Smith (no, the other one) and storytelling

The seemingly missing punchline in the H. Allen Smith buildup I quoted in my previous post reminds me that Smith's humor frequently proceeds by accretion; sometimes by piling one absurd reported anecdote on another one, but just as often by accumulating facts about our position in the universe, say, until at last our poor fellow sitting by the fire is reduced to utter existential terror by the thought of the constellations towards, away from, or along with which he is rushing. Or Smith is terrified on his behalf, or whatever. (I haven't read the passage quoted on the fan site, but it brings back some of Smith's characteristic strategies.)

Other Smith strategies included dryly quoting selected facts, arranged so that the penultimate and ultimate facts in the sequence functioned like the punchline of a joke.

on storytelling, still more

It doesn't matter where you start
It all comes together, it all falls apart.
---Ronald Sukenick, 98.6


I am struck by how prettily the quest for the origin of "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout" illustrates some rules I've noticed in web searches:

1) The anecdote moves from the original punchline to a more polished and rhythmically pleasing one. Except when it doesn't.

2) Scrupulous re-tellers ascribe anonymity to the originator more often than they get the source right. Most other people think the story originated with the best known re-teller of it or with the person best known for the genre in question. A few tend to come up with a completely off-the-wall ascription.

3) The less popular variant is often, though not always, closer to the original. Sometimes none of the variants are close to the original, but in that case it is rare to stumble across the original in the process of a web search.

4) The most crazed, most distorted document sometimes is the only one in which the original citation is embedded with near-total accuracy.

It may be merest coincidence that so many of these empirically derived rules coincide with the hermeneutical guidelines developed by those who study certain well-known texts and tales stemming from regions of Roman Palestine. Or it may be that the human mind is just plain subject to the same sorts of elisions, confusions, simplifications and elaborations any time a story is told or written down, and a huge amount of hermeneutical and interpretational discourse is missing a very fundamental point.

Information theorists and historians of consciousness really need to talk to one another. Or at least annotate one another.