A number of humor techniques are applications of rhetorical devices. My favorite is based on the schemes chiasmus (the reversal of words or phrases) and aposiopesis (trailing off and not completing the statement).
Most of these jokes use chiasmus by letter reversal and most of them are raunchy, so you clean them up by not actually saying the punch line. There is one clean one from the early days of pope John Paul II, where upon arriving in a new country, he would always kneel and press his lips to the tarmac. “What's the difference between the pope and the common man? The common man kisses women and walks on the ground.”
Raunch warning: This next part is one of the clean dirty jokes. If you would be offended by off-color humor, cease reading here. (For that matter, why are you reading a blog about creativity anyway? If you don't enjoy raunchy, go back to your tedious life.) Here's the joke:
What's the difference between a girls' track team and a band of pigmies?
The pigmies are a bunch of cunning runts.
The unstated punch line is an example of metaplasm, the modification of sounds. (Perhaps one would say, metathesis, transposition of letters out of their normal places.)
The unstated punch line is also an example of synecdoche, the use of the whole for the part or the part for the whole, or in this case, the hole for the whole. And that remark is an example of antanaclasis, a perfect homonymic pun.
posted by TC @ 3:44 PM
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