What on Earth??

[Laurence Horn]

--What's the difference between a duck?
--The higher the fewer.

Mad Magazine, maybe?

As I recall, the Groucho "Why a duck?" was somehow connected with "viaduct".  But I'm not sure about the provenance of the above riddle, or the classic "No soap, radio" Dan mentions, which I seem to recall somehow involved two penguins in the bathtub and may have constituted a response to "Please pass the soap."

LH

On Oct 17, 2011, at 9:03 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:

> No soap, radio.
> DanG
>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 3:14 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: What on Earth??
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 2:55 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>> Reminds me of those old papers by Georgia Green and/or Jerry Morgan that begin with a sentence that sounds like word salad out of context
>>
>> That reminds me of something that I heard recited by white
>> barracksmates when I was at the Army Language School, back in '60. It
>> went something like;
>>
>> Q. "Why a duck?'
>> A. "Because the moon."
>>
>> There was a string of such nonsensical question/answer pairs. IIRC,
>> this - or something like it - was said to have originated with
>> Groucho.
>>
>> A quick check with W:pedia shows this to be fact. So, perhaps,
>> everybody but me is more than familiar with this bit. As was the case
>> with a Cosby Show spinoff, "it's a different world."
>>
>> --
>> -Wilson
>> -----
>> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
>> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>> -Mark Twain
>>
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