Modern Nonsense:
Locating a Classic Literary Genre
in Adventure Time with Finn and Jake
Literary nonsense lives in examples of prose and verse which utilize language to create
fantastical worlds operating with their own grammatical rules. Producing those worlds, nonsense
as a literary genre has been cited as disrupting operations of language, employing abnormal
syntax and inventive words to form ‘a complex interplay of order and disorder, meaning and
non-meaning’ (Sewell). While also incorporating aspects of parody, satire, comic, and fantasy,
literary nonsense constructs ‘the privileged locus for the dialogue between an author and his
[child] readers’(Lecerde). Archetypal examples of nonsense, the works of authors Lewis Carroll
and Edward Lear, exist as definitive texts ushering the literary category into mainstream
circulation and remain the most examined works in terms of illuminating definitions of nonsense
and its linguistic structures. Yet, understanding nonsense as a literary form has been a widely
debated work in progress since the nineteenth century. In an effort to further concepts of
nonsense operating in the formation and function and acquisition of language, modern literary
mediums such as teleplay or screenplay might demonstrate nonsense’s adaptability, its
intelligence, and dynamism. As an example I will show here that the same grammatical
characteristics seen in Lear’s and Carrollian texts thrive within alternative literary frameworks of
the scripts of Adventure Time with Finn and Jake, allowing the creative author, Pendleton Ward,
creative freedom to produce demonstrations of contemporary literary nonsense.
The Adventure Time series tracks the adventures of Finn, a 14-year-old human boy, and
his best friend and adoptive brother Jake, a dog with magical powers to change shape or grow
and shrink at will, in the enchanted and quaintly post-apocalyptic ‘Land of Ooo’. Finn is
precocious and has strong morals and strives to be a hero, battling evil whenever it threatens the
tasty ‘Candy Kingdom’ or its sweet ‘Candy-People’ denizens. Interacting with ‘Princess
Bubblegum’, a royal made of the chewy substance, ‘The Ice King’, the mystic ruler of the ‘Ice
Kingdom’, and ‘Marceline the Vampire Queen’, daughter of the Lord of the ‘Night-O-Shpere’,
each Adventure Time episode engages its audience on the level of a fantastic and nonsensical
epic narrative: “Ward intends the show's world to have a certain physical logic instead of
‘cartoony slapstick’; even though magic exists in the story, the show's writers try to create an
internal consistency in how the characters interact with the world’ (DeMott). Adventure Time
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has ‘developed a cult following among teenagers and adults, many of whom are attracted due to
the series' animation and stories, (Lloyd), stories founded in the logic-based languages of
nonsense.
Names are more than names here; they bring into existence the nature of words used:
‘Hot Dog Princess’ is a hotdog and a princess; The ‘Earl of Lemongrab’ is an Earl and a lemon
with a sour disposition; ‘Peppermint Butler’ is, of course, a butler, and a walking, talking,
thinking and reasoning and sinister peppermint- man. The language building Ooo and its
inhabitants gain their sense through consistent linguistic structures of plausible representations
developing plausible meanings. ‘The City of Thieves’ is a city full of looters, poachers, and pickpockets; ‘Magic Man’, a man of magic; ‘Spikey People’ are spikey and live in ‘Spikey Village’,
and ‘Soft People’ are soft and live in ‘Soft Village.’ As such, literary examples of nonsense
integrate language influencing the form of character, geography, and action; for Adventure Time
we read this world as “Candy Land on the surface and dark underneath. This place is a
fantastical land peopled with strange, somewhat disturbing characters and has at its center a
young male making his way in that world with the help of unusual, not always reliable, mentors”
(Lloyd). Like another part of Wonderland or an island continent in The Story of the Four Little
Children Who Went Round the World, Ooo is a weird plane where anything you can speak has
the probability of becoming possible. In terms of its applications of nonsense, language dictates
the terms ergo the terms dictate the language.
There is a distinct systematic making of adjectives at work among the populations of
Ooo. Words like: ‘Math’ or ‘Mathematical’ or ‘Algebraic’ are no longer merely terms of
calculation, they are descriptive exclamations of joy, as are ‘Slamacow’, ‘Shmow-zow’, and
‘Wow-cow-chow’, and ‘What the Zip?’. Each episode of this television series is comparative to
a chapter in a book with each new part introducing new language into the canonical lexicon of
both worlds, that of Ooo and our own. As terms are adopted and used regularly among Oooians
and us human viewers to convey consistent meanings, Ward is essentially building a vocabulary
between his characters and his audience to further ground definitions of literary nonsense as
practiced sensible language, ‘The backbone of nonsense must be a consciously regulated pattern:
rhythmic structure of verse, legal procedure, or rules of a chess game. Implicitly or explicitly,
these variations are all present in Alice’ (Flescher); and those aspects are all present in the scripts
of Adventure Time.
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The regulated language pattern in the Land of Ooo is its strict adherence to taking words
and word pairings at their figurative and literal meanings, ‘The Duke and Duchess of Nuts’ are
an anthropomorphized Pecan and Peanut who oversee the ‘Nut Kingdom’; ‘The River of Junk’ is
a river of junk; and ‘Dr. Doughnut’ is a surgeon, living his animated life as an icing covered
confection. Nonsense ensues as Finn strives to better himself and his surroundings upholding a
strict philosophy as a boy ‘Bound by his word to uphold the Hero’s Code’, his ‘Pledge of
Ultimate Responsibility’ standing as such, ‘To help anyone in need no matter how small the
problem.’ Finn’s fight for justice is predicated on his best intentions, but often gets tied up in the
semantics and technicalities operating in the language of his world which ‘Take adult language
of reason to hyperbolic extremes, so forcefully embracing the sophistication of academic
language as to render it utterly silly’ (Rettberg). That silly or nonsense language at play in
Adventure Time is carefully crafted in each travel-oriented script.
Scripts, screenplays and teleplays, like forms of literary nonsense, have been relatively
marginalized and separated from mainstream classifications as legitimate forms of literature.
Like more canonical formations of literature such as novels, scripts rely heavily on rules of
construction to effectively tell, through carefully chosen grammar structures, a visual story. As
Disney demonstrated in 1951, adapting Lewis Carroll’s Alice for the screen in the contexts of
animation, the marriage of literary nonsense and screenplay proved successful. While Adventure
Time’s nonsense seen operating in its own printed comic forms follows original literary
processes similar to Edward Lear and Carroll, that same nonsense language works well when
adapted into each episodic teleplay constructing the animated incantations of the Cartoon series
Adventure Time with Finn and Jake.
Show after show, Ward’s Finn and Jake are seen and heard employing and playing with
nonsensical methods of forming inventive meaning through the morphology of words; the
phonology and sound words take on together, together take on the syntax, coupling and
decoupling of affixes and suffixes, along with the developed device of an authorial usage of
terms to scrupulously reflect systematic cooperation and coordination of grammar rules, equally
brought to literary delight in the nonsense stories of Carroll and Lear. Methodical linguistic
structures of nonsense which parody meaning, while bringing a world into being through plays in
and on language adapt from the page to fit the screen. Though the process of acquiring nonsense
is primarily visual in today’s culture, the languages of nonsense are heard loud and clear as
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actors read and recite lines of nonsensical dialogue. Theatrical nonsense, perhaps, but it is in
essence the nonsensical language building the scripts of each episodic narrative where we are
able to locate literary nonsense in action:
Finn and Jake are spelunking in a cave. Jake yawns making a sound similar to Chewbacca from Star Wars.
JAKE
Man... let's go home.
FINN
Nuts to that. I wanna find a mystery cave.
JAKE
(Sighs) But, Finn, I'm gettin' all cranky around my joke-hole.
Jake accidentally drops on Finn.
FINN
Ow!
JAKE
Oof!
FINN
Ooh-la-la.
JAKE
Whuzzat?
FINN
Mystery cave! C'mon, Jake!
(Grunts while crawling through tiny entrance.)
Oh, my glory...
Tiny Jake comes through the entrance then gets back to normal size. The Lamb Relic is seen on a pedestal
at the top of pyramid-arranged stairs. Finn walks up to it and nearly touches it.
JAKE
Dude, no!! Don't touch that thing!
It's probably got some kind of sacred significance.
FINN
Yeah. I want it for my sacred bathroom.
Finn touches it and the lamb lights up.
JAKE
Finn?!
The light dims down. Finn's face has replaced that of the lamb; Jake runs up to the lamb panting
JAKE (CONT)
Oh, my Jah! Finn's become one with the lamb!!
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In the Spirit World. Finn can be seen, along with numerous odd-looking Spirits.
FINN
Jake!! You see this crazy jazz?!
Blurring the lines of representation and reality, a new world is entered; Finn and we enter
a world within the world that is a parody or satirical version of our own. “Beyond this Earthly
Realm" is the eleventh episode in the fourth season of Adventure Time, and is the eighty-ninth
episode overall and represents well the typical language between Finn and Jake which
demonstrates dialectical choices based in nonsense. The morphology of words linguistically
decouples forms. Words like “C’mon,”, “Wuzzat?”, “Joke-Hole”, suggest connections based on
our preconceived notions and associations with language used in the same manner as Carroll’s
contraction implementation within the text of the Alice narratives. “Jah”, and ‘jazz’, and ‘glory’
play with meaning by strictly constructing inferred effects of normal words like ‘God’ and
‘stuff’, respectively. ‘Oh my Jah! Finn’s become one with the lamb!!’ is nonsense in terms of
its real world criticism of idols in religion, but also in the phrase being applied literally, as Finn
actually becomes fused with the statue. The world exists through the language in use and adjusts
to that language.
This is a world where we can understand Penguin, and Penguins understand English, and
it is also a world that blends prose with verse. In the same episode, poetic language is introduced
in a reinterpreted version of the nursery rhyme ‘Itsy, Bitsy Spider’:
Three baby spiders.
Three bitty baby spiders.
Were playing in the sun.
The rain came down and it was no fun.
Cry cry cry cry goo ga goo.
Oh me, oh my eyes are raining too.
The first spider drowned.
He was never found.
The second spider cried,
Til' he died.
But the babiest of all,
Splashed and had a ball.
He grew up very tall and lived inside a wall.
Sometimes the sun shines
Even on baby spiders.
And you!
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Carroll and Lear both made good use of this type of nonsense in some of their own
verse; “Poems are well formed in terms of grammar and syntax, and each nonsense word is of a
clear part of speech. Many nursery rhymes are nonsense if the context and background are not
known. Some claim that Mother Goose rhymes were originally written to parody the aristocracy
while appearing to be nothing more than nonsense nursery rhyme” (Tiggs). Here Jake’s poem
has no clear meaning and is used to lure Finn out of the Spirit world, but ends up only
embarrassing him in front of the other spirits: “The silliness of these reactions to the poem and
not just its disruptions of language makes it fit into the same category of nonsense as Lear’s
limericks… We understand it as invented and are in on the joke that allows us to categorize it as
nonsense” (Rettberg).
Contextualizing nonsense in literary forms typically relies on incorporations of visual
cues to signify, correlate, and assist abstract and unusual language. In perfect harmony with the
nonsensical and often poetic and lyrical language in literary examples of nonsense such as Alice
in Wonderland, and Through the Looking-Glass, and The Story of the Four Little Children Who
Went Round the World, like Adventure Time, is the imagination-inspiring art work which
accompanies the text and visually represents the contexts of the literary nonsense at play in
making clear the distorted worlds which are inhabited. Combining modern transferences of
moving illustration and animation with the literary form of scripts creates an environment free of
imaginative limitation. Literature is art made of language; and the language of art in nonsense
literature, like Lear’s and Carroll’s, has been examined in relation to a powerful complimentary
connection between the written word and the illustrative renderings accompanying them,
‘Balancing the visual against the aural, creating a tension which is unresolved: the image calms
the world’ (Tigges). Whether Disney or Cartoon Network, Carroll or Ward, literary nonsense is
seen as well as heard loud and clear. As one of the many characteristic devices nonsense utilizes
to disrupt sense in Carroll’s and Lear’s imaginative worlds so in Ward’s the ‘Mirroring,
reversals, and inventions, the simultaneous juxtaposition of improbable elements; and the
adoption of strict adherence to arbitrary rules’ (Rettberg), illustrations create alternatives to the
ordinary world while concurrently reflecting it.
Illustrations accompanying nonsense language confirm the meanings conveyed through
narratives by balancing the interplays of abstraction and reality, order and disorder: ‘When John
Tenniel was providing illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1864 he was an
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established cartoonist, a professional understanding the visual codes and illustrative techniques
of his day’ (Lovell-Smith). Placing the 42 plates Tenniel illustrated together , ‘all the
expectations, understanding and information we bring to reading an illustrated book and the
information accumulated while reading becomes a schema for each new page of words and each
new picture’ (Nodelman). Tenniel’s illustrations become a visual guide to reading Carroll’s text.
Edward Lear’s drawings of ‘heinous acts of violence and tragedy’ would be contextualized as
vulgar and immoral if understood realistically, but “in the context of nonsense Lear’s
accompanying illustrations confirm the humor and silliness” (Rettberg). Adventure Time’s use
of moving illustration hyper-realizes encounters with sense and representation in the same
manner Lear’s and Tenniel’s artwork juxtapose the macabre and light hearted. Animation and
cartoons of modern eras replace the black and white renderings of nonsense illustrations of the
Victorian age, illustrations which have been colorized and animated in their later renderings to
suit advancing modern aesthetics.
Adventure Time utilizes literary nonsense devices to disrupt common sense and create an
alternative world order, revealing the rules of the ordinary world to be arbitrary through an
embrace of both language and what that language references. Pendleton Ward’s contribution to
literary nonsense is distinguishably his presentation of a Carrollian or Lear-like world operating
in its own grammatical mixture of prose and verse, real and unreal, possible and probable.
Adventure Time brings to life all of the grammatical and syntactical distortions of language, real
world morals, pun, parody, and paradox in its implicit realities, all which remain the foundations
for manifestations of literary nonsense. Showing nonsense as a regulated pattern of ordered
systems of language, Finn and Jake, and all of the characters of Adventure Time exist in a prosaic
reality and combine with the fantastic, building nonsense forms from its content.
Anyone seeking to hear the sounds of nonsense in action need only tune in, for each
script, a literary form previously uncoupled in relation to nonsense, harnesses and reinvents and
powerfully presents emotive, conative, referential, and poetic mechanics to focus messages
spoken in a language enhanced through art. Nonsense language bringing life to the characters
and the world in each of Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time with Finn and Jake scripts
accomplishes literary feats that fit alongside Carroll and Lear, and allow the field of nonsense to
grow and expand out of antiquated paradigms, allowing for new modern interpretations of the
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literary genre to flourish and incite imagination for children and adults brave enough to embrace
the nonsensical elements of life.
Annotated Bibliography
DeMott, Rick. "Time for Some Adventure with Pendleton Ward". Animation
World Network. April, 25, 2010. Print.
Flescher, Jacqueline. The Language of Nonsense in Alice. (1969) Jstor.
http://adventuretime.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Transcripts
Lecerde, J. J. Philosophy of Nonsense (1994). Jstor.
Lloyd, Robert (April 5, 2010). "'Adventure Time With Finn & Jake' enters a wild new world".
The Los Angeles Times (Tribune Company). Retrieved January 1, 2013.
Rettberg, E. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Nonsense Verse. Fourth Edition.
Princeton University Press. Print. 2012
Sewell, E. The Field of Nonsense (1952). Jstor.
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Tiggs, W. An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense (1988). Jstor.
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