Pointsman's cockney joke

[Jody Keith Gilbert]

On page 168 of the Viking edition of GR we have this,
ending with a joke:
        At odd moments of the day Pointsman,
     fascinated, discovers himself with an erect
     penis. He begins making jokes, English
     Pavlovian jokes, nearly all of which depend
     on one unhappy accident: the Latin
     cortex translates into English as "bark,"
     not to mention the well- known and
     humorous relation between dogs and
     trees  (these are bad enough, and most
     PISCES folk have the good sense to avoid
     them, but they are  dazzling witticisms  compared
     with jokes out of the mainstream, such as the
     extraordinary "What did the Cockney exclaim
     to the cowboy from San Antonio?"). 

I wanted to know what the Cockney exclaimed to the cowboy from 
San Antonio , so I guessed, and then figured Steven Weisenburger 
must have a suggestion in *A GR Companion*.  He suggests that 
the Cockney "might exclaim 'I'll be your rose of San Antone" 
following a justification based on "the model [of] the 
cortex/bark/dogs/trees example".  This may be unnecessarily 
complex.  Note in the GR quotation above we are told that most of 
the jokes "are  dazzling witticisms compared with "What did the 
Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?" and "nearly
all of which depend on one unhappy accident: the Latin cortex t
ranslates into English as 'bark', not to mention the well-known
and humorous relation between dogs and trees".  "Nearly all"
Therefore this one might not depend on the "cortex/bark/dogs/
trees" relationship and  I would expect this joke to be
a groaner.  It should be an exclamation, which "I'll be
your rose of San Antone" isn't really.  One answer 
then is "Cor ( or Gor ) Tex!"  "Gor" being a  common Cockney 
exclamation, as in "gorblimey", a corruption of "God blind me."
  For what it's worth, I can't find gorblim(e)y in GR.

Someone else has probably already come up with this one.


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John (Jody) K. Gilbert
Department of English
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C. Canada
V5A 1S6
office phone (604) 291-5517
dept. phone  (604) 291-3136
internet     gilbert at sfu.ca