BETTER BONE UP

Andy Martin's posts

SKELETON – A bunch of bones with the person scraped off. What’s so funny about this? Technically speaking, this is not a wordplay joke. It kind of works because it’s creepy, as are most jokes about death. It’s also why there are so many vampire and zombie jokes as well as scary films and books. People enjoy being scared as long as they can distance themselves from an actual situation and feel that’s it’s a relief that they are not the ones being terrorized. And have you noticed that more and more they are showing not only corpses on TV and movies but also operations and even autopsies where they open up a corpse? This is one of those doors that once you open it, you can’t go back to the way things used to be, unless you only watch those cable channels that recycle TV from the 50’s and 60’s. Contemporary dramas keep escalating in intensity. Skeletons in particular still have a fascination for us living humans. They are recognizably human. Because of the nature of the skull face in particular, they seem to be laughing at us. Skeleton images appear in the art of all cultures from ancient times to the present. In Mexico, the Day of the Dead, which we know as All Saints Day, the day after Halloween, is symbolized by skeletons all over the place. So in today’s photo we see a skeleton being introduced to a group of school children by a teacher, perhaps to teach anatomy. When asked by a student what a skeleton is, the teacher answers that it’s just “a bunch of bones with the person scrapped off. This may be a creepy answer because it is kind of gross to think of a body losing its skin and organs layer by layer until there’s nothing left. I can just picture the special effects of a monster, a robot, or a mad scientist torturing some poor soul or a beautiful women this way, especially in 3-D! And that’s what’s so funny and creepy! #joke #pun #riddle #ESL #ELT #ELL #ELD #ESOL #EFL #TESOL #ESOL #English #language #learnenglish #twinglish #wordplay #skeleton #bones