Someone did a family guy joke in the style of a shakespear play in a thread a while back. Something about “Remember the time you sold your wife?”
I forget which play had a character named Bottom who was later turned into an ass.
Comic relief is scattered through the whole catalogue. I don’t know where this concept of “two jokes” came from. Maybe it’s a Monty Python reference; William “Two Jokes” Shakespeare.
They’re variations on the same joke. Unless you think Hamlet was saying “nothing!” just to change the subject. 
I’d never heard the “an o thing” thing before I read that article last night, and it may be a big giant reach. Stil, Hamlet means something when he says “nothing.”
But does he write in a shed?
I already gave the reference. Funny, I thought it was a pretty famous sketch. I’m really surprised that nobody recognised the reference.
Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder/ Mr Bean) plays a teacher who tells us :
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If Shakespeare wants a funny play he puts a joke in it.
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There is a joke in it is The Comedy Of Errors. The joke is that two people look like each other. Twice.
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There is ‘the other’ joke in Shakespeare… but he doesn’t tell us what it is.
Shakespeare. SHAKESPEARE! Leave! Orifice! Alone!
“Nothing” was already slang for the female genitalia at the time, so there play on words is right there in the plain text. I suspect your source is either misquoting the professor, or that the professor himself is a loon.
Well, in his defense, “second-best bed” is supposed to refer to the bed in the guest bedroom. Since one generally doesn’t have guests sleeping over all the time, this bed is usually in better shape than one’s “best” bed. Therefore, it wasn’t all that mean of him. Or so the Shakespeare apologists say.
FTR, in my studies I’ve heard “nothing” as slang for the female genitalia, but not “[a]n ‘o’ thing”, which is a bit of a stretch.
Er, so to speak.
I’ve heard that, and I can buy it. Now, the claims that he didn’t want his wife buried with him… that’s a little harder to explain, if true.
All right. All right, y’bastid; here it is, then. Here’s the other joke. The other joke is this:
Shakespeare put a joke in The Comedy of Errors. Right? This is how we know he intended it to be funny. The joke involves two people who are mistaken for each other, twice, as previously mentioned. The play is a ‘comedy’ because of its ‘errors.’ We can see, then, that when Shakespeare wants a play to be funny, he announces the joke’s specifics unambiguously in the title. Therefore, in order to find Shakespeare’s other joke, we must consult the titles of the other plays.
It is immediately apparent that the only other play title directly suggesting humor is The Merry Wives of Windsor, because the wives are described as ‘merry.’ Consequently, we should expect that the joke in this play involves wives, just as the joke in *The Comedy of Errors * involved errors. And indeed, this is exactly what we find. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, a man attempts to elope with a boy dressed in a woman’s clothing. Twice.
That’s the other joke. Happy now, McWhorter? I expect an acknowledgement in the next edition of Tower of Babel.
McWhorter 
An Elizabethan play on words. ‘Mc-’ is a variant of the Gaelic prefix ‘Mac,’ (meaning son), a slang expression for “fellow” or “comrade;” while ‘Whorter’ is an elided conjugation of “who-O-orter,” where O signifies female genitalia and ‘orter’ is dialect for ‘ought to’ or ‘should have’. So “McWhorter” translates as “fellow who should have female genitalia.”
In other words, a compliment.
Yep, she was great! We also saw Richard III & Faustus.
Some of Richard’s asides to the audience are pretty funny, despite it being a non-comedy. Perhaps that’s the “second joke” … the frequent co-mingling of “all the world’s a stage” with the stage is the world…
I think Hamlet has some really funny lines, too.
:smack: But why do they invariably cast an actress with a HUGE rack? :smack:
It actually inspired one of my favorite sig lines:
Overheard at the Shakespeare Festival: “Look at the Hooters on that Fuck-Animal! There is NO WAY anyone would mistake her for a Dude!”
You know, there’s a football player with the last name of McQuarters… hmm…
Whoa, guys, hold up…
English-major-to-be-professor speaking up here:
A joke is usually a short story, a one-liner, or a pun that, in Shakespeare’s case, gets inserted into dialogue.
A plot device is what the OP is talking about here, and I’d say the second most popular one (after lookalikes) is girls dressing up as guys, hands down.
If only anyone else had mentioned plot devices. Good to have someone in a position like yours agree, though.