Yellow fingers: a call for orphaned humour.

We have been writing about the material basis for cultural praxis in an article now being revised for publication. The problem at hand is how we transmit/perform Tulādhar culture to/for our children as part of an extended family, but of course we’re not only Tulādhars from Kathmandu we’re also Douglases from California, who have and transmit particular cultural skills (like telling shaggy dog stories). That led me to watch Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure with Eleanor the other night. And that, in turn, bore fruit as a question, for which I gleefully beg responses.

What shaggy dog stories have lost their material basis?

Let me give an example. There is one excruciatingly long joke, whose punchline runs something like this: ‘I am arresting you for jumping State lions with young gulls for immoral porpoises’. That joke still works, if you can find anyone who will sit still long enough without actually suffering from such severe cognitive deficit that they don’t get the joke.

However, there is another joke, whose punchline is (was?): ‘Let your Page do the walking through the Yellow Fingers!’. This joke no longer makes sense, I suspect, as the physical Yellow Pages have long since become a weirdly obsolete thing that occasionally resurfaces if a local company tries to produce a physical phonebook, so no one needs a catchy slogan that portrays the Yellow Pages as the effortless alternative to (gasp!) walking around asking people if there is a cobbler in the area.

So, too, the brilliant stunt of tearing a phonebook in half no longer impresses anyone. (Hint: you baked it until brittle.)

Submit your answers, please!