we spell things.

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2. The theoretical bit – why we find things funny (maybe).

What makes the comical creations of the guys mentioned above “funny”?

Basically, the flexibility inherent within the English language makes it possible for several meanings to be interpreted from the same sentence. Gerry T.M. Altmann, a pscyho-linguist puts it this way:

“It is true that individual words within a sentence can often have more than one interpretation… (‘flies’ as a noun or as a verb, for instance). But there are many cases where the words can be totally unambigious, and yet we still have to figure out which of several grammatical interpretations is the right one. Eating pizza, with one’s family or with one’s fingers, is a case in point. The grammar of English permits whatever is in the position after ‘with’ to be assigned a variety of roles…”, The Ascent of Babal: An exploration of language, mind, and understanding (Oxford: 2000, p.87).

In a fragment of a second, often before the speaker has even finished the word, our brain flicks through our mental lexicon to decide the most suitable interpretation given all other information. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Altmann explains how the phrase “Time flies like an arrow” has at least 50 interpretations when read. For example, ‘flies’ could mean a) small bugs b) the verb to fly c) flies as in a zipper on trousers. And ‘like’ could mean a) similar to or b) admire etc. etc. If the sentence was spoken our brains would have to sift through up to 180 different interpretations based on the order of the sounds we hear and not how words are spelt. For example, is it a) like an arrow b) liken arrow c) lie can arrow etc. etc.?

The crazy thing, according to Altmann, is that our brian has no way of choosing the correct option other than to process all varients in quick and rapid succession. It then reduces the options down to the most plausible which it feeds to our consciousness as the one we “think”. Somehow, it’s funny to us if our brains deduce the expected meaning and then are forced to go back and rifle through the other options to find an unexpected avenue in our brain’s network of neurons. This is probably what happens when we hear a joke based on a play of words. So, as in the example above, when we hear “Jesus saves” our brain chooses the interpretation that seems most plausible based on previous experience – the religious meaning of Jesus offering salvation. When the picture accompanying the words doesn’t fit that interpretation our brain backtracks and looks for other meanings for “saves”, in this case, as in what a keeper does in ice hockey which fits with the diagram. The effect is even more compelling as Jesus is generally associated with sacred and religious areas of language and not popular culture or sport. Oddly, this theory seems to suggest that our brains have ALREADY prcoessed the idea for the joke but didn’t register it as a plausible interpretation. In other words, the joke always existed in our heads but we never “thought” it. This mini-jam inside our skulls, where our brains are forced to consider and accept a solution that was at first rejected, somehow amuses us and produces the response of a pleasing sensation often accompanied by a smile, or possibly even laughter.

It may not be pretty, but that’s basically why we find something funny. It also explains a bit about why humour like this is difficult (but not impossible) for non-native speakers to appreciate. Our brain chooses the first best option based on experience. If a non-native speaker has little experience of the uses of words his/her brain won’t know which is the correct interpretation to begin with, let alone the exact or multiple uses of the word in question to go back to. That is to say, the process of discovering something is funny is muddled.

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3. Who writes MADDOGS&ENGLISH?

My name is Dave Maclure and I’m an English teacher in Brazil. I write a blog about my life here called Maps and Legends and I have a teacher blog too. Its too much effort to draw comics by hand and upload them so I just generate the ones on here quickly on the site toondoo.com. I upload a newone to this site every Monday.

I’ve occasionally used MADDOGS&ENGLISH in my lessons, but with higher level students of English trying to understand a particular language point (phrasal verbs or idioms etc.). I’ve generally found most of my students think this site is pretty strange and don’t really get it, but that says more about my warped sense of humour than their inability to understand English.

Anyway, please enjoy. If you have ideas for lesson plans, comments, corrections, ideas, post them below. I’m happy for people to use MADDOGS&ENGLISH for any purpose, just please cite this website when you do.

Laters,

DM