VLVL2 (3): Check's in the Mayo

[Dave Monroe]

   "A waitress approached with the check.  Both
men--Hector by reflex and Zoyd then startled into
it--sprange toward her and collided, and the girl,
alarmed, backed away, dropping the document, which
then got batted around by the three parties until at
last fluttering into a revolving condiment tray, where
it ended up half submerged in a big fluffy mound of
mayonnaise gone translucent at the edges.
   "'Check's in the mayo,' Zoyd had time to note ..."
(VL, Ch. 3, p. 32)


p. 32 "Check's in the mayo"  A brilliant throw-away
Feghoot. In the fifties, a science fiction writer
named Grendel Briarton wrote a series of short, funny
pieces for Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine
titled, "Through Time and Space With Ferdinand
Feghoot." They all worked the same way: establishing a
silly and complicated story line for the sole purpose
of setting up a painfully outrageous pun. Pynchon is
addicted to the form; one of the best Feghoots ever
written is the "Forty million Frenchmen" gag ("for
DeMille young Frenchmen ...") on page 559 of Gravity's
Rainbow.

http://www.mindspring.com/~shadow88/chapter3.htm

On Feghoot(s), see ...

http://www.awpi.com/Combs/Shaggy/index.html

http://home.tiac.net/~cri/2002/feghoot.html

And on the M of F&SF, cf. ...

"the way Isaac Asimov explains it" (SL, "Intro," p.
12)

Asimov, Isaac.  "Order!  Order!"  The Magazine of
   Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 20, No. 2
   (February 1961):   -  .

http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/Essays/physics.html

http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/Essays/f_and_sf_essays.html

http://ff-asimov.ifrance.com/ff-asimov/Ess-O.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=73011&sort=date

>From Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, "'That High Magic to
Low Puns': Thomas Pynchon, Wit, and the Work of the
Supernatural,"  Rocky Mountain Review, Vol. 54, No. 1
(Spring 2000) ...

   At the same time as these characters are selected
out of grace, the systems they inhabit offer another
kind of magic, a possibility for a life-generating
alternative to entropy. This other motion toward grace
originates in the dozens of puns in Pynchon's novels,
puns that perform not only to mark the accidental
homonymic relationships among sounds, but more
actively to create entire plots to take the place of
the malevolent God's plots, thereby generating a
complete ontological system originating in The Word.
In The Crying of Lot 49, the pun produces energy
against entropy in its ability to multiply meanings,
to proliferate "output" from a single source, a word,
or an image. The pun, even more efficiently than
Maxwell's Demon, defies the second law of
thermodynamics (not to mention the first law): it
actually creates realities, causing a word to do the
work of several with minimal energy. With such
linguistic generativity, these puns reinscribe the
sacred into the secular world, visiting a supernatural
effect upon the world of physical laws, and in so
doing, they work a typological anti-causality against
a perceived Calvinistic, predetermined linear
end-direction. Puns in Pynchon's novels transfigure
the natural landscape, therefore, and not by virtue of
demonic presences that hide in the history of postage
stamps or in Nazi armies; instead, this supernatural
effect comes from the will of language itself,
language made palpable through visible and readable
signs. 
   The activity of puns and their place among the
supernatural marks of grace proceed from a generally
eschatological and specifically Puritan obsession in
Pynchon's novels....

http://rmmla.wsu.edu/ereview/54.1/articles/hinds.asp

And see as well, e.g., ...

Culler, Jonathan, ed.  On Puns: The Foundation of
   Letters.  Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

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