That’s not what I was asking!

[rivkat]

Help me name this trope: My favorite type of joke in the world has the following structure:

Peggy Noonan, stalling for time in answering a question and pointing to one of the portraits of luminaries lining the room in which she is debating: “Why is [noted conservative and killjoy] Bob Bork smiling down at us?”

Barney Frank, immediately: “Because it’s a painting and not a photograph.”

Funny because he's ignoring the meaning of the question, which is "why is there a picture of Bob Bork in this room?"

Or, in astolat’s Looking Glass Country:

“… I've had a good working relationship with Arthur [aka undersea king Aquaman] in my universe. I wouldn't mind re-establishing contact."

"Are you kidding me?" Clark said. "I don't have a good working relationship with—did you just call him Arthur?"

"Is his name different here?" Lex asked, and sipped his coffee.

Is it just a flouting of Grice’s Maxims, especially relevance?  Or is there some more specific name for the play on meaning at issue?

Comments

[resonant]

I wasn't familiar with Grice's Maxims, but it seems to me that they explain pretty much all of the 30% of humor that doesn't involve banana peels and/or testicle damage.

But your favorite humor trope is subtly different from mine, which goes:

Two racehorses are boasting. The first one says, "I can run so fast that the sun seems to go backwards." The second one says, "That's nothing. I can run so fast that the clock seems to pause between the Tick and the Tock." A passing greyhound says, "You think that's fast? I can run so fast that when I'm done with the race, it's the previous day."

The first racehorse says to the second one: "Holy shit! A talking dog!"

Or, a more concise real-life example:

My father-in-law, the first time I meet him: "My other son lives in Nevada."
Me: "Oh, I'll be flying right over Nevada on the way home. I'll wave at him."
My father-in-law: "You won't be able to see him. He's too short."

I've never been able to pin that one down, either, beyond "missing the point."

[rivkat]

Yeah, that is a slightly different form--I like the wordplay aspects, whereas your joke performs the same maneuver on the situation, it seems to me. Surely someone, somewhere, has cataloged this?

[resonant]

Actually it occurs to me that mine gets its humor more or less from a violation of an instruction that the spouse once saw on a standardized test:

"Answer the question asked, and not another question."

[rivkat]

Yes, that's mine too! And I do love the exchange between Sam and CJ on The West Wing:

Sam Seaborn: Where'd you get the bathrobe?
Carol Fitzpatrick: The gym.
Sam Seaborn: There are bathrobes at the gym?
CJ: In the women's locker room.
Sam Seaborn: But not the men's.
CJ: Yeah.
Sam Seaborn: Now, that's outrageous. There's a thousand men working here and 50 women.
CJ: Yeah, and it's the bathrobes that's outrageous.

[seperis]

While I know, in theory, that textual and conversational humor have formal names, it did not occur to me that was something fun I could do in wikipedia, so thanks, I'll be there all night following internal links and end up re-reading The Ring trilogy plot summaries again.

For what it's worth, your examples seem different to me, though this may come from the complexity behind each answer; the second feels literal, with the intent of the question being deliberately ignored to give a technically correct answer. It also doesn't require specific knowledge of circumstances to make it funny. Even without that, the reader can tell the indirect answer Lex gave does not match the question Clark was asking in spirit and that is always funny.

The first feels more layered, since it's a literal interpretation of a subjective answer and also requires, I think, knowledge of why that answer would be funny, like an open in-joke. Granted, I could be overthinking this, but it feels like Bob Bork context would be needed, not to recognize it as humor, but to find it funny.

Because I am here, my favorite is a conversation that on the surface seems that both participants believe they understand each other until one says something to show it went off the rails dramatically very early on, while the reader from the beginning is aware that one of them is misinterpreting it but not which until the end. Similar to your first example, but neither participant is aware that the answers don't match intent. I have no idea what it's called, but like someone saying 'bears' for no reason, I laugh every time.

It's a very specialized taste, I admit.

[rivkat]

I agree that Bob Bork knowledge helps with the first, but I think it's the same joke--that is, what Noonan was clearly asking was, "why is there a picture of Bob Bork in this room?" And in both cases the response was to misinterpret deliberately--answer "why is Bob Bork smiling" instead of "why is Bob Bork smiling," compared to answering Clark's question, which is really "are you on a first-name basis with Aquaman?" They're both literal intepretations, if literalism included no comprehension of ordinary conversation; they're both funny because of the combination of literalism--they didn't do Alice in Wonderland/Bill Clinton style redefinition of terms--with flagrant refusal to respect the intent of the question.

What are your favorite examples of the dual conversation? Sounds funny, but I'm not sure I know any offhand.

[alixtii]

The first joke makes a whole lot more sense to me now that you've explained it.

[rivkat]

Maybe I should add some background!

[seperis]

You would ask that. I went looking and I can't find what I'm looking for because the universe hates me. It's a modified version of the French farce, when one character is trying to tell another character about something and due to teh nature of the explanation, the second character is getting a radically different idea of what they are trying to talk about. The use of inappropriate metaphor helps.

[abbylee]

And for me it's the second one that needed the explanation. I totally thought I had missed a Smallville/Merlin crossover.

[bliumchik]

Many jokes take their humour from the verbal equivalent of the picture of an old lady that suddenly becomes a young lady when you look at it the right way. That moment of realisation, that the lines you've been staring at can aggregate into a different pattern from the one you've been applying, has shitloads of evolutionary relevance (given that half our intelligence is based on pattern-recognition as an adaptive trait) and that's probably related to why we find it pleasurable.

In this case, answering the wrong question actually signposts the ambiguity in the question - it challenges the obvious meaning of the sentence, which we recognise immediately from context, and points out that other meanings are technically available to that combination of words, just like the picture suddenly shows you other meanings technically available to the lines on the page.

I've never seen a specific name for it, but I suspect it could have a word like "inversion" in it.

[medeine]

Me, too. ;)