Search This Blog

Monday, August 25, 2014

Jokes I Missed The First Time...



... because there was just too much of an interval between punch lines. Yes. Punch Lines. Plural. So we have multiple punch lines, long extended jokey narratives, and it takes one heck of a weather eye to spot the Moby Dick of Jest if and when he breaches the placid ocean of the mundane.

So, Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, Season 1, The Great Game.

The opening scene in in Minsk, Belarus. Sherlock is seated across the table from a prisoner in an otherwise deserted room of empty tables, probably a cafeteria doubling as an interview room.

The prisoner tells his story of how he killed his girlfriend, quite accidentally, and as he tells the story, Sherlock corrects his grammar. When the prisoner, Tate (I believe) says " I weren't", Sherlock corrects him: "I wasn't", and Tate repeats " I wasn't".
So also with "he learned me" to "he taught me", "I done it" to "I did it", "weren't" to "wasn't" again, and a double negative with "no more" changed to "anymore".

The prisoner pleads to a departing Sherlock that
"...without you, I'll get hung for this."
Sherlock pauses and looks back,
"No, no, no; not at all, Mr. Tate...(pause)... "hanged", yes!"
 Funny stuff.

So within minutes, the main story starts, Sherlock is in his flat, shooting at the wall from boredom, Watson enters hungrily, walks to the fridge and finds a head that Sherlock has procured from the morgue to study the coagulation of saliva after death, and he is keeping it cool.

Watson asks Sherlock whether he read his "A Study In Pink" in Watson's blog.
After a bit of a dispute as to merits, Watson points out that Sherlock surely must admit that he is unfamiliar with some very basic facts.
Sherlock responds that,
"... it doesn't matter to me who's Prime Minister, or who is sleeping with who."
 I wonder whether back in Minsk there's a dead man walking, muttering "With Whom! Bloody with whom!"

--

No comments: