Back in the 90s: Wordplay in BoJack Horseman
A guide to the tragicomedy's playful use of language
Settle down, readers. Stop horsing around. Today’s offshoot takes a look at the various kinds of jokes used by the BoJack Horseman team to pepper each episode about an alcoholic horse (why the long face? because he’s depressed) in Hollywoo with plenty of humour—neigh, wordplay.
Let’s start with the basics. The show’s writers seize the innumerable opportunities for making puns—especially animal puns—provided by the BoJack universe where anthropomorphic creatures of all types mingle freely. There’s his literary agent, Pinky the Penguin (an ode to the historical British publishing house), who drinks his morning beverage from a “Keep Calm and Carry Prawn” mug. There are fashion shows by Sharc Jacobs, donkeys who say grace by braying before meals, his non-literary agent (a cat) who claims to “always land on her feet”, and the breaking news is announced by a blue whale on the MSNBSea channel.
There’s the mixture of ridiculous alliterative internal rhymes, tongue twisters, and word avalanches. A Word Avalanche is defined as “a highly contrived punny sentence with an emphasis on the repetition of syllables”. For example, this exchange takes place when Princess Carolyn (the feline agent) is trying to get Diane to write a puff piece about her client, actress Courtney Portnoy:
Princess Carolyn: You know Courtney Portnoy. You probably recall when she soared as the thorny horticulturist in One Sordid Fortnight with the short-skirted Sorceress.
Diane Nguyen: Uhh...
Princess Carolyn: How would you enjoy joining Portnoy for a scorched soy porterhouse pork four-courser at Koi?
Diane Nguyen: Wait, what?
Princess Carolyn: Glorify your source, but don't make it feel forced, of course. And try the borscht! Smooches!
Or this one:
Princess Carolyn: You're telling me your dumb drone downed a tower and drowned downtown Julie Brown's dummy drumming dum-dum-dum-dum, dousing her newly found, goose-down, hand-me-down gown?
Mr. Peanutbutter: That is exactly right.
Princess Carolyn: I'll be right down.
Sandro, an Italian immigrant and restaurant proprietor, frequently uses malapropisms, once quoting the Black Eyed Peas by saying:
Well, as the Black Guy Pete say, “Tonight's gonna be a good night.”
There are wacky takes on common idioms. For instance: “Fool me once, shame on you, but teach a man to fool me, and I'll be fooled for the rest of my life.”
There are also jokes that defy categorization but are equally impactful. One running gag includes a game show called Hollywoo Stars and Celebrities: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things? Let’s Find Out! whose title is only uttered in full by its host, every chance he gets.
Lastly, the show uses visual gags to fully exploit its medium and add layers to its humour. The nurses in the show are usually bears (care bears), a hammerhead shark is hammering in nails using its head on a construction site, the feline agent has her desktop screensaver as a ball of yarn and a bookshelf lined with titles like A Tale of Two Kitties or Romeow and Juliet.
All of this may not elevate the show to a higher intellectual sphere but it does show the effort that goes into crafting each scene. Also, from a neurological perspective, hearing and comprehending puns requires both sides of the brain: the left processes the word’s linguistics and meaning while the right hemisphere recognizes the secondary meaning.
While such wordplay undoubtedly earns a bad reputation and not exactly laugh-out-loud reaction, it is thriving on TV. BoJack Horseman is not alone in using wordplay to bring its fictional world alive. The Good Place is another example where such jokes are used freely and one of the writers, Megan Amram, had this story to tell:
I got to the part where I was going to write in all the different store names for different types of food. I was like, ‘Megan, don’t spend more than an hour on this. You don’t need to spend a day writing pun names.’ Then, flash-forward to I was in a coffee shop working on truly hundreds of pun names for six hours or something.
Here’s the proof and fruit of her labour:
Maybe it’s calculated, maybe it’s compulsive, maybe it’s neigh-belline. Some people do suffer from witzelsucht (German for ‘joking addiction’):
A set of pure and rare neurological symptoms characterized by a tendency to make puns, or tell inappropriate jokes or pointless stories in socially inappropriate situations.
I’ll stop short of calling these comedy writers diseased and let you come to your own conclusions. Goodbye for now, readers. It is time to watch another episode and call it research.