Forum:The Joke Book jokes

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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.

Just what is this book, anyway?

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" with humorous reinterpretations of the ship's initials ("This Alien Roadster Does It Stylishly", "Travels At Random Destinations In Sequence", etc.)
• 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.

Our interpretation (and why it may be wrong)

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).

However, I have reason to believe that this interpretation isn't necessarily the right one. At least, not based on how the wiki operates.

To use Farnell's exact words:

Incidentally, now that this has been released I can reveal that it contains a loose framing device about the Doctor and Yaz getting trapped in a joke book.

I did this purely so that it would technically count as a valid narrative source according to

@TardisWiki.Chris Farnell

We already know that the narrative portions are the Thirteen/Yaz vignettes. Okay, what about the actual jokes? Usually when covering meta-fiction of this nature, we go by what is explicitly stated in the narrative.

To use a similar example:

In the Target novelisation of The Day of the Doctor, there are interludes in which the Doctor speaks directly to the reader in "real time". In these interludes, the Doctor makes reference multiple times that they're talking to the reader through the book. And we know that's explicitly what they're doing in-universe too. They talk multiple times about the book itself, the events in the actual chapters, they even tell us why the story is being told: what we, and the in-universe readers (which they allude to; talking about one who picked up the book in a bookshop, for example) are reading, are the Doctor Papers, documents that talk about the last day of the Last Great Time War, and that they're being professionally published as a work of fiction.

… Now let's look at the interludes of the joke book, the narrative framing device. Here's the first of these pages, to give you an idea of how they work:

• 

The rest of these one page vignettes continue the conversation, each with Yaz asking the Doctor a question through a knock-knock joke, which all eventually culminates in the two figuring out how to escape the book.

None of these vignettes make any indication of the joke book that we, the audience, are reading, is the in-universe joke book that they are trapped in.

The most that we get is the first vignette in which the Doctor says "we've become trapped in a joke book". Neither this nor any of the other vignettes allude to the other jokes in the book.

But let's say we ignore that detail because, we also take authorial intent into account; Chris Farnell's assertion that the Thirteen/Yaz scenes are the book's "framing device" may in itself be all the intent needed.

But here's the thing; that still doesn't leave us with any indication of what these jokes actually are.

We currently work under the idea that these jokes are just made up scenarios that are a product of the book itself… buuuuut we have no evidence of that. The Doctor and Yaz don't talk about the other jokes at all, let alone make reference to them being "made-up". Who's to say Susan didn't actually come up with multiple other anagrams for "TARDIS", or that Strax didn't try his hand at some really awful stand-up?

Okay, then, what jokes do we take as valid material?

Honestly, that's up to you guys. In my opinion, it's a mixed bag. The page-long "story" jokes have the most going for them, since they have clear narratives; they could easily be interpreted as short stories in their own right.

There are other things that could potentially count, like Strax's stand-up routine, which is mainly just another list of (intentionally awful) jokes, but framed with an illustration of Strax standing and talking into a microphone.

I'd strongly recommend getting ahold of the book for yourselves and coming to your own conclusions. WaltK ☎

Discussion

I'll need to study this once I have more free time, but one thing I want to say is that I think forums like this should be in Forum:Inclusion debates once that is open again. I think the Inclusion debates should cover all theory of coverage, nut just if the "valid" switch is clicked one way or the other.

One thing we do have to keep in mind here is that I think the author's note about wanting this to be covered on Tardis Wiki is actually a reference to Rule 1. If he hadn't introduced 13 and Yaz being trapped in the book, some might have said "This isn't a narrative!" Ironically, as we all know, rule 1 is now that fiction passes. So it's now more reasonable for us to look at this story and say - hey, this section is clearly contributing a story featuring the actual characters, not meta copies of said characters within the book. OS25🤙☎️ 19:44, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Feel free to argue for that change at Forum:The New Forums, but note that in terms of current policy this was the correct place to post it as per Forum:Inclusion debates#When policy changes. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 11:43, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

But this isn't changing any policies, is it? It's just reevaluating how we look at this source. Aquanafrahudy ☎ 15:30, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Since we're at day 30, and almost nothing has been said, I want to chime in that I personally think Walt seems to know the most about this text and I'd trust him to cover it however he wants until further notice. If anything turns up being extremely disagreeable in implementation we can just do another forum about it later. OS25🤙☎️ 21:31, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

I've finally gotten around to reading this and wow, it's surprisingly tricky. The thing that I find the hardest is that the helter-skelter skit has no unique title or separation from the wider Eleventh Doctor section (which starts before the skit and continues after it). I don't think we should treat all of the rest of the jokes in each Doctor's section as valid as they're, well, jokes, not narratives, or fact files, or descriptions of events, or anything with substance, instead frequently just silly play-on-words, but there is a case to be made for a few specific jokes, like this one.

Outside of the Doctor's section, I feel things are easier. Each of the other sections listed in the contents page have clear framing devices that I feel easily gives cause to treat them as separate. Bongo50 ☎ 07:11, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Conclusion

It seems that even with a further 30 days renewal (whose own deadline has now passed), there's just not that much interest in this thread, I guess because not many people read the book. I'll try to make a preliminary ruling, but note that this thread was skinny enough that anyone would be well within their rights to start another one later if they think they have a shot at drumming up more interest from the community.

There's a lot of unknowns here. I think whether Joke book (Knock! Knock! Who's There?) is Knock! Knock! Who's There itself is probably not one of them, per se. As User:WaltK himself noted, the intent is pretty clear from the quote. But does that necessarily mean that the sub-narratives making up jokes other than the ones about Thirteen and Yaz are necessarily wholly fictive? We shouldn't be too sure. Maybe the joke books was written as a record of true events. Maybe the Eleventh Doctor and Strax and Rory and the Thyme Lord were all trapped into the joke-book too, and Thirteen and Yaz are just the ones who realised! We should steer clear of any coverage that too definitively asserts anything about the jokes' reality one way or the other. And all characters who appear in the jokes should see the book represented in their lists of appearances.

I do not, however, on the current evidence, think there is reason or consensus to split the book into individual pages about specific narrative jokes. This seems more akin to The Book of the War, if you'll forgive the comparison; a tome with something of a frame narrative, and intended by its author to be perceived as one whole, but which is also made up of fragments which can be enjoyed individually. Perhaps I might have been tempted to rule differently a few months ago, for the sake of clearer citation: but now {{cite source}} allows us to cite those jokes which have individual titles more finely, without having to split the book itself up. Much preferable under the circumstances.

Thanks to everone who… erm. Well, thanks to those civic-minded few who participated. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 16:57, 19 August 2023 (UTC)