xtcian

I double dare you to keep your own joke. There's no reason you should make every single second in the play talked down to the level of people who... I was gonna say who didn't graduate from High School. If there's a person at the play who doesn't understand ther word "lactate" then your writing isn't for them.

"It's Sue Indians, not Sy-OOKS"

Don't know if that's funny enough. But I went throug a period in 2nd Grade when I read everything about Indians I could find, but had never heard Sioux out loud.

I TRIPLE-DOG DARE YOU to keep the line!

OK, OK. I doubt this will help, but just since you reminded me of it: In a history paper in high school, I used a metaphor about how someone "kept his finger in the dyke."

Oops.

My teacher merely circled it. I wonder if he was laughing at me, though.

Anyway, if you or anyone else can benefit from my ignorance, please do.

I grew up Catholic. In second grade, we memorized the Act of Contrition, which begins:

"Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee."

For years, I thought it was "Oh my God, I am HARDLY sorry for having offended thee."

I couldn't understand how God could forgive someone who was hardly sorry for her sins!

(But I think your line is funnier.)

When I saw it, I was surprised, too, that it didn't get a laugh... then I decided it was not a "knee-slapper" as we used to call it... it was a "smiler" and a "Yeah, I did something like that once" joke. I felt a lot of reaction around me with the punch line, but no belly laughst... not every joke has to be a noisy eruption to have its effect.

Two suggestions

If you are thinking about changing anything, think about the set up line "It's a list of things I didn't know"... which confused me. I expected a list of facts, not kid Malapropisms. I'm not sure how I 'd fix it. Maybe something alont the lines of "It's a list of words I didn't understand" or "a list of words I'm trying to get right" (you'll think of something better.).

My other thought: when I saw it, there was too much going on... maybe it was the dad, moving around, ... but the focus was not strong on the kid at that moment (sis and dad weren't listening, and they were distracting us). And someone's next line (in my recollection) stepped on the punch line. So my call is it might be in the direciting/acting.

OK, a third thing. You could make it something more familiar, like "The Americans lactated the British Redcoats".

Short answer: I agree with those who say "keep it." It's a lovely little joke, and reminded me of the time my little sister said "I got so tired I had to lie down prostitute on the ground!"

As someone recently liberated from "vanquishing" her younger son for about 18 months, i'm appalled that so many hip LA theatre-goers don't know what "lactating" means! but maybe it's more what your mom observed about direction, etc., than what your audiences actually know about care and feeding of human infants. besides, some positive pro-breastfeeding subliminal messages never hurt. so i join the chorus of fans asking you to KEEP THE LINE!

this a fun post. Unable to see the play, from what I just read it's funny but would be a little clearer if stu said "things I now know" it infers he learned them and goes on to tell what he learned..origami is not chinese food.. I laughed reading it. The last line from Stu could be a bit much for some, but it's probably what your good at, hitting em with the facts fast. I read it "yeah, that sucked. I once wrote in a history paper that at the Battle of Orleans, Joan of Arc lactated the French Army." I agree you should not change it, your auddience knows what lactating and vanquish mean, and if they're not belly laughing they're smiling.

... that Kilter isn't a spice, rather a state of confusion. As in "Argh, I'm all out of kilter" said by my flustered mother from the kitchen one day, when she couldn't remember if she put baking soda in the bread. To which my boyfriend at the time helpfully said "I can go see if my mom has any?" Not sure if this is a Canadian/Irish expression so perhaps it wouldn't fly. "All out of whack" maybe.

Same dude asked me once "Have you seen my bisexual shirt? You know, that black one you borrow sometimes." Well, I still laugh at that one, a good eight years of marriage later. Never again has he confused unisex with bisexual. Shirt is long gone though....

I seem to recall a horrific moment at Carolina in Manly Dorm during the fall of 1988 when I learned that my new that my new, clever twist on the word TWIT was vulgar and appalling to the masses. Never again did I run around calling people TWATS - Although I had been lo those many momths.

I've been thinking about this all day and I agree with those who say keep it. It's good stuff. Your mom also has some great advice.

All I have to offer is that my sister could never say "The Incredible Hulk" when she was little. Her favorite show was always "The Incredible Honk."

It also made me think about one of my more humiliating
moments that runs kinda along the same lines. I was a total teacher's pet during elementary school and if I had half the confidence I had back then in my mental prowess, I'd be doing a heck of a lot more than writing and editing for Tar Heel Monthly. Anyway, I was in 2nd grade when we took a class field trip to Old Salem, a community established by those love-feastin' Moravians in Winston-Salem, NC. Our costumed docent concluded our tour, which included making clay pipes and candles, and asked for questions. Of course, I'm standing at the head of the line and I arrogantly raise my hand, thinking I'm going to impress the hell out of her. My question?

"So where did they burn the witches?"

Thankfully, it did end well in that I now know not to ask the *other* Salem tour guides about how they make those tasty sugar cookies so damn paper-thin.

Congrats to you and Tessa!

I really like this thread (I am still giggling about the bisexual shirt) and your mom's comments (since she has a lot more info about the context of the lines and what's happening on-stage).

My most famous blunders of this sort are more along the lines of mispronounced words. I have been humiliated more than once by assuming that just because I know a word's meaning, I most certainly do not know the pronunciation, no matter how confident I am about my usage. Words that have gotten twisted up by me (to the maniacal delight of my sadistic friends) are: hyperbole (I now know it's not pronounced "hyper-bowl"), detonate (nobody ever "dee-tone-ates" anything), infrared (okay, it STILL looks like "in-frared" to me--a two syllable word that rhymes with spared), and macabre (you can only imagine what I've done with this word).

But I think the most humiliating mispronunciation in my entire history of mangling words is that from about the time I was 7, until I was 12, I never quite registered the meaning of Johnny Appleseed's name. I never heard the name aloud, and when I finally said his name in some class, I pronounced it as Johnny "A-pleased." Everyone laughed, and I felt like a complete idiot afterwards.

As a decidedly nerdy child, with both an over-developed sense of my own precociousness combined with an intense desire to impress adults, I set myself up for many of these moments, most of which I have thankfully repressed. I still remember, however, the feeling of hot red invading my cheeks when I read my teacher’s comments on my first-grade Thanksgiving project (something along the lines of “Please ask your parents what this word means”). Apparently, my description of the elaborate _fornications_ made by the Pilgrims to protect their new-World settlements did not impress her, and now that I am an adult, I am reminded by my parents every year at Thanksgiving of how grateful we should be to those “fucking Puritans” for where we are today.

While mine is personally humiliating, not ripped off from a seventies sit-com, and somewhat bizarre, but I still think lactating Joan of Arc is better.

I too think you should keep the line. Here is one from my personal childhood archives.Until about third grade I always thought Allison Wonderland (first name and last name) was the name of one of my favorites books, aka "Alice in Wonderland."

Reminds me of a long-ago trip into NYC to visit the Museum of Natural History when my older brother (he was 9, I was 7) just didn't get the meaning and logic of the "No Standing" traffic sign. (Why can't you stand there? How close did you need to be to the sign before you got a ticket? Does walking count?)

Funnier to me since I had no idea what it meant either, but since he opened his mouth first I could join in the open mocking that he received from our older cousins when they figured out what he was talking about. Ah youth.

Also, it took me much longer than I wish to admit to figure out the correct pronunciations of melancholy and epitome.

Oh one more - for more years than I'd like to admit and despite the fact that I grew up in the heart of ACC country, I truly believed that Dean was Coach Smith's title, not his name.

I still have issues with salmon and wolf. I tend to pronounce the "l" in the former but not the latter - some kind of disconnect in my brain, I guess. My husband thinks it's the funniest thing in the world when I rant about the "Woof"pack.

My other really embarrassing one that I just remembered was a persistent belief that there was some gangster named "Sal Monella" who went around causing food poisoning among children who ate the cookie dough before it was baked, but I think that was sort of a common one....

"Things I now know" "Hymen" is not a last name. Eleventh grade English class with Dr. Orr. I'm in class early with some buddy's and notice that someone has written graffiti on the wall, but it doesn't make sense. "Keris Hymen is two inches wide" Who is Keris Hymen and what kind of ridiculous insult is "two inches wide". As I repeated the phrase over and over, trying to make sense of the phrase, I realized it was "Keri's" not "Keris". Still not knowing what "Hymen" meant, I turned to my high school sweetheart "Keri" and exclaimed "Oh, that's you!" My good friend Joe pulled me aside an explained why my sweetheart had fled the room in tears. Kind of a tuff day for Salem, but even tougher on Keris Hymen.

back in the day my younger brother Joe thought
it was rude that a news piece would talk about the elderly getting "Old Timers'" disease

keep the line until Fox Executive night, then
sneak in a racy but pedestrian line with sexual
overtones but obtuse enough for prime-time..
oh wait, that's what it is already :-)

Quite the incongruous combination: LA and theatre!!

good luck guys!
meet you at the liquor store/smog check

I think your line is much better than these three stories:

4th grade, just beginning to listen to the radio, hear a song I like "we don't need no education...", I tell my parents that I really like this song on the radio by Pete Floyd. They had to buy me the album to convince me of my ignorance.

5th grade, I was given a report by my evil teacher on Sea Salt. I looked everywhere and could only find one sentence on it. I faked illness rather than face the evil teacher. After about 3 days, my Mom called my bluff and took me to the doctor, hmm no real symptoms, but the blood tests revealed Mono! I got to stay home for the next 6 weeks and never felt ill. When I went back to school, I still had the report to do and finally explained my problem. I'd misheard the evil teacher, my topic was (and always had been) Sea Life.

Finally in the 6th grade, with the family, going past a bowling alley:
me: Let's go bowling!
Mom: huh? Disco bowling?
me: Disco bowling? What will they think of next?
Dad: both of you please shut up.

I still say keep the line.

Not to be a party pooper, but Joan of Arc would have lactated/vanquished the English, not the French, oui???

Ooooh. Andrew's comment reminded me of another school blunder. It was 9th grade. Alyssa and I were at her house studying for a history test. I had been out sick on the day that our teacher had done the review, so we were using Alyssa's list of terms and subjects to know for the test. We broke the list in half and each started searching out the items in our notes. I spent about an hour looking for anything under "farming meat hods." It sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn't find anything in my notes about the farming meat hods. I wondered if it had something to do with raising cattle or chicken? Growing something they used with the animals later? Alyssa couldn't remember it, but it also sounded familiar to her too. I looked in the book index and found nothing. Now, this was pissing me off. My notes were always impeccable and everyone wanted to copy them if they were sick. I was out one day, and now Alyssa's notes were screwing us up. We called a few people and nobody was home. One person didn't know what the farming meat hods were either. Alyssa's mom was now involved, scanning through the text herself. Finally, Alyssa asked to see her list again. She got quiet and then gasped, "Um, I think I was trying to write farming METHODS." Duh. It may not be that funny now, but for the remainder of the year, just a mere mention of the farming meat hods would make either one of us burst into hysterical giggles.

OK, fast forward to a Chemistry class at UNC...professor new to UNC, just relocated from Boston and had a big time accent. Was a big lecture hall and I regularly would write down things I didn't understand (pronunciation-wise) and ask him about it after class.

The two that I remember best:
yods - I knew it was a unit of measurement, but was unfamiliar, ohms, jewels, amps, watts, etc, what the Hell was a yod? Turned out a yod is 3 feet.

Obelisks - why the Hell did atoms have obelisks? Some kind of bizarre quantum physics? And if so how did it apply to us? Orbitals. Orbitals. Orbitals.

I think it's a funny line, but maybe it's not working because the punchline is grammatically incorrect? I don't mean incorrect because he confused vanquish with lactate, I mean that LACTATE is an intransitive verb, which, I think, roughly means that you don't do it to someone else. Not that the audience is sitting there saying, "Hey, that kid just used an intransitive verb incorrectly," but in the back of their minds, perhaps they're thinking, "hmmm, that didn't sound quite right," which prevents them from laughing out loud. Lactating is the act of producing the milk, not feeding it to someone else. So how would the kid ever have heard 'lactate' used in a context where he possibly could have confused it with vanquish? For the audience maybe that subconsciously makes it feel like a "manufactured" or forced joke, and not a believably natural and therefore funny one. I know that my first reaction when I read it was, It's funny, but it doesn't have a mellifluous flow to it - it hits the ear wrong, because the verb is being used incorrectly, which diminishes the humor in the fact that the kid is using it incorrectly in a different way. But maybe that's just me.

I too say, keep the line about Joan of Arc.

Failing that, you could incorporate this Very Small Episode from the life of Piglet...

CARLA: "Origami is not Chinese food. Ubiquitous..."

STU: "Yeah, that sucked. The school librarian called me Ubiquitous in front of everybody."

CARLA: (Still reading) "Ubiquitous does not mean, 'A Spazz'."

I mean, you don't even have to know what Ubiquitous means to get that one...

I think Jon's right about the subconscious "It sounds wrong" part, and it does make the joke sound manufactured and not-so-funny. More importantly, Caroline is EXACTLY RIGHT about the historical mistake.

The original line from my 3rd grade class was "'to lactate' does not mean 'to inspire'." Thus the joke. Turns out I remembered it wrong. So it's good that it was changed all-around.

We're going with three other jokes in its place on Thursday night. I will tell you what they are, but only if they end up being really funny. You guys have been telling some awesome ones, by the way.