Was watching Babylon 5 and am used to excellent writing with Harlan Ellison. There was this sentence in Season 5
Humor is a universal element…like helium.
This seemed to lack impact, especially as delivered with the pause by Bruce Boxleitner. It seems to me that it should be
Humor, like helium, is a universal element.
Or even better
Like helium, humor is a universal element.
Is it just me. Is there a term for screwing up a sentence in this fashion?
I don't think it is screwed up at all.
The punchline should come at the end of the sentence. And "helium" is funnier than "hydrogen".
The important part of this sentence is not the example, but the claim:
"Humor is a universal element."
That is the point to get across, so it comes first. The example is a humorous element, it wasn't necessary at all. And choosing a universal element to compare to, hydrogen and helium were the first to spontaneously form from the energy in the Big Bang, and between them, helium is funnier than hydrogen.
Helium makes people talk funny. There is very little humor centered on hydrogen.
You were right to begin with, Harlon Ellison (or was it J. Michael Straczynski? He wrote 92 of the 110 episodes himself) is a great writer.
Perhaps the name for messing up sentences like that is "burying the lede." It doesn't make sense to bring up the analogy before making the claim.
It wasn't supposed to be a real example, clearly the way it was written, Captain Sheridan was adding an afterthought, and a humorous one. As if he said "universal element" in the sense of a universal trait, and realized element had a literal meaning as well, and compared it to the literally elemental helium for emphasis.
That was funny, IMHO, and the punchline is at the end.
I think the statement 'Humor is a universal element…like helium' fits that idea because it establishes an obvious fact or clear statement - Humor is a universal element - then adds information that puts that statement into a different frame of reference -- comparing humor to helium in this case. Since the comparison is both absurd and truthful, we find it to be humorous.
If humor and helium were grouped together, a different relationship is put forth. Starting the sentence with 'Humor and Helium...' immediately asserts they have something in common and that you are going to tell me what it is. I might write 'Humor and Helium are hard to grasp' or 'Humor and Helium both abhor a vacuum.' Reordering the pieces of the sentence changes the emphasis and reduces the surprise of the original statement.
That said, there is a difference between writing dialogue for an actor to perform. This sentence is funnier when read with proper emphasis -- a pause represented an ellipsis. One could imagine how someone like Douglas Adams might be written a similar statement. I imagine he'd have used a formulation closer to yours -- structurally -- but that he would have looked for a very different comparison.
Humor is like gas. All around us; invisible to the naked eye; But everyone recognizes it when they smell it.
