Jim Sharkey wrote:
Sometimes you read a gag, and many years later you get it, or at the
very least, you get where it came from.
For example, in _Peanuts_, whenever Snoopy was starting his novel, he
opened it with "It was a dark and stormy night." Now this, in and of
itself, is clearly him glomming on someone else's once classic, but
now cliched, novel opening. So it's amusing.
But where it came from? I had no idea. Not one. That is, until I
saw that my oldest daughter had received, from her mother, _A Wrinkle
in Time_. And there, on the first page, right at the top, rested
the following words: "It was a dark and stormy night."
Then, all of a sudden, that old gag got just a little more amusing.
Uh, L'Engle was just following an already-practiced tradition. It was
originally used by Bulwer-Lytton. And it would have been nice if he'd
ended the sentence there, but he went on and on and on and on with it.
In fact, Bulwer-Lytton's sentence was SOOO BAD that someone decided to
make a contest to come up with the worst opening sentence to a novel,
and name it after the guy.
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
Julia
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