SHOTGUN WEDDING: A CASE OF WIFE OR DEATH.
What’s so funny about this? OK, I’ll admit this is not the most PC or politically correct joke, but I still think it’s a fun pun. So what’s not correct about it? First of all, there’s the shotgun. I grew up in the 1950’s watching cowboys and Indians on TV and had cap guns and bb guns all the time. On our street we were either playing cops and robbers or army and we always were shooting at each other, because that’s what we saw on TV and in the movies. That’s just the way it was. One kid would shoot and the other would fall over and play dead, then he’d shoot and I’d play dead. Then we grew up and then there was a real war with real guns and people died and didn’t get up again. My attitude changed, and so did the times. There were always accidental shootings but there wasn’t war in the streets between cops and civilians. There were lots of jokes about guns which I’m not going to tell here. The language itself has a lot of idiomatic expressions such as “Russian roulette” “shootout”, “shooting fish in a barrel”, and so on. Today’s joke is a vestige or left-over from those older expressions. A “shotgun wedding” is one where the groom is being forced to marry a bride or face the bride’s father who has a shotgun aimed at him. All this because the bride is probably pregnant and her father wants the family honor and reputation to stay preserved and not have a baby born out of wedlock. Often this was more important to the father than making sure that the child had two parents. Sometimes a shotgun wedding was the punch line of a farmer’s daughter joke where the travelling salesman seduces the farmer’s daughter whose father catches them and brings out his shotgun. The second part of the joke, “wife or death” is the choice the groom has AND it’s also a pun on the phrase “life or death”. This phrase is still a pretty accurate description of the choice the poor groom has. And THAT’s what’s so funny!
