Talk:The "Doctor Who?" running joke

Prop delete
This doesn't deserve a page of its own, because the topic does not admit itself of concise definition. I vaguely know what the page is trying for, but the examples given aren't all of the same type. For instance, what's going in in The War Machines is different from the quick pre-credit "stinger" Jackie gives before The Christmas Invasion starts. WOTAN's "Doctor Who" was in deadly earnest (and a production error, by the admission of the director). Meanwhile, Jackie's bit was, we're told by RTD in a commentary, a bit of a lighthearted Christmas pun.

But therein lies the rub.

How do you actually define the difference between a perfectly ordinary question and a "joke"? In Black Orchid, it's completely reasonable for Madge to ask "Doctor who?" when she's being formally introduced to the Doctor. That's not a "joke" or a "gag" or anything more than the perfectly obvious thing to do in that social situation. A similar thing happens in The Gunfighters. Bat misunderstands the Doctor and so asks, "Doctor who". That the Doctor then sort of agrees to that name isn't an indication that he's being called "Doctor Who", but rather that he's just attempting to speed away from the issue of being assigned a name.

In order to register most of these instances as "jokes", you almost have to go to a behind the scenes source who tells you, "Yes, that was a deliberate play on the name of the show." Even the "eggiest" of them — probably a tie between Jackie's TCI one, the Brig's replacement in The Five Doctors, and the one in "A Girl's Best Friend" — can be read as perfectly reasonable questions. It's only because we know the behind the scenes info on how those lines came to be inserted that we don't hear them as ordinary bits of conversation.

I also think that by including a definite article in this page's title, we're implying something that simply isn't true. There is no single, running joke involving the question "Doctor Who?" To the extent that the words "Doctor" and "Who" ever occupy consecutive spaces in dialogue — which is far too infrequently to be considered "running" —  they aren't ever used in quite the same way. Jackie's already well familiar with the Doctor before she says "Doctor Who"; The first Doctor's obviously musing so as to solve the "mystery" of the name "Dr. Foreman", Bat Masterson hasn't heard the name "Caligari", etc. There is therefore no single, running joke.

This page should therefore be deleted, its observations relegated to the pages of the individual serials/episodes from which they're drawn.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍  17:49, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Support deletion

 *  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍  17:49, 3 May 2009 (UTC),  per above.