Forum:The Joke Book jokes

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)