User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-45692830-20200723133026/@comment-86.11.164.109-20200724154802

I try my best to explain how the book is formatted.

The book (the real book) is divided into chapters, with jokes that correspond to each Doctor and their era (Doctors 1 through 13, plus the War Doctor) as well as occasional chapters relating to other things (a chapter were LINDA compiles a list of some of the more "embarrassing" Doctors they've heard rumours of, a list of additional Satellite Five shows not previously mentioned in Bad Wolf, some Master-centric chapters, a chapter set up as Strax telling jokes through a stand-up routine, etc.) Every joke is completely self-contained. In some cases, there are jokes that even have their own little (self-contained) narrative going on; one joke comes in the form of a page-long short story where Amy and Rory discover the TARDIS has a room with a helter-skelter that can give you whatever you want.

Now for the the so-called "framing" sections. The book opens with a knock-knock joke between Thirteen and Yaz.

"Knock! Knock!" Yaz: "Who's there?" Doctor: "Doctor!" Yaz: "Doctor, where?" Doctor: "Well, Yaz, it looks like we've somehow been trapped in a joke book..."

Several more page-long knock-knock jokes like this are interspersed between the chapters, that seem to continue the conversation from that first one ("Doctor, why?", "Doctor, what?", "Doctor, when?", and so on). The narrative these jokes present is about the two of them realising they are in a joke book, figuring out when it happened, and how to get out. This is completely self-contained, as they make no reference to the other jokes in the book.

We could definitely call the framing chapters valid. At a stretch, could we even call the narrative-based jokes like the helter-skelter story valid too?