(Untitled)

[gwynraven]

So I'm reading Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett. And I'm trying (mostly successfully) to keep up with the pop-culture references. But here I'm stumped. Discssing the phenomenon of logo t-shirts, where people actually pay money to advertise products. The Discworld versions of these logo t-shirts are ChalKies, 12 the Scours, and Thyngs Done. Now,

Comments

[gwynraven]

Never mind. If I'd read a few pages further before asking I'd have realised it's the address of the aforementioned ChalKies shop.

[saskia139]

Those references seem amazingly unclever to me. Maybe Pratchett just belongs to that school of British humour that never, ever makes me laugh.

[gwynraven]

Well I suppose it's all context. Yeah, when I write it out like that it doesn't sound all that wonderful, but within the context of what he's doing it works. Then again, he does belong to a particular school of British humour, and maybe it's not the right kind for you. You should try reading Good Omens, which he co-wrote with Neil Gaiman. I think you'd appreciate some of the religious subject matter, and it's a good introduction to Pratchett's brand of humour. If that one doesn't work for you, then Pratchett's probably not your thing.

I, on the other hand, absolutely adore him :)

[saskia139]

I'm afraid Pratchett falls into that category of "Watch me not laughing at this". I am sorry to have to admit it, but Are You Being Served? sends me into gales of laughter, whereas Monty Python or Douglas Adams just makes me twitch ever so slightly. There's a particular kind of Britwit that I can *see* intellectually is funny without ever being affected by it--sort of the way some people are ticklish, some are not.

so 8 years later...

[2501]

Chalkie is a troll. All trolls are made of stone and generally named after the kind of stone prevalent where they were born. They are also stupid, for the most part. In the book, there is a guy managing a band and selling shirts with the band's name on them. The troll finds it so unbelievable that people would pay money to buy a shirt to advertise someone else's product that he makes his own shirts, even though he doesn't really have a business, because he's sort of a criminal. So the references are not "unclever", but rather they're references to things *in the book* rather than something else. "Thyngs Done" is a reflection of the fact that the troll is illiterate and also that he can't actually describe what he does since it's illegal. Pratchett is amazingly smart and many of his books are pretty much non-stop funny page after page, but you need to actually read them...