And German neurologist Otfrid Foerster identified manic punning in what eventually became known as Foerster's syndrome.
Brill was exploring a malady termed Witzelsucht - an addiction to wisecracks, according to Psychology Today. Sigmund Freud had impugned puns in his 1905 book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconcious. People who disliked the puns voiced their objections, and people who loved knock-knock jokes were said to have social problems.Īfter all, in Europe, incessant wordplay was being treated as a psychological condition. The knocks against knock-knocks seem to have intensified sometime after the re-election of Franklin D. Who's there? A gang of vigilantes armed with machine guns, leather straps and brass knuckles to thump the breath out of anybody who persists in playing this blame fool knock-knock game.' " "The best knock-knock was made by me," observed Heywood Hale Broun in his column, which appeared in the Reading Times. that has grown-ups as well as children going daffy." He passed along new kickers, including: Sarah doctor in the house?īy September of 1936, spoilsports were ready for the knock-knock fad to fade away. Talk about going viral: Paul Harrison, a syndicated gossip columnist, noted in 1936 that "Hollywood has failed to escape infection by the germ of that game Knock-Knock. Teresa who? Teresa Crowd!įletcher Henderson Orchestra. One of the examples in the Delaware County Daily Times: Knock knock. In August, the company announced a Knock! Knock! Contest with prizes. 3) Agnew I'd seen you somewhere before.Īnd back in Chester, the Edgmont grocery expanded its knock-knocking marketing campaign by crowdsourcing usable ad copy. Here are three of the punchlines: 1) Tarzan stripes forever. "Īnd columnist Ken Murray passed along this in the Altoona Tribune on July 30, 1936: "Evidently the anti-New Deal Democrats are also playing that new game.Īt the end of her duplicate bridge column in the Reading Times on July 31, 1936, Constance Gerhard tacked on a handful of rapid-fire knock-knocks. Don who? Don forget to do your shopping at the Cash and Carry. The Edgmont Cash & Carry grocery in Chester, Pa., ran a display ad in the Delaware County Times: Knock! Knock! Who's there? Don. But you've probably found that out for yourself." "They're fun and when some of the better orchestras perform them, they're screams. "You can't turn the radio on anymore without getting one of the Knock-Knock gags," Jean Mackenzie observed in a radio-listening column in the July 25, 1936, News Herald of Franklin, Pa. Let us hope that soon I will be able to meet you on the street and ask if you know Gladys and you will say Gladys who and I will say Gladys Zellitsover." Such nifties were popular among the flappers, McEvoy noted, who would ask: "Have you ever heard of Hiawatha?" And you would reply: "Hiawatha who?" And the flapper would say: "Hiawatha a good girl. "Most of them travel in elipses of 20 years." The Arthurmometer-type joke, he wrote, had returned - as a new type of jest or a "nifty." "Jokes, like comets have definite orbits," McEvoy observed on May 26, 1922. Writing in the Oakland Tribune, Merely McEvoy recalled that around 1900, a jokester would walk up to someone and pop a question like: "Do you know Arthur?" And the unsuspecting listener would reply, "Arthur who?" And the jokester would say "Arthurmometer!" and run off laughing. But who told the first knock-knock joke?īefore there were knock-knock jokes - as we know them - there were "Do You Know" jokes.
So that, for better or worse, was Douty's initiation. Mickey Mouse who? Mickey Mouse's underwear." The first joke that the 43-year-old Virginia comic remembers telling - at age 4 or 5 - was this: "Knock knock.
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