Philosophical Burogu

Scrabble Brand Sentence Cube Game

Recently I played a game called "Scrabble Brand Sentence Cube Game," a Scrabble (r) spin-off provided by Selchow and Righter in the early sententies.

The game consists of 21 dice on the faces of which are printed short common words, such as "man," "leg," "walk," "kiss." The object of the game is to make sentences, which may be interlocking, within a given period of time (approximately 3 minutes) as timed by an egg timer.

Mis-reading the rules, and failing to note the bonus of 50 per sentences longer than 7 words, I presumed that the longer the sentence the merrier. And I did find it quite merry. Here are some of the sentences that I came up with:

"Baby saw how they live off a young beast and it is too bad his old lady did kiss, bare" (using 20 of the 21 dice)

"How bare a heart may he let love, my boy ran on up her new live work, not any cold felt" (using all 21 of the dice)

My, who is Japanese, wife managed
"They who time his old foot smell, laugh and ran out with a big part which felt new." (Using 18 of the dice)

Now, the thing is that while as a game, the "Scrabble Sentence Cube Game"
is not one I would recommend, I found making the largely non-sensical sentences to be particularly amusing - I laughed heartily - and even cathartic.

Now there is a certain sexual element to the above sentences that might, in a particularly inhibited mind, give rise to laughter. But it seemed to me that it was merely the ability to place words in grammatically correct but largely non-sensical order that caused my merriment.

Drawing on Freud's view of cause of laugher as the controlled return of the repressed, what repressed libinal drive might account for laughter at the ability to create nonsense?

From a Lacanain point of view, perhaps nonsense (the shaggy dog story?
the absurd?) may present the ultimate in comedy since it threatens what he calls the prohibition of the father. According the Lacan, the father prohbits not only that we give up our desire to be (re) united with our mother, but also that we confine ourselves, or even create ourselves, within the bounds, or topos, of language. After that moment that the father banishes us to the world of language, I am as I think myself, in language.

In this light, perhaps, the "Scrabble Sentence Cube Game" plays out the boundaries of the signified, and allows the return of something primally repressed: that we are, in , bounded by language and continually hopping from one signifier to another.

Or perhaps, simply, I simply have a purile sense of humour? There must be others like me. I recommend the Scrabble Sentence Cube Game to all those that are feeling a bit uptight and generally repressed.