Is the Rocky Roll Call funny in print?

Okay, so I wanted to include one of these (Rocky Roll Call, aka Say My Name taken to it's limit) in Stuck, but I wasn't sure if it would be funny. I made sure to keep the thing slightly less confusing by saying who said it, but I don't know if it fits. (The feel is supposed to be campy for this, as it's near the climax so as a result I wanted to have a little fun.)

"Tre?" Nora asked. 

"Nora!" I cried. 

"Grassy!" Max yelled. 

"Max." Grassy sighed. 

"Listman!" Todd screamed. 

"Todd." I grunted. 

"Tre!" Max yelled.

"Max!" I replied. 

"Grassy?" Todd called. 

"Todd." Grassy seethed. 

"Nora?" Max questioned.

"Cici!" Piper cheered.

"Piper?" Cici spoke. 

"Cici!" I stated. 

"PERSONA NON GRATA!" Grassy interrupted. "Enough of this!" 

Everyone looked at him with a glare. "Way to kill the mood, Grass Stain." Todd said. 

edited 11th Nov '10 9:59:17 PM by Tre

What's most noticeable is that you changed the verb each time. It was jarring.

Huh. I just did it to keep things from being overly boring with it. (Really, who wants t read "pick one: Tre/Nora/Grassy/Max/Todd/Cici/Piper said" 15 times in a row?)

Is it bad for this though? Just throwing the idea out, not sure if it works in a non-hearing medium. (I don't see any literature examples on it's page. Then again, there might be a reason for that. Hmm...)

I used to be a disciple of varying the verbs, but in many cases, like this, it just sounds odd and distracting. You don't want people to get tripped up on a verb that strikes them as strange when the verbs aren't really the point.

Having verbs at all is getting in your way, because it's never optimal to have 15 lines of one-word dialogue followed by two-word attributions; you're devoting twice as much time to who is saying what than you are to the actual dialogue. Think of how long it would take to actually play out this scene; you don't want it to take much longer to read it.

Visually, I think anyone is going to just skim this bit anyway—you're going to look at it and think "oh, it's everyone saying everyone else's names" and not look closely at who is saying whose name or in what order. So I don't think the gag works as well in writing.

I applaud you on your verb choices, but as stated before, I think it could wear the reader out. If you want to go for the smallest, teensy-tiniest change, instead of someone *blanked*, try *blanked* someone. It might be possible to cut out the speaker and action altogether after everyone's had a round of this, and maybe put it back in if the speaker has had a drastic change of tone, i.e., questioning softly to DEMANDING. Otherwise, I think this could work out fairly well.