Recently, my friends Theresa and Joe were visiting me in Chicago, and I mentioned a neighborhood here known for being both a lesbian and Swedish part of town. That combination got a smile from my guests, so I added, "The lesbians and Swedes have coexisted peacefully for over five centuries."
Joe then jumped in with, "Right, the Swedish-Lesbian War of 1400... " Theresa turned historian: "The lesbians were more committed to the cause—and each other." Finally, Joe said of this military conflict, "That would make a great graphic novel by Frank Miller."
This kind of outrageous—yet common—verbal play is a comical hypothetical (CH)—a conversational phenomenon named by Michaela Winchatz and Alexander Kozin in the journal Discourse Studies.
CHs usually start with a line like "Just imagine" or "What if" and progress to—as the researchers put it—"highly improbable scenarios" that are often collaboratively created. For example, in one observed group, chitchat about a trip began a bizarre conversation involving "40 years in the wilderness" and the founding of a cannibalistic, secret society.
