User:WaltK/Sandbox 3
Introduction
At first glance, a joke book should be a no-brainer for invalidity. "It's just a series of jokes with no context", you might think. And then Chris Farnell has to go and confirm that he deliberately put a loose narrative in the book with the intention of allowing it to be valid on this very wiki!
Now, it's undeniably pretty neat that an official DW writer had us in mind while writing his work, and I'm certainly not arguing against his assertion of its validity. Said assertion, however, has led to one hell of a headache when it comes to how, exactly, to interpret the body of the work.
For those who haven't read the book for themselves, here's a basic summery of its structure.
The book is split into sections based, loosely, on each Doctor's era. The jokes often fall into various types:
- The standard question and answer format ("When is the Doctor late? When he travels in his TARDY-IS!")
- A list of some kind, like "Susan's rejected list of what "TARDIS" stands for".
- Short skits leading up to a punchline, like a short story in which Amy and Rory find a helter-skelter in the TARDIS.
The "narrative framing-device" that Farmell mentions comes in the form of a series of pages scattered throughout the book between sections, in which the Thirteenth Doctor and Yaz discover that they have become trapped inside a joke book; this short plot is conveyed entirely through Yaz and the Doctor talking to each other through knock-knock jokes, with one joke per page.
How we at the wiki have chosen to interpret this structure, for now, is that these sections with the Doctor and Yaz are events that are physically happening to them, with the rest of the jokes in the book being taken as manifestations from the very in-universe joke book that the Doctor and Yaz are trapped in (as in, no, Rory Williams riding down a helter-skelter into a pool of urine didn't actually happen, it's just a scenario the book made up).
more to come
