One of Stoppard's favorite and most effective comic techniques is the calculated ambiguity -- a line that different characters understand differently:
ARCHIE: Ah! -- I knew there was something! -- McFee's dead.
GEORGE: What?!!
ARCHIE: Shot himself this morning, in the park, in a plastic bag.
GEORGE: My God! Why?
ARCHIE: It's hard to say. He was always tidy.
or one that abruptly takes on a second meaning when the characters pause over it for a moment:
GEORGE: Well, I don't know what's the matter with her. She's like a cat on hot bricks, and doesn't emerge from her room. All she says is, she's all right in bed.
ARCHIE: Yes, well there's something in that.
Write a comic dialogue in which the characters have a verbal misunderstanding or discover a second sense in a line.
Have your dialogue ready to turn in at the beginning of class on October 1. It should be legibly typed or set, double-spaced, with ample margins (I recommend an inch and a quarter at top, bottom, and sides), and printed single-sided. If it runs to more than one page, each page after the first should bear your surname and a page number in the upper right-hand corner.
This document is available on the World Wide Web as
http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~stone/courses/stoppard/calculated-ambiguity.xhtml
created September 24, 2002
last revised September 24, 2002