McClelland read several stories from Resurrection Mary to the Lake Erie Monster. But in listening to the Paul Bunyun stories, I realized what was happening:
The stories were chalk full of dad jokes. At the end of each dad joke, McClelland would pause, give us Pun Husky Face, and then keep reading.
"...And they took that copper and used it to make the dome of the Ohio capital building!"
Dissecting it on the walk home, I thought about how it wasn't the presence of the dad jokes that was novel during the reading, but it was their placement. Usually you see them at the very end of a story, a joke ending where you would slap your hands together and throw them out into jazz hands. "Ehhh?! Get it!" The point of each of my grandad's stories was that at the end he had solved the last engineering puzzle keeping a building from being completed, and once it was solved they were able to construct such-and-such famous building in downtown Dallas that you'd have heard from if you were from Dallas. Or that he gave some advice and then that poet was Robert Frost.
It's like a flag that you wave at the end to say, "Got ya! That didn't really happen...Or did it?!"
So when these jokes are peppered throughout the story, as the punchline to each paragraph rather than the punchline to the full narrative, it sounds different to the ear. It's more, "Let me tell you a string of puns," rather than, "Let me tell you one long, winding joke that sucks you in for a while before spitting you out with how it didn't happen." So maybe not giving the listener time to get engrossed eases that sense of mild annoyance that comes after the big reveal. The annoyance where your friend does jazz hands and cackles at their brilliance, and you boo at them and tell them to delete their account.
But really, they're the same, and it took a different format for me to see it.
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