Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy- Humor

Blog 500 words about the use of motifs in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Think about how the motifs are connected to the creation of humour in the radio play.

In Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy humor is presented in many different ways with help of different motifs. In particular the idea of time travel, alcohol consumption and extra-terrestrials are tools used to help to develop the comedic aspects of the radio play.

Time travel, for us an unrealistic thing, seems to be the most normal thing in this book. The characters travel from one century to the next, 1000 years in the future. It explained as an understatement which makes it funny. Time travel is nothing unusual in the book and how the characters handle the situation and how it's being explained makes it humorous. "He is on an intergalactic cruise!" (page 130), it is amusing to read, how the characters spent their weekend, as an prediction of the future, they don’t do things we do in the present, for them things that we do would be most probably unrealistic.

"They are drunk.", "Let's have a drink. Here is another bottle." or "Let's just get drunk." (Page 134) are the kind of sentences, that present the motif alcohol consumption over and over again. The scenario that they drink in the most mistimed situations is reoccurring over and over again. They take the plenty near-death situations they face as an understatement and take it with humor that they might die soon so they "celebrate" this situation with alcohol, to get drunk and pass the situation in a kind of "trance".

The third tool, extra-terrestrials, is another important one to help create humor in this radio play.
"Haggunenons, super evolutionary life forms. That is to say they can re-evolve into any shape in a matter of seconds." Douglas Adams includes the presence of futuristic creatures that are unrealistic and have supernal powers. They cause a confusion when they are explained and are amusing when the reader gets to know how they occur in the story and what characteristics they have being a futuristic creature. Additionally these creatures make fun of us humans. Us, the people who think are the most normal thing on earth and the centre of the universe. But in this situation we are in the opposite situation, humans are something unusual and the earth is just a little planet among all the other thousand planets in the universe that are still unknown to us at the moment and we can only dream of discovering them.

Douglas Adams uses these motifs purposely to create humor in his radio play. Among the plenty descriptions how his future will look like in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Douglas develops comedic aspects through the understatement of time-travel, seeing it as the most normal thing "on earth", the reoccurring scenario the characters getting drunk when they face near death situations or the futuristic creatures with their amusing characteristics.