Class 7 English Chapter 5: A Funny Man

A stranger in the street

The poem begins as plainly as a poem can. A funny kind of man comes walking down the street. No explanation is offered for him and none will be given at any point, which turns out to matter by the end.

What he is wearing

One shoe goes on his head; the hats go on his feet. Count them: one above, and two hats below. The poem gets the arithmetic right while getting everything else wrong, which is the first sign that the nonsense is being managed carefully.

The first surprise is his manner

He raises the shoe and smiles. Raising your hat to somebody is a courtesy, and he performs it exactly, with the wrong object. His manners, the speaker tells us, were polite. That is not a joke about rudeness.

Why politeness is funnier

Imagine the same man behaving badly. The poem would be about an unpleasant stranger and there would be nothing to laugh at. Perfect manners attached to completely wrong behaviour is a sharper joke, because the two halves do not fit and he seems entirely unaware of it.

The first of the three phrases

Then comes the line that does the real work. She has never seen such a funny sounding sight. Read it again. A sight does not sound. The verb belongs to hearing and the noun to seeing, and the phrase puts them together on purpose.

Your Highness, and a rose

He offers to present Your Highness with a rose, which is the language of a court. What he produces is a currant bun, and he holds it up to her nose. The grand manner and the bun are in the same sentence, and neither gives way to the other.

Her reaction comes before her words

She staggers back against the wall. That is a physical response, and the poem gives it to us before she speaks, which is the right order: the body reacts first. Only then does she manage a word.

The second phrase

And the word she manages produces the second mismatch. What she manages is a rose with a funny looking smell. A smell cannot look. This time the verb belongs to seeing and the noun to smelling, so the pattern has reversed direction.

The song, and the third phrase

He sings, and sits down on the ground while doing it. The speaker has never heard such a funny feeling sound. A sound does not feel. Three phrases, three pairs of mismatched senses, in twenty-two lines.

Why three is the point

Once is an oddity. Three times is a method. The repetition tells a reader that the mismatch is the poem’s idea rather than a slip of the pen, and it is why this poem is remembered while most nonsense verse is not.

The sensible question

At last she asks the obvious thing: why does he wear two hats upon his feet? It is a fair question, politely put, and it is the only moment in the poem where somebody tries to make sense of what is happening.

And no answer at all

He turns the other way about and hops home on his head. That is the end. The question is left standing, and the refusal is deliberate, because any answer would have made him explainable. An explained funny man is not funny.

The one impossible thing

Notice what the last line actually claims. Wearing a shoe on your head is merely wrong; offering a bun as a rose is merely wrong. Hopping home on your head cannot be done at all. The poem saves its single impossibility for the exit.

Inversion

The poem says never had I seen before, where ordinary English would say I had never seen before. Reversing the usual word order is called inversion, and poets do it to fit a rhythm or to reach a rhyme. It is worth recognising, because an inverted line can look like an error.

The rhyme scheme

Take any stanza and listen to the line endings. Only the second and fourth rhyme; the first and third are free. That pattern is written ABCB, and it is a looser scheme than the one in Try Again.

What the loose scheme buys

Freedom. With no rhyme needed on two lines out of four, the poet can put a currant bun or a pair of hats wherever the joke needs them, rather than wherever a rhyme allows. A tighter scheme would have cost her some of the nonsense.

The shape of the whole thing

A stranger arrives, behaves beautifully and wrongly, gives a bun, sings, refuses to explain himself, and leaves upside down. Nothing is resolved and nothing needs to be. The poem’s achievement is that its nonsense has a system inside it.

Scenario:

A new restaurant opens and one waiter becomes famous locally within a fortnight. He greets every table with a small bow. He repeats each order back word for word. He apologises if a dish takes more than ten minutes. He also brings the pudding before the main course, hands the bill to whichever guest is youngest, and refills a glass that is already full. Nobody complains, and several families start asking for his table. The manager cannot work out whether to correct him.

Analysis:

This is the funny man in an apron, and it works for exactly the reason the poem does. Every one of his courtesies is performed properly: the bow, the repeated order, the apology for a delay. None of them is mocking or careless. What is wrong is the matching between the courtesy and the occasion, and the mismatch is funny precisely because the manners are flawless. Imagine a waiter who brought the pudding first while being surly. Nothing about that is amusing; it is simply bad service, and the families would complain rather than ask for him. The comedy requires the two halves to pull in opposite directions, with the person apparently unaware of the gap. Note too what the manager’s difficulty really is. The errors are harmless and the courtesy is real, so correcting the first would risk flattening the second, and the second is what the customers are coming back for.

Activity:

Invent a character who gets every courtesy exactly right and every occasion exactly wrong: a guest, a shopkeeper, a teacher. Write six lines of dialogue in which somebody asks them one sensible question, and do not let them answer it.

Title:

Write a mixed-sense phrase that works

Safety:

None needed.

What You Notice:

Most of the six will be nonsense and two or three will be surprisingly good, usually the ones involving touch or sound. That is not luck: English already accepts a warm voice and a loud colour, so those crossings are half-familiar. The poem is funny because it crosses the senses that English has not yet got used to.

Describing one sense in the language of another has a name: synaesthesia. Poets use it seriously too, as when a voice is called warm or a colour loud.

A currant is a small dried seedless grape, so a currant bun is a plain sweet bun studded with them. The joke depends on it looking nothing whatever like a rose.

Nonsense verse has a long tradition in English, and Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll both built it on the same principle: ordinary grammar carrying impossible content.

The three mixed phrases — A sight that sounds, a smell that looks, a sound that feels — Sounding sight, looking smell, feeling sound. Each takes the verb of the wrong sense, and they arrive in that order in the poem.

What he wears — Shoe up, hats down — One shoe on his head and two hats on his feet. Note the numbers as well: a single shoe above, a pair of hats below.

Three in the poem, easily missed

The funny man comes walking down the street. He takes out a currant bun. He sits down on the ground. Those three expressions are phrasal verbs, and nothing about them draws attention to itself, which is part of the point.

What a phrasal verb is

A verb joined to a small word, a preposition or an adverb, so that the two work as a single unit of meaning. The small word is called the particle. Two words on the page, one idea in the sentence.

The meaning is not the sum

Here is the difficulty. To take in a lesson involves no taking and nothing inside. To put off a meeting involves no putting. The parts are ordinary and the whole has gone somewhere else entirely, which is why you cannot work the meaning out by adding them up.

Which is why dictionaries list them separately

Look up take and you will find take up, take after, take in, take over and take off as separate entries with separate definitions. A dictionary does not expect you to assemble them, because they cannot be assembled.

One verb, five meanings

Consider that list. To take up something is to begin it. To take after somebody is to resemble them. To take in a fact is to understand it. To take over is to assume control. To take off is to become popular quickly. Five unrelated meanings from one verb.

And the particle gets no credit

Nothing about the word up suggests beginning. Nothing about after suggests resemblance. The particle does not carry a meaning of its own that you can learn once and apply; it changes the verb unpredictably, which is exactly what makes phrasal verbs hard.

The thing the exercises do not mention

Now for the most useful rule in this topic, and the book does not state it. Some phrasal verbs can be split by their object and some cannot. This is not a style question. One of the two versions is simply not English.

Separable

Take off your shoes is correct. So is take your shoes off. The object may sit after the particle or between the verb and the particle, and both orders are ordinary English. These are the separable phrasal verbs.

Inseparable

Take after your mother is correct. Take your mother after is not a sentence at all. The object has to follow the whole phrasal verb, and nothing may come between its two halves. These are the inseparable ones.

The test

Put the object in the middle and listen. If the sentence survives, the verb is separable. If it collapses, it is not. Your ear will settle this faster than any rule, and the rule exists mainly to tell you that the question is worth asking.

One extra rule about pronouns

When the object is a pronoun, a separable phrasal verb must split. Take them off is correct and take off them is not, even though take off your shoes is perfectly fine. So the pronoun has less freedom than the noun it replaces.

Literal and idiomatic

Walking down the street is literal: there is real walking and a real downward direction. The plane took off is idiomatic, because nothing was taken and nothing went off. Both are phrasal verbs in form, and the idiomatic ones are the ones to learn on purpose.

Spotting the idiomatic ones

Ask whether the particle still means what it usually means. In sit down, down means downwards, so the expression is close to literal. In take off meaning to become popular, off means nothing recognisable, which is the signal that the phrase has to be learnt whole.

Beyond take

The same thing happens with other common verbs. Look after, look up, look into and look out are four different actions. Run into, run out and run over are three more. Each set rewards learning together, because the contrast is what fixes them.

Why they resist reasoning

There is no principle connecting off to popularity or after to family resemblance. These are facts about how English happens to be used, recorded by dictionaries and picked up by reading. No amount of thinking will produce them.

The third time this chapter has said that

It is worth noticing the pattern. Which words collocate cannot be reasoned out. How a compound is spelt cannot be reasoned out. What a phrasal verb means cannot be reasoned out. Three separate topics, one conclusion: a great deal of English is usage rather than rule, and reading is how it arrives.

Scenario:

A hostel puts up a notice in its corridor. It reads: residents must put up their own bedding, take off their footwear, and put out the lights by ten. Within a week the warden has three complaints. One resident has pinned her bedding to the wall. Another has left his shoes in the middle of the corridor, reasoning that the notice said to take them off and not where to put them. A third has been turning off the corridor lights at ten, leaving the stairs dark. Every one of them can point to the notice.

Analysis:

All three residents have read a phrasal verb and chosen a meaning the notice did not intend, and in each case the meaning they chose is a real one. Put up means to display or pin up, as the notice itself does when it is put up on the wall; it also means to provide accommodation, and only in some households does it mean to stow bedding away. Take off is unambiguous, but the notice gave no destination, so the resident who abandoned his shoes has obeyed it exactly. Put out means to extinguish, and also to place outside, and also to inconvenience somebody; the third resident chose extinguish but applied it to the wrong lights. The lesson is not that phrasal verbs should be avoided. It is that a phrasal verb with several meanings needs its context supplied, especially in writing, where nobody can ask what was meant. Store your bedding in the locker would have cost four more words and prevented all three complaints.

Activity:

Find a notice or a set of instructions that uses a phrasal verb. Write down every meaning that phrasal verb can carry, then decide whether the notice rules the wrong ones out. If it does not, rewrite it so that it does.

Title:

Build the set, then test it for splitting

Safety:

None needed.

What You Notice:

Most people get two or three of the five meanings wrong on the first guess, which is the clearest possible demonstration that these cannot be reasoned out. The splitting test is easier than the meanings, because your ear already knows the answer even where you have never been taught the rule.

English has several thousand phrasal verbs, and they are among the last things a learner masters, because the meanings cannot be predicted from the parts.

When the object is a pronoun, a separable phrasal verb MUST split. Take them off is correct; take off them is not, even though take off your shoes is fine.

Many formal English verbs have a phrasal twin: to postpone and to put off, to tolerate and to put up with. The phrasal one is usually the more ordinary in speech.

The five uses of take — Up begin, After resemble, In understand, Over control, Off succeed — Five particles, five unrelated meanings, one verb. Learning them as a set is easier than meeting them one at a time, because the contrast between them is the memorable part.

Can it be split? — Put the object in the middle and listen — Take your shoes off survives, so take off is separable. Take your mother after does not, so take after is not. The ear settles it faster than any rule.

Three ways of moving in one poem

The poem gives us a man walking down the street, a speaker who staggered back against a wall, and a departure in which he hopped home. Three verbs, all about going along, and none of them a plain substitute for another.

The obvious difference is pace

Some of these verbs are faster than others. Stagger is slower than walk. Jog is faster than walk and slower than run. Sprint is the fastest thing on the list, and it also implies a short distance.

So they can be put in a line

Stagger, walk, jog, trot, run, sprint. That is a reasonable order from slowest to fastest, and arranging them is a useful exercise because it forces you to notice distinctions you had never put into words.

Except that hop refuses to fit

Now try to place hop. Is it faster than walking? It can be. Slower? Also yes, depending on who is hopping. The question has no answer, and the reason is that hop is not telling you about speed at all.

Two axes, not one

Verbs of movement differ in pace and in manner, and the two are independent. Hop describes what the feet do. Stagger describes steadiness. Sprint describes speed. A single line from slow to fast can only show one of those three things.

Which makes the task more interesting than it looks

So when a question asks you to order such verbs by pace, the honest answer sometimes includes a note: this one cannot be placed, because it is not a pace. Noticing that is worth more than inventing a position for it.

What stagger carries

Look at how the poem uses it. She staggered back against the wall. That is not only slow movement; it is unsteady movement, caused by surprise. The verb carries a reason as well as a motion, which is why the poet chose it over stepped or moved.

One word instead of two

Here is the practical gain. Walked unsteadily is two words. Staggered is one, and it says more, because it specifies a kind of unsteadiness that the adverb leaves open. Ran very fast becomes sprinted. Said quietly becomes murmured.

Why that is the same lesson as before

This chapter’s reader has already made the point about description: a verdict tells, a sensation shows. The same thing is true inside a verb. He moved quickly is a report. He bolted is a picture. A precise verb is the showing version.

And why it is worth the effort

Because an adverb is usually the sign of a verb that has not been chosen. Every time you write a verb with an adverb hanging off it, there is often a single word that would do both jobs, and finding it makes the sentence shorter and sharper at once.

Narrating an incident

The chapter’s listening task is a girl telling a story about her own absent-mindedness. She takes off her shoes, eats her lunch, and ends up having put the plate in one room and the shoes in another. Then she laughs at herself.

The order you tell is not the order it happened

Notice what the task actually asks. It wants the events in the order they occurred, and people do not narrate that way. A teller usually begins with the funniest part, then goes back and fills in. Rebuilding the real order is a different skill from following along.

How to do it

Listen for the small anchoring facts rather than the feelings. Shoes come off before lunch. The plate exists only after lunch. The laugh has to be last, because it is a reaction to the whole thing. Each of those fixes a position regardless of when it was mentioned.

Why her story is funny at all

Because of the swap. Putting a plate in a bedroom is odd; putting the shoes in the kitchen at the same time makes it a pattern, and a pattern of two is what turns absent-mindedness into a joke. One misplaced object would just be untidy.

Telling a joke

The chapter ends by asking you to tell one, and there is a structure worth knowing. A joke has a setup and a last line. The setup gives the listener everything except the single piece that makes sense of it.

Withholding is the whole trick

The last line supplies the missing piece, and the laugh comes from the sudden fit. Which means the funny part is not the information but the delay. Tell the last line first and nothing at all happens, even though every word has been said.

So timing beats wording

This is why a joke badly timed fails even when perfectly worded, and why the same joke works for one teller and not another. It also explains the funny man’s exit. He hops home on his head without answering, and the poem simply stops, which is the shortest possible version of the same technique.

Scenario:

Two pupils tell the class the same joke in the same lesson. Rohit tells it first and gets a real laugh. Later, Sameer tells it again, word for word, having listened carefully. He gets nothing. He is certain he has not changed a syllable, and he is right: a classmate who wrote both versions down confirms they are identical. Their teacher points out one difference. Rohit paused before his last line. Sameer, nervous, said the whole thing at the same speed and ran the last line straight on from the one before it.

Analysis:

The joke was identical and the effect was not, so the difference cannot be in the words. It is in the withholding. A joke works by giving the listener everything except the piece that makes sense of it, and the laugh comes from the sudden fit when that piece arrives. The fit needs a moment to happen in. Rohit’s pause gave the class that moment, and in it they were still working on the puzzle, so his last line landed on an audience that was ready. Sameer’s version never let them start. Running the lines together meant the explanation arrived before the question had registered, and an answer to an unasked question is not funny. Notice what this shows about the funny man’s exit in the poem. He hops home on his head without answering, and the poem simply stops. The gap left behind is the same device, done in silence.

Activity:

Take a joke you know and tell it twice to the same person: once with a clear pause before the last line and once run straight through. Then ask them which version worked and whether they can say why.

Title:

Hunt the adverb, and replace it

Safety:

None needed.

What You Notice:

Perhaps two thirds of the pairs have a single-word replacement and the rest genuinely do not, which is worth knowing: the advice is not to delete every adverb but to check each one. The paragraph also usually gets shorter and more vivid together, which is the unusual case where economy and precision agree.

A trot is a real gait with a technical definition: in horses it is a two-beat pace in which diagonal pairs of legs move together.

English is unusually rich in verbs of motion. Many languages describe manner with an adverb instead, so a learner has to acquire dozens of verbs English speakers never think about.

The last line of a joke is called the punchline, and the word is barely a century old. It comes from the idea of the line that delivers the blow.

Ordering verbs of movement — Stagger, walk, jog, trot, run, sprint — and hop sits outside — The first six form a rough line from slowest to fastest. Hop is a manner rather than a pace, so it refuses a position on that line.

Precise verb, or verb plus adverb? — One word beats two — Walked unsteadily becomes staggered. Ran very fast becomes sprinted. The single word is shorter and more exact at the same time.