Let’s discuss the contradiction – The Two Ronnies

When reading André Jolles’ chapter on wordplays and puns, I immediately thought of this classic joke from The Two Ronnies Sketch Show. The humour in this sketch derives from the miscommunication between a shopkeeper and a customer, as the shopkeeper is unable to understand the customer’s accent. However, the humour in this sketch can be read even further. Mary Douglas states in her reading that all jokes are expressive of the social situations in which they occur, and I find that this sketch can be viewed as a demonstration of class division since the customer and shopkeeper are literally wearing white and blue collared shirts. The customer, in particular, is coded to have a working-class profession, as indicated by the list of manual labour supplies he orders and the worn state of his attire. His regional dialect, however, is what especially distances him from the shopkeeper.
Furthermore, Douglas references Bergson and Freud’s theories on humour as she emphasises the importance of contrast within a comic form, suggesting that the essence of a joke relies on something formal and organised being attacked or controlled by something informal. It is unclear, to me at least, who or what the target of the joke is, whether it’s the customer and his inability to articulate his words fully, or the shopkeeper’s visible confusion and frustration. Either way, the main theme of the sketch is contrast and juxtaposition. Like many comic duos, the two Ronnies play off their visual differences during their comedic performances, as Ronnie Barker is slightly taller than his costar, Ronnie Corbett. In this sketch, there is notably both an audial contrast in accents as well as a visual contrast in sets and characterisation, as the service desk divides the sketch subjects and further highlights the characters’ differences – the customer, who speaks and dresses informally, maintains a static, unanimated composure as he reads his shopping list aloud, and the formal, organised shopkeeper, who becomes increasingly flustered as he paces around the store looking for the customer’s desired supplies.