Joke "The Cat is on the Roof..."

Carmine’s “The cat is on the roof” joke via telephone – recorded Saturday Feb. 3, 2007

A fellow is going away for a vacation for a couple of weeks and he has his best friend look after his house.
And water the plants, take care of the pets and all the rest of it.
He’s gone for a couple of days and he gets a phone call from the fellow tending to the house.
He says, “I gotta tell you, I’ve got bad news – your cat’s dead.”
The guy was traumatized.
So the next year when he was getting ready to go on vacation he says, “I’m going to be going again. I want you to watch the house --- and look after things. But if anything happens, you’ve go to give it to me in small installments – so I can absorb it.
Like with the cat – you call me up and, Bingo! You say, “Your cat’s dead!”
Instead, you should have said, “Your cat went up on the roof.”
Then, call me back later and said, “And, the fire department came to rescue your cat.”
And then you can say, “And then the cat fell off the roof.”
And then, you could have called me and said, “Your cat’s dead”. That way I could have prepared myself rather than being so shocked.
The guy said, “Okay. I’ll do that. Probably nuthin is goin ta happen anyway. I understand.”
So he goes on vacation for a couple of days; he’s only on vacation for a couple of days and he picks up the phone and it’s his friend who’s looking after the house, and the fella says,
“I’ve got news for you. Your mother’s on the roof.”

Comments
I think what’s so funny about this is that the conversational “dance” was non-existent when the cat died – then, the naïf-friend then tried to do as he was asked but ended up metaphorically stepping pretty hard on his “dance” partner’s toes.

The house owner wanted both context and adjacency pairs particularly for his receiving of the emotion-laden news that his cat died. The context he asked for was a fuller description of the event that sequentially led to the kitty’s demise. In this case, I think the context and the adjacency pairs overlap. The context he asked for is the small dose approach to bad news; the adjacency pairing he needs in order to establish some emotional space in which to absorb each news byte without being shocked – or humiliated by the shock of being locked in a conversation that is emotionally upsetting.
In Smitherman’s terms, the home owner asked his house-sitting friend to do his part in helping him “gittin ovuh” his personal difficulties through conversational sensitivity and style.
In thinking about this a bit in context of the Baumann and Briggs article, I wonder if the friend was operting on a different “code” (63) and that what is amusing is to watch the bumbled code-switching. As presented, the joke is certainly playful – a “play frame” that provides a setting “in which speech and society can be transformed” (63) The joke, too has everything to do with turn-taking as well. The home owner tries to show his friend not to rush through his turn – that sufficient turn taking indeed, “shapes their social relations” (63). The joke may be an example of “contextualization” in which the performing voices “reflexively examin(e) the discourse s it is emerging” (69). More than the words themselves (context) contextualization is more active and agentive on the part of the speakers. Baumann and Briggs go on to note that the use of reported speech in performance is receiving more attention by researchers. They mention – and it is apparent that by using reported speech – he said; she said – widens the scope of a verbal performance to encompass styles, personalities and histories not their own (70) – as in the case of Carmine, who told the joke.