Knock-knock joke

Knock-knock jokes are a type of word play joke, which derive their humor from the conflation of homonyms. The joke is performed cooperatively by the speaker and the listener in a call and response format as they create a scene depicting a visitor knocking at a door. The joke is dependent on the speaker and the listener having previous exposure to the joke's format and enough general and linguistic knowledge to understand what is being referenced in the punchline. A standard knock-knock joke has five lines of dialogue. The line is an example of onomatopoeia. In the second line, the listener's response of "who's there" has them play the role of someone inside their own home as the speaker knocks. The third line is the point that a person at the door would provide their given name or some other identifier. In the joke, the name does not provide enough information to identify a specific speaker. The joke traditionally uses a name for the third line, but any phrase can be used. If an inanimate object is referenced, it is inferred that the person knocking is a human using the object as a name, rather than the physical object they describe. The fourth line is normally when the person at home would ask for more information to clarify who is at the door, as a given name or title on its own is not always specific enough to discern a person's identity. In the case of a given name, this can be because the person at home does not know anyone by that name or knows multiple people by that name. The fifth line breaks from the imagined scenario of a person knocking on a door. Some knock-knock jokes end by repeating the third line, using its phonetic structure as a pun to be the start of a new sentence. In this case, the content of the third line is spoken quickly to blend its sound into the rest of the phrase. Other knock-knock jokes take advantage of the phonetic structure of the fourth line, and the fifth line is a response to the newly created phrase spoken by the listener. In both cases, the fifth line effectively changes the meaning of the third and fourth lines. ==History==

Predecessors Dialogue resembling a knock-knock joke appears in the play The Case is Altered by Ben Jonson, written , in which the character Juniper says he is not Rachel's father but is willing to become a father with her. The origin of the knock-knock joke, or the first appearance of the phrase "knock knock, who's there", is sometimes attributed to William Shakespeare for his 1606 play Macbeth. In Act 2, Scene 3, the character of the porter gives a soliloquy about a porter accepting people into hell. He compared it to a joke that emerged in the flapper community around 1920 where a woman would ask "Have you ever heard of Hiawatha?", and upon being asked "Hiawatha who?", she would respond with " a good girl ... till I met you." In the game of Buff, a child with a stick thumps it on the ground, and the dialogue ensues: Modern knock-knock jokes The exact origin of knock-knock jokes is uncertain, but true knock-knock jokes had emerged in the United States by the 1930s. Outlets like The Gridley Herald and The Milwaukee Journal also reported on knock-knock jokes that year as a new parlour game and derided it as uninteresting. Meanwhile, a popular knock-knock joke was made at the expense of King Edward VIII. The Edgmont Cash & Carry, a grocery store in Chester, Pennsylvania, used knock-knock jokes in its advertisements and held a contest for the best knock-knock jokes. Fred Allen's 30 December 1936 radio broadcast included a humorous wrap-up of the year's least important events, which included a supposed interview with the man who "invented a negative craze" on 1 April: "Ramrod Dank... the first man to coin a Knock Knock." After peaking in 1936, knock-knock jokes received greater push-back from critics who saw them as unfunny, pseudo-intellectual, or pathological. Despite this, they remained a popularly known joke format. Knock-knock jokes have since been popularized in other countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The format was well known in the UK and US in the 1950s and 1960s, and it enjoyed a renaissance after the jokes became a regular part of the badinage on ''Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In''. ==References==