With mirth laughter let old wrinkles come.

Ladies and gents, hello, greetings, salutations and "how's your mom?"

It is a cross-cultural characteristic of humans that we love to laugh. Varying cultures have subtle nuances to forms of humor, however - some prefer sarcasm, others slapstick, still others practical jokes.

My friend in Native American studies at UCF told me European settlers slaughtered a group of Native Americans because, in the latter's culture, one of their most beloved jokes was to steal something from a friend and then wait for him to slink to the thief's house, tail between his legs, and to ask for it back.

The Europeans neither knew nor thought it was a joke, and met the "crime" with force.

Which, despite the subject, is not funny at all.

With different types of humor in mind, today's word refers to a device favored by many (especially British) comedians for how it defies expectations: the paraprosdokian.

Parsed into its Greek roots, it means "before" (para-) "expectation." The sentence's second part causes the listener or reader to reframe the first part of the second in a new, unexpected context.

One of my favorite examples:

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx

If a rhetorician or comedian should choose to be further fancier, the second part of a paraprosdokian can play on the double meaning of a word or phrase in the first part. This specific device is called a syllepsis.

Example here as well, this time from Cecily in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest:

" 'Oh, flowers are as common here, Miss Fairfax, as people are in London.' "

No wonder the lady-folk fawn all over Oscar. His words are honeyed silver.



I am not liable for any horribly botched attempts to impress women through the use of paraprosdokians, but if you should experience such misfortune, I would love to hear about it. I promise not to laugh at you.*



Information purloined from http://www.socyberty.com/Languages/In-Pursuit-of-the-Perfect-Paraprosdokian.177257 and http://literaryzone.com/?p=146

* - to your face