Daily Dialogue — August 26, 2011
So there’s this guy Walsh, do you understand? He’s tired of screwin’ his wife… So his friend says to him, “Hey, why don’t you do it like the Chinese do?” So he says, “How do the Chinese do it?” And the guy says, “Well, the Chinese, first they screw a little bit, then they stop, then they go and read a little Confucius, come back, screw a little bit more, then they stop again, go and they screw a little bit… then they go back and they screw a little bit more and then they go out and they contemplate the moon or something like that. Makes it more exciting.” So now, the guy goes home and he starts screwin’ his own wife, see. So he screws her for a little bit and then he stops, and he goes out of the room and reads Life Magazine. Then he goes back in, he starts screwin’ again. He says, “Excuse me for a minute, honey.” He goes out and he smokes a cigarette. Now his wife is gettin’ sore as hell. He comes back in the room, he starts screwin’ again. He gets up to start to leave again to go look at the moon. She looks at him and says, “Hey, whats the matter with ya. You’re screwin’ just like a Chinaman!”
— Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), Chinatown (1974), written by Robert Towne
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is jokes, suggested by Francisco Madaragog. Chinatown suggested by John.
Trivia: This was the first film of a planned trilogy about corruption in the development of Los Angeles. It was set in the 1930s and was about the water department. The second film, The Two Jakes, was set in the 1940s and was about the gas company. The third film of the trilogy was about the building of the massive freeway system and was to be called “Cloverleaf”, named after the famous interchange in downtown L.A., but it was never filmed. However, certain elements (like the building of a massive freeway by a corporation called called “Cloverleaf”) were eventually incorporated into Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which took a fantasy/comedic view of this material but also functioned as a detective story.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Now this has some subtext. What of those elements do you see in play in this joke?