Setting the Scene – What Do You Call A….? by Samuel
One thing I’ve learned in my short time as a setter is that it’s impossible to judge how a puzzle is going to be received by solvers. I don’t know how long other setters take to construct a puzzle – and I know that it is hard to tell, as (in my case) there’s often several months of thought and playing around before an idea gels properly – but the Samuel puzzle that seems to have been best received, Doctor, Doctor (published a couple of years ago in the Magpie) was also the one that took least time to set.
In fact, the puzzle was so well received (and I was very honoured that it found its way into the Magpie sample electronic issue) that the decision to set another puzzle themed around a particular sort of joke wasn’t a hard one. My only concerns were a) what sort of joke to use, and b) should I really set a follow-up? Lots of setters do have particular ‘themes’ – Salamanca’s Plays of the Bard, Dipper’s gardening puzzles and Glow-worms ‘A Game Of…..’ series to name three that spring to mind.
The second question was the one to answer first, and the answer was – yes, I thought it was okay, but that would be that – no more digging around for increasingly unlikely types of joke to utilise. The answer to the first question was harder. Molly (my youngest daughter, now 5 years old) had just discovered the joys of telling jokes. She couldn’t get enough of her two favourite ‘Knock, Knock’ jokes (Doctor, Doctor Who; I want a p; I want a p-who, in case anyone’s interested), but there’s an old Torquemada puzzle which utilises these (although not those two specific examples) and I didn’t want to copy one of the masters. Her attempts at jokes also weren’t suitable (sample: Why did the chicken cross the road? Because potatoes!). Who knows how a five year old’s brain works?
My next thought was the ‘what do you call a man/woman who…. series’, which were favourites of mine at school. The only question was whether there were sufficient jokes like this which could be utilised. I also wanted to make the puzzle to be ‘closed’, whereas ‘Doctor, Doctor’ was open – ie solvers had to submit a possible solution to a Doctor, Doctor joke given by superfluous letters. This one should be self-contained.
The obvious answer was to have a clue gimmick revealing the question in a joke, and solvers had to highlight the punchline (ie the name being the answer to the joke). There weren’t many choices for this, as the answer really had to be quite long rather than just a simple short name.
The only two choices were the answers to the two jokes:
What do you call a woman playing snooker whilst balancing two pints of beer on her head? Beatrix Potter (Beer tricks potter), and
What do you call a man wearing two raincoats standing by a cemetery? Max Bygraves. This is the final one in a chain of jokes (man wearing a raincoat = Mack, man wearing two raincoats = Max, man wearing a ridiculously large number of raincoats = Maximilian). I didn’t fancy having a 13×13 grid – it would be good to keep it as a more standard 12×12, so it was MAX BYGRAVES, even though this was only 11 letters. Besides, ‘wearing two raincoats standing by a cemetery’ had 38 letters, and having 38 entries plus a number of thematic joke entries in the grid would undoubtedly make the average answer length too short.
The next step was to come up with a number of jokes that could be used. I discounted some because they might be seen as being in bad taste (What do you call a man with a rabbit up his bottom? Warren, being an example of these). By this time I’d come up with a 32 letter version of the question in the ‘Max Bygraves’ joke (… man with two raincoats by a churchyard), and decided on using this and six thematic entries to give a 12×12 grid with 38 lights.
I simply had to use the ‘Beatrix’ joke, but in its shorter form – I opted for ‘woman who juggles bottles of lager’ in the end, simply to avoid the word ‘beer’ being in the clue. I was also set on using the two jokes of this type that I remembered hearing first - man with a spade on (or possibly in) his head, and man with a seagull on his head. My research also found me two more that I’d never heard before, but quite liked – woman with one leg shorter than the other (Eileen = I lean), and man with three eyes (Seymour = see more). I thought I’d leave the other one open for the time being, and set about generating a fill and a grid.
With the limitations of having MAX BYGRAVES in the grid, as well as the five entries for BEATRIX, SEYMOUR, EILEEN, DOUG and CLIFF, this proved surprisingly tricky. This didn’t seem like a great amount of thematic material, but Sympathy struggled to find fills. An early fill had GRANT as the answer to a normal clue, but I soon adopted this as a punchline. I’d also decided that I was tired of having thematic information to highlight in the main diagonals, so I settled on a vertical position for MAX BYGRAVES. I spent a while flirting with reverting to a 13×13 grid so that this could be symmetrically placed, but in the end decided to avoid this, for the reasons above.
The fill that I finally settled on had only a couple of entries that looked as if they would be hard to clue. I wasn’t keen on the definition for CYMAR, nor ILIAN, but was excited about SYLVIAN (a chance, perhaps, to introduce the ex-singer of Japan, David Sylvian, to Magpie readers), as well as THOREAU – mainly because there’s more than one person of that name to choose from. I hoped I could use the author, responsible for the fantastic Bevis. ALOWE also had great possibilities, thanks to A(rthur) LOWE, stalwart of Dad’s Army.
With a fill in place, the next step was to decide which gimmick to use to generate the question for the Max Bygraves joke. From fairly early days, I’ve always tried to incorporate novel or unusual clueing gimmicks in Samuel puzzles, but for this puzzle I almost didn’t. I thought that one of the reasons that Doctor, Doctor had been well-received was that it was a quirky grade A, and I hoped that this could also be graded A. I started writing clues using superfluous letters, but after four or five I stopped, thought again, and decided that even with a more unusual gimmick, the puzzle shouldn’t be any harder than a B. After a few days’ thought I hit upon using jumbles of given names to be removed before solving, with the initial letters of the names spelling the question for the joke. Little did I realise how much of a challenge I was setting myself.
The golden rule here was that these must all be in Chambers, and that, unless unavoidable, they should never be straightforward anagrams of single words. Up to this point, it had taken only about two weeks from conception to having the working fill. Clueing was to take as many months, and I often despaired – as I so often do when using these unusual gimmicks. Some letters that I needed had very few given names in Chambers, and in many cases these were impossible to jumble and include in clues. U and Y were particularly difficult ones to sort out.
The Arthur Lowe clue worked as expected, but unfortunately David Sylvian did indeed prove to be a pop music reference too far. Never mind, maybe next time.