“In so far as language is a way of communicating with other people or of making oneself understood to others, it is clear from the start that every part of language must possess the quality of intelligibility. As long as language aims at intelligibility, each verbal form can thus be used only in its intelligible sense. If, however – given this same activity – I use a word in another sense, or if I really mean one thing with it while appearing to mean something else, or if I replace a comprehensible word with another that sounds the same but has a different meaning, what arises is not what we called ‘special language’ in our treatment of the riddle – ambiguity – but rather a double sense: that is, the communicative intention oflanguage is abrogated, the intelligibility of language is undone, the bond of relationship between speaker and listener is momentarily unbound.” (Jolles, 202)
Jolles’s description of wordplay reminded me of these two scenes for slightly different reasons. Jolles describes wordplay as the temorary breakdown of communication between people or characters forming from a misunderstanding of context and words with double meanings. Both of these clips include characters who are for all intents and purposes, fish out of water. The Doctor is an alien interacting with humans, and the Sanderson Sisters have just come back from the dead after three hundred years. The first clip features The Doctor making introductions between his companion, Clara, and two other people. His use of language is a form of joking in itself, as he describes one of the soldiers as “gun girl,” but the main joke is when Clara claimes to be his carer, as in one who looks after elderly poeple, and The Doctor misunderstands the word, and says the punchline: “she cares so I don’t have to.” He’s not trying to be funny, but the humor comes from the double meaning and misunderstanding. Similarly, in the second clip, the Sanderson Sisters, misunderstanding the purpose of a bus see it as a magical way to get what they want–the souls of children. However, when Winnifred says “we desire children,” the bus driver misunderstands her as saying they want to get pregnant and creates the double meaning and punchline in his response by saying “it may take me a few tries.”
These jokes are made funnier (in my personal opinion) because the misunderstandings are coming from people who are “other” from society and the current environment. These types of wordplay is also optimizing on the situations of the characters, and can be seen in many different places in their respective media.