The Light Fantastic

The original quote here dates back to 1777, and is by Samuel Johnson (a well-known harmless drudge): “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Quite a few people have mistaken this quote for a reference to Douglas Adams. Of course Adams was simply parodying Johnson’s quote as well when he wrote (in Chapter 4 of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe):

'[…] when a recent edition of Playbeing magazine headlined an article with the words ‘When you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta you are tired of life’, the suicide rate there quadrupled overnight.”

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When someone on the net wondered if this scene had been influenced by Monty Python (who also do a Death-at-a-party sketch), Terry replied:

'No. I'm fairly honest about this stuff. I didn’t even see the film until long after the book was done. Once again, I'd say it’s an easy parallel—what with the Masque of the Red Death and stuff like that, the joke is just lying there waiting for anyone to pick it up.”

The Masque of the Red Death is a well-known story by Edgar Allan Poe, in which the nobility, in a decadent and senseless attempt to escape from the plague that’s ravishing the land, lock themselves up a castle and hold a big party. At which a costumed personification of Death, of course, eventually turns up and claims everyone anyway.

It is perhaps also worth pointing out that the quoted sentence looks very much like a classic Tom Swiftie (if you can accept Death as a shade). Tom Swifties (after the famous series of boys’ novels which popularised them) are sentences of the form “xxx, said he zzz-ly”, where the zzz refers back to the xxx. Examples:

'Pass me the shellfish,” said Tom crabbily.

'Let’s look for another Grail!” Tom requested.

'I used to be a pilot,” Tom explained.

'I'm into homosexual necrophilia,” said Tom in dead earnest.

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The miscommunication between natives and foreign explorers Terry describes here occurs in our world as well. Or rather: it is rumoured, with stubborn regularity, to have occurred all over the globe. Really hard evidence, one way or the other, turns out to be surprisingly hard to come by. As Cecil Adams puts it in More of the Straight Dope: “Having now had the “I don’t know” yarn turn up in three different parts of the globe, I can draw one of two conclusions: either explorers are incredible saps, or somebody’s been pulling our leg.”

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Speaking of Tom Swifties…

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The cottage and the events alluded to a bit later (“‘Kids of today,’ commented Rincewind. ‘I blame the parents,’ said Twoflower.”) are straight out of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale by the brothers Grimm.

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Candyfloss is known as cotton candy in the US, or fairy floss in Australia. It’s the pink spun sugar you can eat at fairs and shows.

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A parody of the typical numerical pseudo-science tossed about regarding the Great Pyramid and the ‘cosmic truths’ (such as the distance from the Earth to the Sun) that the Egyptians supposedly incorporated into its measurements.

The remark about sharpening razor blades at the end of the paragraph is similarly a reference to the pseudo-scientific ‘fact’ that (small models of) pyramids are supposed to have, among many other powers, the ability to sharpen razor blades that are left underneath the pyramids overnight.

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From the first Conan The Barbarian movie (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger): “Conan! What is good in life?” “To crush your enemies, drive them before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.” This quote, in turn, is lifted more or less verbatim from an actual conversation Genghiz Khan is supposed to have had with his lieutenants.

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Another fairy tale reference, this time to Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

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A mixture of “someone’s been eating my porridge” and “someone’s been sleeping in my bed”, both from the Goldilocks and the Three Bears fairy tale.

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