The Language of Comic Narratives: Humor Construction in Short Stories 9783110208337, 9783110205145

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The Language of Comic Narratives

≥

Humor Research 9

Editors

Victor Raskin Willibald Ruch

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

The Language of Comic Narratives Humor Construction in Short Stories

by

Isabel Ermida

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ermida, Isabel, 1968⫺ The language of comic narratives : humor construction in short stories / by Isabel Ermida. p. cm. ⫺ (Humor research ; 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-020514-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Short story ⫺ Authorship. 2. Humor in literature. I. Title. PN3373.E66 2008 808.311⫺dc22 2008035951

ISBN 978-3-11-020514-5 ISSN 1861-4116 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at ⬍http://dnb.d-nb.de⬎. ” Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Contents List of tables and figures Foreword

ix xi

Chapter 1 The concept of humor: history, scope and issues Introduction 1. Matter and manner 2. Taxonomic systems 3. Lexicological evolution 4. Conceptual satellites of humor 4.1. Laughter 4.2. Wit 4.3. Irony 5. Humor theories 5.1. Disparagement theory 5.2. Release theory 5.3. Incongruity theory 6. Ontogenetics and philogenetics of humor 7. Humor as a communicative act 8. Conclusion

1 1 1 3 4 5 5 8 11 14 15 22 25 31 34 39

Chapter 2 Linguistic resources of humor Introduction 1. Sound 1.1. The phonetic pun 1.2. Mimesis 1.3. Stylistic devices 1.3.1. Rhyme and rhythm 1.3.2. Alliteration and assonance 2. Written form: graphological games 3. Word: morphological play 4. Sentence: syntactic ambiguity 5. Meaning 5.1. Paradigmatic inversion 5.2. The lexical pun 5.3. Sets and scales

41 41 42 42 45 48 48 50 52 55 57 61 61 63 66

vi

Contents

6.

5.4. Mechanisms of displacement 5.5. Logical irregularities 5.6. Nonsense 5.7. Possible worlds Conclusion

68 70 74 76 80

Chapter 3 Humor as a textual genre: from jokes to comic narratives Introduction 1. Semantic script theory of humor 1.1. The concept of script 1.2. Combinatorial rules 1.3. Humor, bona-fide communication and the notion of truth 1.4. Script overlap and script opposition 1.5. An example 2. General theory of verbal humor 2.1. Knowledge resources 2.2. Joke variation and KR hierarchy 2.3. A ‘general’ theory 3. Cognitive joke model 3.1. Operational concepts: informativeness and markedness 3.2. Conditions for joke well-formedness 3.3. An example 4. Linguistic approaches to comic narratives 4.1. Morin’s disjunctive articulation 4.2. Nash’s modes of comic expansion 4.3. Chlopicki’s application of script theory to short stories 4.4. Palmer’s semantico-pragmatic framework 4.5. Holcomb: nodal humor in comic narratives 4.6. Attardo’s linear model 5. Conclusion

83 83 84 84 85 86 88 89 90 91 93 93 94 94 97 98 99 100 101 103 105 107 108 110

Chapter 4 Structural principles of narrative humor Introduction 1. Narrative dimensions 2. Structure, model and whole 3. Cohesion and coherence 4. Narrative units

113 113 113 115 116 117

Contents

5.

6. 7.

Organization of narrative units 5.1. Sequencing: horizontal configuration 5.2. Hierarchy: vertical configuration 5.2.1. From sentence grammar to story grammar 5.2.2. The concept of narrative macrostructure Limitations of narrative structure analysis Conclusion

Chapter 5 Pragmatics of the humorous narrative Introduction 1. Narration and other modes of discourse 2. Humorous text and context 2.1. Situational humor and ‘canned’ humor 2.2. Written varrative versus conversation 2.3. Overlapping utterance levels 2.4. The literary specificity of the humorous short story 3. The principle of humorous transgression 4. Breaking the communicative contract 4.1. Illocutionary ambiguity 4.2. Humorous ‘(in)felicities’ 4.3. Infringing conversational maxims 4.4. Predictability and convention 5. The unsaid in narrative humor 5.1. Presuppositions 5.2. Implicatures 6. Humorous intertextuality: allusion and parody 7. Narrative, literary and humorous cooperation 8. Conclusion Chapter 6 A model of humorous narratives Introduction 1. A hypothesis 2. A case study: The Lunatic’s Tale (1975), by Woody Allen 2.1. Structuring the humorous cycle 2.1.1. Setting the humorous mode: creating an opposition 2.1.2. Developing the humorous mode: recurrence and predictability 2.1.3. Closing the cycle: informativeness and surprise

vii

120 121 124 124 126 128 130 131 131 131 132 133 134 136 138 140 142 142 144 146 149 151 153 158 162 164 168 171 171 172 173 174 175 176 179

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3.

Contents

2.2. A supra-structural semantic opposition 2.2.1. Lexicality, inference and functionality: criteria of script identification 2.2.2. Determining the scope and limits of scripts 2.2.3. Lexico-semantic nuclei 2.2.4. Presuppositions and implicatures 2.3. Levels of script opposition 2.3.1. Supra- and infra-scripts 2.3.2. Script hierarchy and hyponymy 2.3.3. Extratextual scripts: allusion 2.4. Stylistic aids to humorous opposition 2.4.1. Register clash 2.4.2. Hyperbole 2.4.3. Irony Conclusion

181 181 183 184 186 189 190 193 195 200 200 201 203 204

Chapter 7 Extending the analysis Introduction 1. The Norris Plan (1927) by Corey Ford: parody 2. On Guard (1936) by Evelyn Waugh: black humor 3. You Were Perfectly Fine (1939) by Dorothy Parker: irony 4. A Shocking Accident (1972) by Graham Greene: sarcasm 5. Hotel des Boobs (1986) by David Lodge: meta-humor 6. Counter-examples 7. Conclusion References

207 207 207 212 218 223 227 232 234 237

Subject index

257

List of tables and figures Tables Table 1. Table 2. Table 3. Table 4. Table 5. Table 6. Table 7. Table 8. Table 9. Table 10. Table 11. Table 11. Table 12. Table 13. Table 14. Table 15. Table 16.

Logical narrative models The protagonist’s antithetical characterization inThe Lunatic’s Tale Antithetical portraits of Ossip’s partners in The Lunatic’s Tale bum and successful doctor scripts in The Lunatic’s Tale Supra- and infra-script oppositions in The Lunatic’s Tale Comparative supra-script analysis of The Norris Plan Evolution of the book control infra-script in The Norris Plan Comparative analysis of two supra-scripts in On Guard Diagrammatic analysis of Millie’s suitors in On Guard Opening and closing sequences in You Were Perfectly Fine First supra-script opposition in You Were Perfectly Fine continued Second supra-script opposition in You Were Perfectly Fine Pattern switch in A Shocking Accident Semantic diagram of the derision supra-script in A Shocking Accident Supra-script switch in Hotel des Boobs Supra-script opposition in Hotel des Boobs

123

224 230 231

Types of narrative units Types of discursive sequences A sequential diagram of The Lunatic’s Tale Hierarchical script representation of The Lunatic’s Tale

118 122 175 194

177 178 185 191 210 211 214 217 219 219 220 221 224

Figures Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4.

Foreword I will skip the apology usually offered by authors of books on humor for the unfunniness of their writing. The alleged violence of academic analysis, which is taken to downright kill humor, is well-known and does without elaboration. Therefore, although the examples on the following pages may retain their humorous charm, the pages themselves are not meant to be funny – which is fair enough, since engaging in dry scholarship comfortably spares me the comedians’ anxiety to make people laugh at all cost. This book is a spiralling approach to humor. It departs from a survey of a few central premises to humor studies, and expands laterally to wider circles of analysis, like a rock hitting a pond’s surface. In terms of linguistic analysis, it classically departs from sound and goes upwards to morpheme, word and sentence; then, it focuses on text and, finally, on context. The resulting theoretical amalgam congregates, among other areas, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. This interdisciplinary fusion was sought on purpose – and yet it sometimes falls short of capturing the ever-evading nature of linguistic humor. The target object of my analysis is the comic short story. Therefore, the book has a great deal of narratological input, as well as quite a few considerations regarding literary analysis. It also has a considerable amount of terminology relative to text linguistics and discourse analysis, and a deliberate option for a pragmatic framework of research. In methodological terms, I try as far as possible to illustrate theoretical points along the chapters with examples, be they from the corpus of short stories to analyze or elsewhere, so as to anchor theory in specific texts. A user-friendly concern of mine is to avoid footnotes, which in accordance are echologically absent from this volume. The book is divided into seven chapters, each of which includes an introduction and a conclusion, and which are organized as follows. The first chapter reviews the concept of humor from a multidisciplinary perspective, examining its history and evolution, as well as its scope, applications, and a few key issues, in particular those that are useful for a linguistic approach. The second chapter focuses on the language of humor by presenting a discussion of a number of linguistic resources, ranging from sound to morpheme, sentence and word, which lend themselves to comic use. The third chapter discusses the humorous text, by examining a few prominent approaches to humor as a textual genre, not only regarding jokes but also longer comic texts. The fourth chapter sheds light on narratological frameworks of analysis, by looking into some structural

xii

Foreword

principles underlying current discussions of humorous narrative texts. The fifth chapter moves on to the major issue of context by focusing on a wealth of questions concerning the pragmatics of humorous texts, such as the dynamics of written interaction and the mechanisms involved in producing and receiving the comic short story. The sixth chapter offers a model of humorous narratives, putting forth a five-principle hypothesis that is to guide the analysis of the corpus, beginning with a case study of Woody Allen’s A Lunatic’s Tale. The last chapter analyzes other short stories so as to test the validity of the model, and it discusses apparent counter-examples. May my obliging readers survive this journey with enough energy to consider my arguments and hopefully accept them. That fate may strike and make them refute my claims is a remote and far too bleak possibility to entertain on these confident initial pages. A final word of acknowledgement is due to my daughter, Catarina, who partially grew up together with the book, and who ever so wisely kept advising me to drop it and instead earn a living by opening a restaurant – my meagre culinary talents notwithstanding.

Chapter 1 The concept of humor: history, scope and issues Introduction The aim of this opening chapter is to make a succinct review of the basic concepts involved in humor studies, highlighting those which are useful for a linguistic approach. This avowedly interdisciplinary venture feeds on a wealth of academic contributions to humor research, the variety of which it is also important to reveal. After pondering the essential question “What is humor?” I shall review the lexicological history of the term and the different terminological groups into which it has been divided. I will then discuss the polemical distinction between humor, laughter, wit and irony, and elaborate on the various theoretical approaches to the humorous phenomenon, namely the so-called disparagement, release and incongruity theories. Afterwards, I will consider the philogenetics and ontogenetics of humor and, last but not least, its crucial dimension as a communicative act. A disclaimer should be added at the outset of this endeavour: although other books on humor often start with similar reflections, my purpose is not to repeat or recycle those reflections. Rather, it is to look at them from a linguistic perspective, to examine the bibliographical sources at their root (instead of resorting to laconic name-dropping), and to establish a conceptual basis for my work to follow.

1. Matter and manner Trying to define humor is one of the definitions of humor. (S. Steinberg)

Humor has many facets and many academic constructions, as well as many terminological shades, which a tradition of interdisciplinary distance has tended to overlook and confuse. This may explain why researchers tend to disagree when struggling to answer a seemingly simple question: what is humor? Being regarded as an intangible object of analysis, humor has faced a general ‘agnostic’ tendency on the part of many scholars. Back in 1900, for instance, Bergson’s advice is: “One should not lock up the comic spirit in a definition; instead, one should regard it as a living being.” Similarly, in 1903 Croce states, “Humor is

2

The concept of humor: history, scope and issues

indefinable like all psychological states,” and three years later Cazamian entitles his article ‘Why one cannot define humor’ and complains: “The theory of humor suffers from a general handicap of insufficiency, which also affects aesthetic analysis.” Eastman (1921: 134) also sides with this line of thought by stating: “There is no other subject, as we reflect upon it, besides God and laughter, toward which the scientific mind has ever advocated so explicit and particular a humility.” This “humility” has continued to haunt the academic discourse on humor to this day, despite many attempts at defining the phenomenon. Apte (1988), for instance, compares the importance of defining humor – the object of what he coins as “humorology” – with such notions as language in linguistics or culture in anthropology, but he refrains from producing the definition himself on the grounds of its elusiveness. Likewise, Evrard (1996: 4) refers to the remarkable “semantic flexibility” of humor and its “enigmatic character,” and states: “Its range of degrees, procedures, themes, its subtle and diffused character make it a difficult phenomenon to spot and define.” The reluctance to define humor bears on the extreme diversity of forms which the phenomenon assumes. Humor can be either verbal or non-verbal; it can be a subjective experience or serve communicative purposes; it can draw upon common everyday reality or consist of fiction and imagination; it can charm or attack, be created spontaneously or be used as a well-prepared technique of personal and professional interaction; it can be a simple joke told among friends or amount to the sophistication of Shakespeare’s plays. . . Nowadays, there are also many humor media – which go beyond the classic forms of theatrical comedy, literary farce and limerick, or such types as satirical leaflets and clown pantomimes – and which range from TV sitcoms to comic movies, cartoons in the daily and weekly press, and Internet gags. Besides, humor also varies according to age, gender, social group, situation, epoch, culture and civilization, covering a virtually infinite variety of objects. The truth is there does not seem to be a specific ‘humorous theme’: everything, in principle, can become an object for humorous use. It is a fact that one laughs at the frivolous and the sacred alike, just as one laughs at both happiness and pain; one laughs at one’s illusions, deceptions, dreams, but one can, and does, also laugh at death and many other ´ fears. As Emelina (1996: 17) says, “absolutely nothing escapes from laughter; it is not a question of matter, but of manner, context and perspective.” Therefore, it is not surprising that a wide variety of humor manifestations equals a correspondingly wide variety of approaches, analyses and interpretations. Hence another obstacle to the definition of humor: the fact that it is studied in such diverse areas as philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, medical sciences, information sciences, pedagogy, literary theory and linguistics. In

Taxonomic systems

3

fact, the danger of generalizing and unduly interfering upon parallel research fields seems to be so inhibiting that it is common to avoid the essentialist question “What is humor?” (i.e., “What characteristics are necessary and sufficient for humor to occur?”). Instead, one tends to consider circumstantial questions, such as “When, how and where does humor take place?”, “Who produces and receives humor?”, “What objectives does it have?” and “What functions – social, interpersonal, ideological, political – does it serve?” Be that as it may, it is the coexistence of contradictory terminologies – academic and informal alike – which renders the issue more complex. As we shall see next, to know what the humorous phenomenon is implies, for a start, acknowledging the taxonomic conventions which underlie the word ‘humor’.

2. Taxonomic systems The absence of a terminological consensus within the vast range of humor studies is problematic not only for neophytes but also for more experienced researchers. Nowadays, as Ruch (1998: 6) explains, two taxonomic systems coexist side by side and, contrary to what happens in other disciplines, they do not meet with a normative usage. On the one hand, there is a historical terminology that derives from the field of philosophical ethics, according to which the comic – defined as the faculty of causing laughter or amusement – is distinguished from other aesthetic qualities, such as beauty, harmony or the tragic. Humor is here conceived of merely as one of the elements of the comic, together with such concepts as wit, nonsense, sarcasm, satire, or irony, basically meaning a conciliatory and cheerful attitude towards life and its imperfections. In this restricted sense, humor is seen as the product of a well-meaning and tolerant heart, which obviously differs from the haughty stance that is believed to underlie wit, or the aggressive malice of sarcasm. Therefore, this terminological system does not consider any joke as an instance of ‘aggressive humor’, since humor is, by definition, benevolent, and jokes are not a form of humor but of wit. A second terminological system, largely subscribed by today’s Anglo-American tradition – and used in daily language –, takes humor as an umbrellaterm covering all the phenomena in this field. In this way, ‘humor’ replaces ‘the comic’ and is regarded as a neutral term, which admits both positive and negative meanings. Hence the possibility of conceiving aggressive humor and facing the joke as a humor-specific field of study. Having been promoted to the status of a superordinate term, humor has come to preside over numberless sub-

4

The concept of humor: history, scope and issues

categories, sometimes indiscriminately substituting names of literary genres such as parody, comedy, satire or farce. Given the comprehensiveness which the term has lately acquired, it is frequent to see it being used together with a qualifier, such as ‘verbal humor’ (instead of wit), ‘hostile humor’ (instead of sarcasm) and ‘coping humor’ (to name what previously was ‘humor’ tout court).

3. Lexicological evolution The difficulty in defining and circumscribing the humorous phenomenon is also due to the fact that the entry of the word ‘humor’ into the lexicological field of the comic was rather late. However, its lexicological roots can be traced back to Antiquity. As Evrard (1996: 9) points out, the term originates in the medical theory of Hippocrates, who defined the human moods according to the predominance of blood, lymph, yellow or black bile (which came to be known as ‘black humor’). From this division sprang the different temperamental types, namely, sanguineous, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. The French language is claimed to be responsible for exporting the term to Middle English, albeit in a physio-pathological dimension. Still, according to Escarpit (1960: 10), it was only towards the end of the 18th century that the French came to devise the dichotomy humeur/humor, which distinguishes between medical or temperamental humor and humor as a “rational mechanism.” Curiously enough, both the English and the Portuguese languages lack this subtle philological distinction, having only one term descending from the Latin root umor to name the two semantic facets of the concept. But it was in the 17th century that, a bit around all Europe, humor slowly began to enter the lexical field of the comic. The term gradually expanded so as to cover a sort of behavior which, owing to an imbalance of the physiological fluids, escaped the social norms and was connoted with an eccentricity that caused laughter. Later on, this involuntary object of laughter came to be called a humorist and the man of humor came to be the one that comically exposed the peculiarities of the humorist. Thus humor progressively started to be regarded as a talent to make others become aware of the ridiculous. The next turning point, as Ruch (1998: 8) remarks, is the positive connotation which the previously neutral term acquired. The attitude of scorn and mockery before the temperamental particularities of others was by then condemned as ‘bad humor’. Instead of hostile laughter, moralists advised benevolent smiling, and the term ‘good humor’ – which later on became ‘humor’ alone – came to mean the humane and tolerant forms of laughter, which could be targeted at pretension, vanity and oddity, but never at the involuntary flaws of others.

Conceptual satellites of humor

5

In the 19th century, this positive meaning received philosophical support. Coleridge (1836), for instance, claimed that “the humorous consists in a certain reference to the general and the universal” and that humor appears “whenever the finite is contemplated in comparison with the infinite.” Likewise, Schopenhauer (1966 [1844]: 101) defended the sublime character of humor, which is often “artistic and poetic,” and should not be confused with indiscriminately comic situations. He also slated the tendency felt in Germany in the first quarter of the 19th century to use the term ‘humor’ as a synonym for ‘comic’. It was also in the 19th century that humor – or sense of humor – acquired the status of a cardinal English virtue, together with others such as common sense, tolerance and compromise, thus becoming an integral part of the English life style. With the political predominance of the British Empire, the positive connotation of the term ‘sense of humor’ became definitively rooted overseas, still surviving nowadays. Indeed, although the term ‘humor’, taken alone, has somehow lost an exclusively positive signification, the phrase ‘sense of humor’ has kept its constructive tradition. In daily language, ‘sense of humor’is, today as in the past, a socially desirable asset, whereas ‘humor’came to acquire multiple applications and to be used rather comprehensively, even within the academic world. The lexicological evolution of the word ‘humor’, indebted to various legacies, explains the fact that many authors have sought to define the phenomenon along the scale of the comic. Many attempts at defining humor are, in fact, linked to distinctive taxonomies which suggest limits and differences. Fruitless though these attempts may have been in the long run, they deserve a closer look, since they indicate a few key issues involved in the history of humor studies.

4. Conceptual satellites of humor 4.1.

Laughter Though laughter may be regarded as a trivial matter, and an emotion frequently awakened by buffoons, actors or fools, it has a certain imperious force of its own which is very hard to resist. (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, VI, iii, 8)

Prior to the lexical establishment of the word ‘humor’, the term ‘laughter’ used to be the core of scholarly discussions about the nature of the comic, albeit to little avail, as Dugas points out:

6

The concept of humor: history, scope and issues There is no other fact more banal and over-studied than laughter; there is no other fact that can be said to have excited more curiosity among both the layman and the philosopher (. . . ); but neither is there any other fact which remains as unexplained. One is tempted to say, like the sceptics, that one should be contented with laughing without trying to know what one is laughing at. Since, perhaps, reflection kills it, it would be contradictory if reflection could discover its causes. (Dugas, Psychologie du Rire, 1902, quoted by Freud 1905: 239)

Theories about laughter came to share research space with humor, in a somewhat fallacious manner. The supposed symmetry between the two concepts – humor is what causes laughter and laughter is what is caused by humor – implies the falsely proportional correlation between an intellectual and cognitive phenomenon, humor, and a complex neuro-physiological manifestation, laughter. The logic of this line of reasoning is present in the titles of works on humor. Chapman and Foot, for example, chose Humor and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications to name the book they published in 1976; Durant and Miller (1988) came up with Laughing Matters: A Serious Look at Humor; and Morreal called his 1987 book The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. The idea that laughter has many causes which may – or may not – coincide with today’s concept of humor goes back to Quintilian (cf. epigraph). In fact, the Latin author points out the dually intellectual and physical causes of laughter: “Laughter (. . . ) is excited not merely by words or deeds, but sometimes even by touch (corporis tactu)” (op.cit. VI.iii-7). James Beattie (1764: 588–589) resumes this dichotomy, calling it animal (“laughter occasioned by tickling [. . . ] or proceeding from bodily feeling or sudden impulse”) as opposed to sentimental (“laughter proceeding from a sentiment or emotion, excited in the mind, [. . . ] or arising on reading the Tale of a Tub”). Likewise, Aubouin (1948) establishes a distinction between the two types of laughter by adding some elements of a medical nature: the one that is caused by chemical and physiological factors (like laughing gas and other hallucinatory elements, or something much simpler, like tickling) and the one that is caused by intellectual factors, a category where he includes humor. And, lucidly, he adds: “Under these terms [laughter and humor] are confused very different reactions (. . . ) which have only superficial similarities without common causes (1948: 12). Many authors have pointed out the fallacy of equating humor with laughter, which is a crucial point when starting to approach any of the two phenomena. As Lewis (1989: 8) claims, “we need to avoid tripping over crucial terms by distinguishing the broad phenomenon of humor from laughter (a response to some humorous and some non-humorous stimuli).”Among many non-humorous stimuli of laughter, Olbrechts-Tyteca (1974: 14) mentions the following: in some African tribes, laughing is more a sign of embarrassment and shame than joy

Conceptual satellites of humor

7

or happiness, and in many parts of Asia it is a courteous imposition, dictated by strict social traditions. Levine (1969: 1) supports this claim and lists several causes of laughter: “We laugh for many reasons, some contradictory; we may laugh in sympathy or in scorn, from anxiety or relief, from anger or affection, from joy or frustration.” On the other hand, it should be noted that sometimes laughter is not directly proportional to the intensity of humor. Keith-Spiegel (1972: 17) points out that “one can be amused and not laugh, especially if alone.” Even in social situations, subjectivity causes a wide range of responses before the same humorous stimulus. Back in the 19th century, Schopenhauer (1966 [1844]: 99) draws attention to the fact that individuals show remarkable differences in terms of the way they laugh and the time when they do so. He also condemns those who do not laugh spontaneously. “Persons whose laughter is always affected and forced are intellectually and morally of little worth.” One does not have to go that far to admit that there are indeed many factors – like education, geographic and socio-cultural context, mood and personality (on this see Ziv 1984) – which influence one’s perception of and reaction to the humorous stimulus. As Aubouin (1948: 14) remarks, those who often deal with humor seldom laugh. This is exactly the point that Leacock (1935: 20) also makes: “It is true that humorous people seldom laugh and that many people with little sense of humor laugh a great deal.” Laughter is, therefore, a rather versatile phenomenon, which may – or may not – accompany the humorous stimulus. Humor, similarly, is very flexible in terms of the reactions it causes, laughter being just one of them. The variety of responses to humor and, simultaneously, the variety of humor stimuli invalidate the equation ‘laughter = humor’. To try a definition like “Humor is what makes one laugh” is, according to Emelina (1996: 25), as illuminating as saying “Wind is what makes the tree leaves stir.” To mix up the effect (or one of the effects) with the essence is a conceptual fallacy of which one should be aware. Be that as it may, references to laughter abound in the literature on humor, especially when it comes to earlier authors. In the past, just like nowadays, the kinship that brings the two phenomena together is indisputable, but it does not annul the differences that separate laughter from the broader humorous phenomenon.

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The concept of humor: history, scope and issues

4.2. Wit Some to conceit alone their taste confine And glittering thoughts struck out at ev’ry line; Pleased with a work where nothing’s just or fit; One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit. (Pope, Essay on Criticism, apud Palmer 1994: 136)

The overlap between the concepts of wit and humor goes back to more than two centuries ago, when the latter slowly emerged in the field of the comic. Escarpit (1969: 40–41) calls attention to this very fact in the following passage: But in the 18th century, humor was too much burdened with contradictory meanings, and it came apart. Its vital, visceral part – the sense of humor – was detached from its intellectual, conscious, aesthetic part, the one which the world came to call humor ever since then. And this ‘humor’ found itself in a very delicate position before another phenomenon, wit, because it was too close to it to be easily distinguished, but it was also too much a prisoner of its other half to bear to accept being confused with wit. That is why the debate wit-humor will never end.

One of the classical criteria to distinguish between wit and humor is the former’s verbal character. Knox (1928: 17), for instance, explains this argument as follows: “What it is still remains a mystery. Easy enough to distinguish it from its neighbors in the scale of values: with wit, for example, it has nothing to do. For wit is first and last a matter of expression. (. . . ) But humor can be wordless.” Likewise, Aubouin (1948: 74) points out that there is a French phrase, ‘to have sense of humor’, but not ‘to have sense of wit’ – which, he claims, shows the situational, factual and natural character of humor as opposed to the linguistic, intellectual and artificial nature of wit: We sense humor, we can bring it out, cultivate it, reconstitute it, we do not invent it: it is inherent in situations and in facts. Wit, on the other hand, is a creation of intelligence, and its ideas and words are the substance from which this creation is made. We therefore have ‘the gift of wit’ (idem, ibid).

The intellectual character of wit makes it more solemn and sombre, driving it away from the sphere of the laughable. As far back as 1764, James Beattie states that “Wit (. . . ) raises admiration instead of laughter” (cf. p. 586), an opinion which, one and a half century later, Greig (1923: 219) supports: “At much of the world’s finest wit we do not laugh.” This line of thought goes back to Antiquity. Cicero considers wordplay to be a manifestation of intelligence which causes respect and admiration, but not fun or laughter, except for situations

Conceptual satellites of humor

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when it is accompanied by some “category of the laughable” (like the unexpected, the literal interpretation of jokes, antithetical expressions, caricature, etc.): The play upon equivocal words is particularly clever, and depends on language, not on facts; but it seldom raises any considerable laughter, being chiefly praised as evidence of elegant scholarship (. . . ) Indeed the play upon words wins really vast applause on its own merits (. . . ) yet the jest arouses wonder rather than laughter, except when it also falls within some other category of the laughable. (cf. De Oratore, II–lxi, 253–254)

But the Latin author was also among the first to establish the distinction between jokes (facetiae) that are language-based (de dicto) and those that are eventbased (de re), which implies that the play on words can be funny, and is not a prerogative of wit. By the way, it is curious to note that many occurrences of situational humor are themselves transmitted through language. Let us not forget Bergson’s classical dichotomy ‘situation comedy’ / ‘word comedy’: the latter category covers another dichotomy, the one between ‘comedy that language expresses’ and ‘comedy that language creates’ (cf. 1900: 78). What should be stressed is that, along the evolution of the concept of humor, the play on words, i.e., the games that exploit syntactic structure or lexical choice, gradually stopped being considered an exclusive manifestation of wit, and were integrated into a larger conception of humor. The second major criterion to distinguish wit from humor is of an ethical nature. The idea that to exploit the involuntary flaws of people is morally wrong paves the way for a more benevolent attitude towards the world and its imperfections. Wit came therefore to be regarded as being hostile and fierce, whereas humor assumed a tolerant and forbearing character. In 1876, Cox (pp.16–17) used a strong medical image to illustrate the differences between the two phenomena, which echoes the same presupposition: “While wit uses the scalpel, brings blood, divides our members, cuts out the gangrene, and oftentimes the healthy parts, humor manipulates gently, or gestures with the playful finger under the ribs of jollity.” From this perspective, the author stresses the idea that wit is not a “desirable asset” but rather a characteristic of the “worst men,” who do not fear the moral consequences of their attacks, almost as if, Cox claims, they were the very devil. Conversely, humor is essentially benign: “Genuine humor is founded on a deep, thoughtful, and manly character.” Besides, the functions it carries out are utterly altruistic: “Humor, if true, is kind and reformatory. (. . . ) It would make men laugh more heartily, in order to make them live more happily.” Bergson (1900: 80) also sides with this line of thought. According to him, wit, or esprit, consists in a cruel language trap, an ambush set for careless hearers:

10

The concept of humor: history, scope and issues Who are the partners of a witty man? To begin with, his interlocutors, when the witty saying is a direct reply to one of them. (. . . )You take a metaphor, a sentence, a piece of reasoning, and you turn it against the one that produced it, so as to make him say what he would otherwise avoid saying.

Freud (1928) also regards humor as a strategy of self-defence before the external aggressions and as a means of evading a world that causes fear and uncertainty. In this sense, “humor has a dignity that wit totally lacks, for the latter only aims at pleasure; or rather it directs this aim at aggressiveness” (p. 403). Some presentday scholars agree: Evrard (1996: 41), for instance, distinguishes between the critical lucidity of a witty man as opposed to the ‘detachment’ that is typical of a humorist, and he states: Wit is above all intellectual, and derives from an aggressive and hostile tendency mixed with wickedness, as can be seen in ad hominem attacks. Unlike wit, humorous discourse is affectionate. (. . . ) Without a subject, or a direct target, it is discreet and sociable, and it does not aim at injuring anyone.

Humor has managed to keep these essentially positive connotations. However, the uncertain semantic limits of the word ‘humor’ have allowed a considerable, and sometimes problematic, expansion of its use and application. Black humor is a good example of the extent to which taboos and delicate subjects have become legitimate material for humor (on this, see Ermida fthc). Indeed, humor has assumed multiple facets of aggressiveness, especially when it is directed at individuals or groups that are likely to be more vulnerable to attacks. Race, religion, sex, age, culture, nationality, sexual or political orientation – all are potential targets of jokes that, even if camouflaged in an apparently innocent wrapping, are intended to hurt and denigrate. At the same time, they strengthen the unity and cohesion of the group that produces them. Yet, it should be noted that on such occasions the aggressors shield themselves behind a protective shell of impunity which humor typically provides. To attack someone in a joking tone is ambivalent enough to inhibit an otherwise certain disapproval. The evolution that humor thus suffered, allowing it to appropriate a verbal and aggressive dimension that beforehand was wit’s alone, made it a richer phenomenon, insofar as it became more subtle all the while keeping the joy that it traditionally had. Some researchers even use genealogical arguments to explain this process: as humor appeared lexically after wit did, it absorbed part of the latter’s legacy, and coloured it in a special shade, joy. Escarpit (1960: 41) puts the idea as follows: “Wit was the father of humor; then, humor consists of wit plus something else.” Escarpit also quotes from Joseph Addison, who in 1711 wrote an article entitled ‘Genealogy of Humor’ for The Spectator. In this

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good-humored piece, Addison explains the kinship of the two phenomena in the following way: Truth was the founder of the family, and the father of Good Sense. Good Sense was the father of Wit, who married a lady of collateral line called Mirth, by whom he had Humor. [. . . ] Descending from parents of such different dispositions, Humor is very various and unequal in his temper.

4.3.

Irony

The analogy between verbal humor and irony derives from a common characteristic: having one signifier which conceals more than one signified. Of course, this notion of ‘verbal indirection’also characterizes many non-ironical, and nonhumorous, phenomena that, as Kaufer (1981: 496) remarks, are “non-assertively communicated – indirect speech acts, metaphor, synecdoche, metonym, puns, (. . . ) hints, suggestions, implicatures, and so on.” But according to the premise above, both the humorist and the ironist hide their true communicative intention beneath at least two possible interpretations, while using one and the same verbal form. In both cases, language is used in a non-serious register – or, in a non-bona-fide mode (cf. Ch. 3) – which the interlocutor will have to decipher. No wonder, then, that it is so difficult to tell them apart. Stora-Santor (1984: 18) states: Those that elaborated on irony could not avoid comparing it with humor. To tell the truth, the results of this comparison did not bring about the clarification wished for. Still, one has reached at least one certainty: humor and irony are relatives.

The debate over irony has been a very active one (on the evolution of the concept, especially in philosophical terms, see Sedgewick 1948), sometimes together with the idea of comedy. Socrates, to begin with, conceives of eironeia not so much as a speech device but rather as a general behavioral mode, an attitude of pretended ignorance one assumes before life so as to make others do likewise. But, for Socrates’ fellow-men, the word eiron had a highly negative connotation, meaning something like ‘cheater’, ‘liar’, or ‘hypocrite’. In the comedies by Aristophanes, the ironist is placed side by side with the charlatans and swindlers, and in Plato’s dialogues one can see that many of Socrates’interlocutors consider his pretended ignorance as a cowardly and scornful form of escapism. Only with Aristotle does irony assume a noble and refined character, becoming a legitimate strategy to spare the others a feeling of inferiority. In his Rhetoric, the ordinary humorist (the joker) is, in fact, portrayed as someone who attacks everything and everyone so as to arouse laughter, even if at his own expense. Conversely, irony is seen as the art of the true gentleman:

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The concept of humor: history, scope and issues Some jokes are becoming to a gentleman, others are not; see that you choose such that becomes you. Irony better befits a gentleman than buffoonery; the ironical man jokes to amuse himself, the buffoon to amuse other people. (Rhetoric, 3.18)

In Ethics, Aristotle also rehabilitates irony, attributing its practice to those men of refined character who, like Socrates, keep away from pride and vanity (on this, see Lane Cooper’s important 1922 study). Cicero reformulates the image of Socrates as a patient and skilful teacher who makes use of short, simple and seemingly ignorant answers to drive his interlocutors to contradiction and silence. As he puts it, “[. . . ] Socrates far surpassed all others for accomplished wit in this strain of irony or assumed simplicity” (cf. De Oratore, II–lxvii, 270). In classical rhetoric, the word irony is included on the list of tropes, among other indirect speech modes (like metaphor, allegory, metonym and synecdoche), and it is rendered in a simple formula: irony is a figure of speech which conveys the opposite of what is said.This is roughly Dumarsais’definition (1730: 156): “Irony (ειρoνεια, dissimulatio in oratione) is a figure through which one wants to make others understand the opposite of what one says: thus the words one uses in irony are not to be taken in their literal sense.” This restored concept of irony is thus turned into a rule-governed formal mechanism which leads to the truth. Therefore it constitutes a useful argumentative weapon, as it allows subtle and indirect attacks, through which the speaker can conceal his true thoughts while belittling his hearer (an aggressive use which is miles away from the Socratic position of faked ignorance). The romantics were to recuperate the genuine Socratic irony, in a period of transition from the unequivocal strategies of classical rhetoric to the literary style of modernity. According to Behler (1990: 74), the ironical configuration of thought and writing, which characterizes modern discourse, dates from this period.Also, he claims, it establishes contradiction and paradox as processes of liberation of the subject, towards self-reflection and self-awareness. As Sedgewick (1948: 18) remarks, this is not about a shock between word and meaning, or between apparent situations and real situations anymore, but rather – as in Socratic irony, upon which it is moulded – about the attitude and mental posture of a subject who sees only contradictions around him, which he shapes through art. Nowadays, as Lang expounds in Irony/Humor: Critical Paradigms (1988: 37, 49), there are two main approaches to irony. The first one is prevalent among continental critics and regards irony as a philosophical instance that refuses the classical dichotomies ‘reality/appearance’ or ‘sense/expression’ on which irony-as-a-trope is based. The model to follow is a sophist and non-dialectical Socrates, who plays on the speech of his interlocutors so as to make them trip over contradiction. Such notions as truth, intention, or sincerity are thus subverted,

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giving way to a paradigm of irony as an end and not a means, as a continuous process without any ontological, teleological or moralist purposes. The second main approach follows the Anglo-American tradition (with D. C. Muecke, N. Knox and W. Booth) and is directed at revealing the author’s intention. It regards irony as a rhetorical technique, a trope that consists in saying the opposite of, or something different from, what one means. It embodies the Cartesian posture of rationality, taking the author/reader duo as being rationally superior and as having the key to deciphering the (latent) signified beneath the (patent) signifier. The ironical text is devised along the lines of a dialectical and justified post-Platonic Socrates, and it constitutes a set of symbols whose superficial appearance hides the author’s true meanings. The critic’s task is to unveil them in a process of conducted epiphany, as if he/she were a “midwife of truth” (Lang 1988: 38). This exercise is about formulating a logical and coherent language that renders the original intention in a unified text obeying a central semantic core. The conception of irony as a ‘text-to-interpret’ and a ‘meaning-to-reveal’ allows some authors to attempt a comparison with humor. Evrard (1996) is one of them: Irony is different from humor as far as its objectives and seriousness are concerned. Whereas irony makes a judgement and tends to determine meanings, humor looks at the world and doubts it, hesitating, refraining from interpretation.

In this sense, humor is the realm of uncertainty and doubt, unlike irony, which aims at making judgments and, as it were, setting things right. For Evrard, therefore, the ironical message has an almost ethical function, whereas humor threatens established moral and pedagogical certainties. Lang (1988) also sides with this line of thought. She regards the humorous text as an infraction without any alibi, that is, as a challenge to the laws of order and coherence without any guarantee of a truth existing somewhere. In this sense, she establishes a parallel between humor and a type of irony she calls post-modern, an essentially non-rhetoric exercise that has to do with the first of the two critical paradigms mentioned above. This genuinely Socratic irony is like humor in that it exploits the situation of a plural and fragmented subject, without any moralistic aims at imposing a single truth or an exclusive meaning. This may be why Lang (1988: 49) calls Socrates “the elusive, infinitely negative humorist.” At the linguistic and textual levels, the concept of humor focuses on the notions of signifier and reader, rather than signified or author. It is about a language that refuses the fetters of the author and the critic, and is free, plural and self-sufficient. But if, philosophically speaking, this distinction between irony and humor obtains, the two phenomena merge together, rather than draw apart, when it

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comes to the use of rhetorical irony for humorous purposes. Granted that there are many cases of non-humorous irony, many others are unequivocally humororiented. In texts longer than jokes this is also the case, as I will show later on (cf. Ch. 6). For the time being, let us bear in mind, with Attardo (2001: 122), that the two phenomena overlap at times: “With the proviso that irony need not be humorous, when it is so, it is clear that irony may contribute to the perception of humor in a text.”

5. Humor theories Over the centuries, many elaborations on humor or, more generally, on the comic phenomenon have covered recurrent aspects and resulted in parallel findings. Some authors have attempted to classify these humor theory families. KeithSpiegel (1972: 4–13), for instance, has come up with a detailed eight-category division, whereas Attardo (1994: 47) has adopted the classical tripartite approach: sociological theories, which focus on such principles as disparagement, hostility, superiority; psychoanalytical theories, which concentrate on the notions of release and sublimation; and cognitive theories, which tackle the principles of incongruity and contrast. To reconsider each of these theoretical groups implies making a review of the very history of humor studies. Indeed, the chronology of humor research goes as far back as Antiquity, encompasses the Renaissance, reaches modernity with the lexical establishment of the word ‘humor’, and arrives at contemporary times with a multitudinous legacy. Instead of adopting a diachronic perspective to go over this evolution (on a diachronic approach to the history of humor studies, see Ermida 2007a), I will rather present a topic-based approach, using the comparative method to tune in the various authors and discourses. However, let me stress that none of the theories, if taken separately, constitutes a self-sufficient response to the innumerable questions that humor poses: on the contrary, each one of them puts forward one or two important characteristics, which are only a part of the phenomenon. As Raskin (1985: 30) claims, it is preferable to suppose that “a synthesis of those features may serve as a better approximation of what humor is than any partial theory taken separately.” That is why it is not surprising that some authors – like Bergson – display a mixed theoretical positioning, presenting elements that belong to the three main groups of theories. The present book also aims at defending the importance of a combined reading of the humorous phenomenon, even if the incongruity theory naturally becomes predominant in a script-based approach such as mine. Once again, it

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should be added that instead of a sum-up of existing summaries of the humor theories, it is my intention to provide a clear review of the original bibliographical sources that shape them. 5.1.

Disparagement theory

Humor has for a long time been equated with scorn, and the comic emotion linked to feelings of superiority and attitudes of disparagement. When one laughs, one laughs at someone. In this sense, humor is regarded as an interactive phenomenon that is based on an asymmetrical relationship between two or more individuals – and it is the perception of this asymmetry that causes enjoyment in those that consider themselves to be superior. The humorous stimulus, which is almost always situational or circumstantial, consists in showing a flaw, a deformity or incapacity on the part of the butt of the joke. As Schaeffer (1981: 3) points out, the fact that humor may be potentially dangerous explains why some researchers warn against its practice. The argument is that humor stimulates anti-social behavior and voices negative emotions like pride and contempt, which has often led moralists to defend moderation. However, it is exactly because of the existence of repressive social ethics that humor constitutes a valuable escape for feelings of Schadenfreude, which would otherwise be unacceptable. Plato is usually regarded as the first to point out the derogatory and potentially hostile character of humor. Be that as it may, Lane Cooper (1922: 99) mentions a study by Mary A. Grant (1917), entitled The Ancient Rhetorical Theories of the Laughable, where Grant discusses pre-Socratic face comedy as an exercise in superiority which at the time was disapproved of. Still, it is Philebus that contains the first explicit considerations about the nature of the laughable. In the dialogue between Protarchus and Socrates, Plato shows that other people’s misfortune is the object of our laughter, and also that it paradoxically causes pleasure and pain: Socrates: But have we not said that this pleasure of watching the misfortune of our friends is caused by envy? Protarchus: Necessarily. Socrates: Then, when we laugh at the ridicule of our friends, reasoning shows that, by mixing envy with laughter, we also mix pain and pleasure; for we know that envy is a pain of the soul whereas laughter is a pleasure, and both of them coexist on such occasions. (cf. 50a)

It is interesting to point out that much later on other researchers took up the idea that humor is also about pain. Beattie (1764: 586), for instance, says: “(. . . ) the

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The concept of humor: history, scope and issues

imitation of [the comic singularities of a good man in real distress] will form a species of humor which, if it should force a smile, will draw forth a tear at the same time.” Similarly, Cox (1876: 14) focuses on the connection between humor and tears: “The tear, too, may have its prism of humor. But pathos has a law and an orbit of its own, though it may often meet in conjunction with humor.” According to Plato, then, envy is the first cause of laughter; but, as it is a contradictory mixture of joy and suffering, it turns comedy into a purgatory experience. Hence, comedy and tragedy come closer. Generally speaking, however, Plato regards laughter as something potentially negative that should be moderated, since its underlying motivations are unworthy of free and noble men (Laws, 7. 816– 817). Besides, it also causes “violent reactions” and “laughter fits,” both of which should be avoided (Republic, 3.388). Aristotle’s definition of comedy is another archetype of disparagement theories, and it shows a few interesting differences vis-`a-vis Plato. Although his most important writings on comedy were lost, a few disperse fragments remained, like the short excerpt in Nichomachean Ethics where he states that “the jest is a sort of abuse,” and where he condemns disparagement as a form of buffoonery, which he considers unbecoming to “refined and well-bred men” (iv, 8–9). He succinctly elaborates on this idea as follows: Those who carry humor to excess are thought to be regular buffoons, striving after humor at all costs, and aiming rather at raising a laugh than at saying what is becoming and at avoiding pain to the object of their fun (. . . ) But those who joke in a tasteful way are called ready-witted, which implies a sort of readiness to turn this way and that (ibidem).

In Poetics there is also a very important, albeit short, passage on the nature of comedy: Comedy is (. . . ) the representation of low men; however it does not cover all of their faults, but only those that are a species of the ugly. Indeed the ridiculous consists of a fault or a deformity that causes neither pain nor destruction; an obvious example is the comic mask: it is ugly and deformed but it does not express pain. (cf. Ch. 5, 49a, 32–37)

Here, likewise, comedy consists of what is ugly and lowly, thus allowing the audience to feel a hierarchically safe distance from which to deride. However, unlike Plato, pain is not intrinsic to comedy: it is about deformity and ugliness, but it does not cause “either pain or destruction.” One laughs at other people’s flaws, but only because they are not serious or painful. Cicero (c.106–43 Bc) produced one of the rare systematic treatises on comedy that have survived since Antiquity. In De Oratore, the laughable is once again the ugly and the vile, but the rhetorical use of such manifestations does

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not exceed the limits of decorum. Indeed, Cicero claims that it should respect the feelings and values of the audience: Then the field or province, so to speak, of the laughable, is restricted to that which may be described as unseemly or ugly (. . . ) But the limits within which things laughable are to be handled by the orator is one calling for most careful consideration. (. . . ) Thus the things most easily ridiculed are those which call for neither strong disgust nor the deepest sympathy. (cf. De Oratore II, 236–238)

The use of humor is a precious resource of a nimble orator, who can win the empathy of the audience if he manages to dose it and respect its frontiers. Therefore, Cicero warns against excess, and advises prudence and good taste when dealing with the laughable (geloion): In ugliness too and in physical blemishes there is good enough matter for jesting, but here as elsewhere the limits of license are the main question. As to this, not only is there a rule excluding remarks made in bad taste, but also. . . an orator. . . must not let his jesting become buffoonery or mere mimicking. (cf. ibidem, 239.)

It should be noted that Cicero defends a combination which would today be morally unacceptable: on the one hand, he defends elegance, respect and good manners; on the other, he tacitly supports the legitimacy of laughing at other people’s physical problems. This is indeed an impossible combination by today’s moral standards. According to Graf (1997: 31), deformity and disgrace constituted, in the Greek context, a legitimate motif of mockery, because they stood for the low and marginalised (or deviated) social classes. Comedy thus became an instrument of power in the hands of the upper classes. The case of the circus dwarf is a remnant of this tendency, which today is considered cruel and politically incorrect. However, as Milner (1972: 25) remarks, similar manifestations have survived: “True though it may be that we no longer laugh at the blind, or the deaf and dumb, or hunchbacks, yet many of us may still find it necessary at times to suppress an urge to smile in the presence of spastics, stutterers, people with squints or cleft palates.” Leacock (1935: 11) also draws attention to the link between humor and cruelty: “The Romans liked to see a chariot and its occupants smashed in the circus; we prefer to see a clown fall off a trapeze.” Quintilian (c. 35–100 Ad) devotes the third section of the sixth book of Institutio Oratoria to humor and its utility as a rhetorical tool. He also adds a few moralist remarks, warning against excess and language incorrectness. He conceives of humor as a phenomenon that has many causes, physical ones included, and he sees it as an expression of disparagement and scorn: Moreover there is great variety in the things which raise a laugh, since we laugh not merely at those words or actions which are smart or witty, but also at those

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The concept of humor: history, scope and issues which reveal folly, anger or fear. Consequently, the cause of laughter is uncertain, since laughter is never far removed from derision. (cf. VI.iii 7–8)

However, unlike Cicero, Quintilian does not pact with aggressiveness. Indeed, he is sensitive to the imperfections of others and is well aware of the dangers of backfire which threaten those that attack: “In the courts and elsewhere it is regarded as inhuman to hit a man when he is down, either because he is the innocent victim of misfortune or because such attacks may recoil on those who make them.” And he adds: “Our jests should never be designed to wound, and we should never make it our ideal to lose a friend sooner than a jest.” (VI.iii–28). A long gap separates these Latin authors from another very important landmark in the disparagement theory. Descartes, in 1649, published The Passions of the Soul, in which he elaborated on the foundations and legitimacy of mockery and laughter: Mockery and scorn are a type of joy mixed with hatred; and they are caused by a problem that one is happy to find in another person. One hates this finding but at the same time enjoys that the other person deserves suffering from it. And, when this finding happens unexpectedly, surprise and amazement give way to laughter. (Art. 178)

In this passage, a significant novelty is that Descartes takes into account an element that would become established in present-day humor studies: surprise. Besides, he attempts to justify scorn in moral terms, attributing it to “someone who deserves it.” In spite of this, he shows to be aware that laughter is not morally edifying: “The joy that results from good is serious, whereas the one that results from evil is accompanied by laughter and mockery” (Art. 62). An outstanding paradigm of the superiority theory is contemporary with Descartes. Thomas Hobbes, in Human Nature (1650: 112–113), regards laughter as a dual phenomenon. On the one hand, as a reflexive reaction to something that, in ourselves, is funny: “Men often laugh at their own deeds when they exceed their expectations”; they also laugh at “their own jokes,” as well as at “their previous weaknesses,” that is, at something which points to the past and brings along no “present-day dishonour.” On the other hand, laughter is regarded as an interpersonal phenomenon, as a pleasurable reaction before other people’s problems which contributes to raise one’s self-esteem: The passion of laughter originates in a sudden awareness of our superiority and eminence. What else is there in those jokes besides a recommendation we give of our own value and importance, as opposed to the weaknesses and absurdities of another man?

Since laughter is a manifestation of scorn and superiority, other people’s laughter at ourselves or at “friends whose dishonour is partly ours” is “odious” and means

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“other people’s triumph over us.” Therefore, Hobbes advises a type of laughter that is neither offensive nor directed at anyone in particular. After all, it is “vainglory (. . . ) to think that our neighbor’s weaknesses imply our triumph.” In Leviathan (1651: 27), Hobbes resumes the idea that “those grimaces called laughter” are caused by “the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.” Once again, he is well aware of the extent to which laughter constitutes a camouflage of our own weakness and, consequently, an attitude of cowardice: to compare ourselves with those that are weaker is too easy; what is difficult is to face the level of those that are superior to us: (. . . ) And it is incident most to [those] that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; [those that] are forced to keep themselves in their own favour, by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much Laughter at the defects of others is a sign of Pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper works is to help and free others from scorn, and compare themselves only with the most able. (Ibidem)

In the 20th century, Henri Bergson, in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, resumes this line of reading. He conceives of laughter as a socially hostile element, which carries a corrective function and a revengeful purpose. Laughing at someone means applying a punishment – public humiliation – and it also means asserting the superiority of the one who laughs, since “the laughing individual proudly affirms himself” (1900: 135). Through laughter, we direct our aggressiveness towards a vulnerable target: Laughter is, above all, a correction. It is meant to humiliate and to hurt its object. (. . . ) Laughter punishes certain flaws more or less like the disease punishes certain excesses, catching innocent people, sparing the guilty ones. In this sense, laughter is not entirely fair. And let me repeat that it cannot contain any kindness. It aims at intimidating, through humiliation. (cf. 1900: 134–135)

However, for comedy to be effective, it is essential that it does not interfere with the emotions and affections of the interlocutor. Emotional detachment is, consequently, a catchphrase in humor: Comedy is directed at pure intelligence; laughter is incompatible with emotion. Present to me the least defect; if you do so in such a way as to arouse my sympathy, my fear or my pity, I will not be able to laugh at it. (Ibidem, p.101)

Along quite similar lines, Freud (1905: 132 ff.) draws a parallel between what he calls ‘tendentious wit’ and ‘innocent wit’. The former covers hostile tendencies, as well as obscene, cynical and sceptical tendencies. All of them share an attack technique that is similar to sexual aggression. Moral prescriptions manage to

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The concept of humor: history, scope and issues

inhibit aggressiveness (or “active hatred”), but they do not succeed in controlling the more subtle forms of invective that evade social censorship: By making our enemy small, inferior, despicable or comic, we achieve in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him – to which the third person, who has made no efforts, bears witness by his laughter. (. . . ) Wit will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously. (1905: 147)

This process of abasing the enemy ensures the adherence of the recipient, who sides with the speaker because of the comic pleasure s/he experiences. It follows that ‘hostile wit’ aims exclusively at objects that are emotionally detached from the recipient. Freud (1905: 284) is very categorical with regard to this point: The generation of affect is the most intense of all the conditions that interfere with the comic and its importance in this respect has nowhere been overlooked. For this reason it has been said that the comic feeling comes easiest in more or less indifferent cases where the feelings and interests are not strongly involved.

Lately, the evolution of the theory of hostility has taken a different turn: from conceiving humor as a mechanism of consolidating personal triumph and superiority, researchers have come to focus on the cohesive function of humor within a group and also on its role in maintaining or subverting power. According to Lewis (1989: 34–39), the earlier empirical psychologists (Murray, Smith and Woolf, 1934) who studied hostile humor departed from the hypothesis that having fun derives from watching an ‘unaffiliated’ object in a demeaning situation. From this perspective, they supposed that women may refuse misogynous jokes in favour of those that belittle men, whereas Negroes may not be receptive to racist jokes against them, though they may accept racist jokes that target white people. The experiments they carried out confirmed their hypotheses. However, Lewis remarks, more recent studies have shed a new light on the question: contrary to earlier findings, the response to such group-targeted humor does not vary on an ‘inter-group’ basis but rather on an ‘intra-group’ one. In other words, it varies according to the diversity of individuals within the same group, and not according to whether or not they belong to it. In this way, atheist Jews may enjoy rabbi jokes, and some women may laugh at ‘dumb-blonde’ ones. Be that as it may, some forms of humor do seem to be built on the basis of group identity. As English (1994: 9) points out, “even the most trivial piece of wordplay or seemingly nonsensical comic reiteration can function as a sort of rudimentary ’dividing practice’, as an ’understanding test’ to distinguish an ’in-group’ from an ’out-group’.” This has to do with asserting some form of cultural or sub-cultural identity, be it avant-garde, teenager, or cosmopolitan, and also with affirming a sense of superiority over the ’non-laughing others’. The

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tendentious mechanisms that surreptitiously operate in the humorous transaction show that humor is never ‘innocent’. When a joke falls flat, causing discomfort and even rage, the reason for failure may reside in the recipient’s identification with, or support for, the butt. In such situations, the ethical differences between the speaker and the hearer make the latter reject the former and the values s/he stands for. Hostile humor can thus be understood as an instrument to exercise power through humiliation. The history of human violence is significantly laden with instances of humor at the service of tyranny, intolerance and brutality, of which sick humor (see Dundes 1987) is but an example. Racist jokes in America during the sixties, or anti-Semitic jokes about Auschwitz in the Germany of the eighties are two such cases. When humor is used in this way, it not only voices but also implements and strengthens destructive ideologies and policies. However, the political force of humor can work both ways and serve the interests of the powerless. The abundance of political cartoons in today’s press recuperates the tradition of satire, which used to take the shape of leaflets, novels or poems. In this sense, political humor can help to overthrow unwanted regimes, making the oppressed groups wake up to an organized type of fighting. In critical times, the victimized succeed in strengthening resistance in the face of enemies, at the same time as they jeopardize their morale. This explains the jokes against the Nazis during the Czech or French occupation or, in a more restricted scale, the ones by employees against their bosses or by students against their teachers and ministers of education. As Levine (1969: 12) puts it, “humor, as an interpersonal process, is much more than the disguised and mitigated expression of aggression. It is also a cohesive force which moulds human relationships. There is nothing so completely shared as laughter.” And he mentions an example to illustrate the efficiency of the cohesive mechanisms that underlie aggressive humor: in the Teheran meeting of 1943, Roosevelt managed to melt down Stalin’s icy mistrust at the expense of jokes against Churchill. Given the emphasis put on the social and interpersonal aspects of humor, the theory of hostility / disparagement / superiority is particularly useful for a sociolinguistic approach to the humorous phenomenon, in particular with regard to the numerous sociocultural, political and professional contexts where the language of humor works. Of course, instances of hostile humor are also present in literary comedy, as will be seen in Chapters 6 and 7 (for example, in David Lodge’s text, the protagonist is said to arouse feelings of Schadenfreude, revelling in the face of other people’s misfortune).

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5.2.

Release theory

Regarding humor as a form of escape before the inhibitions that society imposes upon the individual has become a popular line of psychological research. The underlying principle is that laughter provides relief to various tensions and allows repressed desires to be satisfied. Two keywords within this framework are pleasure and compensation. When we laugh, we temporarily liberate ourselves from the fetters and limitations that oppress us, and we express emotions that would otherwise be forbidden. Bergson (1900: 132–134) attributes the liberating principle of humor to its similarities with dreaming. Both phenomena show evidence of a “movement of relaxation” that neutralizes the “effort of common sense.” According to him, living in society implies adapting to real existing things, as well as thinking only what one is supposed to think. By laughing, however, just as by dreaming, we manage to disconnect ourselves from reality and to break loose from its logic. In other words, we act like children, who are still free from the obstacles with which reason and upbringing will eventually burden them. The comic emotion, Bergson claims, allows the adult to transitorily regain the freedom and innocence that are long past. He states: Deep down, the comic feeling is the tendency to slide down an easy slope. (. . . ) We do not seek to adapt or readapt endlessly to the society we belong to. We neglect the attention we should pay to life. More or less, we become distracted: from will, no doubt, even more than from intelligence. Besides, we become lazy, (. . . ) which means we are having fun.

Freud follows in Bergson’s footsteps regarding a few points – namely the psychogenesis of humor in childhood, and the equation of humor with dreaming – but his celebrated work is a much richer and more personal approach to the comic phenomenon. In Jokes and their Relations to the Unconscious (1905: 241), he describes the nature and functions of laughter, and outlines the process that originates it as follows: “I would say that laughter supervenes when an amount of psychic energy (. . . ) stops being useful, in such a way that it can be freely released.” In this sense, laughter is caused by a discharge of unused psychic energy, as when a feeling one is used to repressing suddenly slips out. Therefore, the pleasure of laughing derives from the release of energy or tension that has been uselessly accumulated. (On a comparison between laughter and other tension-discharge processes, like sobbing and orgasm, see Bateson 1969 [1952]: 163.) The laughing spasms spend this tension effortlessly, which implies that the individual “economizes” on repression efforts.

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But the liberating discharge of this type of energy, laughter, derives from different phenomena. Indeed, it is important to stress that Freud distinguishes between wit, comic and humor. As Martin (1998: 18) remarks, this distinction “has often been ignored by researchers, who have tended to confuse Freud’s theory of jokes with his theory of humor.” Although all three of them use a similar economizing strategy, the first one does so with regard to inhibition, the second one with regard to thought, and the third one with regard to feeling (1905: 307). That is why the well-known joke on the man convicted to death (“The week’s beginning nicely!”) is an instance of ‘humor’ in Freud’s terms: in such a case, it is feeling – namely self-pity – that is spared, or economized, allowing the ‘humorous clash’ to ensue. In 1928, Freud published an article entitled “Humor,” where he elaborated on a few notions which came to be a corollary of the release theory. Humor, Freud claims, is a means of self-defence against pain, and as such it does not ‘conform’: rather, it ‘defies’, imposing not only the triumph of the self, but also the triumph of the principle of pleasure, transforming the adverse circumstances into something that amuses and does not hurt: Humor has something liberating about it, and this sense it is similar to wit and to the comic, but besides that it also has something sublime and elevated (. . . ) It obviously had to do with the triumph of narcissism, with the invulnerability of the ego, which proudly affirms itself. The ego refuses to be tamed down, to be imposed upon by external reality and its pains and traumas (. . . ); it goes as far as turning such menaces into pleasurable experiences. (p. 402)

The humorist thus acquires his ‘superiority’, regarding the ego and its futile interests from the point of view of an exalted ‘super-ego’ that finds everything and everyone insignificant and trivial. In a certain way, the humorist plays the role of the adult that faces people as if they were children. The ‘humorous attitude’ disposes of reality and serves an illusion – a mechanism that is apparently fragile but constitutes a valuable asset, since it allows one to break free. Indeed, the defensive function of humor underlying Freud’s theory, just like its liberating function, is a useful tool to control fear in real-life menacing situations, such as war. As Berger (1997: 58) points out, “There may be no atheists in foxholes, (. . . ) but there are plenty of humorists.” The idea that the one who laughs takes a relativist stance in the face of the surrounding world and its limitations is present in other authors of Freud’s time. For instance, Dugas (Psychologie du Rire, 1902: 105–114) states that “laughing means cutting loose from reality, hovering above it,” whereas Penjon, in an article significantly entitled “Le rire et la libert´e” (1893: 113, 139), declares that

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“spontaneity, or even freedom, constitutes the essence of the pleasurable and the laughable in all their forms.” In an attempt at tracing back the forerunners of the release theory, we come across William Hazlitt and his On Wit and Humor (1818: 5–30). He claims that the comic resides in a sudden relaxation of the intellectual pressure that makes us continuously hope for a ‘natural’ order of things. This relaxation allows us to abruptly switch from the expected to the incongruous. By decompressing, we feel a sort of liberating pleasure: “Such an abrupt transposition of the order of our ideas, as taking the mind unawares, throws it off its guard, startles it into a lively sense of pleasure, and leaves no time or inclination for painful reflections.” Schopenhauer, often regarded as a paradigm of the incongruity theory, also offers a few probing remarks about the psychological and cognitive mechanisms that underlie the humorous pleasure. In the 2nd volume of The World as Will and Representation (1966 [1844]: 98), he starts by stating that “in general, laughing is a pleasurable state,” and he goes on to say that the ‘spasmodic convulsion’ in laughter is caused by the observation of an incongruity between the ‘conceived’ and the ‘perceived’. And it is exactly the “triumph of perception over thought that gives us pleasure.” Whereas perception is a type of original knowledge, inseparable from animal nature, and a vehicle of effortless present sensations like joy and satisfaction, thought provides a type of secondary knowledge, which is painstaking and so often opposed to our immediate desires. Defeating thought implies therefore releasing ourselves from its influence and from the effects of pain and fear it brings along: (. . . ) The concepts of thinking (. . . ), as the medium of the past, of the future, and of what is serious, act as the vehicle of our fears, our regrets, and all our cares. It must therefore be delightful for us to see this strict, untiring and most troublesome governess, our faculty of reason, for once convicted of inadequacy. Therefore on this account the mien or appearance of laughter is very closely related to that of joy.

All these are precursors of the theoretical trend that Freud would make more visible in the 20th century. Important figures of this school are also Kris (1952), Bergler (1956), Grotjahn (1957), Fry (1963), Levine (1969), Mindess (1971) and Kline (1977). More recent psychological studies have tended to focus on the specific notion of sense of humor and its ‘individual differences’, using empirical tools and experimental analyzes (cf. Martin 1998). From the standpoint of linguistics, the release theory just sketched is interesting insofar as it explains the motivation process underlying wordplay, as well as phenomena like the infraction of Grice’s Cooperative Principle, a central concept to most verbal humor theories and also to the present approach (on this,

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see Ch. 5). Indeed, subverting linguistic rules and the communicational contract has a lot to do with the principle of liberation mentioned above: to go against the norm is to break free. This explains the fact that the humorous game is often viewed as an iconoclastic and subversive exercise. 5.3.

Incongruity theory

The idea that humor results from the combination of dissimilar elements and feeds on the consequent surprising effect is an established one. From this perspective, contrast and surprise equal humor. When we find something funny, it is because the sudden perception of an incongruity makes us drop our initially wrong interpretation, and, as if in a game, search for a surprising meaning we had not anticipated. Very productive within cognitive psychology, the incongruity theory enjoys an established reputation in many fields, including linguistics. Also illustrative of this influence is the present work, predominantly linguistic, whose principles of semantic opposition and informativeness follow up on this line of thought. Kant is a major forerunner of this school, albeit not the most systematic one. In a brief passage from Critique of Judgement (1992 [1790]: 238–243), he regards laughter as a “kind of game on aesthetic ideas” which is pleasurable because the ideas are alternate: in other words, when we laugh and delight ourselves, it is because we play with our own imbalance for some time. This imbalance is due to the fact that every laughable object has to contain some degree of absurdity, in the face of which our understanding suddenly yields, and accepts the unexpected. Hence Kant’s famous maxim: “Laughter is an affection that results from the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing.” In this process, however, it is necessary that there be an appropriate occasion – and a favourable disposition – to temporarily oscillate between doubt and mistake: (. . . ) The joke must always contain something that may deceive. If it brings about no effect, one rememorizes it again, and as many times as necessary, in a rapid succession of tension and distension which makes one oscillate. This movement (. . . ) causes tiredness, but also amusement (which is very profitable for one’s health). (ibidem)

Therefore, rememorizing and reconstructing the interpretive process so as to solve the mistake is tiring but healthy. However, the homeopathic virtues of laughter, which “agitates one’s body invigoratingly,” only bless those that have “originality of mind,” that is, a capacity to adapt themselves to situations diverse

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from – or inverse to – the usual. Humor is, then, what Kant calls a “pleasant art,” which demands specific talents and skills. Schopenhauer resumes this line of thought. In an important passage from the 1st volume of The World as Will and Representation (1966 [1818]: 59–61), as well as in a chapter from the 2nd volume, entitled “On the theory of the Ludicrous” (1966 [1844]: 91–101), he puts forward a solution to the questions that an exclusively human phenomenon – laughter – poses, and he starts by devising its causes: In every case, laughter results from nothing but the suddenly perceived incongruity between a concept and the real objects that had been thought through it in some relation; and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.

The perception of a difference between the objects and the concept that defines them reveals that the concept is adjusted to the objects only from a unilateral point of view. If seen from a different perspective, the concept suddenly becomes inappropriate and absurd, thus arousing laughter. As in other passages from the book, Schopenhauer bases his thesis on the idea of contrast between ‘representations of perception’ and ‘abstract representations’. In this sense, the greater the disparity between what one perceives and what one conceives, that is, the greater the incongruity in the ‘object/concept’ relationship, the more powerful the ‘laughing effect’ will be. The contrast – which is unexpected – can, however, be expressed either through words or through actions: “All laughter therefore is occasioned by a paradoxical, and hence unexpected, subsumption; it matters not whether this is expressed in words or in deeds.” This double dimension of the humorous phenomenon covers two manifestations: wit, which plays on verbal objects by attributing ‘arbitrary’ concepts to them, and folly, which is expressed through incongruous and irrational actions and attitudes. The joke is, therefore, “intentionally ridiculous,” and it is meant to show the discrepancy between the idea and reality – once again, between conception and perception. The joy that underlies laughter springs from the feeling that one can cheat and temporarily confound reason – our “demanding governess,” as we saw above – by making use of a paradoxical combination of heterogeneous objects and concepts. The origin of this line of reasoning can also be traced back to Antiquity. Although Aristotle usually stands for the hostility theory, other fragments of his writings – apart from the ultra-quoted Poetics – show a richer understanding of the comic phenomenon. Indeed, some extracts from Rhetoric (3.11) constitute an earlier contribution to the incongruity theory: Clever turns for the most part depend upon metaphor with the addition of a deceptive element. That the hearer has learned something is more obvious from

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its contrast with what he expected. (. . . ) Good riddles are enjoyed for the same reason, for there is an act of learning.

Here is the idea that the frustrated interpretive expectations that take place in wordplay are due to contrast, which makes the recipient re-learn the meaning intended by the sender, or the writer, as is the case of comedy. Attached to contrast is, early enough, an element of surprise, in the face of which the reader has to re-do the reading process, in a ‘garden-path’ sort of way (as one would call it today): Similarly, ’novelties of expression’ arise when there is an element of surprise, and (. . . ) the thing turns out contrary to what we were expecting, like the jokes found in comic writers, produced by deceptive alterations in words, and by unexpected words in verse, where the listener anticipates one thing and hears another. (. . . )

The notion of opposition or antithesis is essential for the humorous saying to be effective and ‘popular’. Let us note, in passing, that the element of brevity, which would be central to communication theories such as Grice’s (cf. “be economical”), already exists in Aristotle: “The more concise and antithetical the saying, the more popular it is, for the reason that our new perception is made sharper by the contrast, and quicker by the brevity” (ibid.). The Latin authors also take this problem into account. In Cicero, the categories of the ‘laughable’ include a fundamental element, which he calls ‘the unexpected’, and which is a forerunner of the concept of incongruity: “(. . . ) When we are expecting to hear a particular phrase, and something different is uttered (. . . ) our own mistake even makes us laugh ourselves” (op.cit., II.lxiii.255). Quintilian does not neglect the question either. Indeed, he also elaborates on the idea that the humorist frustrates the expectations of the audience. In fact, applying humor to oratory implies adding a subcategory to the art of public speaking, namely a strategy of provoking an intended interpretive mistake, to which Quintilian refers as follows: “cheating expectations, taking words in a different sense from what was intended” (op.cit.,VI.iii.24). The effect of contrast and opposition between circumstances, words and senses – achieved through a vague similarity or suggested similarity – is, according to the author, particularly skilful: Still more ingenious is the application of one thing to another on the ground of some resemblance, that is to say the adaptation to one thing of a circumstance which usually applies to something else, a type of jest which we may regard as being an ingenious form of fiction. (cf. VI–iii, 61)

After a few disperse contributions during the Renaissance, in the 18th century James Beattie writes An Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition

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(1764: 591–653), where he systematically reviews the studies on the comic, and where he frontally opposes Hobbes. If, as Hobbes claimed, laughter were caused only by pride and the assumption of our superiority, it would be impossible, Beattie argues, to laugh at our peers, or at our present dreams – as indeed is the case. Therefore, following Hutcheson, according to whom “it is the contrast of dignity and meanness that occasions laughter,” Beattie elects incongruity as the fundamental cause of laughter: Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage, or as acquiring a sort of mutual relation from the peculiar manner in which the mind takes notice of them.

Contrast and heterogeneity alone are not enough: there has to be a combination of disparate elements under the edge of similitude. In other words, the comic resides in the union of opposites. Besides, quantity should also be taken into account: “the greater the number of incongruities that are blended together in the same assemblage, the more ludicrous it will probably be.” In modern times, Bergson (1900) takes up the connection between humor and incongruity. He starts by re-stating his recurrent claim that the comic in general, but mainly the comic of forms and movements, derives from a basic incongruity – the view of something “mechanical working behind the living.” Then, Bergson applies the principle of contrast to other cases, although he concedes that the notions of surprise and contrast “are applicable to a multitude of other cases that are not laughable at all.” He concentrates on examples of “interference of series,” which occurs whenever two sets of unrelated words or situations intersect. Bergson formulates this principle in the following way: “A situation is always comic whenever it simultaneously belongs to two absolutely independent series of events that hide two different sets of meanings” (1900: 74). It is easy to think of examples to illustrate Bergson’s principle: the nouveaurich sitting at an aristocratic table, or the old man that goes to the disco, are typical instances of independent series – social and generational – that partly coincide, thus creating the comic effect. Like Kant, Bergson mentions a “pendulum movement between two opposite interpretations in our mind,” which precedes the interpretive victory that gives rise to amusement. In fact, oscillating between the possible meaning and the real meaning” is not the true source of comic pleasure: what makes us laugh is the feeling of overcoming the interpretive threat and the awareness that everything was but a game. So, the comedic author must always call the audience’s attention to this double factor: independence and coincidence.

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But if Bergson, following Beattie, emphasizes resolution as the primary source of comic pleasure, later authors think otherwise. As Keith-Spiegel (1972) shows, there are ‘incongruity theories’ and ‘configurational theories’. Though in the latter “it is the ’falling into place’or ’sudden insight’that leads to amusement” (as Bergson claims) in the former “it is the perception of ’disjointedness’ that somehow amuses.” This means that resolution is not a sine qua non condition for humorous pleasure, as can be seen in the case of unsolved incongruities, like ´ nonsense, which may make us laugh. As Emelina (1996: 21) also defends, the comic (. . . ) is born from everything that can, on the one hand, create a disorder, and on the other, solve this disorder suddenly and cheerfully; however, there are solved disorders that are moving rather than laughable, and unsolved ones that make us laugh (as is the case of the absurd).”

Gregory Bateson, in ‘The position of humor in human communication’ (1969 [1952]), sheds new light on the notion of humorous incongruity by distinguishing between two kinds of content in the humorous message. The ‘informative content’ emerges at the surface of the utterance, whereas the ‘ideational content’ is implicit in its deeper layers. A joke is achieved whenever these two levels overlap, creating a paradox: “When the point of a joke is reached, suddenly this background material is brought into attention and a paradox, or something like it, is touched off. A circuit of contradictory notions is completed.” The notion of incongruity on which I have just expounded, according to different authors and perspectives, involves a further distinction that Beattie (1764: 591–653) was the first to put forth, and which deserves attention: there are, he claims, “innumerable combinations of congruity and inconsistency, of relation and contrariety, of likeness and dissimilitude which are not ludicrous at all.” This statement was to be central to later approaches to humorous incongruity, posing a problem that has proven difficult to solve to this day. Beattie clearly puts it in the following way: “Though every incongruous combination is not ludicrous, every ludicrous combination is incongruous.” Freud (1905: 365) also raises the issue in the following terms: “The comic phenomenon results from contrasting representations, yes, but only insofar as they give rise to a comic effect and not to a strange one.” It is in this sense that Schaeffer (1981: 8–16) tries to distinguish between “ludicrous incongruities” and “serious incongruities.” By incongruity he means “a contrast that triggers a significantly hidden meaning,” a meaning that takes the form of a “slender element of congruity,” which is our duty to unveil. If this share of hidden incongruity is missing, then the matter in hand is not incongruity but irrelevance. Now, the reason why relevant incongruities are not always comic has to do with “the manner we read into them.” Schaeffer holds (not indisputably I think)

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that those that are humorous are capable of inspiring a larger number of interpretive idiosyncrasies, a wider and deeper range of associations. Conversely, the serious or poetic incongruities, whose poles of signification are limited by the presence of other metaphors, belong to a relatively closed and established meaning system. It is perhaps McGhee who best distinguishes between humorous and nonhumorous incongruities. In an article entitled “A Model of the Origins and Early Development of Incongruity-Based Humor” (1977), he argues that the fallacy ‘humor = incongruity’ originates in the fact that such properties as discrepancy, surprise and novelty do not necessarily derive from humor, nor do they engender it. Actually, they may, McGhee claims, induce quite different states, like confusion, fear, or mere curiosity. Those properties cannot, therefore, be taken as sufficient in a definition of humor, which can, but does not have to, be expressed through them. The humorous incongruity, unlike other incongruities, must display, in adults and children alike, an element of fantasy and an element of play. According to McGhee, “this fantasy element is essential to the humor experience of young children, and to much of the incongruity humor of adults.” Similarly, the existence of a “playful set or frame of mind” is essential for the child to feel confident that the strange and incongruous event s/he witnesses is “in a way, wrong or impossible” and, hence, funny. If such factors are absent, the stimulus will be incompatible with humor, and the child will react with curiosity, amazement, or fear. The incongruity theory is important for a linguistic handling of humor because, as Attardo (1994: 49) remarks, it is the only one that attempts an ‘essentialist’approach to it, as opposed to the sociological or psychological paradigms. In fact, the present theoretical current sets out to analyze what humor is, what characterics it involves, what elements constitute its essence and how they work. In this sense, it is understandable that many linguistic approaches to humor (except for socio- and psycho-linguistic ones) are usually associated with the incongruity theory, sometimes even when they are explicitly directed at different issues, and at larger aims, as is the case of Raskin’s (1985). The present book does not deny the centrality of the concept of incongruity, given that, as stated above, it underlies the principles of semantic opposition and informativeness that are stipulated in the hypothesis guiding textual analysis (cf. Ch. 6).

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6. Ontogenetics and philogenetics of humor A relevant trend in humor studies has focused on childhood in an attempt to handle the problems that affect the investigation of humor in grown-ups. This line of research has drawn a parallel between the evolution of production and reception mechanisms of humor in children and those of humanity. In other words, it has sought to establish a comparison between an ontogenetic look at humor and a philogenetic one. Taken as a maturational process, humor can be traced back to infancy, when the four-month-old baby learns how to laugh when exposed to maternal stimuli. This early form of laughter is regarded as a manifestation of pleasure in the external world and in the child’s own capacities, and also as a reaction to two factors that are present in grown-up humor: the occurrence of something unexpected, even abnormal, and the fact that this abnormality takes place in a safe context, namely a playful situation that neutralizes the corresponding threat. As Berger (1997: 50) points out, the peek-a-boo effect is primal. (. . . ) The child is distressed by the disappearance of the familiar face, relieved by its reappearance. The response is laughter. (. . . ) The disappearing act must remain within the confines of a game. (. . . ) The formula goes something like this: pleasure/an interruption of pleasure/mounting anxiety/cathartic relief.

According to Glasgow (1995: 16), this picture suggests by analogy that in adults laughter also arises as a response to an unsettling surprise in a jokey or nonbona-fide context. But it is at slightly later ages that the first manifestations of humor, and not simply laughter, can be found in children. The emergence of the linguistic faculty in infancy plays an important role. Freud (1905: 206–211) claims that the first preparatory stage in wit acquisition coincides with language acquisition, taking the shape of “a play on words and thoughts that results from repeating similarities, rediscovering acknowledged things, enjoying assonance games.” This is the phase when the child tries to explore the linguistic patrimony in a playful manner, by associating unrelated words, altering their form, enjoying the pleasure of rhythm, rhyme and transgression. In adulthood, Freud claims, many verbal games make use of mechanisms initiated in infancy, insofar as they explore “all the particularities of vocabulary and all the possible constellations of meanings.” Greig (1923: 209) follows this line of reasoning: “Children, it would seem, handle words very much as they handle their toys, tossing them about, catching them, (. . . ) setting them in queer and unaccustomed postures, lopping off pieces from them (. . . ).” And he adds: “. . . grown men and women (. . . ) in the mood of play revert to these

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childish habits, and toy with high-sounding or fantastic words, ‘pour rien, pour le plaisir’.” McGhee, in his classic Humor: Its Origin and Development (1979), uses Piaget’s theory on children’s stages of intellectual evolution as a basis for his own model, called ‘Four Stages of Humor Development’. The basic premise is that more abstract forms of humor only become accessible when the child has attained a higher cognitive development. The first stage in McGhee’s model happens around two years of age, when the child already handles some fantasy and make-believe skills, but only in a physical dimension, switching the logical order of objects or making strange uses of things. At around three, words start substituting actions as the basis of humor, and the child manages to find incongruous names and strange words funny. On stage three, which carries on until six years of age, the child develops her language and conceptual capacities in such a way that she starts enjoying not only rhyming games but also nonsense wordplay and other not-so-obvious forms of incongruity. From seven years onwards, the child is ready to identify and understand multiple meaning – which allows her to enjoy puns and riddles – as well as explain why she finds such games funny. This is the beginning of more abstract degrees in humor. But the defence of an early acquisition of the capacity for interpreting verbal humor may be too ambitious. Shannon (1999) comes up with less enthusiastic results than McGhee’s. She tries to establish children’s reaction to humorous literature and the capacity for reflection they show. Her informants are sevenyear-olds and older, who presumably belong to McGhee’s fourth stage. However, Shannon claims, they “seemed to lack the necessary background knowledge to appreciate some potentially humorous material that depended on comprehension of analogies, allusions or ambiguous or multiple meanings of words.” Conversely, the children clearly enjoyed forms of physical humor, incongruous names and strange words, elements that are typical of stage three, just like references to scatological and gross humor. Besides, all children showed to be receptive to forms of humor that transmitted a feeling of personal fulfilment, physical prowess and superiority to the other children or to themselves at earlier ages (cf. Hobbes), which reveals a mechanism of victory over sources of anxiety and stress. Nonetheless, Shannon ventures that perhaps children performed worse in more subtle humor challenges because the object under analysis was children’s literature. Had it been jokes, riddles, or cartoons, as happens in most such experiments, the children might have performed better. Be that as it may, it seems to be consensual that the older the child, the wider the humorous range she will be able to access, especially in more subtle forms and in less obviously aggressive manifestations. According to some researchers, the same may be said of humankind. In Rapp’s view (1949, 1951),

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later corroborated by Gruner (1978), the evolution of civilization has allowed humor to disconnect itself gradually from more direct and physical forms, and to acquire an intellectual dimension. At the beginning, humor used to be connected to belligerent activities, like the cry of victory in battles and conquests. As Rapp (1951: 21) remarks, “the single source from which all modern forms of wit and humor developed is the roar of triumph in an ancient jungle duel.” This archaeological form of humor explains the amusement that many children and adults experience at the destruction or the deformation of objects. Leacock, in Humor and Humanity (1937: 21, 24), also defends that at the beginning laughter consisted “in the cry of the savage over his fallen enemy,” whereas humor meant “exultation, the sense of personal triumph over one’s adversary, or the sense of delight in seeing something – anything – demolished or knocked out of shape.” Besides, the caveman laughs at the weaknesses of his fellow-men because they indicate a possible defeat on their part when it comes to physical confrontations. And this, of course, implies a pleasurable feeling of personal safety in the face of external aggressions. This is a type of psycho-social mechanism that still survives in some primitive societies. As Clastres (1974) argues, in his study “What do the Indians laugh at?”, the forms of humor that the Chulupi in Paraguay cultivate not only have a camouflaged aggressive intention, but they are also directed at targets that stand for adversaries and enemies in the collective imagination of the group. The jaguar and the sorcerer (a kind of healer with magical powers over life and death), who inspire respect, fear and hate – but never laughter – are demystified and turned into ridiculous and inoffensive objects. The verbal discrediting of a latent fear is a way to make a sometimes violent existence become laughable and hence less dramatic, at the same time as it applies a virtual punishment and revenge. Therefore, Clastres claims, language and myth come together to exorcize collective demons and thus make fun of something that would never otherwise be challenged. This ancestral humor, of a strong hostile flavor, would pave the way for less direct manifestations of scorn, albeit equally aggressive. Indeed, somewhere along the evolutional process, when physical confrontation gave way to intellectual confrontation, the duel assumed the form of puns, wordplay, enigmas, and other types of verbal humor. Yet, these civilized and urbane succedanea of bodily fights do not hide an intention of personal exultation and triumph over a potential or real adversary, as Rapp (1951: 75) points out: Early riddle competition must be pictured as serious. Its purpose was to establish superiority. Mental superiority. (. . . ) And as soon as wit duels began to be staged more for the laughter which they provoked than as a result of anger and personal rivalry, there would be great changes.

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Indeed, not everything changed. Even if humor evolved from personal antagonism to ‘spiritual confrontation’, that is, to more restrained and formal manifestations, it remained “a contest in which you are beaten without even knowing you were in a contest” (Rapp 1951: 90). But humor has evolved also for the loser’s benefit. Rapp explains how, throughout history, many humorous forms have aimed at hitting the usurpers, governors and winners in general. This strikes a chord with the occupation jokes in France, or the political jokes in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to which I referred above. This sort of ‘loser’s humor’ – or, as seen above, ‘humor of liberation’ – is good therapy for the victim who suffers under the yoke of the oppressor. Besides, it is also the echo of an evolutionary process that has gradually led humor to more subtle and camouflaged forms.

7. Humor as a communicative act The communicative dimension of humor – which is crucial for the analytical stance which the present work assumes – has been a fruitful object of investigation, particularly as far as the conditions, factors and components of the humorous interaction are concerned. This line of research takes into account what one might call, echoing Austin (1962), the felicity conditions of the humorous act, as well as the fundamental issues of comprehensibility and permissibility. Besides, it raises such questions as the essential characteristics of the humorous phenomenon, the elements which it comprises, the situations where it occurs, and the various levels at which it functions. Let us begin with a basic characteristic of, or condition for, humor, namely its human character. Aristotle’s maxim – “Laughter is natural to man,” or, as medieval scholastics would phrase it, Risus proprium hominis – has met with little opposition, but there are a few critical voices to point out. Darwin (1872), for instance, disputed the claim, by noting that chimps produce vocalizations similar to human laughter, when playing or being tickled. Similarly, Leacock (1937: 21) categorically contradicts the Greek philosopher: “Aristotle is scarcely correct when he says that man is the only laughing animal. There is good ground for saying that the primates all laugh.” Bateson (1969 [1952]: 161) is more careful when he states: “I suspect that there are prefigurations [of laughter] in certain mammals, but (. . . ) not developed (. . . ) to the extent that they are among Homo sapiens.” But the ethologist Jan von Hoof (1972) is bolder in claiming that the simian ‘distended face, open mouth’ mimic equals man’s laugh. Today, many primatologists present a more reserved diagnosis: even though laughter can, in extremely primitive forms, be detected in superior mammals other than men, humor as a cognitive phenomenon is consensually taken to

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be intrinsically and exclusively human. After all, it is undisputed that irrational animals are denied the intentional production and interpretation of humor. But how many participants does it take for humor to occur? This question is closely linked with another: what type of humor do we have in mind? The thing is, even though humor is usually a communicative act, it can also assume an individual form. In the latter case, a single human participant perceives an event or an attitude that spontaneously occurs around him as funny. Freud (1905: 385) refers to this as follows: “Humor runs all its cycle in the same individual; other people’s participation adds nothing to it.” This is a ‘humorous attitude’ that the individual takes on so as to defend him/herself from such feelings as fear and anguish. Other authors, like Victoroff (1953), refer to this ‘attitude’ as ‘natural laughter’ as opposed to ‘artificial laughter’. Schaeffer (1981: 6) also uses the term natural humor to refer to “obvious ludicrous events that occur in the natural world – occur, that is, without human intervention.” Furthermore, Aubouin (1948) distinguishes between ‘ridiculous’ (caused by involuntary stimuli) and ‘comic’ (deliberately meant to be funny); and Raskin (1985) uses the dichotomy ‘unintended / intended humor’ to cover the same distinction. If humor is not regarded as an individual perception of involuntary elements, but as a deliberately shared experience, it is established that at least two participants are necessary for the humorous act to take place. And this is so even if today’s electronic age may provide a virtual substitute, as Raskin (1985: 15) remarks. Freud (1905: 298), however, considers a third participant, albeit an involuntary one: “Wit (. . . ) is the most sociable of psychological activities aiming at pleasure, and it needs, more often than not, the intervention of three people.” They are: the sender of the witty saying, the recipient, and the target (who takes part unintentionally). A question which derives from these considerations is that of the humorous stimulus. On the part of the sender, there has to be an object or a situation that arouses his/her active involvement in the production of a humorous verbal utterance (or of physical mimicry). In the case of so-called situational humor, an event – like the occurrence of a polysemous word in somebody’s speech – stimulates the sender to produce, or re-produce, a joke. Conversely, from the recipient’s far more passive standpoint, this stimulus is provided on a mediated basis, constituting an intentional stimulus that was somewhere caused by a circumstantial one. For the humorous cycle to be accomplished, the recipient has to perceive the stimulus, interpret it, and consequently react to it in a laughing manner. The nature of the humorous stimulus is closely related to the question of risibility. What makes one laugh? Palmer (1994: 93) explains that this question

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is linked with yet another: is humor an inherent characteristic in something that causes laughter, or is it a spiritual or intellectual quality of the one who laughs? Many traditional conceptions of humor have adopted the relativist posture of defending that nothing is inherently laughable, since there are many personal, social, age-related, geographical, and cultural variations affecting possible reactions to the humorous stimuli. Consequently, humor is said to reside entirely on the mind of the laughing subject. This arbitrary and idiosyncratic view of humor makes it hard to explain ‘collective humor’, as well as finding a common denominator to laughable phenomena. On the other hand, conceiving of humor as a trans-cultural and trans-historical entity, resisting the passage of time and different latitudes, is obviously incorrect as well. As English (1994: 6) puts it, “there is no utterance that is always and everywhere laughable; there is no universal joke-text.” Indeed, the subjectivity that underlies the perception of the comic stimulus makes it very difficult to generalize. If different subjects react differently to the same stimuli, having diverse humor perception potentials and dissimilar psychological and intellectual profiles, it is not possible to scientifically define individual variation. This poses a serious problem to humor research, especially when it comes to finding analytical models, as is the purpose of this book. In the face if this impasse, Palmer is right to advocate a compromise solution: humor lies in the interaction between the one who laughs and the object that is laughed at. The former has a structural and emotional structure that allows him/her to understand and enjoy humor; whereas the latter possesses certain describable attributes that make it risible. As Raskin (1985: 4) also points out, “it is the stimulus and the human participant(s) that bring humor about.” Therefore, he adds (1985: 16), humor scholars should first devise an ‘idealized community of speakers and hearers of humor’, in Chomsky’s vein, and only then should they set out to attempt an explanation of individual variation. What is the recipient of the humorous act like, then? Or, who is supposed to do the laughing – and why? The intellectual and emotional structure of the laughing subject is directly related to the question of the predispositions that have to be contemplated in order for humor to take place. Sometimes treated under the heading ‘psychology’, this parameter is a fundamental condition for the humorous communicative act to be successful. According to Levine (1969: 17), a basic pre-condition for humor “is the readiness to adopt a playful, non-serious attitude and to share in the unreality and nonsense which the humor is designed to create.” This echoes, once again, Freud (1905: 366–372), who presents a list of conditions that preside over the comic experience, as well as the factors that make it difficult or even impossible.To begin with, he mentions a “general feeling of good humor that predisposes one to laugh.” This positive predisposition is of

Humor as a communicative act

37

an emotional kind, and it has to be combined with an intellectual predisposition. Knowing one is about to hear a joke helps interpreting and enjoying it in that light. This also explains how the audience in a comic play sometimes starts laughing at the very entry of actors onto the stage. By contrast, certain circumstances – or negative predispositions – may block the humor process. Freud (1905: 368) considers “representative and logical thought directed at a serious object” to be an obstacle that drives the subject away from the realm of the laughable. In his words, “abstract meditation leaves no room for the comic experience.” A second obstacle which Freud (1905: 370) puts forth, already mentioned above, is affect: if there is an emotional connection between subject and object, humor is doomed to defeat. The psycho-cognitive frame that predisposes – or indisposes – the subject before the humorous stimulus also includes pragmatic elements such as one’s familiarity with humor as a specific communication mode. True though it may be that the humor instinct is universal, it is one’s life-time range of humorous experiences that gives us the intellectual flexibility to respond to new stimuli. Keith-Spiegel (1972: 23) significantly draws attention to the difference between nature and nurture vis-`a-vis each individual’s humor skills: as she puts it, “what is laughed at is increasingly extended through experience, learning and habit.” But if the individual that receives and interprets humor has to enjoy a set of psychological and intellectual conditions that predispose him/her positively, the surrounding circumstances also have to be favourable. This fundamental factor of the humorous act is called ‘situation’ or ‘situational context’. According to Schaeffer (1981: 17), “our laughter depends upon a ludicrous context which cues us to the nature of the experience we are about to enjoy and prepares us to receive it and react to it in a responsive manner.” The clues that the comic context provides are indeed essential for an appropriate reaction to supervene. A good example of these clues is the so-called ‘canned laughter’ that is used in TV sitcoms, and so are the hints which, in everyday language, so often serve an introductory function to jokes (“Have you heard the one about. . . ?” or “The funniest thing happened to me. . . ”). When such standard prefaces are missing, and when no other non-verbal clues are present (facial expression, intonation, emphasis, rhythm), the recipient may hesitate and resort to explicit disambiguation (“What, are you joking?”). Contextual signaling – be it of a linguistic or circumstantial nature – may, therefore, condition, redirect or modify the perception of a humorous situation. On the other hand, when a joke falls flat, the failure may be due to what Palmer (1994: 11–23, 161ff.) calls ‘performative inadequacy’, which concerns “the nature of the occasion on which the attempt at humor is made.” The specific situation in which a joke is produced obeys, as a guarantee for success,

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The concept of humor: history, scope and issues

a well-defined social and interpersonal code. In western cultures, some of the behavioral norms we spontaneously learn stipulate that certain situations – like religious ceremonies, military parades, job interviews, and police questionings – are inappropriate, in principle, for joke-telling. (It is obvious that one can subvert this principle and turn the very subversion into a potentially humorous element, as when students tell jokes about priests at Sunday-school.) Be that as it may, anti-Semitic jokes in a bar-mitzvah, or jokes that favour cowardice in a Regiment dinner are most likely doomed to defeat. In light of this, Palmer’s notion of permissibility is central to the felicity of humor attempts. The distinction between what is permissible and what is not varies considerably, not only from culture to culture, but also in terms of social class, professional and age group, and between individuals. Historical variations should also be taken into account, as Walker (1998: 4) points out: “Humor, like all forms of communication, requires context: to find it amusing, the audience must have certain knowledge, understanding, and values, which are subject to evolution from one century or even one decade to the next.” The idea of a community sanction that determines what situational context is ‘humorfriendly’ underlies Glasgow’s (1995: 17) concept of ‘play-context’, which is also subject to an authorization by the community: “human laughter (. . . ) arises in a mutually acknowledged or ‘officially’ designated play-context.” According to Palmer (1994), the notion of what is or is not allowed humorwise also lies in the relationship between the participants. In a hospital meeting, for instance, hierarchical relationships and different power degrees of the intervening elements determine specific roles in the humorous interaction. Older doctors are allowed a much wider range of jokes than younger ones, whereas auxiliary staff, particularly nurses, seldom – if ever – dare venture a joke, whatever its kind (which, besides, points to gender roles that go beyond the professional situation under focus). Therefore, Palmer claims, even though “one person’s humor” may be “another person’s offensiveness,” it is undisputed that the humorous communication is subject to ‘group consensus’ and to specific interpersonal codes, which require acknowledging and accepting. This type of consensus is also implicit in the anthropological notion of ‘joking relationships’. In many primitive cultures, as Levine (1969: 10–11) points out, humor assumes sanctioned forms of abuse and provocation that function as a cultural mechanism to control sexual and aggressive impulses. Through a collective adoption of humorous codes, deriding, insulting and harassing members of a group (such as, lo and behold, the mourning women in a funeral service) are taken as joking behavior – although such hostile attitudes may lead, in extreme cases, to murder and suicide. As Levine puts it, “by formalized joking behavior, these tabooed urges are channelled or drained off in acceptable ways.”

Conclusion

39

In western societies, the codes that determine the degree of acceptability or permissibility of humor tend to be connected to larger social practices, such as courtesy and good manners – which, obviously, also differ across cultures –, and to the degree of familiarity between the individuals. Besides, it is accepted that sharing ideas, emotions and world views brings together humor interlocutors. Indeed, the cohesive force of humor helps to create an interactional basis that facilitates the humor experience and enhances its effects.

8. Conclusion In this chapter I have aimed at sketching a brief history of humor studies. I started by reviewing the lexicological evolution of the term ‘humor’, after which I rehearsed a conceptual distinction between humor and what I called ‘satellite phenomena’. Then I attempted to draw a comparative approach to the three main theories of humor, and I outlined the ontogenetic and philogenetic evolution of the phenomenon. Finally, I succinctly discussed the various factors that are involved in the humorous communicative act. I thus produced a bibliographical review of the major questions that the academic study of humor has raised up to this day. At the same time, I tried to point out the basic concepts that a linguistic analysis of the phenomenon can and should re-use. Having ended the chapter, I shall make a few concluding remarks relative to the polemics outlined and, once again, reiterate a number of points that are interesting for the area of linguistics. A preliminary note regarding the terminological scope of the concept of humor is that this book adopts the Anglo-American practice of taking the term as a superordinate category that presides over multiple forms and manifestations – ranging from the joke told among friends to written comedy and ‘sitcom’scripts. This comprehensiveness is deliberate, but it is also cautious: the debate around the correlated phenomena of laughter, wit and irony which I reviewed was meant to eschew unnecessary overlaps. I would like to stress here, as I did above, that humor is not the same as laughter, since it can exist without it. However, I agree that the intended perlocutionary effect of the humorous message is laughter, or a substitute like smiling, or psychological emotions such as amusement or joy, and it is only in this sense that I view the present object of analysis. Given that wit shares with humor the same illocutionary force of comicality, I also include it under the umbrella conception of humor. With regard to irony, I have tried to stress that not all ironies are humorous, but some are, and this offers interesting analytical possibilities (on this, see Section 5.3 in Ch. 2 and Section 2.4.3 in Ch. 6).

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The concept of humor: history, scope and issues

Among the three theories of humor I discussed, the incongruity theory is usually considered to be more adequate for a linguistic approach to the phenomenon. It is, after all, the one that describes the intersection of two meanings, one of which is inconsistent and appears to be displaced, which characterizes the majority of the linguistic forms of humor. Nonetheless, the academic debate about hostility in humor is useful, let it be stressed, for a sociolinguistic treatment of the humorous event, i.e., for an analysis of the sociocultural, political, ideological and institutional contexts which structure the humorous language. Likewise, the principles of the release theory prove interesting for a semantico-pragmatic analysis of the production and reception of the humorous act, as we will see later on. In a nutshell, the three theories, taken together, help to understand the humorous phenomenon in a more thorough way. Finally, the discussion I offered about the communicative dimension of humor aimed at paving the way for an analysis of the mechanisms which structure humorous discourse, the key objective of this work. The authorial intentions that underlie the production of the humorous message, as well as the interpretive choices that the recipient makes, are central questions to the understanding of humor as interactive discourse and as language-in-situation. However, the case of literary communication, on which this book specifically focuses, requires (as will be seen in Ch. 5) a peculiar handling. In such a case, given that sender and recipient are not face-to-face, the notion of context and the relationship between the participants have to be conceived of differently. The spatio-temporal discontinuity between the production and reception of the humorous message – i.e., between writing and reading – explains why the interpretive solutions devised by the author and those processed by the reader are always ‘mediated’, and never ‘immediate’ (as happens in oral jokes, for instance). The humorous stimulus and the humorous reaction do not emerge on a simultaneous level, but, in spite of this, function in interaction. Underlying production and reception is, as in all types of successful communication, a common presupposition: being familiar with a set of cultural codes and discursive norms, without which the joke is bound to fail.

Chapter 2 Linguistic resources of humor Introduction From the interdisciplinary perspective adopted in the previous chapter, and especially in light of the incongruity theory discussed therein, some questions arise. What is the language of humor? Is there one, to begin with? In what way, and to what extent, is humor conveyed linguistically? Does it conform to common language usage, or does it subvert its norms and conventions? What linguistic mechanisms do comedians exploit? Are there specific linguistic resources available to humorous use? If so, how do they work? It is established that humor can be explored at levels other than the linguistic one: that is the case of, for instance, situational or physical humor. And it is also established that many jokes can be linguistically conveyed without being language-dependent (see, for instance, Crystal 1998: 12). Cicero’s distinction between the so-called referential jokes (de re) and verbal jokes (de dicto) points to the difference between, respectively, the references or events a joke is about, and the forms of wordplay that give rise to funniness. However, in jokes as in longer humorous discourse – like literary comic narrative, my object of analysis in due course –, humor may depend on the way verbal expression is manoeuvred and processed. Such humor thrives on all levels of linguistic analysis: from sound to morpheme, from word to sentence, from text to context. Whatever the dimension, language can indeed be manipulated, distorted, displaced, and even rendered meaningless, all for the sake of comic effects. The following survey is a brief inquiry into these manipulations, from which I wish to show how and why (or why not) language-dependent humor works. Similar surveys, albeit of a more succinct and superficial nature, already exist in the literature (cf. e.g. Chiaro 1992 and Ross 1998). Notwithstanding, my purpose here is to elaborate on the linguistic concepts at stake in these and other surveys, investigate their origins and theoretical implications, and establish relationships between them, paving the way for my analysis of similar mechanisms in literary context (Ch. 6 and 7).

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1. Sound 1.1. The phonetic pun I have been waiting since 1948 for some poor devil to ask, “What does a woman want most in a man?” so that I can come back, quick as a flash, with “Fiscal attraction.” (Peter de Vries, Laughter in the Basement)

One of the most prolific resources of verbal humor is sound, which can take such different forms as homophony, juncture, sound symbolism, assonance, alliteration, rhyme and rhythm. Among these, the pun stands out as being quite close to the very definition of humor. In the rhetorical tradition, the pun is called ‘paronomasia’, meaning “a form of speech play in which a word or a phrase unexpectedly and simultaneously combines two unrelated meanings” (cf. Sherzer 1978: 336). This is not far from the idea that humor consists of incompatible elements brought together. The origin of the word is uncertain, but it is likely to be an abbreviation of Italian puntiglio, small or fine point, formerly also a cavil or a quibble (cf. Bates 1999). In the present case, puns based on sound can explore two mechanisms: first, homophonic words, i.e. words with similar pronunciations but different spellings and meanings (on homophony see Ermida [1998: 49–50] and references therein). As the epigraph shows, entirely distinct, but phonetically similar, lexemes (fiscal/physical) lend themselves to humorous games. Oaks (1994: 386) presents other cases a) Why couldn’t the pony talk? – Because he was a little horse [hoarse]; b) How can you tell if a bucket is not well? – When it is a little pail [pale]. In writing, the occurrences of phonetic ambiguity seldom result in effective misunderstandings, given that spelling and, sometimes, syntax automatically disambiguate them. See, for instance, the following well-known riddle: What is the difference between a jeweller and a jailor? One sells watches and the other watches cells. Conversely, it is exactly writing that makes the perception of many homophonic puns possible. Without the orthographic support, they would easily escape understanding, as Chiaro’s (1992: 38) example adequately shows: The three ages of man: Tri-weekly; Try-weekly; Try weakly. Secondly, phonetic puns can also be constructed on the basis of juncture, according to which the same segmental elements can form more than one morphemic structure (as in a name/ an aim). However, homophonic phrases are much rarer to occur than homophonic words, and they require a greater degree of imagination to be created and of attention to be detected. Besides, the rhythm

Sound

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and stress assignment patterns of the English language impose a timing that does not yield easily to a type of inter-lexical manipulation. Many of these games are, therefore, rather elaborate. Pepicello (1989: 209) presents a good example: Why can you not starve in the desert? – Because of the sandwiches (sand which is) there. The complex homophony of the answer establishes a convoluted parallel between a single lexeme in the plural form and a fragment of a relative clause that involves three lexemes. Playing with the phonic-morphological frontiers of words sometimes demands that grammar rules be subverted, even if only at the level of the shadow-interpretation: Why did the nutty kid throw butter out of the window? – He wanted to see a butterfly (Oaks 1994: 388). One should note the ungrammaticality of the use of an article before a non-count noun: *a butter fly. Consider also Ross’s (1998: 64) example, which plays not only on homophonic sequences, but also on a national stereotype: Gwendolyn, a young Welsh woman, returned from her honeymoon. Her mother asked how it went. – Oh, mother, what a penis! – No, Gwendolyn, you mean “What happiness.”

Chiaro (1992: 35) considers nursery rhymes to be a good example of “playing with word boundaries”: Knock, knock! / Who’s there? / Felix! / Felix who? / Felix Ited All Over! This implies the creation of a distant from of homophony between a proper name, Felix, and a presumable surname, which is nothing but a disguised verbal phrase (feel excited all over). Also to children’s liking are other games on the titles and imaginary authors of books: “Keep Fit by Jim Nastics” (Gymnastics), “Hospitality by Collin Anytime” (Call in any time), “The Arthur Negus Story by Anne Teaks” (Antiques). In all these cases, the authors’surnames play homophonically on the titles of the books. But children are not the only ones to enjoy this type of phonetic game: a typical formula for puns, in English, exploits the indefinite article a. Another example by Chiaro is the graffiti that exhort youths to enrol in the army, which play on the axial shock created by the omission of the initial sound /∂/ in adjectives: BE ALERT! Your country needs lerts!, or Don’t be afraid! Your country doesn’t need fraids! However promising, this mechanism of “controlled ambiguity” (Kelly 1972: 5) more often than not makes recipients wince or become impatient. As Purdie (1993: 39) remarks, “pure puns traditionally evoke a groan rather than a laugh, a conventional expression of the unease created when theAudience’s transgression is not cognitively justified for them.” The recipients eventually find out that what was given to them was misleading data, meant to trick them into error. Consider the following well-known example: What’s black and white and red all over? A newspaper. The punch line puts forward another signified for the signifier red, which is the homophonous past participle verb form read. However, the

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reference to black and white obviously suggests ’colour’. The thought-reworking process that ensues, which eventually solves the puzzle, is felt, not as a victory, but as a crude manipulation of one’s legitimate expectations about language. This type of pun, which Purdie calls naked puns, just like the so-called Shaggy Dog Stories, which resort to extremely long prefacing, constitute, in her words, “an aggression against the audience, no matter how playfully offered” (idem, ibid.). The pun’s bad reputation should be restricted, as the example above suggests, to the phonetic pun. One of Freud’s contemporaries, K. Fischer, whom the former quotes in his Jokes and their Relations to the Unconscious (1905: 73), distinguishes between (phonetic) puns and wordplay: “The pun is a bad play on words for it plays with the word as if it were only a sound”; wordplay, on the contrary, “goes deep into the very soul of the word.” Freud himself claims to agree: “The truth is that puns make the least demand on the technique of expression, just as wordplay proper makes the highest” (1905: 71). In other words, Fischer and Freud dismiss phonetic puns as mere games with the form of words, deliberately focusing on a resemblance between signifiers, but overlooking signifieds, or meanings. Tzevetan Todorov, in an article entitled ‘Significance and Meaning’ (1981: 116–117), explains why this is not so. In his words, “a relationship between signifiers always entails a relationship between signifieds.” Consider an example by Freud, Traduttore - Traditore, which implies that a translator is a traitor to the author. This is obviously a pun on the phonetic resemblance (though not absolute identity) between two semantically different words. In the dictionary, the two lexemes have no common semes. But, Todorov argues, “the significance that signs receive in a dictionary is not identical to the discursive meaning at work in discourse.” At this level, “any juxtaposition can bring out a new seme in a word.” Discourse therefore makes it possible for any relation between signifiers to be matched by a relation between signifieds. There is no qualitative difference, Todorov concludes, between phonetic puns and wordplay: “One can observe only a greater or lesser richness in the semantic relationship, a greater or lesser motivation of the relationship between signifiers.” Other authors try to rehabilitate phonetic puns by highlighting the amount of meaning they share with the rest of the text or conversation. Marino (1988: 44), for instance, states that if puns “generate ideation or emotionally significant matters,” and if they “speak cogently to an immediate situation” and “focus on the matter at hand,” they will be good puns. If, however, they are “perceived of as being incidental and distracting,” they will be seen as dispensable. The critical assessments regarding pun quality seem to have taken one or the other direction ever since Shakespeare, who has been both praised and criticized for his recurrent use of puns, among which sound games no doubt abound. As

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Nash (1985: 138–139) points out, the homophonic pun is sometimes said to have won a negative reputation in the Victorian age, when it was seen as an exercise in vacuous formalism, but if one goes further back, to Tudor times, one will see that Shakespeare’s punning was also often regarded as gratuitous, if not downright vulgar: in As You Like It (II. vii.26), for instance, the seemingly innocent phrase and thereby hangs a tale conceals a detail of Tudor linguistic coarseness – the pun on tale (caudal appendage) and tail (penis). But in many other cases, Shakespeare explores homophony in an elevated register, conveying semantic and stylistic richness. In The Comedy of Errors, for instance, when Egeon, the Syracuse merchant, narrates his misfortunes at sea, he refers to the birth of the twins in the following way: That very hour, and in the self-same inn, A mean woman was delivered Of such a burden male, twin both alike; [. . . ] (I, 1, 53–55)

The term male, here used as an adjective to qualify burden, projects a parallel meaning, namely the homophonous word mail (baggage), which anaphorically refers to the verb delivered (on this, see Ermida 1998: 89–95). The double reference – to the sex of the new-born and to the nature of the burden, which, like the baggage one carries in a journey, is supposed to arrive safely – obviously makes the passage richer. 1.2.

Mimesis

Humor also exploits sound mechanisms which are related to morphology and popular etymology. They consist of distorted, phonetically suggestive forms, which borrow parts of words and attach them to phonetically similar ones through a principle of mimesis. Alternatively, entire words are imported into distorted original forms. This type of linguistic game is usually regarded as pseudo-punning, since the words used are not pure homophones. Duch´acek (1970) gives a few humorous examples of mimetic sound forms in French (on other examples of sound games in French, see Datain 1971 and Guiraud 1976). For instance, in 1908, workers acquired the right to hebdomadaire (weekly) rest, but the word was twisted into the mimetic shape hebdromadaire, which eventually resulted in a joke phrase: le repos des dromadaires, (the dromedaries’ rest). This type of ‘morphologic attraction’, which, Duch´acek claims, makes up for the ignorance of the original erudite etymology, is also present in the following cases of mimetic wordplay: Delirium tremens – d´elire d’homme tr`es mince (Delirium of a very thin man), Huile de ricin (Castor oil) – huile d’Henry Cinq (Henry the Fifth’s oil), Embarcad`ere (Wharf) – embarque-

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Linguistic resources of humor

a` -terre (Shipping on land). Sometimes, Duch´acek adds, the principle of mimesis serves more aggressive and cathartic functions, as in 1815, when the Parisians named the Russian, Austrian and Prussian soldiers quite imaginatively: rustres / russes (boors / Russians), autres chiens / autrichiens (other dogs / Austrians), and plus chiens / prussien (more dogs / Prussians). A brief survey of children’s humor books shows the extent to which similar sound games thrive therein. Nash (1985: 139) presents a couple of them: in What do policemen have in their sandwiches? / – Truncheon meat, the word luncheon is projected through mimesis, whereas in What do cats read? / – The mews of the world, the onomatopoeic word mimics news. But children are more than just receptive to mimetic humor – they are also quite productive in this type of verbal faux pas. Children’s speech is in fact full of mimetic solutions to linguistic problems. Apte (1988: 186) explains this process of children’s analogy as follows: “Humor based on analogy and patterning occurs most commonly in children’s speech because children are unable to recognize word boundaries, and attempt to create new utterances on the basis of patterns already acquired.” When the child does not understand an utterance, or part of it, s/he tends to divide it into different parts through mimesis, by using the linguistic patterns s/he already controls. This is noticeable in the child that asks: What’s a chee, Mom?, when asked to pass the cheese. In this example, presented by Hockett (1958: 425), the child’s linguistic ingenuity implies that s/he is not familiar with a word that ends in exactly the same phonetic form as the regular plural forms. By analogy, the child solves the difficulty by converting the problematic word into the singular. Phonetic punning can also exploit bound morphemes, by mixing words with similar beginnings or endings. Milner (1972: 17) shows that some types of wordplay make use of the mimetic effect produced by different prefixes and suffixes when attached to an identical base or pseudo-base: a) Flirtation is all attention but no intention; b) Love is a conflict between reflexes and reflections. These humorous definitions are very effective because they establish a close phonic-morphological parallel between words that one would not deem suitable for a semantic match. Another example of a game on prefixes which comes to mind is the popular saying that goes: Genius is 1 % inspiration and 99 % perspiration. Allusive parody sometimes makes use of strategies of phonic-morphological mimesis. Generally, it consists of complex witty sayings that exhibit classical or biblical culture by alluding to literary and philosophical phraseology or passages from the Scriptures. Susan Sontag quite tellingly illustrates this principle with her Cogito ergo Boom phrase (cf. Ross 1998: 15). Here, the Cartesian quotation gets adulterated by means of an onomatopoeic word which mimes

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sum, and which alludes to the noise of an explosion. Nash (1985: 140) lists a few other examples of humorous mimetic phrases: a) I see you serve cod and salmon (an allusion to the biblical injunction Ye cannot serve God and mammon – Mathews, vi, 24 – made by a client in a restaurant); b) Hollywood, land of mink and money (cf. Land of milk and honey); c) Lord, what food these mortals eat (cf. Shakespeare’s Puck exclaims Lord, what fools these mortals be!). In these cases, deciphering the mimetic phrase requires knowing the text parodied, which turns them into pearls of a type of humor that is refined but also slightly arrogant. Consequently, like etymological puns, jokes that play on erudite cultural references often meet with poor responses. As Nash (1985: 144) argues, such forms of wordplay “are often coldly, even angrily received, being regarded as pretentious and undemocratic.” Binsted and Ritchie (2001) put forth a so-called model of story puns which is based on similar mimetic mechanisms. They focus on stories that make use of, as they put it, distorted versions of a well-known proverb. The case example they analyze is a story of a chieftain in a remote tropical village who is offered a new throne by a visiting dignitary. Feeling attached to the old throne, he stows it away on the roof of his grass hut, but the roof collapses, because the throne is too heavy, and kills him. The moral of the story is that “people who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.” As Binsted and Ritchie point out, for the joke to work the audience has to be familiar with the original proverb, and the ‘wording’ of the distorted version has to be as close as possible to the original. A particularly comic form of mimesis underlies the so-called ‘lucky lapses’, or ‘slips of the tongue’, involuntarily produced by ignorant, amnesiac, dyslexic, or simply pretentious, yet unable, speakers. Some notorious cases include Reverend William Archibald Spooner, who mastered linguistic maladroitness, and who is renowned for telling a student the following:You have deliberately tasted two worms and you can leave Oxford by the town drain (cf. wasted two terms and down train). Likewise, Sam Goldwyn was immortalized on account of pearls of morphological ineptitude such as Include me out! and In two words: im-possible! Fictitious characters also illustrate this infamous path of blundering. Apte (1985: 186) gives the example of Mrs. Malaprop, in Sheridan’s play, The Rivals, who constantly tried to enrich her speech with complex words: If I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs. According to Apte (ibidem), this is a typical case of hypercorrection, which happens whenever “social climbers who are insecure of their speech” attempt to adopt “a dialect or speech style that seems to them more prestigious than their own.” The terms spoonerism, goldwinism and malapropism have derived from these characters to name any linguistic slips of a mimetic nature, which are so often explored with deliberately humorous intentions.

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1.3.

Stylistic devices

Humor sometimes borrows stylistic devices from literature, such as principles of prosody and poetic composition techniques. Indeed, comic versification applies the laws of rhyme and rhythm, and exploits the potentialities of alliteration and assonance. However, these humorous games are deliberately faulty, insofar as they frustrate rhyming expectations, offer hyperbolic rhythmic patterns, exaggerate the alliterative potential of words, and parody the style and resources of serious poetry, as will be seen next. 1.3.1. Rhyme and rhythm Used though we may be to seeing rhyme in serious works of poetry, we should not forget that it is also a rich resource for humorists. We should not forget either that rhyme has not always been regarded as an elevated or noble stylistic device. Beattie (1764: 627) points out the negative connotations that rhyming used to have in the past: “Some critics, taking all their notions from the practice of Greece and Rome, have reprehended rhyme of every kind as a ridiculous thing.” But Beattie himself defends the use of rhyme: “Similarity of sound in contiguous verses gives pleasure to all children and illiterate persons, and does not naturally offend the ear of any modern European, however learned.” The ‘ridiculous’ character attributed to rhyming in ancient times may well explain the profusion of its humorous uses throughout history. In Portugal, for instance, satiric poetry abounded in the Middle Ages, as is the case of the socalled ‘scorn songs’, humorous poems with derisive intent. Likewise, a very popular type of comic poetry – the limerick – appeared in Ireland at the beginning of the 19th century. It was originally a song about the deeds of imaginary characters of different Irish cities, in which each verse was sung by a different singer. The characteristics of this literary genre – the fantastic plot, the easy rhythm, the ingenious rhyme and the climax of the punch line – proved to be a guarantee of longevity. Consider this example, by Rev. Charles Inge (quoted by Crystal 1998: 46): A certain young gourmet of Crediton Took some patˆe de foie gras and spread it on A chocolate biscuit. Then murmured, ’I’ll risk it.’ His tomb bears the date that he said it on.

The point of this versifying practice is that the form resembles regular poetry but the content is ordinary and down-to-earth. As Hockett (1977: 276) points out, “a joke can be cast into verse form but that does not render it poetic (. . . ) –

Sound

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indeed, verse form is no guarantee of poetry in any genre of literature.” In fact, the rhyming mould may be put to many non-poetic uses. Today, the legacy of the limerick can be seen in humorous verse forms of dubious literary quality: in the following example, the humorist-cum-poet insists on forced rhyme, assigning prosodic stress to non-stressed words and exploiting feminine (bi-syllabic) rhyme: I love to gaze upon a child; A young bud bursting into blossom; Artless, as Eve yet unbeguiled; And agile as a young opossum. (C.S.Caverley, quoted by Spear 1974)

Comic rhyming can sometimes be internal, which is much to the liking of younger audiences. Dennis Lee, in his poem ‘On Tuesdays I polish my Uncle’ (quoted by Foster 1985), provides good evidence for internal humorous rhyme: I started the ark in the dark. My father was parking the shark. And when we got home we had ants in our pants, Dirt in our shirt, glue in our shoe, Beans in our jeans, a bee on our knee, Beer in our ear and a bear in our hair, A stinger in our finger, a stain in our brain, And our belly-buttons shone in the dark.

Parodying the poetic style of great authors is another lavish source of humor. Consider the case of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’, whose poetic density, syncopated rhythm and alliterative richness lend themselves to humorous parody, as is the case of C. L. Edson’s ‘Ravin’s of Piute Poet Poe’ (quoted by Nash 1985: 158): Once upon a midnight dreary, eerie, scary, I was wary, I was weary, full of worry, thinking of my lost Lenore, Of my cheery, aery, fairy, fiery Dearie – (Nothing more). I was napping, when a tapping on the overlapping coping woke me, yapping, groping. . . toward the rapping. I went hopping, leaping. . . hoping that the rapping on the coping Was my little lost Lenore. (. . . )

Multiple, mainly internal, rhyme is here exaggerated, whereas rhythm suggests the beat of a drum, thus losing any claim to the original’s elegance or spirituality. These examples show that rhythmic games are usually based on breaking the laws of common sense and good taste. Humorists usually opt either for the

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repetitive banality of a dry rhythmic format, or for an uncontrolled rhythm that violates the laws of meter and bends the verse to suit the author’s wishes. In either case, the humorous effect is quite visible, and the echo of the so-called ‘serious’ poetic versification becomes more distant. Rhyming is not, however, a mere phonological phenomenon, carrying instead interesting semantic implications. According to Attardo (1994: 161), the more distant words are semantically, the stronger the rhyme effect is. If, as he correctly argues, the pair Essex-Wessex is uninspiring (since they are both toponyms, i.e., two related terms), the pair Confess – IRS is much more interesting, also in humorous terms, exactly because of the semantic distance between the two terms and the incongruous effect that their unsuspected phonetic similarity produces. Then, if the rhyming potential increases in an inversely proportional relation to the semantic proximity between words, so does its humorous potential. It is because rhyme plays on disparate words that humor happens more easily. 1.3.2. Alliteration and assonance Another plentiful source of humorous effects related to sound is alliteration and assonance. Beattie (1764: 627), once again, gives a good definition for the former, and, once again too, remarks its negative connotations: “A similarity of sound in the beginning of contiguous words, or rather in their initial consonants, has of late been called alliteration. Some authors speak of it in terms of the utmost contempt and abhorrence, as if none but fools could take any pleasure in it.” Yet, he adds: “But that many good judges of poetical harmony have been pleased with it might be made appear by innumerable examples from Lucrecius, Spencer, Dryden, and others.” A good piece of evidence of the value and legitimacy of this stylistic device is, also according to Beattie, the fact that it thrives in many popular sayings. A set of examples easily comes to mind: Many men many minds; Spare to speak and spare to speed; Love me little, love me long; Manners make the man, etc. The humorous uses of alliteration and assonance – a kindred phenomenon, but related to vowels – may well be due to this popular preference. Lederer (1990: 129–150) illustrates the abundance of alliterative games in everyday language: fast food, candid camera, hitch hiker, mass media, pen pal, road runner, hold your horses, kit and caboodle, live and let live, clear-cut, back-to-basics, etc. This tendency, which can take on the shape of assonance, often shows a rhyming format: hoity-toity (snobbish), even Stephen (an equal split), herky-jerky (erratic movement), humdrum (boring routine), mumbo-jumbo (meaningless chatter), namby-pamby (wimpy), razzle-dazzle (flashy), teeny-weeny (very small), willynilly (without plan), etc. At other times, these games consist in alternating vowel sequences on an alliterative basis: chitchat (idle talk), clipclop (sound a horse

Sound

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makes), flimflam (deception), knick-knack (a small ornamental item), mishmash (a confused state), riffraff (the rabble), shilly-shally (to hesitate), ticktock (sound a clock makes), wishy-washy (indecisive), pitter-patter (the sound of small feet). This alliterative, assonant and rhyming twist of everyday language is, as Lederer shows, deliberately exploited in humorous games. Consider the following cases, all of which are humorous definitions: What’s a. . . a) comical hare? – a funny bunny; b) an indolent flower? – a lazy daisy; c) a horrible couple? – a gruesome twosome; d) an elementary skin eruption? – a simple pimple; e) a drunk fortuneteller? – a tipsy gipsy; f) a meat robber? – a beef thief; g) a dock for shorties? – a dwarf wharf; h) a stupid finger? – a dumb thumb; etc. Or, alternatively, consider the examples that follow: What is. . . a) the first fruit? – Adam’s apple; b) a demographic explosion? – a baby boom; c) an annoying insect? – a bee in her bonnet; d) a friend of the heart? – a bosom buddy; e) a deceased jerk? – a dead duck, f) a canine 24-hour period? – a dog day, g) a story that grew up a lot? – a tall tale, etc. The copious use of alliteration is a very frequent formal strategy in children’s stories and rigmaroles, as well as in collections of youngsters’ humor. Take this example, Eric Carle’s (1974) alphabetic book, All About Arthur (An Absolutely Absurd Ape): In Atlanta one autumn day an absolutely absurd accordion-playing ape named Arthur felt all alone. In Baltimore Arthur befriended a bashful banjo-playing bear named Ben. Ben was bored beyond belief. (. . . )

The following passage from Morreall (2004: 397) deserves quoting, for it combines examples with explanation: The books of Dr. Seuss are full of whimsical rhymes such as “Fox in the Socks” and “Yertle the Turtle.” To take a more adult example, I once attended a lecture about the Berbers of North Africa, in which someone asked a question about the Berbers living in cities. The speaker replied, “Well, the urban Berbers. . . ” Laughter broke out through the hall, not because of anything semantic but simply because of all he R and B sounds crowded into “urban Berbers.”

Attardo (1994: 139) claims that the alliterative games do not obey a mechanism of connection/disjunction (as is the case, for instance, of phonetic puns). On the contrary, he claims, alliterations abide by a “diffused configuration,” since they consist of a repetition of sounds, or sets of sounds, that are scattered throughout the text of a joke: hence the impossibility of identifying a unique disjunctor. The example Attardo gives reads as follows: Today’s tabloid biography: High chair, high school, high stool, high finance, high hat – hi, warden!

However, it seems to me that there is a unique disjunctor in the text, namely hi, which constitutes a homophonous pun on the previous occurrences of high.

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Linguistic resources of humor

These occurrences function in ‘connection’ to each other, establishing an alliterative sequence, or recurrence pattern, which the disjunctor duly breaks, creating an incongruous effect. It is true that the alliterations are scattered throughout the text, but that is not the point of the joke, which would not have existed at all if it hadn’t been for the insertion of the disjunctive element. At best, what the alliterations do in the above joke is signal the humorous register, thus constituting a motivation strategy, but the punch line is triggered as usual at the end. So far, we have seen that alliteration and assonance, just like rhyme and rhythm, are humorous resources related to sound. But humor exploits other communicational media besides the oral channel. Let us, then, analyze the graphological and visual ways in which written language is easy prey to humorous manipulations.

2. Written form: graphological games The disparity between pronunciation and spelling is another dimension that bears humor potential. The illogical and counter-intuitive character of orthographic rules is particularly blatant in the English language, which maintains a fairly rigid etymological norm. The multiple phonetic values that a single letter, or set of letters, can assume, as well as the variety of graphological representations that the same sound can have, pave the way not only for error but also for many sorts of play. The following game satirizes today’s use – and abuse – of computer spelling correction programs: Eye have a spelling chequer It came with my pea sea It plainly marques four my revue Miss steaks eye kin knot sea. Eye strike a key and type a word And weight four it two say Weather eye am wrong oar write It shows me strait a weigh. As soon as a mist ache is maid It nose bee fore two long And eye can put the error rite Its rare lea ever wrong.

Homophony is here stretched to its limits, either in independent words or in poly-lexical segments. Such games confirm the strongly conventional nature of writing, at the same time as they show how fragile the orthographic norm is in light of common sense. But the fact that literacy comes very early on makes

Written form: graphological games

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one internalize the rules to such an extent that it sometimes becomes difficult to identify rival representations of the same orthographic principle. Humorists, well aware of this fact, take advantage of it. Attempts at reforming the English orthography (see, for instance, Scragg 1974) have always sought to make writing come closer to pronunciation, but the truth is that the present form of written English still keeps a plethora of explicitly etymological and, some argue, unjustifiably anachronistic, cases. The discrepancy between pronunciation and writing is so serious that once Bernard Shaw good-humoredly suggested an alternative spelling for the word fish, namely ghoti. This curious orthographic neologism should be pronounced in the following way: as in enough, as in women and as in nation. It is obvious that such a word clearly violates morphophonemic and supra-segmental rules that preside over the orthographic logic (on an explanation of the impossibility of Shaw’s game, see Stubbs 1980: 51–61). Be that as it may, the rigidity of spelling laws appeals to humorists, who openly deride the distance between the written code and the oral realization of the language. Consider this poem, by W. S. Gilbert (apud Crystal 1998: 47), which constitutes a kind of visual tongue-twister: A right-handed fellow named Wright, In writing ’write’ always wrote ’rite’ Where he meant to write right. If he’d written ’write’ right, Wright would not have wrought rot writing ’rite’.

Other spelling games exploit, not the conventions, but the orthographic proximity between semantically distinct words. Chiaro (1992: 28) presents a few examples, all taken from imaginative graffiti. One slogan that read Lesbians: when only the best will do was added an extra r to best, thus giving way to a humorous reading. Similarly, an innocent notice at St. Mary’s Church, pointing the direction to the Brass Rubbing Centre, was vandalized through the deletion of the two initial consonants. Other obviously humorous, yet accidental, spelling problems often happen in the discourse of advertising, in which some unhappily spelled ads are undoubtedly comic: – Save regularly in our bank. You’ll never reget it. – Modular Sofas. Only $299. For rest or fore play.

Acronyms constitute another interesting humor supply. The fact that these graphological sets are difficult to decode and tend to blight today’s language, mainly in the press, is the focus of the following joke: I think there are too many TLA’s. – What’s a TLA? – A Three Letter Abbreviation (Ross 1998: 14). Likewise, the Net-

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Linguistic resources of humor

posted joke that follows makes fun of the abundance of acronyms in colloquial everyday language: Two guys and a girl were sitting at a bar talking about their respective professions. The first guy says, “I’m a YUPPIE. . .Ya know, Young-Urban- Professional.” The second guy says, “I’m a DINK. . .Ya know, Double-Income- No-Kids.” They asked the woman, “What are you?” She replies, “I’m a WIFE. . .Ya know, Wash-IronF***-Etc.”

But humor usually springs from farfetched readings of well-known acronyms. Nilsen (1991: 147) presents a hilarious list of air company acronyms that challenge the most elementary flying phobia: DELTA= Don’t Even Leave The Airport; PSA = Pretty Sloppy Airline; US Air= Unscheduled Air; BOAC (British Overseas Airline Company) = Bring Over American Cash; BWIA (British West Indies Airlines) = But Will It Arrive?; TWA = The Worst Airline, To Wait Always, Try Walking Across, Travel With Assholes, etc. I cannot resist adding another example I recently came across on a trip via Brussels: SABENA (Belgian Air Company, no longer existing) = Such A Bad Experience Never Again. Graphological humor also exploits visual representations of language, like the so-called concrete poetry. The ‘X rules Ok’joke series includes an interesting example (Chiaro 1992: 28): Yo-yos rule OK

One last resort of graphological humor is homography, which consists in two or more words sharing the same spelling but being pronounced differently. Words such as bow, read and row have two readings each, and may give rise to ambiguity – therefore, to humor possibilities as well. But two reasons explain why homographic humor is rarer: the English language is not rich in homographic words, and games of this sort can only be found in written speech.

Word: morphological play

55

3. Word: morphological play At last in the third year of this regime a new problem presented itself in the person of Major Sir Alexander Dreadnought, Bart., M.P. (. . . ) (Evelyn Waugh, On Guard)

The mechanisms that preside over the processes of word-formation are also easy prey to humorous manipulation. Morphology, or the study of how morphemes make up words, is accessible, in a simplified form, to all those who take an interest in playing with language. The example quoted above illustrates the type of humorous morphological play that concerns us here. Consider how Evelyn Waugh builds a compound (dread + naught), to name one of his characters (on the importance of naming in comedy, see Barton 1990) and describe the psychological profile of someone who is to face Hector the dog – a fearful animal, as we will see in due course. This example confirms once again that the linguistic resources of jokes discussed in this chapter are also detectable in texts longer than jokes, which proves the relevance of the present survey for an understanding of the literary humorous narrative. An interesting form of morphological play consists of the so-called blend. By bringing together two words, which lose some of their elements along the way, it creates neologisms that usually have humor potential: If buttercups are yellow, what colour are hiccups? Burple. The punch-word in this example is a contamination resulting from mixing burp and purple. Besides, the noun hiccups is analogically taken as a compound, as if, like buttercups, it were made up of two root morphemes. Freud’s (1905: 50–53) famous examples of humorous blends run along the same lines: a) I sat beside Salomon Rothschild and he treated me quite as his equal – quite familionairely (familiarly + millionaire); b) Old people are inclined to fall into their anecdotage (anecdote + dotage); c) Christmas season is the alcoholidays (alcohol + holidays). Similar games, which have to do with erroneously taking one-morpheme words as being made up of separate elements, occur in the following cases: What do you do with a wombat? Play wom. Here, wombat is analogically related to compounds like baseball-bat, and accordingly disintegrated into a pseudo-morpheme. In What’s a baby pig called? / A piglet. / What’s a baby toy called? / A toilet, another process of analogy takes place, turning an independent one-morpheme word into a root + suffix combination. As Ross (1998: 15) explains, some morphs (like -ish) may constitute, depending on the situation,

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either a bound morpheme (as in yellowish), or part of an indivisible syllable (as in establish), and it is the consequent ambiguity that can be handled humorously. Such intentional misinterpretations of morphological functions and structures are quite common. Confer Fromkin and Rodman’s (1974: 120) examples: a) Misfortune: the kind of fortune that never misses; b) Longevity: the condition of being very tall; c) Bibliography: holy geography; d) Gullible: providing one with sea birds. Nash (1985: 143) puts forth a biblical example: in Samson was terribly distressed by Delilah, the verb conceals a double meaning – distressed (upset) and dis-tressed (something like dis-haired), the latter being an invented form along the lines of many verbs in which the dis- prefix means ‘inversion’ or ‘negation’ (cf. disentangle, discredit, disconnect). The intentionally abusive misinterpretation of the morphemes that make up a word is also present in a joke which Chiaro (1992: 66) quotes: Is a polygon another name for a dead parrot? Here, polygon is divided into two pseudomorphemes that mime Polly (a noun) and gone (a verb). Pepicello (1989: 208) adds two further examples: a) What kind of ears does a train have? Engineers; b) What is the key to a good dinner? A turkey, in which two free morphemes, respectively ear and key, are deliberately mixed up, either with a bound morpheme (-er), or with a phonetic sequence that does not even constitute a morphological unit (-key in turkey). Sometimes, morphological games exploit the free morphemes that make up compounds: going back to Pepicello (1989: 208), the morphological pun in What bow can you never tie? A rainbow ignores the polysemy of the free morpheme bow, here integrated into a compound. In other cases, it is the compound’s opacity (on this, see Matthews 1974: 83 and Katamba 1983: 320) that is exploited: in Have you heard the one about the man who bought a paper shop? It blew away, the ambiguity of paper shop resides in the fact that it can mean shop that sells paper (the question’s implicit sense) or shop that is made of paper (the answer’s intended sense). But morphological games can also be established across linguistic frontiers. In What a dolly bird! Is she a Sheychelloise? / – No, she is a Seychelloiseau, there is a suffix (oiseau) that puns anaphorically on bird. They can likewise play on the dimensions of metaphor and metonymy, as Duch´acek (1970: 114) shows in the following examples: to have been at Hammersmith (to have been slapped, the slap impact being metaphorically represented by the hammer); to go to Bedfordshire (to go to sleep or, metonymically, to go to bed). All these cases are about manipulating language with humorous purposes at the micro-level of the morpheme, that is, of the minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. The popularity of these comic neologisms shows that peo-

Sentence: syntactic ambiguity

57

ple are keen on, rather than wary of, tackling word composition with humorous intentions.

4. Sentence: syntactic ambiguity Humor is built at levels other than sound and word-form. The syntactic chain – a structure ruled by relations of dependency and contiguity – is a fertile ground for ambiguity to occur and, consequently, for comic effects to be created. A syntactically ambiguous sentence is one which is analysable into more than one different syntactic structure. Closely connected with morphology, syntactic humor exploits this duality, that is, the extent to which a word or words belong or not to a phrase, and the sort of relations they establish among themselves within the sentence. It should be noted that research on syntactic, or structural, ambiguity usually aims at identifying and classifying the different cases so as to help avoid its actual occurrence. Consider, for instance, Taha (1983: 265), who presents a careful taxonomy of the different categories of syntactic ambiguity, while expressing the wish that “the survey will enable the learner to avoid this linguistic defect by using clear sentence structures and by including adequate formal signals in his sentences” (see also Kooij 1981). Now, it is rather obvious that avoiding ambiguity makes sense when the purpose is to write clearly. However, many discursive situations not only allow but actually require ambiguity: humor, generically understood, just like advertisements or press jargon, are flagrant examples of the extent to which structural ambiguity enhances important semantic effects. Newspaper language, especially as far as headline formulation is concerned, is rich in examples of humorous uses of syntactic ambiguity. Condensation and ellipsis are two basic requirements of headlining, but they easily give rise to double combinations, sometimes accidentally created, but more often than not deliberately sought to catch people’s attention and obtain humorous effects. Take the following example: Policeman Helps Snake Bite Victim (Ross 1998: 20). Two readings emerge: a) It’s a snake-bite victim that the policeman helps; b) The policeman and the snake together bite a victim. The former is the result of an immediate disambiguation process that is activated as soon as an ambiguity is spotted. At the same time, however, the latter humor-flavored interpretation takes shape. These two decoding possibilities point to different phrase structures, depending on the morphological category or the syntactic function which the words take on. On the one hand, snake bite may be seen as two nouns, acting adjectively as a modifier of victim. A participial paraphrase (something like

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Linguistic resources of humor

snake-bitten victim) would obviously do better, if the aim were to clarify the intended meaning. On the other hand, though, the same sequence may be interpreted as a second clause (a subordinate infinitive one), formed by a subject, snake, and a predicate, bite (verb) + victim (object). Exactly the same goes for these two humorously ambiguous advertisements: a) Dog for Sale: Eats anything; especially fond of children; b) A superb and inexpensive restaurant: Fine food expertly served by waitresses in appetizing forms. The ambiguity that underlies both syntactic structures would be easily solved if the order of the elements were changed: a) Dog for Sale: Especially fond of children; eats anything; b) Fine food in appetizing forms expertly served by waitresses. Once again, however, a second shadow-interpretation, which carries humor potential, emerges: a) The dog is fond of eating children; b) It is not the food, but the waitresses, that have appetizing forms. Another form of syntactic ambiguity is the intersection of the ‘object’ and ‘complement’ functions. In Priest found drunk in local church, the word drunk can either be a noun or a participial adjective, assuming respectively the functions of direct object to the verb and of its complement. The former reading would equal a paraphrase such as A priest found a drunken person in a local church. The latter would be similar to A priest was found in a drunk condition in a local church. Note the active and passive voices upon which the ambiguity is built. The following joke illustrates the same type of structural game: Call me a taxi. / - You are a taxi. If one interprets the question, as one logically would, as Call a taxi for me, the syntactic structure would be V (verb) + IO (indirect object) + DO (direct object). Conversely, Address me as a taxi, a syntactically legitimate but highly improbable interpretation, would correspond to V+O+C (complement). This very productive dual formula is often connected with the employment of bi-transitive verbs (those that have two objects), as can be seen in the following examples (by Ross 1998): a) We don’t serve coloured people (implying indirect object) / – That’s fine with me. I just want some roast chicken (taken as direct object); b) Do you serve frogs’ legs? (implying direct object) / – We serve anyone who’s able to pay (taken as indirect object). In both cases, the ambiguity lies in the fact that the verb ‘serve’ has two objects, i.e. one serves something to someone. Time, place, and manner complements, expressed in prepositional or adverbial clauses, are also easy prey to deliberate syntactic fallacy. Consider the case that follows: Sylvester Stallone will talk about his ex-wife Brigitte Nielsen who was unfaithful to him in an interview with Conan O’Brien. The prepositional phrase in an interview is linked to a second one, with Conan O’Brien, and, together or apart, they constitute the ambiguous core of the sentence. Besides, the fact that the non-defining relative clause, who [Brigitte Nielsen] was unfaithful

Sentence: syntactic ambiguity

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to him, is collocated immediately before the prepositional phrase makes it possible to take the phrase as its adverbial complement. In this way, Nielsen may be taken as having been unfaithful to her husband with Conan O’Brien. The directionality of prepositional phrases is also exploited in the following dialogue, quoted by Chiaro (1992: 40): Mummy, can I go out to play? / – With those holes in your trousers? / – No, with the girl next door. The mother’s question could be paraphrased as a participial phrase, something as Showing those holes in your trousers? The child’s answer wrongly takes the preposition that starts it, with, as meaning in the company of, instead of having, possessing or showing. The elliptical character of the question is, therefore, linked with the polysemy of the preposition, giving the child a perhaps involuntary pretext to evade an answer to it. Groucho Marx is said to have come up with a similar example: I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas I’ll never know. The phrase in my pyjamas can be initially taken as an adverbial modifier of the action of shooting: ‘I shot an elephant while I was wearing my pyjamas’. But the second sentence suggests another meaning: it is the elephant that is wearing the pyjamas (on linguistic humor by the Marx Brothers, see Tiersma 1985). Other prepositional phrases, now playing the role of agent, lend themselves to equally fallacious uses. A tomb epitaph reads: Erected to the memory of James Macmillan drowned in the Severn by some of his closest friends (Nash 1985: 150). The double passive construction of the sentence, repeated in erected and drowned, allows the spooky interpretation that the deceased passed away owing to the direct participation of exactly those one would least suspect. This derives from the fact that the agentive prepositional phrase (by some of his closest friends) is placed next to drowned in the Severn, instead of erected to the memory of. The humor also springs from the fact that the confessional allusion to a criminal deed in an epitaph is incongruous, since epithaphs are usually meant to express love and affection. Syntactic ambiguity can also be pronominally built, when the structure of the sentence – or the context that involves it directly – contains more than one reference attributable to the pronoun. Indeed, the pronouns it, he, she, they, often have their anaphoric or cataphoric functions turned ambiguous, which of course offers humor possibilities. This is the case of The boss told the employee he was a lazy sod. Given that the sentence has two references, the pronoun used in the subordinate report clause can refer to either of them. Of course, the possibility of the boss incriminating himself is humorous qua absurd, but perfectly possible in syntactic terms. This sort of game upon intersected references is also made explicit in the following joke: My friends are stuck in Indonesia because there’s been a tsunami warning. / – Are they safe? / No, tsunamis are really dangerous. Here, the double referentiality of the pronoun they, namely my friends and

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tsunamis, is paralleled by a lexical pun on safe, a polysemous word that can either mean out of danger or not likely to cause harm. The utterly improbable answer takes the pronoun as an anaphora on tsunami, which is closer-by on the syntactic chain. Sometimes, the anaphoric mechanism can be established when the noun is missing, that is, one can take a pronoun as a substitute for a previous noun that never came to be mentioned: Anybody in the audience with a New York license plate BL 74467458930623145098725, will you kindly move it.Your license plate is blocking traffic (Nilsen 1989: 266). Here, it is automatically taken to refer to car, but the noun is never actually expressed. These types of pronominal ambiguity, non-analysable through a diagrammatical representation (like phrase-marking tree diagrams – see Chomsky 1957: 87), can only be solved by resorting to the pragmatic and discursive dimension where the co-text allows for disambiguation. In an article entitled ‘Creating structural ambiguities in humor: getting the English grammar to cooperate’ (1994), Oaks analyzes some types of syntactic ambiguity in light of the so-called ‘ambiguity enablers’. Besides passive or participial constructions (such as Why is it hard for leopards to hide? Because they’re always spotted), which, as seen above, easily give rise to structural ambiguity, other ambiguous constructions require the presence of certain elements, without which they would automatically abort. This is the case of ‘class ambiguities’, those that mix up the morphological classes of the words. Consider, for instance, the confusion between verb and noun in What has four wheels and flies? A garbage truck. Here, the use of the copulative coordinative conjunction is essential for the following term to acquire an ambiguous connotation, therefore constituting the ‘ambiguity enabler’ in the sentence. But the confusion between verb and noun can also be created by the contiguity of other words, as the following examples show: a) How do you make a Venetian blind? Stick a finger in his eye; b) When did the lobster blush? When it saw the salad dressing. In the former case, the phrase Venetian blind can be an adjective followed by a noun or a noun followed by a verb, whereas salad dressing can be ‘noun + noun’ or ‘noun + verb’. Other constructions that mix up the morphological categories of words make use of non-count nouns as ambiguity enablers: a) What is a good way to get fat? / Fry up some bacon; b) This coffee is like mud! / Waiter: Well, it was ground this morning. If the nouns fat and ground were to be countable, that is, if they were to be preceded by articles, ambiguity would disappear. Since this is not the case, they can be mixed up respectively with an adjective (fat) and a past participle (grind-ground). Thus, certain collocations turn a sentence into a deliberately ambiguous construction. In a nutshell, the sentence is a humor-friendly dimension. By exploiting the contiguity of syntactic elements, the degree of dependency which words assume

Meaning

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with one another, as well as the various relations they establish, it is possible to multiply the interpretive, and humorous, possibilities of language.

5. Meaning 5.1.

Paradigmatic inversion

Humorous language, as we have seen, is based on peculiar word combinations that suggest two or more meanings which seem to collide. We have also seen that sound, morphemes and sentences may be give rise to different readings. At this level, word choice is crucial to projecting several meanings and to creating interpretive switches. Crucially, words tend to appear in syntactic collocations that turn out to be dis-locations. These remarks suggest the importance that the Saussurian dichotomy ‘paradigmatic series / syntagmatic chain’holds for the study of the language of humor. Let us recall that Saussure (1978 [1916]: 207–213) takes meaning to result, on the one hand, from a choice between available options and, on the other, from differential relationships between elements that are contiguous along a syntactic line. Hence the fact that the syntagmatic chain is constituted by units that are explicitly present, functioning in praesentia and in mutual opposition, whereas the paradigmatic – or associative – series is structured as a set of possible, virtual options that function in absentia, among which only one is actually realized in the syntagm. Milner (1972: 14–17) seems to have been the first to point out that the collision or juxtaposition of two distinct semantic universes, which is typical of the language of humor, derives from a mechanism of paradigmatic inversion. In many jokes, the linguistic game lies in choosing elements from a paradigmatic aggregate that appear to be out of place on the syntagmatic axis.At the same time, other elements that are legitimately anticipated are discarded and transferred to a virtual sphere. According to Milner, “instead of the anticipated one, it is a member of the same virtual series that is actually used and the other item is relegated to virtual status.” This strategy of frustrating interpretive anticipation – which applies to several levels of linguistic analysis, from phonetics to morpho-syntax and semantics – has to do with the collision of two distinct semantic universes: “within a single linguistic context,” Milner adds, “two universes collide, and it is this collision that makes many forms of humor possible.” Consider the following joke: You can always tell a Cramford man, but you cannot tell him much. Here, paradigmatic inversion is of a lexical kind: the first interpretation of tell (= recognize) is canceled by the second part of the

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utterance, in which the verb assumes the meaning of say, communicate. In His sins were scarlet, but his books were read, the inversion is of a graphologicalphonetic kind: the first meaning that is anticipated – due to the reference to the scarlet color – is red, but the spelling invalidates this interpretation, and sends it to a virtual dimension, imposing the past participle verb form, read. These examples suggest, therefore, a process of interpretive collision or break, in which the meaning attributed to the utterance is later annulled, in the face of new contradicting data. This fact is caused by an unusual paradigmatic selection that constitutes an inversion of syntagmatic expectations. Sherzer (1978) analyzes puns in light of the ‘paradigm/syntagm’ dichotomy. The word or phrase, he claims, that happens to be selected by the speaker to fill in a syntactic slot is often subject to syntagmatic constraints, being anaphorically related to previous words on the syntactic chain. Take the following example: After talking about the undertakings of a woman he knows, X concludes by saying: “I wanted to keep you abreast of the situation.” The humorous choice of the adjective abreast is a metonymic back-reference to (or anaphora on) woman, while keeping its literal meaning (abreast of = informed about). This double directionality derives from what Sherzer calls “the projection of the paradigmatic onto the syntagmatic”: from a set of virtual choices, the sentence projects more than one meaning and so operates simultaneously in several directions. Todorov (1981) also elaborates on the importance that the pair ‘paradigmatic/syntagmatic’ holds for the study of humorous language. A text’s discursive meaning, Todorov argues, is not restricted to the meaning of its elements in praesentia. Instead, it involves constant relationships with the virtual set of meaning possibilities that do not assume, in the utterance, a contiguous shape along the syntagmatic line. For instance, a parody is a text that evokes another text in absentia, and so do many allusions and humorous references. Likewise, humorous puns also play on the overlap between the two dimensions. Todorov analyzes an example by Freud, This girl reminds me of Dreyfus: the army doesn’t believe in her innocence, in which the two senses of innocence are realized at different levels, as Freud (1905: 63–64) himself claims. Its exposed meaning is juridical, and fed by the adjacent terms army and Dreyfus, whereas its imposed meaning – which the joke aims at – is sexual. To identify the hierarchy between these two meanings one has to take the word, not in terms of the lexicon, or the virtual/paradigmatic set of possibilities, but in terms of the syntagm, where its discursive meaning is structured and its interpretive richness lies. Nash (1985: 126–128) coins the terms zone of choice / line of text to refer to the ‘paradigm/syntagm’ dichotomy. The former constitutes a set of options or a synonymic series that, depending on the co-text to be used, creates diverse effects, from emphasis to surprise, through strangeness and nonsense. The syn-

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tagm, on the other hand, allows the humorist to make use of such devices as repetition, parallelism, assonance, alliteration, inversion, etc. However, Nash claims, most of the time the humorous properties of a sentence derive from the intersection of the zone and line dimensions. In this sense, words and expressions become comic because of the semantic relationships they suggest and the contextual relationships they establish. In an example like The lank sergeant sighed lugubriously, there are alliterative syntagmatic sequences combined with specific paradigmatic choices. The selection of the adjective lank (which sounds funny, especially when applied to a military rank), instead of lean, thin or emaciated, and of the adverb lugubriously instead of dolefully, sadly or mournfully, indicate a humorous intention. But, Nash stresses, the humorous potential of these lexical choices is only activated in a specific context, or when “allocated to a position in a design.” It is along the syntagmatic line that the paradigmatic choices are amusing: “If we do not smile at lank we may be cajoled by lugubriously; then, if lugubriously charms us, we may be retrospectively amused by lank.” Therefore, the variety of paradigmatic choices allows actualizations or collocations that are not innocent, aiming at specific humorous intentions. Along the syntagmatic line, inseparable from the context and the situation where they occur, these choices may either frustrate interpretive expectations or project unsuspected significations. Exploiting these possibilities is the basis of many mechanisms of linguistic humor, as we shall continue to see next.

5.2. The lexical pun Did I ever tell you about my cousin twice removed? (. . . ) Well, as I say, he was twice removed – once as a treasurer of the bank he was connected with and later to the state prison at Ossining. Peter de Vries (Laughter in the Basement)

The lexical pun explores, in the context of the humorous utterance, two mechanisms that are inherent in the linguistic system: homonymy and polysemy. Traditional definitions of the semantic pun tend to focus only on the latter, ignoring the fact that similar pronunciation and spelling may regard different lexemes rather than a single lexeme with different meanings. Freud (1905: 56), for instance, regards “wordplay proper” (which, in his terminology, is synonymous with the semantic pun) as “the varieties of the multiple use of the same word.” In

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other words, he too conceives of semantic puns as instances of polysemy alone. So, one should start by clarifying this fundamental difference. The distinction between homonymy and polysemy is controversial, and there are some that even defend it should be dropped altogether. This is the case of Ullmann (1973: 20), who stresses the difficulty of establishing precise semantic boundaries between words that are spelled and pronounced in the same way: “the degree of nearness is not subject to precise measurement.” Even so, the traditional conception is that homonymy takes place whenever the same signifier has two or more signifieds among which there is no relation. Each and every one of those signifieds corresponds to individual lexemes which, along the evolution of the language, randomly took on the same phonic shape. As Lyons (1977: 560– 562) remarks, two essential conditions for homonymy to take place are lexical distinctness and formal identity (in phonetic and graphological terms). Besides, true homonyms have to enjoy, as a third requisite, syntactic equivalence, that is, they must have the same distribution and be “intersubstitutable throughout the grammatical well-formed sentences of the language.” In other words, homonymy translates as several lexemes having the same signifier, instead of the same lexeme having several signifieds. Ross (1998: 64) presents a good example of a joke that plays on homonymy: Marriage is like a bank account. You put it in, you take it out, you lose interest. Consider the homonymy of the two phrasal verbs between a non-marked and a marked (sexual) meaning, as well as the two meanings underlying the phrase ‘lose interest’. Of course, two entirely distinct lexemes underlie the two readings of ‘interest’, a psychological one and a financial one. The same goes for the following examples by Oaks (1994: 378): a) Man in restaurant: I’ll have two lamb chops, and make them lean, please. Waiter: To which side, sir? b) Why was Cinderella thrown off the baseball team? Because she ran away from the ball.

On the other hand, polysemy – a term coined by Michel Br´eal, in 1897 – occurs whenever the same signifier has several signifieds which are related to each other. This means that there has to be a word with more than one meaning, that is, a lexeme with several semes. The kinship between the different meanings of a polysemous word is, therefore, the element that distinguishes it from the semantic disparity of homonyms. Polysemy is very productive contextually, often springing from innovative uses of a term in a certain communicative situation. According to Ricoeur (1973: 101), a polysemous language allows speakers to create “practically innumerable meanings from the finite set of lexical entities codified by the dictionary.” The economical nature of this phenomenon explains

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why puns based on polysemy tend to be subtler and more profound than the ones that explore homonymy. Take, for instance, Pascal’s example: Le coeur a des raisons que la raison ne connaˆıt gu`ere. A humorous pun on the two meanings of the polysemous verb to show (roughly, to be perceptible / to be displayed) is quoted by Attardo (1994: 290): A young lady was talking to the doctor who had operated her. “Do you think the scar will show?” she asked. “That will be entirely up to you,” he said.

But homonymy and polysemy are ineffectual if the information surrounding the potential pun does not make it explicit. Therefore, a fundamental element to take into account when defining the lexical pun is context. Kelly, in ‘Punning and the Linguistic Sign’ (1971: 10), states that such language games are immune to the disambiguating function of context; rather, they make use of it as an element that generates parallel meanings. This has to do with the fact that puns carry a double dimension: a) an ‘inherent’ ambiguity, which is purely linguistic, existing at the abstract level of the system, and b) a ‘functional’ ambiguity, which depends on the interaction between linguistic units in context. Consider the following joke: When the flood had subsided and the animals were leaving the ark, Noah blessed them saying, ‘Increase and multiply’. To which two snakes replied, ‘We can’t: we’re adders.’ Some time later Noah met these surrounded by a vicious brood. When he reminded them of their reply to his blessing, and asked how they had done it, Father Adder replied, ‘Easy, we found some logs.’

The puns on which the story is based, namely multiply, adders and logs interact with each other so as to allow ambiguity to take place. The second meaning of the polysemous word multiply, namely ‘mathematical operation’, only comes about after the snakes’ reply, which puts forward a problem that would not be considered if multiply were taken to mean ‘increase species’. The fact that adder refers to two homonyms – ‘kind of snake’ and ‘mathematical operator of addition’ – creates a contextual obstacle that brings ambiguity about. Likewise, the noun log points to another two homonyms, namely ‘a thick piece of wood from a tree’ (a providential nest) and ‘mathematical logarithm’ (a device for multiplying by addition). The latter reading is imposed by the previous suggestions, thus reaffirming the parallel interpretation that has to do with maths rather than the natural biological setting of the episode. The puns on this chain, therefore, feed on each other because their collocations intersect. The role of the context, in many cases other than this one, is not to help choose from a set of meanings, but to generate and legitimize concomitant and unrelated meanings. The ‘inherent’ ambiguity of the signs under focus is, for that reason, activated by the context, which allows it to become ‘functional’ and explicit.

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The lexical pun, be it homonymous or polysemous, therefore relies on the contextual environment to be effectual. It is through the contradictory linguistic information provided by the contiguous sentences that the punned word operates a meaning split, and a re-reading process is made necessary. And, as Yus (2003: 1320) points out, the enjoyment of this process “may lie in the simultaneous entertainment of both interpretations”: namely, the first, accessible (overt) one, and the second (covert) one.

5.3.

Sets and scales

There are other semantic mechanisms, besides homonymy and polysemy, which also affect the structural relationships between words, at the same time as they lend themselves to humorous uses. Synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy determine several types of kinship, opposition and gradation between lexemes. When purposefully mixed up, these effects carry humorous potential. Hyponymy is a linguistic concept that is particularly useful for the analysis which this book puts forward (see esp. Ch. 6). As Lyons (1977: 291–295) explains, the hyponyms are ‘subordinate’ lexemes endowed with specific semantic properties, which are part of a set presided by a more general and comprehensive element, a so-called ‘superordinate’ lexeme. Rose, carnation, violet and daffodil are hyponyms of flower, whereas animal is a hyperonym that includes, for instance, dog, cow and rabbit. This type of hierarchy can be deliberately inverted in the humorous practice. Nash (1985: 129–137) considers several cases of play on lexical sets and scales. Take the following utterance: Down, Alphonse! And Fifi, do stop baying at the vicar! This phrasing is comical due to the use of the hyponym bay: a dog christened with such a name as Fifi is unlikely to be bigger or stronger than a poodle or a chihuahua, dogs which bark shrilly instead of ‘baying’. The bark hyperonym – a more neutral and general term – would actually suit the subject better. But, amongst the hyponymic paradigm (yap, snap, yelp, bay), the latter choice implies specific semantic intentions. If, instead of Fifi, the dog were a bull mastiff, its semantic properties of size and strength would be in agreement with the use of bay. But a poodle or a chihuahua cannot bark in such a way – it is therefore the hyponymic substitution that makes the situation comic. Co-hyponyms establish various relationships among themselves, ranging from near-synonymy to antonymy, which can also be used with humorous purposes. Consider the case of Huck telling Tom, Welcome to my abode, when he lives in a shack. Abode is a synonym for residence that is not correlated with the shack hyponym. (Other correlations would be acceptable: abode is correlated

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with mansion and humble abode with cottage.) Similarly, if the Sultan of Brunei told a guest in one of his palaces, Welcome to my hovel, he would be joking on the antonymic gap between palace, mansion, etc. and hovel, shack, shanty. This game of lexical overlap often underlies the rhetorical use of irony and sarcasm, to which we shall come back in chapters six and seven. A proposition like Tom is lazy could be ironically rephrased as Poor chap! He is a slave to work (cf. Nash 1985: 152), which consists of employing a phrase that is situated at the opposite end of the antonymic scale. Since rhetorical irony consists of saying the opposite of what is meant, Nash argues, the recipient automatically reconstructs the utterance so as to find an antonymic formulation, such as Tom hates straining himself, and, hence, Tom doesn’t like working. Therefore, the ironist uses a counter-code that is inscribed on the level of semantic opposition. Conversely, sarcasm makes use of a pro-code, that is, a set of lexical forms that are blatantly equivalent to the ‘maternal proposition’ in terms of denotation (cf. Nash, ibidem). The paraphrase, in this case, would be Tom doesn’t strain himself, or Tom likes to take it easy, or yet Tom believes in working at a leisurely pace. All these alternatives are part of the synonymic set ‘Tom is lazy’, but they express this key-idea in a camouflaged and somewhat deficient way, typical of the so-called understatement. In other words, the sarcastic formulation cannot be absolutely synonymous with the original proposition, as it must contain the interpretive seed to allow the recipient to identify the underlying meaning. The humorous flavor of sarcasm can also be enhanced via hyperbole, as in Dear me! Tom’s scratched his pinkie! or Send for Dr. Kildare! Tom has lacerated his digit (Nash’s sarcastic alternatives to Tom has cut himself ). The synonymic sets and the hyponymic scales are useful for games on formality vs. informality. If a couple in love used a phrase like I hold you in great esteem, amidst the smoke and noise of a disco, the incongruity of the formulation would make it ridiculous. Likewise, as seen above, using the words abode or domicile – which are highly formal and characteristic of a juridical or contractual language – in an informal context can also be incongruous, hence potentially comic. Nash (1985: 137) presents a hilarious selection of hypothetical synonymic phrasings to express a rather down-to-earth situation: inviting friends over for a drink. The richness and variety of the examples bear witness to the humorous potential of this type of lexical-semantic games: What say we toddle down to my humble abode for drinkies?; Shall we proceed to my pad for a spot of liquid refreshment?; Let us sally forth to my domicile and imbibe a few snorts; We’ll trek to my shack and put a few back; Let’s skedaddle to my seat and rape the grape.

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5.4.

Mechanisms of displacement Edgar thinks he’s going to have another novel, Charlie. (. . . ) He’s been typing his eyes out. Corey Ford (The Norris Plan)

The dimensions of literal meaning and semantic conventionality (which underlies idioms and the so-called dead metaphors) can also be put to humorous use. Displacing a certain word or phrase from its usual or conventional signification to an unexpected one is a common resource of comic texts. Freud (1905: 79–84) first shed light on this mechanism of displacement, which is obvious in the joke that follows: A match-maker assures the suitor that the girl’s father is no longer alive. But, later on, everybody comes to know that he is in jail. The suitor angrily complains to the match-maker, who does not lose face: “What are you complaining about? I told you nothing but the truth! Do you call that a life?”

According to Freud, this devious reply is based on the displacement of a literal meaning (‘life’ as an antonym of ‘death’) and its replacement by an idiomatic meaning (as in ‘a dog’s life’). The match-maker thus manages to make the word switch from its usual and more obvious sense, nimbly giving an answer that does not correspond to the sense of the question but to its displaced meaning. Such humorous displacements can also occur between a literal meaning and a metaphorical one. Koestler (1964: 36) gives an example: At the time when John Wilkes was the hero of the poor and lonely, an ill-wisher informed him gleefully: ‘It seems that some of your faithful supporters have turned their coats.’ ‘Impossible’, Wilkes answered. ‘Not one of them has a coat to turn.’

Here, as Koestler puts it (ibidem), “the coat is turned first metaphorically, then literally.” Sometimes, the semantic displacement is operated at the level of a seemingly irrelevant characteristic of the object under focus: In the happy days of La Ronde, a dashing but penniless young officer tried to obtain the favours of a fashionable courtesan. To shake off this unwanted suitor, she explained to him that her heart was, alas, no longer free. He replied politely: ‘Mademoiselle, I never aimed as high as that.’

In this case, the adverb high is displaced from a metaphorical context (implicit in the lady’s formula of refusal) to a ‘topographical’ one (to which the officer impolitely alludes). In Koestler’s terminology, the adverb is therefore bisociated, and he adds (1964: 92): “the officer’s mental leap from the metaphorical to the literal plane indicates the displacement of attention (. . . ) from the poetic connotations of the lady’s heart to its particular spatial location.” Similarly, a

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current, or ‘dominant’, signification can be replaced by an equally legitimate, but previously neglected, aspect of the whole, as in the following well-known case: A car dealer is boosting a sports model to a prospective client: ‘You get into this car at midnight and at 4 a.m. you are in Grimsby.’ The customer is indignant: ‘And what am I to do in the middle of the night in Grimsby?’

This question is perfectly logical, but out of place, or displaced, in this context, which is a conversation about the speed of the car. The salesman only mentions the little country-town in the middle of the night for illustration’s sake, i.e. as an example of an argument he is defending, not as a suggestion for the customer to follow. The next joke is again an instance of semantic displacement, but this time between two types of reference: The statistics teacher says: – In New York, a man gets run over every four hours. – Oh, poor thing!, remarks a student.

A generic reference, at which the teacher’s piece of information obviously aims, is humorously mistaken for a specific one, owing to the ambiguity of the indefinite article. All these cases can be taken to entail a shift of emphasis between two elements of a dichotomy: literal/metaphorical, general/specific, whole/part, and so on. But one can also achieve similar effects through register manipulations. Curiously enough, it is as early as the 18th century that Beattie puts forward what I propose to call ‘register displacement’ (on an account of register games with humorous purposes, see Attardo 1994: Ch. 7 passim). Being one of the early proponents of the incongruity theory of humor, Beattie (1764: 629–630) argues that the ludicrous combination of incongruous elements can be expressed by means of “mean or common thoughts delivered in pompous language” or “a sublime thought, or solemn expression, unexpectedly introduced in the midst of something frivolous.” Beattie is referring to contradictory registers and different levels of formality being mixed up, or displaced, with the purpose of “exciting laughter.” And he gives an example which shows how displaced the solemn decasyllabic line seems to be when expressing the author’s “unseasonable levity”: My hair I’d powder in the women’s way, And dress, and talk of dressing, more than they, I’ll please the maids of honour, if I can; Without black velvet breeches – what is man!

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A case of register displacement – which, according to Alexander (1984: 60), consists of “selecting a lexeme or phraseological unit from a different style level than the context would predict” – is also present in the following joke: A lawyer proposing to a woman: I love you, Sharon, and these documents will advise you of certain rights you have under federal and state law. (Ross 1998: 46)

In our corpus of analysis, Woody Allen also illustrates the mechanism of register displacement. This happens when the narrator of The Lunatic’s Tale introduces highly colloquial lexical elements in passages that exhibit a rather elegant literary style, as in the following case (cf. Section 2.4.1, Ch. 6): On the one hand, the yawning abyss of compromise. On the other, the enervating existence of the amorous cheat. [Emphasis mine]

Likewise, Corey Ford recurrently employs the strategy of lexical-semantic displacement throughoutThe Norris Plan. Indeed, the deviant collocation of to have a novel (see quotation at the beginning of this section) pervades the pages of the story, reminding one of the conventional phrase to have a baby, and activating all the semantic nodes that are attached to it (pregnancy, nausea, dizziness. . . ). In the extract quoted, Kathy informs Charlie, her husband, about a fellow writer, who happens to be as prolific as themselves, ‘giving birth’ to another novel. At the same time, she activates yet another collocational pun: He’s been typing his eyes out, instead of He’s been crying his eyes out. As in Allen’s case, I shall get back to these and other short story examples in chapters 6 and 7. 5.5.

Logical irregularities The ‘Bay Area bisexual’ told me I didn’t quite coincide with either of her desires. (Woody Allen,The Lunatic’sTale)

Every humorous incongruity carries a particular logic of its own, which seems to go against our legitimate interpretive expectations and our sense of order and coherence. Besides, for one to enter the world of a joke, one often has to suspend disbelief and accept a reality that ‘does not make sense’ exactly because it is rendered in a non-bona-fide mode (on this, see Raskin [1985: 100–104] and the next chapter, Section 1.3). But, apart from this, some forms of humor exploit the logic factor per se, constituting self-reflexive games on language which manipulate propositions, predications and implications in a fallacious and circular manner.

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Groucho Marx, who is said to have asked one of his ‘victims’, Have you stopped beating your wife?, provides an obvious example. The presupposition that underlies the question, namely “The recipient beats his wife,” implies, as Nash (1985: 109) shows, two answers alone, both of them being incriminating: a) “Yes, the recipient has stopped beating his wife”; b) “No, the recipient has not stopped beating his wife.” In either case, the recipient is caught off-balance, in the middle of the presuppositional snare. Of course, he could try to evade it by saying “I have never beaten my wife,” but the very wording of the question traps him within a self-destructive entailment. The use of the verb to stop, which marks a cessation aspect – and therefore implies that an action actually took place –, does the trick (on stop and other ‘change of state’ verbs, see Sellars 1954). Such dialogue games, which imply erroneous yes/no answers, are typical of certain forms of academic humor that exploit irregularities of semantic fit, such as paradoxes, truisms, false syllogisms, propositions containing defective premises and faulty inferences. Here are two cases (by Nash 1985: 47): a) My doctor says if I do nothing for my cold it’ll last for seven days, but if he treats it, it’ll go away in a week; b) Nothing is kinder to the hands than Fairy Liquid, so next time you wash the dishes, use nothing. From a mathematical truism to a logical classic based on attributing a referential substance to the pronoun ‘nothing’ (as Lewis Carroll was fond of doing), all these examples defy reasonable expectations. Other types of what Nash (ibidem) calls ‘logical malpractice’ include irregular uses of because and therefore, confusions over the extension of pronouns like all, some, many and most, and the attribution of a positive reference to a negative sign. This sort of humor promotes circularity, running the risk of becoming tedious, but the reward for those who solve the riddle is the pleasure of their superior insight. Koestler (1964: 82) also presents an interesting example, where the lexical choice, combined with a contradictory syntactic construction, results in a typical case of logical irregularity: An art dealer bought a canvas signed ‘Picasso’ and travelled all the way to Cannes to discover whether it was genuine. Picasso was working in his studio. He cast a single look at the canvas and said: ‘It’s a fake.’A few months later the dealer bought another canvas signed Picasso. Again he travelled to Cannes and again Picasso, after a single glance, grunted: ‘It’s a fake.’ ‘But, cher maˆıtre’, expostulated the dealer, ‘it so happens that I saw you with my own eyes working on this very picture several years ago.’ Picasso shrugged: ‘I often paint fakes.’

The illogical character of the answer lies in the impossibility of a fake being produced by the faked author. In the dictionary fake indeed means ‘an object produced by an imitator intending to deceive’, and, by extension, also means

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a repetitive, uninspired, second-rate product, a worthless copy of something. However, in this case the logical irregularity is based on attributing a personal seme to a well established lexeme. Indeed Picasso uses fake as meaning ‘an imitation of an author by himself’. Likewise, a definition like A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist carries the logical impossibility of taking the kindness seme as a qualifier of a sadist. As Koestler (1964: 65) explains, this is exactly the link-concept that bisociates two diametrically opposite meanings, to which two interpretations are attached: a) the sadist does a kindness to the masochist by torturing him; b) the sadist is torturing the masochist by being kind to him. In both cases, the sadist will have to fight his/her nature, or, in other words, s/he will have to become a non-sadist, which will prevent him/her from qualifying to torture the masochist in the first place. This catch-22 reminds Koestler of another logical joke that plays on a comparison: – – – –

Tell me, Comrade, what is Capitalism? The exploitation of man by man. And what is Communism? The reverse.

The syntactic ambiguity of the answer results in the logical impossibility of two rigorously identical terms being taken as opposites. Indeed, instead of taking the noun phrase ‘the reverse’ as meaning ‘the reverse of exploitation’, the joke takes the adjunct ‘man by man’ as the semantic focus. Now, the reverse of two identical terms is a dead-end. Koestler (1964: 91, 93) believes humor to be achieved through the “ability to break away from the stereotyped routines of thought,” which often takes the shape of a “feat of mental acrobatics.” Freud (1905: 80, 99–103) also focuses on jokes that “invert the character of logic in a striking manner.” These “faults of reasoning” often take the form of arguments that seem to be correct but are false and meant to deceive, as can be seen in the example that follows: A suitor complains that the woman who has been introduced to him has a limp. The match-maker answers: “But you ought to be pleased! Suppose you marry a woman with normal legs. What do you gain from it? No one can assure you that she won’t have an accident and break one of her legs and become handicapped for the rest of her life. And think of the suffering then, the agitation, and the doctor’s fees! If you take this woman, you’ll avoid all those problems: it is a fait accompli.”

This sly match-maker deceitfully persuades the suitor to prefer an existing problem to a possible one. This is, Freud claims, a typical piece of sophistry, which “abstracts from reality in favor of possibility.”

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An important point to notice is that the flawed reasoning which is at work in these jokes must appear to be correct. As Morreall (1983: 74) remarks, such games cannot exhibit a “complete lack of logic, but rather a violation of some logical principle in a piece of reasoning that is just logical enough to sound somewhat plausible.” This distinction is useful for one to differentiate logical irregularities from nonsense, the next category to cover in this chapter. Many witty popular sayings, which exploit tautological propositions, are also wrapped in this plausibility. Consider the following examples: a) A rich man is just a poor man with money; b) Everything tastes more or less like chicken; c) You can get anywhere in 10 minutes if you go fast enough. On other occasions, the logical irregularity depends on the grammatical choices that underlie the comic utterance. Take, for instance, the oxymoron Forever goes quick: it also presents a logically irregular syntactic structure, with which lovers may be familiar. Besides, the use of quantifiers may easily give rise to comicality, as in the following example: There are three types of people in this world: those who are good at maths and those who aren’t.

As Eastman (1936: 138–139) puts it, “using words without a keen sense of their logical relations is most humorous,” and “bad grammar is good fun.” Comic writers often exploit ungrammaticalities, such as the blunders of children and non-native speakers, whose speech easily tends to raise laughter. Of course, the fact that incorrectness is equalled with stupidity – a comedic stereotype – partly explains the resourcefulness of this line of humor, but so does the fact that such mistakes cause a pleasurable sense of transgression that is also good fun. The following list of grammar infelicities and pieces of contradictory stylistic advice are all logically irregular and no doubt humorous: – – – – – – – – – –

Don’t use no double negatives. A preposition is a bad thing to end a sentence with. The passive voice should never be used. No sentence fragments. Stamp out and eliminate redundancy. Down with categorical imperatives. Avoid cliches like the plague. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “I hate quotations.” Never use that totally cool, radically groovy out-of-date slang. Avoid those abysmally horrible, outrageously repellent exaggerations.

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5.6.

Nonsense

Very close to the previous category is nonsense or the absurd. It consists in the negation of logic but also in the impossibility of solving the incongruity that, as seen above, so often underlies humor, linguistic or otherwise. Indeed, nonsense is an unsolved and unsolvable incongruity – in other words, it lacks any sense while feeding on that very lack. Therefore, unlike the cases of logical incongruity tackled above, the occurrences of absurd humor neither target nor allow any type of resolution, or subsequent logical rearrangement. In Keith-Spiegel’s (1972: 11) words, “it is the perception of ‘disjointedness’ that somehow amuses,” whereas in other types of humor the cause of amusement “is the falling into place or sudden insight.” As seen in the cases of semantic and grammatical irregularities focused on above show, the comic pleasure springs from one’s capacity to identify – or configure – where and why the logic fails. When one re-processes information and overcomes the logical obstacle, one attains ‘resolution’ and the corresponding interpretive enjoyment. In the case of the absurd, it is not possible to restore an original meaning, exactly because there is no such thing to restore – and the game is established on the basis of this absence, and not on the distortion or dislocation of a supposed meaning. Beaugrande and Dressler (1981: 144) are quite right in claiming that “senselessness (or nonsense) results from lack of continuity between [a textual] occurrence and the rest of our knowledge and experience.” In other words, the extreme implausibility of a certain textual occurrence in the realm of our world knowledge prevents any attempt at reintegrating that occurrence. Purdie (1993: 53–55) defines non-sense joking as “joking which foregrounds and so questions the very structures on which the text’s capacity to signify is grounded.” The semantic impossibility of this type of humor is not established between two meanings, but on the very grounds that the utterance lacks a meaning. This has therefore to do with a complete draining of content that hinders any interpretive answer, whatever it might be: “the answer to the ‘puzzle’ is that there is no answer” (idem, ibid). The same goes for non-verbal nonsense: in a sequence of a Laurel and Hardy film, for instance, an initial shot shows Laurel carrying a plank on his shoulder, followed by several other shots in which the long plank slowly slides past; in the end, Laurel re-enters the screen carrying the other end of the plank. What does this mean? What message does it convey? None. It is only the staging of the absurd, the portrayal of situational and factual impossibility. Unlike Purdie, Dolitsky, in Under the tumtum tree: From nonsense to sense (1984), claims that there is a sense to nonsense, even if only in terms of the

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associations it provides within one’s knowledge of the world. As she puts it, “nothing would be more erroneous than to believe that all one must do is to nullify normal language conditions to create nonsense.” If monkeys were made to play with typewriters, she argues, chances of producing a nonsensical text would be as high as typing Hamlet. Therefore, the key to nonsense lies in finding a place for it in one’s knowledge network. Of course, individual responses vary considerably, depending on the associations one makes and on the schemas to which one relates the nonsensical object. As a “phenomenon of reception,” deciphering nonsense is, according to Dolitsky, assigning a meaning to an “opaque text” which is supposed to have a meaning in the first place. Wilson (1979: 160) tackles the subject from a different perspective, taking nonsense humor as a synonym for “innocent humor.” He claims that many children involuntarily produce nonsense sayings – mainly in an interrogative form – which adults consider very funny, as is the case of What does blue look like from behind? At other times, however, children “talk nonsense,” through which they experience the pleasure of escaping from the constraints of the adult world. Freud (1905: 206) also shows that the “pleasure of nonsense” is gradually denied to the child, until she eventually produces word associations that make sense. But, Freud claims, this type of freedom comes to be rescued in the grown-up world, exactly through humor, absurd humor in particular. Let us look at two examples. An assertion like This card-carrying rabbit consists of five volumes, excluding the index and the egregious opossum is an example of a quite elementary semantic violation, which will remind one of childhood. It is also through a similar mechanism that a sentence like My uncle always sleeps standing on one toe (cf. Ross 1998: 31) carries a comic potential to which children will not be indifferent. Regardless of the perspective from which one looks at them, nonsense games defraud the interpretive efforts of the interlocutor, insofar as they provide vitiated information. Indeed, to speak nonsensically is to violate the rules of communication and the tacit commitment to convey information. Hence, such a practice embodies somewhat aggressive connotations, if not in relation to the recipient, at least in relation to socially established principles, like coherence and rationality. According to Feinberg (1978: 169), nonsense humor is exactly a form of “aggression against logic and order.” Therefore, it functions also as a form of catharsis and release on the part of the sender. If this somewhat selfish manipulation of language and communication manages to produce laughter, it must be because the recipient goes along with it and gladly adheres to the game.

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5.7.

Possible worlds Suffice it to say that one dark and stormy night a shadowy figure might have been observed smuggling two drugged women (. . . ) into an unused operating room at Flower Fifth Avenue. There, (. . . ) he performed an operation done before only in the world of celluloid fantasy (. . . ) (Woody Allen,The Lunatic’sTale)

Absurd humor, like alternative forms that challenge the way one usually conceives of the actual world, can be more effectively understood if seen in light of a theoretical framework that combines logic and theories of fiction. The quote from Woody Allen that opens this section equally points to the question of possible worlds and its implications for humor construction. Likewise, consider the following jokes: a) Question: How do you fit four elephants into a Fiat Cinquecento? Answer: Two in the front and two in the back. b) A mute says to a deaf man: “Careful! There’s a blind man spying on us!”

According to Semino (1997: 114), these two cases, just like many other forms of humor, prompt a reflection on the concepts of possible and impossible worlds. Before proceeding to apply these notions to the case of humor, let us briefly discuss the theoretical context from which they spring. The theory of possible worlds initially evolved within the realm of modal logic in the late 50’s and early 60’s (on this, see Bradley and Swartz 1979, Loux 1979). The key-idea, put forward by Leibniz, is that the real world is only one among a multitude of possible worlds. The utility of this notion resides in the fact that, on the one hand, it allows a definition of the concepts of possibility and necessity, and on the other, it provides a system within which the truthvalues of propositions can be determined beyond the constraints of the actual world. The principles of possible truth and falsity and necessary truth and falsity refer not only to the actual world, but also to sets of hypothetical alternatives to the actual world. For example, the proposition The President of Portugal is a woman is ‘possibly false’, since it is false in the actual world, but it can be true in some other possible world (for instance, a fictional world). Conversely, The President of Portugal is a woman but it is not the case that the President of Portugal is a woman is ‘necessarily false’ because it expresses a logical contradiction: for a world to be considered possible, the propositions cannot be true and false simultaneously, etc. In this way, it is possible to come up with other frames of reference that allow one to analyze a proposition beyond the

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physical, technological and psychological boundaries of the so-called reality. An alternative world – one where, say, cats teach at universities and people travel on a time-machine – is physically and technologically impossible, but it may be possible in terms of the frontiers of logical possibility. Literary studies, and especially the theories of fiction (and it is level, the level of humorous fictional texts, that this work will focus on), adopted the possibleworld framework to rescue fictional entities from the limbo of non-existence to which they had been relegated. In traditional logical semantics, two propositions like Romeo loved Juliet and Romeo didn’t love Juliet were treated either as false (because they presuppose the existence of non-existing individuals) or as neither true nor false (because they refer to imaginary entities with no referents in the real world). Possible-world semantics bridges a gap between fiction and reality by legitimizing the existence of fictional, i.e., non-real entities, objects and situations. As Semino (1997: 62) puts it, this corresponds to a “move away from a one-world segregationist ontology” and also to a “shift in priorities and objectives”: fiction stops having an anomalous and marginal status and starts being regarded as an omnipresent and central cultural phenomenon. But the transfer of the logical concept of possible worlds to the semantics of fiction cannot be mechanic or linear. Modal logic postulates possible worlds in view of logical operations, ruled by such criteria as comprehensiveness (the inclusion of all necessarily true propositions) and consistency (the denial of logical contradictions). The worlds of fiction, on the other hand, tend to be incomplete and inconsistent, that is, small and defective. In the real world, if it is true that John lives in NewYork, it is also true that he lives north of Washington and south of Boston. But, in a fictional world, it is possible that these requisites are not respected, or even considered: John may, for instance, live in a post-atomic New York, or in a lunar New York. Eco, in The Limits of Interpretation (1990: 231– 236), describes how the flexibility of fictional possible worlds assumes various degrees of credibility and likelihood, which can even come near the threshold of the (in)conceivable: a) There are possible worlds which seem likely and credible, and are easy to conceive: for instance, one can conceive a past world where Hester Prynne wears a scarlet letter; b) There are others which seem unlikely and are barely credible from the viewpoint of one’s actual experience, as is the case of the realm of fairy-tales and of Little-Red-Riding-Hoods that talk to wolves; c) Finally, there are inconceivable worlds, which integrally violate one’s logical and epistemological habits: as Eco puts it, “we cannot conceive worlds where circles are square and can be bought with an amount of dollars corresponding to the highest even number”; however, as these two lines have just shown, it is possible to mention such a world. The inconceivable worlds are, Eco ventures, maybe an extreme example of impossible possible worlds, that is, “worlds that

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the model-reader is led to conceive just up to the point of understanding that they are impossible to conceive.” Going back to the jokes quoted at the beginning of this section, we can see how evident the distance between what can be mentioned and what can be conceived becomes: we can say that four elephants can be fitted into a tiny car, but we cannot, to be true, conceive that situation, because it is physically and volumetrically impossible; likewise, it is linguistically possible to build a proposition stating that a mute person can talk, a deaf one hear and a blind one see, but it is impossible to rationally construct such people, because the terms of this projected world are contradictory and mutually exclusive. Or, consider the following stanza, quoted by Semino (1997: 115): Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish that man would go away!

Once again, the incompatible elements brought together in these lines enjoy a linguistic existence, but the status of this existence becomes uncertain because, as Eco would say (1990: 233), “the very bases of the validation mechanism are undermined.” But how does this validation mechanism work? And how does its violation produce the ‘impossibility’ of texts such as the ones at hand? The process of construction of the fictional world – which covers genres as diverse as realist novels, fairy-tales, science fiction and the humorous text – generally abides by a certain number of categories which are valid in the actual world. The fictional world becomes possible qua accessible from the actual world. Ryan (1991) departs from these premises to develop a list of “accessibility relations” that connect the actual world to the possible worlds of fiction. Among these stand three principles whose violation jeopardizes the very process of constructing a textual world: namely, ‘logical’, ‘analytic’ and ‘linguistic’ compatibility. To break the third of these principles is the highest possible infringement, for it hinders the possibility of constructing a text world at all. Some forms of experimental poetry and of modernist writing, as is the case of the following poem by Russian modernist Aleksey Krucenyx (quoted by Enkvist 1991), destroy the very relationship signifier-signified: dyr bul scl ubessc skum vy so bu r l ez

Conversely, the jokes and the stanza quoted above are linguistically interpretable (it is possible to attribute meanings to them, albeit incompatible ones); but, like

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many post-modernist romances, they disrespect the logical principles of noncontradiction and of the excluded middle. Besides, they step over analytical truths, for instance by using a word to refer to an object that does not possess the properties implicit in the word. Hence, fictional worlds are wider than logically possible ones, since the former admit logical impossibilities. Consider another example of this type of analytic and logical breach (Semino 1997: 101): Ladies and jellispoons: I come before you To stand behind you To tell you something I know nothing about. Last Thursday Which was Good Friday There will be a Mothers’ meeting For Fathers only. Wear your best clothes If you haven’t any. And if you can come, Please stay at home. Admission is free So pay at the door.

The paired oppositions that also stand out in this dizzying poem are admitted by the discursive subject as ‘possible’, that is, they are allowed to be and not to be at the same time. Now, a world thus constructed, or mentioned, is not only logically and analytically impossible but also unimaginable. On a linguistic level, however, it is verbalizable, despite the blatant non-grammaticality that pervades it. According to Semino (1997: 102), “the main effect of texts such as these lies in playfully and repeatedly frustrating the interpreter’s attempts to construct a coherent text world.” Nevertheless, as Eco (1990: 233–234) correctly remarks, the reader, or interpreter, at whom impossible possible worlds aim, is a critical one. By the way, a semantic interpretation differs from a critical one insofar as the former implies a reader that linearly fills a text with a given meaning, whereas the latter presupposes a metalinguistic activity through which the reader describes the formal reasons why a text engenders a certain reaction. The concept of self-voiding text (Dolezel 1989: 238) also applies here, as Eco shows. In fact, self-voiding texts, as is often the case of humorous texts, are interpreted on two levels: on a first (semantic) level, the reader forms the illusion of a coherent world that is quickly undermined by an “inexplicable impossibility”; on a second (critical) level, the reader is able to understand the

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textual strategies that configured the first na¨ıve reading, and thus understand the text in its self-voiding nature. This process, which demands cooperative willingness from the reader, produces perplexity and confusion, but also, as Eco (ibidem) stresses, pleasure: “The pleasure we get from impossible possible worlds is the pleasure of experiencing our logical and perceptive defeat, but also the pleasure of enjoying a self-revealing text that talks about its own incapacity to describe impossibilia.” I shall get back to this point later on (cf. chapter 3, Section 1.3), when discussing, with Raskin, the question of truth in humour.

6. Conclusion All the linguistic strategies of humor I have succinctly reviewed in this chapter exhibit a high degree of functionality and also of conventionality. They constitute a kind of matrix – based, as it were, on the principle of incongruity – to be contextually adapted and identified as potentially humorous. Actually, as Koestler (1964: 93) argues, “the craftsmen of the comic operate mostly with the same familiar matrixes (. . . ) and their task is reduced to devising new links – puns, gags, pegs for parody.” That is why the humorists manage to find, within a pre-established and ritualized practice, some freedom of adaptation to situational conditions. In principle, the unitary and brief nature of many forms of humor thus constructed makes them a kind of a non-sequitur, a self-sufficient unit which does not lack co-textual support. Still, such forms are also present in many broader discursive structures, both in narrative jokes and in longer comic texts (as the examples from short stories show), activating cohesion mechanisms and co(n)textual relationships. Now, it is exactly the problem of situational context that raises a parallel question: what are the perlocutionay effects of the linguistic mechanisms just discussed? Most of language games aim at humor, and the examples I have examined do so too. In other words, they are humorous in illocutionary terms. Sometimes, however, language-dependent jokes misfire, that is, they are unsuccessful in perlocutionary terms. We have already seen that puns, especially phonetic ones, are often winced at, since they are regarded as a gratuitous swap of words for one another just because of their sound similarity. Likewise, many humorous riddles meet with cold responses, because the recipients feel that the cognitive effort they are led to apply does not bear fruit, given the deceptive nature of the information provided. In fact, many such games are deliberately faulty, providing interlocutors with devious formulations and defective informa-

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tion that are meant to cause them unnecessary interpretive trouble. The result, on the part of the recipient, is that s/he feels caught in a trap, whereas the teller has fun at the victim’s expense. Besides, other jokes are disliked for being perceived as undemocratic and snobbish, insofar as they require processing efforts that are regarded as culturally demanding. Comic illogicalities, for instance, ask for reasoning skills and cultural data that are deemed to be elitist (the same goes for bilingual puns and jokes that are based on philosophical or literary allusions). Besides, they project a sense of lack of order and coherence which may be unsettling. As Nash (1985: 110, 113) rightly claims, “the response to jokes that turn on logic or the manipulation of language is an uneasy one,” because a distorted language or logic is “feared as a quasi-criminal act, a threat to the regency of the mind.” Be that as it may, many people willingly abide by the transgression principles of language-dependent humor. This may relate to Freud’s (1905: 206) claim that children start manipulating humor by producing nonsense sayings, which is a symptom of their liberation from social constraints. Likewise, adults may enjoy these linguistic challenges due to their liberating and defying potential. Engaging in language games and successfully solving the interpretive problems they present provides one with a sense of victory, freedom and self-confidence which is compensatory. As Eco (1990: 234) explains, to go from the stage of Na¨ıve Reading to the one of Critical Reading entails turning our “logical and perceptive defeat” into a pleasurable experience. But the question of the success or failure of linguistic humor bears on the domain of pragmatics, that is, the interactional dynamics of the humorous act – a fundamental point to which I will turn later on (cf. Ch. 5). In the present chapter we have seen that humor is built on every level of linguistic analysis, but we have not discussed, in a systematic way at least, how it is structured in a communicative situation and at broader discursive and textual levels. Raskin’s (1985) contribution, which I shall discuss in the next chapter, takes a decisive step in that direction, even if – just like Attardo’s (1991) and Giora’s (1991), also discussed next – it is restricted to short discursive units. However, these proposals pave the way for an analysis of more extensive texts, as can be seen in several approaches to humorous narratives which I will also review in the next chapter, and which are, for the most part, grounded on theories of the joke.

Chapter 3 Humor as a textual genre: from jokes to comic narratives Introduction In the previous chapter we looked at humor at the microstructural level of sounds, morphemes, sentences and meanings. In this chapter we will consider humor in its macrostructural dimension. In other words, we will investigate the general principles that rule the humorous text, as a type of discourse obeying particular structural, cognitive and communicative requirements. The core concept in this venture is genre, here understood in its general sense as “a recognizable communicative event characterized by a set of communicative purposes identified and mutually understood by the members of the community where it occurs” (Bathia 1993: 13). Regarding humor as a textual genre entails sketching the necessary and sufficient conditions for a text to be humorous, regardless of the themes it covers, the forms it assumes or the reactions it causes. In light of this, I will begin by reviewing three main contributions to the comprehension of joke-texts, which offer models for the analysis of textual humor. Firstly, Raskin’s (1985) groundbreaking Semantic Script Theory of Humour; secondly, its sequel, the General Theory of Verbal Humour (1991), co-authored by Raskin and Attardo; and thirdly, Giora’s (1991 and later) cognitive model, whose principle of marked informativeness proves very useful in the analysis of humor as undertaken in the present work. (On an overview of the thriving cognitive line in humour research, see e.g. Brˆone and Feyaerts 2004 and Veale et al. 2006.) Then, I will turn to longer humorous texts and review the most significant attempts that have been made at tackling longer and more complex comic narratives. Departing from the structuralist period, I will proceed to analyze scattered contributions to this field of research, although an exhaustive coverage is beyond the reach of this work. From a synopsis of the state-of-the-art will emerge problems and questions yet to answer, as well as the need for an alternative approach.

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1. Semantic script theory of humor Published in 1985, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor presents a systematic development of the theory which Victor Raskin initially sketched in 1979. Being the first successful attempt at applying a semantic theory to humor studies, hitherto largely restricted to the areas of philosophy, psychology and sociology, Raskin’s contribution soon became an internationally acknowledged cornerstone. His Semantic Script Theory of Humor (henceforth, SSTH) aims at establishing the joke as a specific type of text – in other words, as a genre. Therefore, its perlocutionary effects are regarded as irrelevant: in other words, it is extraneous if a joke makes one laugh, cry or shrug one’s shoulders: what matters is to assess its humorous illocutionary potential. In light of this, Raskin sets out to determine the “necessary and sufficient conditions” (1985: 99, 147) for the semantic structure of a text to be considered humorous. In this way, he also intends to describe the ‘humorous competence’ (1985: 51, 58) of the native speaker, i.e., his/her capacity to assess the humorous character of a text. Significantly enough, Raskin’s book does not stop at an abstract formalist level: rather, it duly integrates the pragmatic dimension of humor production and reception as well as the importance of context in processing the joke text (1985: 63).

1.1. The concept of script Raskin defines this central theoretical tool as follows: “the script is a large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word or evoked by it” (1985: 81). The lexicological emphasis of this definition is obvious and helps to differentiate Raskin’s conception of script from previous authors, especially within the areas of psychology and artificial intelligence, where the notion is seen as an experiential and cognitive object (cf. Shank and Abelson 1977: 37 ff.). To Raskin, then, a script is activated and evoked by a word. Also, it represents the knowledge that a native speaker has of a small part of the world, such as established routines, common procedures and regular situations. For instance, a word like check-in will evoke the travel script, and this, in turn, will evoke the ways to go about that situation, such as queuing at a counter and producing tickets. Since a script is endowed with a strong connectivity, any of its components may evoke the whole script or other related scripts, which reveals a well-structured and relatively predictable system of associations. Raskin draws a polemical distinction between linguistic (lexical) scripts and non-linguistic ones (1985: 135). The former, he claims, concern the linguistic

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knowledge that each and every native speaker is supposed to have (for example, that “telephone” means an object used to communicate orally with absent persons), whereas the latter may not be shared by all (e.g. that the telephone was invented by Bell). Raskin further distinguishes between three types of nonlinguistic scripts: a) encyclopaedic or cultural scripts, which are common knowledge but are not necessarily known by all speakers (as in the Bell example); b) restricted scripts, which the speaker shares with a certain group of people, such as friends, neighbors, family, and c) individual scripts, which are determined by the subjective experiences and the personal background of each speaker. It is clear that the frontiers separating these notions are blurred, and that any attempt at defining them is problematic. Actually, how is one to set apart the strictly semantic meaning of a word from its cultural and encyclopaedic implications? Or, how can one tell where a script ends and another begins? Or, still, how does one know if a script is ever complete at all? Being aware of these hitches, Raskin postulates the principle of continuity. In technical or formal terms, he claims, a script is a graph of lexical nodes connected by semantic links (like synonymy, hyponymy, antonymy). Taken together, all the scripts of a language make up “a single continuous graph” (1985: 81), which connects words on different degrees of distance, emphasis and kinship, and which cannot, to be rigorous, be fragmented. Nevertheless, Raskin points out that a script analysis of humor requires that the scripts be simplified and “discretized” artificially despite their inherently continuous and multidirectional nature.

1.2.

Combinatorial rules

Having devised the script-theory bases to his humor model, Raskin goes on to present the semantic mechanisms that underlie it, starting with the notion of combinatory rules. If, as claimed above, a word in a sentence triggers at least one script, an ambiguous word triggers more than one by definition. Indeed, the ambiguous lexical node will necessarily be the centre of at least two, equally evoked, domains of the continuous graph. Granted that an unequivocal sentence is associated with only one compatible combination of the evoked scripts, an n-times ambiguous sentence will have n compatible combinations. In light of this, the function of combinatorial rules is to put forth one or more “compatible combinations” of the scripts evoked by an ambiguous sentence (1985: 86). In Raskin’s example, The paralyzed bachelor hit the colourful ball, each word (with the exception of the definite articles) evokes more than one script. For instance, “paralysed” may refer to a ‘disease’ node or to a ‘moral’ one. In turn, “bachelor” may mean “single,” “academic,” “knight” or even “seal,”

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whereas “hit” may imply ‘collision’ or ‘discovery’, etc. The compatibility of these multiple interpretive alternatives is determined by combinatorial rules, which establish a listing of all possible relationships, and only these. A tag-pair like ‘moral / seal’ for “paralyzed bachelor,” for instance, would be automatically excluded, since a seal cannot be ‘morally’ paralyzed, though it may be so physically. For the sake of illustration, two acceptable combinations that disambiguate the sentence would be: a) A never-married man who couldn’t move (some of) his limbs discovered (found himself at) a large dancing party abundant with bright colours; b) A fur seal which couldn’t move (some of) its limbs pushed (with its nose?) a spherical object painted in bright colours. The fact that the combinatorial rules are versatile, allowing many different interpretations, does not imply that in normal communicative situations the speakers process them all. On the contrary, it is usually the case that they only process one of the combinations. This happens whenever the communication mode is identified as bona-fide, that is, whenever the possibilities of lying, acting, playing or. . . joking are dismissed. In these situations, the combinatorial rules (unlike Katz and Fodor’s “projection rules”) are meant to disambiguate the sentence, putting forth the non-marked scripts of the words. Conversely, if the ambiguous sentence occurs within a non-bona-fide context, the function of the rules changes drastically. Instead of aiming at disambiguating the sentence, and breaking it down to one meaning, they will be used to list all the compatible combinations and all the potential meanings. As will be seen next, in the analysis of the doctor’s wife joke, the combinatorial rules allow for several latent meanings to be placed side by side as being equally compatible. This procedure unveils scripts that overlap and oppose each other – which constitutes (cf. below) the necessary and sufficient conditions for humor to occur.

1.3.

Humor, bona-fide communication and the notion of truth

The notion of bona-fide communication, closely related to the question of truth, is recurrent in Raskin’s book and deserves some attention. Generally speaking, normal communicative situations are supposed to obey Grice’s (1975) ‘cooperative principle’ and as such be in accordance with the purpose of, for instance, transmitting truthful information and avoiding ambiguity, irrelevance and lack of clarity. Conversely, in humour situations (as in the discourse of theatre or poetry) the mode of communication is drastically different. Raskin calls it ‘non-bonafide’ and believes it to play an important role in interpreting comic discourse. When the hearer is caught unawares, s/he may be initially unable to decode the

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humorous meaning of the utterance and may explicitly ask for disambiguation. But usually the humorous discourse is wrapped in cues that allow the hearer to automatically search for the comic alternative meaning. That is why this alternative communication mode should not be regarded as uncooperative – although it does flout Grice’s conversational maxims. Rather, as Raskin claims, speaker and hearer are ‘cooperatively’ engaged in a different type of verbal interaction. To support this claim, Raskin (1985: 103) puts forth what he calls the ‘cooperative principle for the non-bona-fide communication mode of joketelling’, which involves the following maxims: (i) Maxim of Quantity: Give exactly as much information as is necessary for the joke; (ii) Maxim of Quality: Say only what is compatible with the world of the joke; (iii) Maxim of Relation: Say only what is relevant to the joke; (iv) Maxim of Manner: Tell the joke efficiently.

In the nineties, Raskin (1992, 1998) went back to this question. In his ‘Humour and Truth’article (1998: 99), he states: “What makes humour a natural expansion of bona-fide is that both the latter and the joke-telling mode are cooperative.” Indeed, they are both “on the positive pole of the cooperativeness scale,” whereas lying occupies the opposite end. (Let it be noted that the importance of the principle of cooperation is also acknowledged in the narrative humor model to be presented in Ch. 6.) But where does this leave the question of truth, traditionally equated with bona-fide communication? Can humor be regarded as an alternative form of truth? Raskin answers these questions by arguing that it is a fallacy to take the truth as the primary function of language. He points out that the amount of actual new ‘truths’ in daily communication is very scarce; much of it is recycled information, small talk, phatic input. Also, the speakers’ concern to transmit genuinely truthful messages is secondary to other social and gregarious motivations. By extension, humor should not be regarded as a suspension of truth or as a simulacrum of truth. Language and the world(s) it refers to are multi-modal and multifarious, and so are the possible worlds of humour. In light of this, humor is not a second-rate or hierarchically inferior communication mode: it is just alternative and parallel, ruled by its own principles and specificities, which the competent native speaker should master. Two critics of the non-bona-fide principle of joke-telling are worth pointing out. In her famous 1988 article, Zhao offers a “new and serious look at jokes,” claiming that jokes do carry informative potential, and should therefore be regarded as bona-fide. She focuses on ethnic jokes which, if told to hearers that are not familiar with the culture and corresponding stereotypes which such jokes spring from, inform him/her of the nature and existence of such stereotypes. The

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same goes for political jokes, which, she holds, transmit descriptive information by denouncing abusive practices. A second critic is Morreall (2004), who tries to argue that some techniques for creating verbal humor do not imply switching to non-bona-fide communication. He uses examples of informal conversational humor in which he describes how, for instance, he ran over his tennis racquet, and how someone’s wife got everyone in the house confused by setting the clocks back one hour rather than forward. Nothing of this being false, he asks, how can the non-bona-fide mode be activated? Though Morreall’s examples are indeed humorous, because they play on the clumsiness script, they are not joke-texts proper, which are the object of Raskin’s analysis – so they cannot count as counter-examples. 1.4.

Script overlap and script opposition

The SSTH aims to assess the semantic well-formedness of a text and, in case of irregularities, proceed to determine its humorous nature. In order to do so, it activates any necessary portions of the complete semantic network of the language, employs the combinatorial rules to establish possible interpretations, and, given the occurrence of two conditions to be presented next, evaluates the funniness of a text. These two conditions constitute the basis of Raskin’s theory, which he refers to as “main hypothesis” (1985: 99): A text can be characterized as a single-joke-carrying text if both of the [following] conditions are satisfied: (i) The text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts [which overlap]; (ii) The two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite.

The first of these conditions, script overlap, implies that somewhere along the interpretive processing of a text, stretches of it will be compatible with more than one script, i.e. the combinatorial rules will uncover more than one reading. Consider, for instance, a stretch of text where a man suddenly clutches his heart and falls to the ground: this may be interpreted as a cardiac fit, as a clown act or as a parent playing with his kids. Raskin also postulates that script overlap may be total or partial. In the former case, rather less common, the two scripts processed are equally compatible with the text of the joke in its entirety, and there is nothing “odd, redundant or absent” regarding any or the two scripts (1985: 105). Partial overlap, on the other hand, occurs whenever segments of the text, or some details of it, do not fit in with one or the other script. Necessary though it may be, script overlap is not a sufficient condition for humor to exist. Indeed, many non-humorous texts also present ambiguity and

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double meaning – hence, overlapping scripts: this is the case of metaphors, allegories, allusions or, simply, obscure texts. A second condition, script opposition, also has to obtain. Antonymy is an obvious script-opposition technique, as can be seen in some of the joke examples Raskin analyzes: reward vs. punishment, justice vs. corruption, nuisance vs. comfort. But since diagnosing antonymy may sometimes be hard, Raskin also puts forward the notion of local antonymy (a potentially troublesome concept) which he borrows from Lyons (1977: 271– 279) and defines as follows (1985: 108): “two linguistic entities whose meanings are opposite only within a particular discourse and solely for the purposes of this discourse.” It should be noted that Raskin determines three basic classes of script opposition (1985: 111): ‘actual/non-actual, ‘normal vs. abnormal’, and ‘possible vs. impossible’. These classes derive from one major supra-opposition between real and unreal situations, and are instantiated in more concrete oppositions which make up a list of binary categories. Raskin believes these categories to translate the basic oppositions that all jokes are about, even trans-culturally: namely, good/bad, life/death, obscene/non-obscene, money/no-money, high/low stature. An obvious criticism to make is that the first pair (good/bad) could be taken to include all the others (on other criticisms see Chlopicki 1987 and below). Let it be added that the so-called ‘trigger’, which can be either ambiguity or contradiction, operates the passage from the initially processed script to its opposite. It is this element that causes the processing clash and makes the hearer/reader redirect his/her interpretive path. 1.5. An example The famous Doctor’s Wife Joke is Raskin’s choice to demonstrate the SSTH principles (cf. 1985: 117–127), given the text’s medium complexity (it is not based on a simple pun or allusion) and typicality. It reads as follows: “Is the doctor at home?” the patient asked in his bronchial whisper. “No,” the doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered in reply. “Come right in.”

There are two steps to analyzing this joke: first, to list all the senses of the words in the text (e.g. for “doctor”: 1. Academic; 2. Medical; 3. Material; 4. Mechanical; 5. Insect; etc.), and second, to apply the combinatorial rules and select, amongst the different scripts, those that are compatible. At the same time, the reader will activate presupposition mechanisms: for instance, that a) The patient is human; b) The patient is at the door of the doctor’s residence; c) The patient does not know the answer to the question, etc. Besides, the reader will also set in motion inference mechanisms. Hence: a) The patient whispers

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because of a problem with his bronchi or lungs; b) The patient wants the doctor to correct the problem, etc. Using this procedure, the reader will arrive at a first interpretation that can be freely paraphrased as: Somebody who was previously treated for an illness wants to know whether the doctor is physically present in his residence, so as to be treated for a disease whose symptoms include a whispering voice. The doctor’s wife, who is young and pretty, answers, in an equally whispering voice, that the doctor is not at home, and invites the inquirer to enter the house. At this point, the reader reaches an impasse: something in the reading process went wrong. Otherwise, how can the wife’s reply make sense? How can she invite the patient to the house if the doctor is not there to treat the patient and if the doctor script requires physical closeness? These puzzles lead the reader to become aware that the bona-fide interpretation is not viable, and switch to the humorous non-bona-fide mode. In other words, the reader drops the interpretation, backtracks, and reinitiates the combinatorial process, looking for an alternative script. The fact that the person who replies to the patient’s question is female is now considered, as well as her beauty, youth, and the possibility that she may be whispering for a reason different from the patient’s. These findings will pave the way for the activation of the lover script, which includes the condition that if the adulterous subject or object be married, the absent spouse should not be in the know. It is thus possible for the reader to overcome the impasse and understand the wife’s behavior: she is taking advantage of her husband’s absence to have a sex meeting with another man. The lover and the doctor scripts are accordingly found to overlap almost completely, and to be opposed on the sex/no sex basis. As a result, it becomes clear that the text fulfils both conditions of the SSTH ‘main hypothesis’ and that it can be assessed as humorous.

2. General theory of verbal humor In ‘Script Theory Revis(it)ed: Joke Similarity and Joke Representation Model’ (1991), Attardo and Raskin systematically revise the SSTH, as well as Attardo’s 1987 five-level model. The main objective of the so-called General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) is to formulate a hierarchical model of joke representation that quantifies the degree of variation from joke to joke. Each level on this hierarchical model corresponds to, and is determined by, a knowledge resource (KR). The methodology used is to compare seven jokes (seven versions of the light-bulb joke) and expose the variation parameters that characterize them, so as to analyze the nature and function of the knowledge resources that each joke

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employs. Determining the degree of similarity or difference between these jokes entails evaluating the number of knowledge resources they share: the more they share, the more similar they are. The corpus of analysis is the following: (1) How many Poles does it take to screw in a light bulb? Five. One to hold the light bulb and four to turn the table where he’s standing. (2) The number of Polacks needed to screw in a light bulb? Five - one holds the bulb and four turn the table. (3) It takes five Poles to screw in a light bulb: one to hold the light bulb and four to turn the table he’s standing. (4) How many Irishmen does it take to screw in a light bulb? Five. One to hold the light bulb and four to turn the table where he’s standing. (5) How many Poles does it take to wash a car? Two. One to hold the sponge and one to move the car back and forth. (6) How many Poles does it take to screw in a light bulb? Five. One to hold the light bulb and four to look for the right screwdriver. (7) How many Poles does it take to screw in a light bulb? Five. One to take his shoes off, get on the table, and screw in the light bulb, and four to wave the air deodorants to kill his foot odor.

2.1.

Knowledge resources

Language (LA) is a KR that contains the whole range of phonetic, morphological, syntactic, lexical and pragmatic choices to be made when wording a joke. In the sample above, LA is the only knowledge resource that differentiates the two first jokes: with the exception of syntactic and lexical choices, the two texts are paraphrases. This is an example that referential (de re) jokes, unlike verbal (de dicto) ones, allow for changes of form without loss of meaning. This also explains why many jokes travel easily: if they are well translated, the humorous content remains unscathed and may meet with a culturally receptive audience. Conversely, jokes based on wordplay are difficult, if not impossible, to recast. It should also be noted that the importance of language is paramount in punch lines: anyone trying to tell a joke knows how delicate and subtle the punch line moment is, and how easily the words may fail. The second KR to consider is narrative strategy (NS). Joke number three above differs from all others on one aspect alone: that it is not a riddle, or pseudoriddle, but an affirmative sentence.The other six jokes are cast as a pseudo-riddle, since the hearer is not expected to give an answer and accordingly no pause is made. Other narrative strategies include expository sequences, question-answer pairs, triple sequences, asides, slogans, etc. The NS parameter is also important to differentiate jokes from longer humorous texts: the same humorous content

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can take the form of a joke (and, within this category, any of the above NSs), or a short story, or even part of a novel. The third KR is target (TA) and indicates who the butt of the joke is. Only the fourth joke in the corpus is targeted at an ethnic group other than the Poles, namely the Irish. But all seven jokes are aggressive in the sense that they are about an absurd way to fulfil a simple task and they assign this behavior to a specific group (on aggressiveness and hostility theories of humor, see Ch. 1). Choosing the Poles rather than the Irish, or the Belgian, or the Portuguese, is a matter of stereotyping that has deserved sociological attention (cf. Davies 1990). It should also be noted that the simple mention of the word ‘Pole’ or ‘Belgian’ often functions as a cue to switch to the humorous mode. Jokes that are neither aggressive nor directed at any butt cannot be considered under this parameter, which makes it “optional” (cf. Attardo 2001: 31). The situation (SI) is the KR that distinguishes the fifth joke from the rest: instead of changing the light bulb, the joke is about washing a car. The so-called “props” of the situation parameter are the objects, participants, instruments, activities, etc. that illustrate it. Any joke has to be “about” something – changing bulbs, getting married, making dinner – but so have all other texts. This KR, then, can be regarded as not being exclusive to humorous texts. The logical mechanism (LM) is the fifth parameter which, in the corpus above, sets the sixth joke apart from the others. Whereas the “figure-ground reversal” is the LM that characterizes the remaining jokes, joke number 6 illustrates the “false analogy” LM. Of course, moving the table instead of the bulb is logically possible, though it is absurd and energy/time-consuming. More flawed in logical terms is joke 5, to the extent that moving a car back and forth does not allow it to be properly washed, i.e. it is ineffective. Joke number 6, meanwhile, establishes a false analogy between changing a bulb and using a screwdriver. Other logical mechanisms include paralogim, chiasmus, false priming (a.k.a. garden path), etc. A good deal of research on the LM parameter has been done, especially on its troublesome nature (cf. Attardo 2001: 32), and other logical mechanisms besides those initially presented have been added, such as field restriction, perspective change, missing link, and so on. This goes much beyond the two sole script-switch triggers put forth in the SSTH, namely ambiguity and contradiction. The sixth and last KR is the script opposition (SO) requirement postulated in Raskin’s SSTH. Joke number 7 above differs from the others because it evokes a dirtiness script instead of a dumbness one: the butt of the joke suffers from foot odor instead of being plain stupid. Being indispensable for humor to occur, the SO parameter is also regarded as the most abstract on the KR list.

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Joke variation and KR hierarchy

Having established the list of KRs, the authors go on to assess the degree of variation of the jokes in the corpus. Thus, the jokes are found to differ in terms of one KR alone, coinciding on all others – hence the fact that they are rather similar. For instance, the second joke differs from all others on the basis of LA, whereas the third differs in terms of NS, the fourth with regard to TA, the fifth SI, etc. As Attardo and Raskin point out, each joke can be considered in relation to any other as one-difference pairs. If they were to differ on more than one KR, they would occupy a lower similarity level. As a result, “a number of different choices is reversely proportionate to similarity” (1991: 322). It should also be noted that joke number 2 is the most similar one to the basic joke because language, namely a slightly different wording, is the only parameter that sets them apart. Conversely, joke number 7 is the most distant, since it activates a different script. Assessing the degree of variation between the jokes helps to establish a hierarchy of KRs and consequently a hierarchical model of joke representation, going from the highest and most abstract level to the lowest and most concrete one. To be precise: SO→LM→SI→TA→NS→LA. The details of how to order the medium parameters are highly technical and go beyond the scope of this brief discussion. What is relevant to point out is that the 6-element hierarchical model also provides an abstract model of joke generation (the concept is claimed to be used in strictly logical, Chomskyan, terms). This means that it provides a dynamic description of a process in which choices of several ingredients are made on different logical levels. Of course, the order presented lacks any temporal significance: a lower level is not a level that comes later. In fact, the empirical and psychological process of producing a joke is useless and clueless in trying to establish a KR hierarchy. Therefore, even though the GTVH model does set a KR order, it does not imply that speakers produce jokes in the same order (e.g. starting by thinking of the SO and moving down to language choices). As Attardo and Raskin stress, this is meant to be, rather than a joke-production model, a joke-analysis one, i.e. a template that allows distinguishing a (potential) joke from a non-joke.

2.3. A ‘general’ theory The GTVH openly assumes a universal stance, which its very name conveys. Whereas the SSTH is held to be a linguistic (semantic) theory of humor, the present proposal springs from, and feeds on, a much wider array of disciplinary

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contributions to humor research. As the authors remark, this is the case of, for instance, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, mathematics, rhetoric, political science, history, literary studies and discourse analysis. A second, related, characteristic of the GTVH is its essentialist nature. The question it aims at answering is the general “what is humor?” one. The why and how of the use of humor do not concern it. These research paths are dealt with by disparagement theories and release theories of humor. Like the SSTH, the GTVH addresses the “what” question, which incidentally lies also at the core of incongruity theories. Yet, Attardo and Raskin openly dismiss this affiliation on the grounds that not all SOs can be mechanically classified as an incongruity (though simple negation and contradiction obviously can), and that the SSTH and the GTVH make no use of arousal-resolution elements, as most incongruitybased approaches do. The authors go on to claim that the GTVH gains nothing from being equated with the incongruity paradigm, because it is “much better defined, developed, and explicated than a regular incongruity-based theory” (1991: 331).

3. Cognitive joke model Also in 1991, Rachel Giora published ‘On the Cognitive Aspects of the Joke’. The article represents substantial progress in the comprehension of the cognitive principles and concept-formation processes regulating the joke. By gathering elements from cognitive psychology, information theory and pragmatics, Giora proposes a humor model that concentrates on the surprise element and stipulates the conditions for joke well-formedness. Giora’s model is a follow-up to an earlier sketch (1988) and it is complemented by a 1995 addendum. A more recent contribution (2003) recasts some of the principles at stake in the present discussion under a new, though not incompatible, light. It should be noted that the jokes under focus are cases of semantic ambiguity only, which dismisses from consideration syntactic or pragmatic humor. Before stating the conditions for joke well-formedness, Giora discusses two operational concepts: informativeness and markedness. 3.1.

Operational concepts: informativeness and markedness

Giora (1991: 467) begins by defining informativeness along the lines of classical information theory (cf. Shannon and Weaver 1949; Shannon 1951; Attneave 1959): “a message is informative relative to the number of uncertainties it either

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reduces or eliminates relative to a question.” The more numerous the alternative answers, the more informative the chosen one will be. Besides, in terms of probability, the most informative element in a set is the least probable one. Giora goes on to refine the notion by using input from psychological categorization theories (e.g. Rosch and Mervis 1975), particularly the notion of category inclusion. For an entity to belong to a given set, or category, it must resemble the other entities of that set in at least one feature. The common features shared by the members in the set make up its ‘categorial redundancy’ structure. Conversely, the information which is additional, i.e., which members do not share and which makes them distinctive, is regarded as informative. By extension, the most informative member is the least similar one to the redundancy structure of that category – in other words, it is the least redundant. Besides, it is also the least accessible, i.e. the most distant from the category prototypical member (the member that represents the category redundancy structure). Therefore, it is not surprising that informativeness involves surprise value: not only is the informative member the least accessible, but also the least probable and predictable, i.e. the most surprising in a set. In textual terms, informativeness concerns a hierarchical organization of textual information, based on categorial principles. Since longer texts are the focus of the present book, it seems appropriate to dwell on this point for a paragraph or two. Initially (in 1988) Giora considered non-narrative texts only, but later on she broadened her analysis so as to include narrative texts as well, on the grounds that the “narrative/non-narrative distinction is not dichotomous, but a matter of degree” (1995: 488). According to Giora (1988: 470), the internal structure of a text is determined by a prototypical proposition called Discourse Topic, which encompasses the highest degree of conceptual intersections with other propositions in a given set. In others words, the Discourse Topic is the least informative message that “governs the rest of the messages in a text” (1991: 467). Linguistically, the Discourse Topic is a salient and accessible textual constituent, apt to function as a reference point. At surface structure level, it usually occupies the initial position, thus playing the role of the text’s organizational entry. Each new proposition, obeying the Relevance Principle, will be processed in terms of, and assessed in relation to, the prototypical proposition. It could be added that, by contrast, the humorous text, in Giora’s model, consists of establishing a sense divergent from the Discourse Topic. Giora (1988: 482) traces her notion of textual informativeness back to a linguistic tradition that initially analyzed the information structure at sentence level. Historically, the Prague School coined the term ‘rheme’ to refer to a sentence constituent that adds information to the topic.As Giora recalls, Mathesius (1939) conceives of this constituent as the means by which the speaker predicts some-

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thing regarding the topic, whereas Halliday (1967) equates the theme/rheme pair with the given/new dichotomy. Danes (1975) and Lappin (1979), she continues, suggest that the rheme of a sentence constitutes the theme of the next. In light of these foundational notions, Giora claims that ironical, metaphorical and, in particular, humorous texts deserve special attention. Before moving on to discuss Giora’s notion of markedness, let us divert for a moment longer and take a look at Beaugrande and Dressler’s (1981) seminal discussion of informativeness. Being regarded as a central element in their notion of textuality, informativeness is conceived as a content-related element and defined in terms of “the extent to which presented materials are new or unexpected, [hence] exerting important controls on the selection and arrangement of options in texts” (1981: 160). Among the three types of informativeness which Beaugrande and Dressler devise, it is the ‘third-order’ type that more obsviously concerns the analysis of comic texts. Third-order informativeness includes the so-called ‘discontinuities’ and ‘discrepancies’, which consist of new meaning patterns that disagree with stored information. The reader’s role is to search for their ‘motivation’, and discover the meaning of the problematic occurrence among a set of less accessible and less probable interpretive choices. The notion of expectation is very useful in this regard: interpreting a text involves ordering information into organized patterns which integrate new information and establish bridges among the data. The different types of text – be they a scientific report, a newspaper column, a dialogue on the street or a poem – activate different expectations and reading patterns. Of course, it could be added that jokes also activate certain expectations, but their role is exactly to defraud them and produce highly informative messages with strong surprise effects. The second relevant concept in Giora’s framework is markedness, whose history deserves a short preface too. As Crystal (1990: 211) points out, the notion also stems from the Prague School, where it was initially conceived in phonological terms: a phoneme is marked with regard to its distinctive feature (e.g. [+voiced]). In lexico-semantic terms, it came to imply ‘specificity’ (in the dog/bitch pair, for instance, the latter term is specific insofar as it is gendermarked). Generative linguistics moved on to assign it ‘exceptional’ character: a marked property constitutes the exception and as such is regarded as a ‘relative universal’. In sociolinguistics, markedness is regarded as carrying prejudice: in her feminist critique of language, Cameron (1985: 67), for example, considers the arguments that segregate feminine gender as a specific, non-generic, nonneutral and less frequent category to be male-centred and fallacious. Giora (1991: 469) understands markedness in terms of the notions of categorial inclusion and accessibility. On the one hand, the unmarked members of a given set are the least informative – i.e. the ones that are prototypical and best

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represent the set, being the most accessible. By contrast, the marked members are the least typical and least accessible, or rather the most informative, marginal and surprising in the category. In textual terms, Giora points out, standard expository texts are considered informative to the extent that they evolve gradually from the least to the most informative stages, but they are not markedly informative. Conversely, jokes are markedly informative, because their final messages are, in Giora’s words (ibid.), “too distant, in terms of number of similar features, from the messages preceding them.” This is one of the requirements for joke well-formedness, as will be shown next.

3.2.

Conditions for joke well-formedness

Giora (1991: 470–471) postulates three requirements for a joke-text to be considered well-formed: a) Relevance: Following up on Grice (1975), this condition requires that the joke’s marked constituent (unveiled upon final reading) be “least relevant but not irrelevant, that is, not entirely distant [from] or unrelated [to]” (1991: 470) the Discourse Topic, a.k.a. prototypical member, which conversely has to “bear maximal conceptual intersections with the other members of the linguistic set” evoked in the joke. b) Marked Informativeness: This condition requires that a joke “end on a markedly informative, i.e., almost inaccessible constituent” (ibid.). Two situations may occur: the last constituent is marked either because it is an extremely marginal member of the category evoked by the joke, or because it is a prototypical (unmarked) member of a different/neighboring category. It follows that the joke does not evolve gradually (thus violating the Graded Informativeness Requirement regulating standard texts) from the least to the most informative/marked text constituent; rather, it does so abruptly. In terms of cognitive distance, the text’s last constituent, a.k.a. the punch line, shares the least amount of common features with the previous constituents. c) Linear Shift: This condition requires that the first unmarked interpretation be canceled upon processing the second marked interpretation. In other words, it requires that the two interpretations do not coexist, as happens in metaphors, similes, advertisements and, Giora stresses, witty texts. All these cases obey both a) and b) above, which proves that these two requirements overgenerate, and thus are not sufficient to define humorous texts. Therefore, the third condition is necessary as a constraint on the previous two conditions: in jokes, Linear Shift requires that the second meaning erase the first one, instead of subsisting side by side with it.

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3.3. An example So as to apply and test the three conditions for joke well-formedness, Giora chooses the following (rather feeble) joke: “Did you take a bath?” a man asked his friend who had just returned from a resort place. “No,” his friend replied, “only towels.”

The range of activities that one can do in a resort place includes ‘taking a sun bath’, ‘taking a mud bath’, ‘taking a swim in the hot spring’, and obviously enough, ‘taking a bath’. The latter member is prototypical, or redundant, in the set given that it shares various common features with the other members in that set. ‘Taking towels’, however, is not a prototypical member, frequent though it may be. Rather, ‘taking/stealing towels’, which is an extension of the unexpected interpretation of taking a bath as stealing a bath, is very informative, i.e., marked, marginal and distant in cognitive terms from the prototypical members, which makes it almost inaccessible and certainly very surprising. Nevertheless, it is not irrelevant relative to the other members in the category, that is, its dissimilarity is not such that prevents it from being included in the category. If the punch line were, say, “No,” his friend replied. “Only a bus,” the text would not be a joke, since “taking buses” is not eligible for inclusion in the resort place category – actually, it is unrelated and hence irrelevant. Therefore, the text proves to obey the Relevance Condition. Secondly, the joke-text does not progress gradually from the least informative to the most informative constituent: it does so abruptly. In this way, it violates the Graded Informativeness Requirement regulating normal informative texts. If the punch line were “No,” his friend replied, “just a shower. But, to tell you the truth, I also did what most Israelis do in hotels, I took ash-trays and towels” (1991: 475), it would be the reverse case and it would fail to be a joke (actually, this is largely why, as Giora [1991: 483] remarks, “explaining a joke kills it by filling the gap”). Indeed, this alternative text evolves from the least to the most informative constituent, but it does so gradually, supplying intermediate messages that progressively fill in the information spectrum. So, the text under focus also proves to obey the Marked Informativeness Condition. Thirdly, the initial, unmarked meaning of ‘taking a bath’is replaced by ‘stealing a bath’, given the subsequent ‘stealing towels’ constituent. In other words, the semantic ambiguity underlying the occurrence of the verb to take is solved by ‘canceling’, or ‘erasing’, the unmarked sense and establishing a marked one. In advertisements and metaphors, for instance, the two meanings are deliberately sustained, and one is not able to obliterate the other in interpretive terms.

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In jokes, conversely, the recipients shift from an initial interpretation to another one, dropping the former altogether, so as to allow the text to make sense. Consequently, the text proves to obey the Linear Shift Condition. All in all, Giora’s example passes the three-requirement test, and is thus regarded as a well-formed joke-text. It should be noted, in passing, that Giora (1991: 482–483) mentions two further principles that humorous texts must observe: emotional detachment and ease of processing. These pragmatics-based notions explain why unfunny texts with surprise endings and detective stories are not counterexamples to Giora’s model. The former flout the disparagement motivation in humor, in that the heroes of these stories do not provoke the readers’ derision or arouse their emotions; whereas the latter demand too much processing effort to produce comic pleasure, besides being ‘gradually’, rather than ‘markedly’, construed in terms of informativeness. An important detail to point out is that Giora dismisses Raskin’s notion of script opposition vis-`a-vis the question of markedness and the related notion of asymmetry. As she puts it, her Marked Informativeness requirement excludes Raskin’s ‘script oppositeness’, because “opposition does not necessarily pertain to asymmetrical relation” (1991: 474). In her model, conversely, the two constituents evoked by the joke have to “be asymmetrically related so that the final interpretation is informatively marked” (ibidem). In a later study (2003) Giora seems to take a different stance. There, she puts forth a ‘Graded Salience Hypothesis’, according to which the resolution of some forms of humorous, punning and ironic incongruities involves, as she puts it (2003: 178), a “slight twist that results in some change of the original, salient meaning, which is still recoverable and partakes in the construction of the new meaning.” In this view, interpreting humorous texts involves a dual process: first, processing unexpected, marked meanings, which are incongruous, and second, resolving what was incongruous at first sight by acknowledging the marked use. Of course, as in the 1991 text, markedness is inversely proportional to salience: the more marked, the less salient – and the later to appear along the textual axis. The relevance of Giora’s contribution to the analysis of comic narratives offered in the present book will be made clearer in the 6th chapter.

4. Linguistic approaches to comic narratives Given the three theoretical proposals just discussed, it remains to be seen how far the principles they put forth are applicable to longer discursive sequences, in particular to the comic literary narrative. How are such texts organized? Much in

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the same way as jokes, by using the mechanisms analyzed above in a recurrent or extended manner? Or is it by using other resources that create a different textual configuration? Let us look for the answer to these questions amongst the restricted set of linguistic approaches to narrative comedy. Of course, narrative humor is not necessarily a written, let alone literary, phenomenon, nor does it have to be ‘long’ in sequential terms. A short joke may indeed, as it often does, display a narrative format, much in the same way as many funny episodes told orally assume an undeniable narrative character. However, the focus of this book is the humorous literary narrative, more specifically the comic short story. Therefore, it is to this object that the references to ‘humorous narrative’ and ‘narrative humor’ are geared.

4.1.

Morin’s disjunctive articulation

A pioneering contribution to the analysis of narrative humor took place in 1966, when Violette Morin published, in a famous issue of Communications (a French journal of structural narrative analysis), an essay entitled ‘L’Histoire Drˆole’(‘The funny story’). Using a corpus of 180 short narratives published in a daily paper, she set out to examine the connections between these short comic sequences, so as to find and classify “certain construction regularities.” Following up on Greimas, Morin reduced the stories into a single sequence that unfolds into three parts: to introduce, to argue, and to solve a problem. These three parts correspond to another three functions, which allegedly preside over the construction of any humorous text: a normalization function, which introduces the characters and the fictional situation; a triggering function, which introduces the problem to solve; and a disjunction function, which “comically solves the problem.” Consider one of the examples provided by Morin: an African claims that there are no more cannibals (normalization function). Are you sure?, asks the reporter (triggering function). Yes; the last three were eaten a few days ago (disjunction function). This third function is operated by means of a ‘disjunctor’ (or switch-peg) which establishes a change from a serious interpretation to a comic one. This element usually consists of a lexical quibble, or semantic pun, but it can also be a referential detail that prompts several interpretations. These two broad types of disjunctors can be articulated according to three possibilities: a) blocked articulation (when two parallel narratives are caught within a vicious circle), b) regressive articulation (when an absurd meaning makes the narrative go back to a ‘zero stage’ of interpretation), and c) progressive articulation (when

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a new meaning ‘rehabilitates’ the endangered logic and makes the narrative progress). Morin’s model obviously feeds on incongruity theories of humor, and it proves operational for the analysis of longer humorous narratives. In fact, Morin’s examples are all, as she emphasizes, the result of an adaptation and simplification of the original narrative, which is reduced to a single sequence. Of course, her matrix does not cover all narrative formats, nor does it account for the various layers of information in a longer narrative. Be that as it may, it is an original and quite revolutionary contribution to the study of a textual genre that remained overlooked for the following two decades.

4.2.

Nash’s modes of comic expansion

The distinction between the joke formula and longer comic narratives is one of the central issues that Walter Nash addresses in The Language of Humor (1985). This eclectic book, with an emphasis on the stylistics of humor, was published in the same year as Raskin’s, but Nash’s approach is more analytical and descriptive, instead of assuming a synthetic or systematic stance. It uses a lavish textual corpus, ranging from canned jokes and popular sayings to advertisements, graffiti, and extracts from comic literary fiction, humorous poetry and parody. The objective is to understand how the humorous act functions at the cultural, interpersonal and linguistic levels. These three dimensions constitute three modes of comic expansion which I will briefly outline next. First, the cultural mode of expansion covers the set of literary, ethnographic and socio-historical references which make up the culture shared by a group. This so-called genus provides a wide range of comic material, which encompasses cultural stereotypes, behavioral patterns, artistic and literary conventions, institutions, prejudices, traditions and artefacts. It is comparable to a reservoir of references from which humor derives and on whose basis it is established. From this emerge several forms of allusion (e.g. to political facts, philosophical maxims, literary quotes, everyday events) and types of parody (e.g. of literary styles, social attitudes and conventions). Secondly, the interpersonal mode of comic expansion relates to the interactional dimension of humor as an act established between a performer (be it a comedian on a stage, a writer or a character within a story), who manipulates and controls the information, and a respondent (the audience, the reader or another character), who infers and decodes it, according to established rituals and predictability patterns. As Nash puts it, “humor is an occurrence in a social play,” and it is established interactively. The rules of this game, which are

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culture-specific, are therefore implicit and taken for granted on both poles of the communicative axis. Thirdly, the linguistic mode of expansion includes various graphological, phonetic, morpho-syntactic and semantic strategies belonging to the traditional realm of stylistics. Studying the language, or locus, of a joke means breaking it down to its structural components, such as mimesis (or the recurrence and variation of syntactic structures), coupling mechanisms (like rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, etc.) and semantic concord and discord (as is the case of synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy). Yet, as Nash (1985: 12) claims, “linguistics in the strictest sense may not comprehend the humorous activity of language.” Language must be understood in the wider context of cultural and historical practice. In light of this three-fold framework, Nash attempts at determining the specificity of the longer humorous narrative. Although some passages of narrative comedy resemble simple jokes (and are in fact analysable on their own as such), he defends that the elements which design the humor in the narrative at large derive from the specific context of the story, not surviving independently of it. These elements, as Nash (1985: 68) explains, “may not be jokes in the formal sense, but they are nonetheless jokey.” A distinction should therefore be made between formulaic jokes – autonomous sequences mostly emerging in the characters’ direct speech – and what Nash calls formulates – elements whose comic potential only makes sense within the specific context of the narrative. These formulates are usually provided by the narrator, as comments, reflections, or asides bearing on the humorous value of an event, situation or micro-narrative. But they can also occur along extended stretches of the text, as “a loosely-linked series of short narratives that arise out of, and in many cases make ‘infrastructural’ comment on, the central theme” (1985: 65). If removed from the context, these humorous occurrences would hardly survive. Hence the importance of the notion of central theme, or root joke, which according to Nash (1985: 70) is the element operating the internal cohesion in the text and bringing together the loose elements making up the narrative. In a nutshell, Nash’s contribution to understanding narrative humor emphasizes that instead of a mere addition of separate parts, or a sum of loose jokes, the comic narrative should be regarded as a whole resulting from complex interrelations between the various linguistic and structural elements. It also stresses that a linguistic analysis cannot bear fruit without a wider interpersonal and cultural framework of analysis.

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Chlopicki’s application of script theory to short stories

The first systematic attempt at applying the SSTH to texts longer than the joke took place in 1987, when Wlasdyslaw Chlopicki analyzed a corpus of five Polish short stories. The basic assumption underlying his study is that script oppositions, similar to the ones operating in jokes, also characterize the organization of short stories, but along extended narrative sequences. These sequences assume three different formats, or structural layouts. The first one is escalation (on this, see also Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 170ff.), which determines an obvious progression in the order of events from a less serious to a more serious arrangement, or from a less improbable to a more improbable design. In Smoke Outlet, one of the stories in Chlopicki’s corpus of analysis, the accidents become more and more violent as the story unfolds, at the same time as the characters’ reactions become more and more implausible. The second format is variation, which occurs whenever a script opposition is actualized more than once, either because different triggers set it off, or because it appears in different situations. For example, in From the Diary of a Prudent Woman, the use of the phrase I wonder triggers the STUPIDITY script repeatedly. The third structural format is accumulation, whereby the resolution of comic information is constantly postponed until a final or pre-final stage in the narrative. Stories built in this way are comparable to very long jokes whose punch line occurs at the very end of the text. Although Chlopicki puts forth these three types of humorous narratives, he concedes that it is very difficult to articulate them with a script analysis approach, given that the latter lacks the means to process macrostructures. Another major obstacle to face in applying the script analysis method to narratives is, according to Chlopicki, subjectivity. Given the absence of what might be called a dictionary of all the scripts in a natural language, the analyst of a specific linguistic situation is bound to view it and classify it from a personal standpoint. A partial solution to this problem is the concept of shadow opposition, which allows at least two different interpretations of a given opposition to be mapped from the beginning of the analysis. But the concept of shadow opposition also applies, quite significantly, to a deeper script opposition, which lies beneath the surface structure and is responsible for the humorous character of the utterance. So as to refine this notion, as well as others, Chlopicki tries to expand on Raskin’s terminology relative to the types of script oppositions. Three new categories emerge: much/little; absence/presence; and necessary/unnecessary (besides true/false, which Raskin also briefly mentions, cf. 1985: 113). Another terminological novelty is the introduction of the concept of background script

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(1987: 113), the linguistic equivalent to the setting in literary theory. These background (or major) scripts are identifiable by the reader on the initial lines of the text, and they function as a slot-filling frame throughout the reading process. Chlopicki claims that these scripts are responsible for most of the oppositions in the text, which is an interesting point, but lacks more careful elaboration. With regard to script-switch triggers, Chlopicki chooses not to list them, because, he claims, they are diffused and scattered along the textual sequence. Besides, sometimes an opposition results from another opposition instead of a specific trigger, which is due to a chaining mechanism guided by causality and repetition. In both cases, each new opposition points to scripts which the reader has already processed, often at the very beginning of the text. This confirms the importance of an overall view of the narrative, lest the meaning of a particular occurrence be lost from its context. The important concept of supra script opposition, which in my view is essential to analyzing a short story hierarchically, is never postulated by Chlopicki, but he does come close to it in a few passages. For instance, he takes the apartment script in Smoke Outlet, processed at the initial textual stages, as the basis for the subsequent analysis, and he regards the corresponding opposition – normal vs. abnormal apartment – as indispensable for understanding the text as a whole. Besides, the diagram summing up the main oppositions in the text, which is presented at the end of each textual analysis, is tantamount, according to Chlopicki (1987: 56), to the “main idea” of the story, which may be understood as the one presiding over the rest. Also, consider his remarks a propos of Slon: “An ‘A’ opposition seems to prevail in the text of the story, except in the first and last paragraph, because the story is ‘about’ a deceit scheme” (p. 118). However, these general remarks are never fully developed. In short, Chlopicki’s 1987 attempt at expanding on Raskin’s model is a valuable exercise that proves, quite early on, that script theory is operative in longer narrative texts. Still, some methodological cornerstones – like script-switch triggers and the notion of macroscript – were to wait for another decade before Chlopicki tackled them. In fact, it was not until 1997 that he scrutinized these problems again. In an article he co-authored with Attardo (but, as he grants, “with a clear bias towards [my] proposals and opinions”), the question of script activation, or more specifically, of what textual and linguistic indicators activate a script, is addressed again. The answer found is three-fold: a) The script is activated directly, through lexical items; b) The script is activated implicitly, through presuppositions, inferences and “accommodations”; c) The script is activated along a chain, through phrases, clauses and longer sequences in the text. A second question to which Chlopicki goes back is the extent to which scripts are organized hierarchically, according to different layers or levels. Besides the

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basic level of individual scripts, the humorous narrative consists of a wider range of scripts, which go by the name of macroscripts and meta-scripts. The former – quite like the notion of supra-scripts I will put forth in Chapter 6 – are responsible for the repetition of certain motifs along the stories, being activated lexically. The latter constitute a larger category, being understood both as character frames, to be filled in with information about a character as the story evolves, and as scripts resulting from two or more levels overlapping (for instance, when a script evoked by a character is referred to by the narrator). In light of his previous work, this later contribution by Chlopicki is one important step in attempting to consider overlapping levels of information – instead of a mere sequential structure – in the organization of comic narratives.

4.4.

Palmer’s semantico-pragmatic framework

In an article published in 1988, “Theory of comic narrative: semantic and pragmatic elements,” which was later developed in Taking Humor Seriously (1994), Jerry Palmer sheds light on the study of the humorous narrative text. He begins by critically reviewing two paradigms: those that are based on literary criticism and those that are based on joke theories. Then, he presents some foundational elements of an alternative theoretical model, situated within the area of discourse analysis, which addresses the social circumstances under which a text is received by an audience. He also tries to distinguish between jokes as selfcontained semantic units and narratives as superordinate structures. The first theoretical paradigm which Palmer outlines uses traditional insights from literary theory. He illustrates it by mentioning Suzanne Langer, who in Feeling and Form (1953) distinguishes between comedy and tragedy by stating that the threats to the comic hero’s happiness are never internalized. The tragic hero, she claims, internalizes the unhappiness imposed by the circumstances, and exhibits the typical self-questioning frame of tragedy. Therefore, according to Langer, there is no intrinsic connection between comedy and humor: some comedy makes one laugh, yes, but many comic plays do not do so at all. Palmer agrees that there are many canonical examples of the latter case, “where there is not much relationship between the desire to amuse (in the humorous sense) and the basic forms of comic narrative” (1988: 113). Still, he adds, the comic impact of a narrative written a few centuries ago may be irretrievable at the present time, away from the historical and cultural circumstances that determined it.As he puts it (1988: 114): “The well-known uncertainties about which bits of Shakespeare’s comedies are or were intended to be funny is a clear illustration of this principle”

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The second paradigm which Palmer reviews conceives the text as a structure composed of a sequence of individual jokes, whose semantic properties constitute the source of comic pleasure to be experienced. The nature of jokes, as told in everyday situations, and the nature of comic narratives are intrinsically similar. If the former theoretical paradigm seems to be directed at canonical comedy, theories of this second type look more appropriate, Palmer ventures, for analyzing the comic products of the mass media, which express common present-day humorous formulae, but also the music hall and boulevard traditions. The distinctive feature of such humorous forms is, according to Palmer, that the narrative is little more than a way to fit as many jokes as possible into a temporally feasible sequence that entertains the masses. In light of this, TV sitcoms are typical humorous narratives which feature a group of characters showing crystallized forms of interaction and which represent a series of similar situations that are to be repeated in each new episode. Palmer goes on to explain the reason why both theoretical paradigms are inadequate. The former is incapable of explaining why a comic narrative is humorous – when and if it is so, given that some comedies are not considered humorous to begin with. The latter fails to explain the way in which jokes and narratives are articulated. If the individual joke is to be taken as the humorous basis of the narrative, how is it framed within the text as a whole? Palmer postulates an alternative theoretical framework on the basis of the principle that “any theory of comic narrative imperatively demands a theory of funniness, some theory which explains the difference between what is funny and what is not” (1988: 114). The second major principle is that any joke, or textual element that evokes a humorous response, should be understood as part of a discourse. Their meaning, so often based on connotation, is carefully positioned in rhetorical terms so that it leads to and departs from the rest of the story. The humorous elements are thus organized sequentially “in such a way that the relationship between the statements that compose individual jokes serves as the basis for further jokes or for non-humorous elements of the narrative” (1988: 116). This is an important claim, for it helps to establish the nature of individual humorous elements within the narrative as part of a context, from which they cannot be estranged. The third principle is that the humorous text is to be understood extralinguistically. In other words, the comic meaning is to be sought as a negotiation between the text and the audience, and as such, determined by sociological and cultural factors. Art, Palmer claims, is created and received within a specific historical situation. That is why “types of humor vary with types of occasion” (1988: 22). For instance, ancient Greece’s rituals in honour of Dionysius, which culminated in the sophisticated comedic form of Aristophanes, are considered

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obscene from a Renaissance point of view, even though they spring from a religious framework. This proves that the criteria of what is acceptable or appropriate on the stage evolve historically and vary across geograpgies and cultures. The performance of humor, its acknowledgement and acceptance, constitute a process that is negotiated on a social and interpersonal level. As Palmer puts it, the comprehension of how humor works “is inseparable from the enunciative dimension” (1994b: 229, 233). Therefore, the humorous narrative must be studied from a semantic and pragmatic perspective simultaneously. The objective, Palmer (1988: 125) claims, “is to argue for a less text-centred approach to the study of humor, for an approach that is as sensitive to the structure of occasion and audience as to the structure of texts.” Notwithstanding the usefulness of this assertion from a sociological perspective, Palmer’s emphasis on the reactions of the audience seems to miss the point. Regardless of the type of reaction a comic text triggers, the focus of analysis should be the set of characteristics which, in the text, make it a potentially humorous product. Like Raskin, I believe that the perlocutionary effect of a humorous text should not be the analyst’s core concern. Rather, so as to establish the nature of the humorous textual genre, one has to seek the necessary and sufficient conditions for it to be funny in illocutionary terms, that is, for it to be intended as humorous. A second criticism to make of Palmer’s contribution is that, although it is programmatically valid, it lacks explanatory power. In other words, it correctly sets the methodological principles underlying the study of humorous narratives, but it does not actually study them, or provide a definite model for analysis.

4.5.

Holcomb: nodal humor in comic narratives

Christopher Holcomb’s (1992) analysis of comic narratives departs from the important assumption that such texts function, not as a succession of jokes, but as an interdependent structure of elements that are based on one or more central semantic cores. These cores are called ‘nodal points’ and constitute specific textual instances that concentrate humorous information and function as “detailed accounts of the fostering narrative” (p. 235). They are also understood in the Raskinian sense of script opposition, on two levels: taken separately, each nodal point contains one or several script oppositions; taken together, they contribute to the overall meaning of the text by alluding to other, broader, oppositions. Holcomb’s corpus of analysis consists of two short stories by Twain and Wodehouse, namely Journalism in Tennessee and Ukridge’s Accident Syndicate. Twain’s story is the narration of a series of violent attacks on the newspaper edi-

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tor, which end up victimizing the narrator. This text displays a sequence of nodal points which, in spite of having humorous potential per se, only function fully if considered on a par with broader oppositions that shape the story as a whole. In microstructural terms, each nodal point activates a script opposition (cf. violence vs. calm), based on the tension between the content of the passage (i.e. highly violent and disturbing events) and the form with which the narrator tells his tale – imperturbably. On a macrostructural level, each of these nodal points feeds on other oppositions, which pervade through the text. For instance, the convalescence script is imported from the initial part of the story and placed against the violence script, thus creating a humorous clash that constitutes a thematic pillar in the story. Therefore, the nodal points only make full humorous sense when taken together. Also, as they anticipate and retrieve meanings along the textual axis, they tend to be repeated or construed parallelistically. As Holcomb rightly puts it, “once a script has been evoked and firmly established, it continues to resonate throughout the story” (p. 244). This echo is established by means of textual clues that are spread out as the text progresses (p. 249). In short, Holcomb’s contribution offers significant insight into the study of narrative humor, even though it falls short of a formally rigorous model. For instance, the question of how to connect the local oppositions with the global, macrostructural, ones is not addressed, nor is a linguistic method of identification of such oppositions. The notions of allusion and evocation also require a better definition if they are to be promoted to the status of exclusive analytic tools. All in all, a key point to highlight is that the article does raise the importance of articulating different levels of analysis, thus paving the way for a vertically oriented approach such as the one I will attempt to design in due course.

4.6. Attardo’s linear model In Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis (2001), Attardo sets out to expand on his (and Raskin’s) GTVH (1991) by applying it to longer texts – not only narrative ones, but also dramatic and conversational texts. His point of departure is that longer comic texts are exclusively linear structures, which can be divided into two classes: those that are structurally similar to jokes, i.e., end on a punch line; and those that consist in non-humorous narratives which display, somewhere along their vector, one or more humorous components, a.k.a. jab lines. The difference between the two concepts lies in the fact that punch lines constitute “disruptive elements” (2001: 89), which means, narrative instances which break the interpretive flow established hitherto, whereas jab lines are

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defined as “humorous instances that occur in another [non-final] position” (2001: 37) and that are “fully integrated in the narrative (i.e. they do not disrupt its flow).” Departing from this dichotomy, Attardo sums up the premises of his work as follows: “The study of humorous texts reduces then to the location of all lines (jab and punch) along the text vector i.e. its linear presentation” (2001: 37). I disagree that the complexity of the comic text can be tackled by ‘reducing’ it to a simple succession of humorous moments. The full meaning and potential of these moments only obtains if taken as part of a larger, interdependent, whole. So, it is my purpose in this book to offer an alternative model to analyze longer comic (narrative) texts. For the time being, let us briefly review Attardo’s classification of comic ‘lines’, based on criteria of ‘formal or thematic’ similarity (2001: 89): a strand is a group of three or more jab-lines that are thematically or formally related, whereas a stack (a term borrowed from Wilson 1987) is a group of strands which occurs in longer, intertextually related, textual corpora. For instance, the Seinfeld series and the Wodehouse short stories starring Jeeves display stacks, bearing on authorial, chronological or thematic similarities that turn the texts into a macro-narrative, or a “single very large text” (2001: 93). Attardo makes another major distinction between serious plots and humorous plots. The former encompasses texts which, understandably enough, are “not funny” and texts which “are essentially serious but have some degree of humor within them” (2001: 104), namely as jab lines. This is the case of Il Nome della Rosa, by Umberto Eco, one of the case studies presented in the book. The latter category, humorous plots, includes several types of text that “are humorous in and of themselves” (2001: 98) and display one or several humorous techniques. The most obvious example is texts which are structurally similar to jokes, i.e., progress in a realist way up till the point when the punch line operates the humorous clash (as is the case of Feuille d’Album, by Catherine Mansfield). A second major example is humorous plots which evolve around a central funny script opposition, evoked via jab lines along the text vector, and which can, but need not, end on a punch line. Other humorous techniques cover “metanarrative disruption,” “coincidences,” “hyperdetermined humor” and “diffuse disjunction” (2001: 105 ff.). The distinction between serious plots and humorous plots deserves criticism, insofar as the so-called serious plots should automatically be excluded from the very category of “humorous texts.” Otherwise, any text would be eligible for analysis – including tragedies, which may have comical elements in them. There is an important difference between texts that are (integrally) humorous and those that display scattered marks of humor, a point to which I shall return

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in due course (Ch. 6). Suffice it to say that only the former should be under scrutiny in an attempt to create a model of humorous texts. Be that as it may, Attardo’s taxonomic efforts are praiseworthy, especially given the incipiency of the disciplinary sub-area of narrative humor studies, where most terms and concepts have to be borrowed from other disciplines. For instance, the notion of central vs. peripheral strand has a good analytical potential, much along the lines of the narratological distinction between nucleus and catalysis (see next chapter). Besides, Attardo makes interesting, albeit momentary, references to the hierarchical organization of the humorous text, thus hinting at the relevance of such an approach. For example, the distinction between macro and micro-narratives (2001: 86), the vertical correlation between strands and stacks (2001: 92) and the notion that a humorous plot may evolve around a so-called central script-opposition. However, Attardo’s contribution to the comprehension of comic narratives goes astray by favoring an exclusively sequential criterion of analysis. His linear model falls short of capturing the hierarchical complexity of the textual meaning and the significance of the text’s vertical organization. Although a portion of narrative humor is indeed construed along a horizontal axis, it cannot be overall reduced to a vector-based approach. Rather, the way to go at it is to investigate the supra-sequential dimensions of the humorous narrative, as I shall attempt to do in the next chapters.

5. Conclusion The three linguistic theories of the joke analyzed in this chapter have different degrees of impact on the treatment of narrative humor I put forth in the present book. Raskin’s 1985 theory provides the present proposal with script-theory bases, while its assumedly pragmatic alignment is also adopted. The GTVH expands on a script-based approach to comic texts, offering a hierarchical model of the knowledge resources at stake in verbal humor. Thirdly, Giora’s model, emphasizing the cognitive processing of humor, supplies the concept of marked informativeness, which proves very relevant in the analysis of longer narrative texts, as my analysis will try to show. The importance she also gives to the pragmatic dimension of humor, as a cognitive situation processed by concrete speakers who abide by principles of relevance, economy and ease, also bears fruit in the present view of narrative discourse. Meanwhile, all three of these joke theories help to establish the joke-text as a genre, having properties which distinguish it from other texts and which, regardless of the perlocutionary effects it may bring about, determine its comic illocutionary nature.

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The question of how to handle longer humorous texts is left open in these approaches. Amongst the three, it is the GTVH that more overtly moves in that direction, as the adjective ‘general’ suggests. Still, its corpus of analysis comprises joke-texts only. So, the following step in the chapter has been to bridge this gap by looking for attempts to tackle longer texts. Three of the authors I have covered absorb, to a greater or lesser extent, the Raskinian legacy (as is the case of Chlopicki, Holcomb and Attardo), whereas two of the remaining ones (Morin and Nash) clearly take the joke as a foundational text too. Only Palmer openly claims to be reticent about transposing joke-theories to longer narrative texts, but he fails to provide any workable alternative model. Altogether, however, none of the contributions on narrative humor seriously applies a semantic approach of a macrostructural kind (which Nash, Chlopicki and Holcomb tacitly defend but do not systematize). Although a linear approach along Attardo’s lines helps to uncover some specificities of the humorous narrative (such as parallelism and recurrence – see Ch. 6), it is essential that a supra-sequential approach be applied, so as not to reduce the text to a succession of autonomous joke-like structures. In this sense, the narrative text ought to be understood at a structural (vertical and horizontal) level, but also at a pragmatic one, from where several questions arise: What are the patterns of comic narratives? Are there structural regularities in the narrative construction of humor? What are the general principles ruling the comic narrative discourse? The next two chapters will look for the answers to these questions within the fields of narratology and pragmatics.

Chapter 4 Structural principles of narrative humor Introduction The literature reviewed in the previous chapter illustrates a considerable amount of disciplinary overlap in the analysis of humorous narratives. Besides, it shows that sometimes technical terminologies and concepts are not properly defined and are notwithstanding taken for granted. One of these concepts is structure. The present chapter focuses on this problematic notion (some call it the s-word), which cannot be ignored if one is to tackle the pieces that make up the narrative humor jig-saw puzzle. In fact, so as to assess the organization of the comic short story and the textual elements that constitute it, it is important to elucidate the methodological principles underlying this structural approach. Such an undertaking will account for some basic notions in literary theory and especially in narratology, which is heir to a clearly linguistic legacy and which has today been largely absorbed by discourse analysis. Once again, interdisciplinarity will be a key issue not to be evaded. Bearing this in mind, the present chapter goes over several structural conceptions of the narrative text, trying to discuss the viability of different angles of analysis. Along the way, the case of humorous stories will be considered vis-`a-vis other narrative formats. The narratological debate, especially when following a structuralist line, has striven to answer one major question: what features do narrative texts, and only them, share? Regardless of the different surface forms, or the different contents, what are the invariable elements that distinguish narratives from other texts? From classical contributions to narrative analysis – with Propp, Barthes, Bremond and Todorov – to more recent textual approaches, like van Dijk’s and Beaugrande’s, the effort to determine the structural principles that grant unity and identity to the narrative text has been recurrent. Therefore, understanding the humorous narrative text requires placing it within the theoretical and terminological realm from which this debate springs.

1. Narrative dimensions When we speak of the structure of the narrative text, we should bear in mind that the term ‘text’ covers only one of the dimensions of the narrative (Martin 1986: 107 ff., O’Neill 1994: 19 ff.), namely its conception as a finished, written or oral,

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product. Indeed, what is told should not be mistaken for how it is told, which means, the ‘story’ should not be confused with the ‘text’. In other words, content and form are distinct facets of the narrative which ought to be distinguished, especially in the case under focus, since humor is the perfect example of the fact that the way one tells a story may jeopardize its comic potential. The basic story/text dichotomy, whose venerable kinship goes back to Aristotle (see mythos/logos), is translated, in Russian formalism, into the distinction between fabula and syuzhet. To Shklovsky and Tomachevsky, the former of these terms signifies the chronologically ordered pre-literary material, that is, what actually occurred, whereas the latter consists of a literary appropriation of that material, integrating various transformational procedures (ellipsis, flashback/flashforward, inversion) and thematic emphases. In French structuralism, the two terms are called story and discourse: Todorov (1966: 211, 231), for instance, claims that the concept of ‘story’ evokes “a certain reality, made of events that might have happened and characters that might have existed” (a story that might be told through other means besides writing, like film), whereas ‘discourse’ signifies “the real speech (parole) which the narrator directs at the reader.” Genette (1972) was to refine the binary model story/discourse by adding a third dimension. Besides the pre-verbal and temporally organized events (histoire) and the shape they assume in the text (r´ecit, which Genette also calls narrative discourse), he introduces a third level of analysis, which corresponds to the communicative situation where several narrative voices, like the narrator and the narratee, interact, and which is called narration. Later on, authors like Rimmon-Kenan (1983) and Toolan (1988) rescued Genette’s important additional distinction (story/text/narration), which sheds a dynamic light on narrative analysis. More recent narratological trends tend to focus on the communicative dimension of narrative interaction. O’Neill (1994: 23–26) proposes a fourth narrative facet, textuality, which integrates the multiple communicative contexts in which the narrative how, what and who operate. Accordingly, O’Neill’s four-fold model covers the levels of the story (abstract), text (concrete), narration (intra-textual process) and textuality (extratextual process of production and reception). This analytical approach, which emphasizes an extratextual dimension where the author/reader interaction takes place, is due, O’Neill claims, to the need to account for the narrative as an inferred process, rather than as a deferred product, or a physically existing verbal artefact. The present work adopts a hybrid position, by focusing both on the characteristics relative to the text and on the factors that shape the sender/recipient virtual interaction. The humorous narrative text involves, as we shall see, a set

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of observable structural features to be assessed in the concrete textual object. At the same time, however, these features also hint at the contextual way in which the author’s and the reader’s intentionality is construed.

2. Structure, model and whole The concept of structure in narratology has oscillated between two clearly distinct theoretical stances, namely an operational conception and an ontological one (Reis and Lopes 2000: 146). On the one hand, structure is a synonym for model, an abstract product resulting from a comparison between several phenomena, whose heuristic value lies in its capacity to represent a set of universal characteristics and combinatorial rules. On the other, the term ‘structure’ is seen from an organic perspective, designating an ordered whole, a concrete object describable in terms of units and relations. The classical trend within structural narrative analysis sides with the former of these stances. Indeed, such authors as Barthes, Bremond and Larivaille seek, in a rather ambitious vein, to devise the ‘universal narrative language’, while overtly ignoring the concrete text. In other words, they attempt at uncovering recurrences and regularities between texts that point to universal algorithms and abstract models. The resulting formulation of narrative categories, rules and syntaxes aims at revealing the deep logic that underlies the syntactic organization of the text. This operational goal also partly underlies the present work (one of whose guiding questions is, roughly, “What are the constants of the humorous narrative?”). But the latter – and, in my opinion, complementary – stance outlined above, namely the ontological/organic approach, also obtains in the present analysis. What does the concept of structure imply in terms of the specific organization of each humorous text? What is meant by functionally relevant and textually coherent structural elements? The reply to these questions is implicit in the idea that the comic narrative constitutes a whole resulting from the organic integration of multiple parts, and not a fortuitous succession of heterogeneous units. The definition of narrative structure according to Prince (1987: 93) bears on this conceptual frame: “[Structure is] the network of relations obtaining between the various constituents of a whole as well as between each constituent and the whole.” Following up on a clearly linguistic tradition, structure constitutes, in this sense, a dynamic concept that is not equivalent to the idea of form tout court, but rather derives from the articulation of form and content. Drawing a parallel between syntactic structure and narrative structure will help to clarify this organic perspective. If one takes the sentence to be a set of

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constituents that establish certain relationships between themselves and between each of them and the whole, it is possible to determine the possible combinations of these constituents, as well as the order in which they may or may not be placed along the syntactic axis. In English, a sentence like The cat ate the mouse yesterday can be reformulated as Yesterday the cat ate the mouse, but not as *Yesterday ate the cat the mouse given that the grammatical rules allow only a few combinations of syntactic roles (the subject before the predicate, for instance) or of morphological categories (the article before the noun). The principle of structure implies, in this case, the limited number of the possible constituent configurations within the sentence. The question that follows is: can it be that the text, and more specifically the narrative text, obeys similar organizational principles? Consider a minimal narrative segment like I left the room and I saw everybody staring at me. The meaning of the sequence would be radically altered if the order of the clauses were I saw everybody staring at me and I left the room. In this case, the structure that confers unity to the narrative whole observes the same collocational and sequential rules as those that operate within the sentence. In other words, the temporal and causal organization of the narrative seems, just as in the sentence, to comply with a limited number of possible configurations, otherwise risking meaning loss and even unintelligibility. Similarly, beginning a sentence with the clich´e And they lived happily ever after is as anomalous as finishing it with the phrase Once upon a time – and, yet, there is nothing anomalous in any of the phrases as far as their purely syntactic structure is concerned. Instead, the anomaly is of a distributional kind, that is, the problem resides in the collocation of a segment inside the narrative structure, which is ruled, as it were, by conventional principles. From this, one could infer a central characteristic to the concept of structure, pointed out by Stubbs (1983: 97): “the concept of structure separates the possible from the impossible (that is, it separates well- from ill-formed).” Going back to our object of analysis, we could also argue that starting the humorous narrative with what sometimes functions as the punch line, i.e., the script reversal moment (see below, Ch. 6), would not obtain. In other words, such a text would be, in Stubbs’s terms, ill-formed – and it would actually be hard for it to be funny in the first place.

3. Cohesion and coherence In line with the organic conception of structure as a unified whole, two additional, complementary, notions need some elaboration. They consist in a fundamental

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dichotomy underlying textual structure or, more generically, the concept of textuality: cohesion and coherence. According to Beaugrande and Dressler (1981: 3–4), the former is based on the grammatical dependencies established between the components on the text’s surface, whereas the latter has to do with the configurations of ideas, conceptual relationships and world knowledge that underlie the text’s surface. The two different levels of analysis of this dichotomy allow Stubbs (1983: 147) to talk about “surface cohesion and underlying coherence.” Indeed, cohesion can be conceived as being of a linear and sequential kind and as covering microstructural textual units, like lexical, grammatical, phonological, stylistic and rhetorical elements (on this, and on the notion of “cohesive ties,” see Halliday and Hasan 1976, 1985). Conversely, coherence is established at a macrostructural level, and covers non-linear pragmatic and compositional elements that inform the text from a global point of view. Obviously, as Cook (1994: 33) points out, cohesion is neither necessary nor sufficient to create coherence. Actually, there can be texts devoid of cohesion (for instance, ungrammatical writings by children) which ‘make sense’, that is, which are coherent, whereas others, albeit cohesive, are divorced from the context and have therefore an incoherent effect. Besides, it is possible to find narrative texts, mainly of a literary kind, having extremely complex cohesive structures, in terms, for instance, of the temporal organization of the textual segments (cf. discussion by Georgakopoulou and Goutsos 1997), which are nonetheless coherent. Conversely, many experimentalist movements, from the avant-garde period onwards, have shown that writing (poetic or non-poetic, lyrical or dramatic) can, and does, play on genre conventions and on the expectations that readers typically share, to the point of seeming incoherent. The humorous text, a challenge to interpretative norms par excellence, is paradigmatic of this too, as we shall see in the next chapter. And, of course, it also illustrates how cohesion can be successfully violated for comic purposes – of this, plenty of evidence was given in the second chapter, which discussed how phonological, grammatical, and lexical cohesive relationships can be comically exploited.

4. Narrative units The analysis of narrative structure implies, as noted above, departing from the idea that the text, as an organic and dynamic set, is made up of interdependent units. These units are supra-syntactic, which implies rejecting the sentence as an analytical and operational element. In this sense, analyzing the narrative requires us to search for the trans-syntactic elements that, on the double level of

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the text’s linear (microstructural) sequencing and of its global and hierarchical (macrostructural) organization, represent its semantic content. Thus, two methodological perspectives emerge: first, to regard the narrative units as analytical entities at the level of action, that is, the level where the text is organized sequentially; second, to do so at the level of theme, that is, the level where the text is organized hierarchically. The former of these perspectives has resulted, within the structuralist current, in concepts such as function and proposition, which encompass sequences, whereas the latter, according to van Dijk, gives rise to theoretical principles like macrostructure, frame/script and topic. (The importance of the notion of script for the aims of the present book has already been made clear and will be elaborated on in the sixth chapter.) This two-fold conception of narrative units and corresponding elements can be seen in the following diagram: – Functions 1. Actional units {

– Propositions

}

2. Thematic units {

– Macrostructures }

Sequences

Narrative units {

– Macropropositions – Frames/Scripts

Figure 1. Types of narrative units

Let us concentrate on the first of these notions, that of function, which inaugurated the narratological debate, before turning to the other elements in the diagram. Since the Russian formalists, the basic narrative units have been seen from a functional point of view, which means, according to the signification they assume, not in isolation, but in correlation with other parts of the narrative discourse. Following up on Tomachevsky, Propp, in Morphologie du Conte (1928: 36), defines the ‘morphologically stable unit’ of the fantastic short story as follows: “By function, I mean the action of a character, defined from the perspective of its semantic effect on the development of the narrative.” In view of this, verbs, or actions, are structurally more meaningful than nouns or adverbs: as Propp (1928: c35) points out, “the important question is to know what characters do in the story, and not why or how they do it.” The analyst’s task is therefore to identify the functions and replace them, in the structural template of

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the fantastic short story, by temporally ordered nouns – interrogation, interdiction, flight, etc. By extension, this implies determining the specific relationships that those functions establish with other functions and with the progress of the global action. For instance, buying a gun is meaningful in narrative terms only insofar as the gun gets to be used; otherwise, to refer to such an action becomes pointless. Using the gun is the closure of a correlation. It is this emphasis on the relational context between the elements, instead of on the elements per se, which Propp fruitfully bequeathed to later narrative theorists. With the French structuralists, the concept of function became a cardinal category – or, as Bremond (1966: 71) puts it, a “narrative atom.” Barthes (1966) divides it into two major classes: distributional functions and integrative functions. The former group covers the narrative elements which contribute to make the action evolve in causal and temporal terms, thus constituting dynamic units that correspond, by and large, to Propp’s original conception of functions as actional and verbal elements. These distributional functions are sub-divided into nuclei (cardinal functions that make the action progress) and catalyses (completive functions that ‘fill in’ the narrative space in-between the cardinal functions). For instance, between the co-relative nuclei The phone rang and James Bond picked it up, there may be several catalyses that are not important for the action to proceed but are of an actional nature, such as Bond looked back, opened the door, laid his cigarette on the ashtray and looked out the window. The latter group – the integrative functions – is of a static character, not contributing to the development of the action. On the contrary, these narrative units somehow accumulate along the text’s vector, providing information that gradually integrates into the textual whole. Barthes (1966: 23–24) also subdivides this class into two subtypes. The informants are explicit data that help situate the action in time and place, as is the case of a character’s age. The indices are implicit pieces of information relative to the personality of a character, or a feeling, or an atmosphere, which require a deciphering activity (for instance, if Bond makes a silent prayer prior to jumping from a plane, this may ‘indicate’ religiosity, superstition, irony, etc.). The Barthesean dichotomies just sketched strike a balance with other contributions to narrative analysis. Among Barthes’s contemporaries, Greimas (1966) developed an interesting parallel distinction between enunciates of doing and enunciates of being, and Todorov (1966) followed suit by putting forth the ‘dynamic / static predicates’ dichotomy. (In Todorov’s model, the minimal narrative unit is the proposition, made up of an actor plus a predicate.) These structuralist concepts proved very productive also within the Anglo-American tradition. An influential example is Chatman (1978), who adopted the ‘distributional vs. integrative’ parallel under the names of, respectively, kernels vs. satellites. More

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recently, Fabb (1997) also fed on this influence and distinguished between storyline clauses (“which describe what happens”) and orientation clauses (“which describe what is”). The study of the humorous narrative text also thrives on terminologies and concepts of a structuralist flavor, albeit not in an explicitly admitted way. Holcomb (1992), for instance, puts forward the concept of ‘nodal humor’, as seen above, which echoes the notion of cardinal functions as opposed to completive ones, whereas Attardo (2001) distinguishes between punch lines and jab lines, pretty much along the lines of the ‘nuclei / catalyses’ dichotomy (the former operating a break in the flow of the action; the latter not altering it). In fact, the establishment of nuclei and catalyses is very important for the study of humorous narratives. There, the semantic nuclei correspond, as a rule, to segments that carry a specifically humorous content, whereas catalyses convey neutral narrative information. The comprehension of the text depends on the perception and processing of cardinal humorous functions. The catalytic elements only contribute to keeping the engine moving, as it were, not interfering with the basic semantic line that transmits the humorous oppositions at stake. I shall get back to this in due course (cf. Section 2.2.3, Ch. 6). Meanwhile, the question of how narrative functions are articulated in terms of causal, temporal and spatial connections deserves pondering. Also, it remains to be seen how macrostructures are to be defined. As sequences, that is, linear sets of functions, or as hierarchically organized chunks of information, that is, scripts? The importance of these criteria to approach the narrative text, and particularly the humorous one, from a macrostructural point of view will be discussed in the next section.

5. Organization of narrative units The two levels of macrostructural organization of narrative units – a sequential level and a hierarchical one – imply different approaches to the textual corpus. In the former case, the analyst tackles the text horizontally, as a linearly organized succession of data; in the latter, s/he does it vertically, conceiving the text as a hierarchical organization of units that obey principles of salience and dependency. Let us take a look at the former approach.

Organization of narrative units

5.1.

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Sequencing: horizontal configuration

A sequential approach to the narrative text primarily focuses on the position that the units occupy along the textual axis – be it according to a ‘first-intermediatefinal’ model, or to a ‘former-present-later’ one. Besides, it also concentrates on the implications that the notions of causality and temporality bear in terms of this positioning. Since the model put forth in the present work also integrates sequential elements (cf. principle of recurrence), it is relevant to sketch the theoretical background that informs such elements. In structuralist terminology, the articulation of textual units observes what Barthes (1966: 14) calls the “rules of narrative syntax.” These rules determine the extent to which the beginning and the end of a unit emerge sequentially, as well as the way in which it is possible to identify them. The resulting notion is that of ‘sequence’, i.e., a “logical series of nuclei, joined together through a solidarity connection” (ibidem). In this sense, a new sequence begins when one of its terms lacks a solidarity antecedent, and closes as soon as another of its terms lacks consequents. For instance, the ‘departure’ sequence includes several nuclei, e.g. picking up the keys and the suitcase + closing the front door + opening the car + starting the car + driving away, thus constituting a closed sequence. Therefore, the sequences, or semantically coherent blocks, are not a random series, but a whole that abides by causal principles and mutual implication rules. (In humor such coherent sequences are many a time disrupted, as will be seen later.) According to Propp (1928: 45–64), these causal principles are temporally rigid: ‘transgression’ must follow ‘interdiction’, and ‘asking for help’ must precede the departure of the hero on his horse. However, not all stories are fantastic stories of the kind Propp analyzed. In fact, the rigidity of Propp’s sequential model prompted the French narratologists to look for an alternative model, a more flexible one, which might account for the sequential structures of a great amount of stories – and not only of a subgenre, as was the target of the Russian formalist. Actually, the search for a deductive model of narrative universals marks the passage from a rigid narrative syntax, crystallized in Propp’s canonical thirty-one-function sequence, to a flexible approach that aims at revealing the logic underlying surface sequences. Now, the question of how to analyze the narrative text, humorous and nonhumorous alike, in logical terms has to do with mapping its prediscursive sequencing. And this, in turn, bears on the problem of temporality, the implications of which are too intricate to tackle here. Let us just briefly outline the asymmetry existing between logical and chronological factors in narrative analysis. In narratological terms, time is conceived in a two-fold manner: as narration

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time and narrated time. The former constitutes a linear concept that is reflected, spatially, on the number of pages the book has and, chronologically, on the time of writing/reading. The latter is the one that suffers compressions, ellipsis, leaps (flashbacks and flashforwards), to name but a few narration techniques. Todorov (1966: 232) elaborates on the time dichotomy by discussing the difference between the temporality of the story and the temporality of discourse: “The discursive time is, in a certain sense, linear, whereas the story time is polydimensional.” In the story, he claims, many events may occur simultaneously, but discourse imposes a sequential line: it is as if a “complex figure were projected onto a straight line.” The literary use of temporal deformation derives, therefore, from the logical and aesthetic need to break this chronologically realistic succession of events. The time of the text can never be the ‘actual’ time; it is a discursive time. On the text’s surface, this discursive time is presented as a mosaic, assuming diverse shapes. Indeed, the way the narrative sequences are arranged depends on specific textual options, such as chaining (the causal sequencing of events), embedding (the inclusion of a minor sequence in a larger one) and pairing (a parallel narration of simultaneous events). A graphic representation will help understand how these three discursive sequencing modes are organized: a)

Chaining: S1⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯→ S2⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯→S3

b)

Embedding: S1⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯.... [S3]…. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯→S2

c)

Pairing: [S1⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯→S2] + [S3⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯→S4]

Figure 2. Types of discursive sequences

So as to discover the logic of the story beneath the syntax of discourse, one has to reconstruct the underlying chronological line – the ‘before’, the ‘during’ and the ‘after’ of the narrative’s semantic vector. These elements roughly correspond to the initial situation, the transformations in-between, and the final situation. Several narratological models attempt to formalize this type of succession. To Bremond (1966: 71), every narrative sequence obeys a triple phase: a) ‘possibility’, a function that opens the process; b) ‘realization’, a function that develops it, like an attitude or an event; and c) ‘closing’, a function that closes

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the process in terms of an expected result. Much later on, in 1980, van Dijk offered a follow-up to this triadic model, namely exposition + complication + resolution, but in the meantime other proposals took place. Todorov (1973: 82), for instance, extended Bremond’s triad to a five-term template, which accounts for the static and dynamic components of the sequential structure: “There are two types of episodes in a narrative: those that describe a state of affairs (balance + unbalance + new balance) and those that describe the passage from one state to the other (disturbing force + soothing force).” Larivaille (1974: 387) resumed the five terms of this sequence in a model which also ends in a restored balance, and so did Stein (1982), whose proposal does not, however, imply any circularity, just ‘reactions’ to situations. Let me present a synoptic account of these logical models of the narrative: Table 1. Logical narrative models Bremond (1966)

Possibility → Realization/Non-realization → Closing/Nonclosing

Todorov (1973)

Initial stable situation → Disturbing force → Consequent unbalance → Force directed in the opposite direction → Situation of restored balance

Larivaille (1974)

Initial balance → Transformation (Provocation → Action → Sanction) → Final balance

Van Dijk (1980)

Exposition → Complication → Resolution

Stein (1982)

Given situation → Initial event → Reaction → Attempt → Consequence(s) of the attempt → Reaction to the consequence(s)

The challenge that the humorous narrative poses in view of the rigidity of these and other models – and especially in view of the assumption that the final textual situation corresponds to a restored balance – will, in the sixth chapter, be made clear. Nevertheless, the idea that there is a disturbance that shatters the initially stable situation is validated by many humor theorists (see, for instance, Sacks 1978), who regard the humorous situation as the introduction of an unsettling puzzle to be solved. But the most prominent example of the importance that a sequentialist approach has assumed among narrative humor scholars is Attardo (2001). His analytic proposal is indeed of a linear type, putting forth a sequential treatment of comic narratives which sets out to devise the occurrence of lines, and to understand such questions as how the story ends and where the punch line occurs (cf. previous chapter).

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It should be noted that this sequential theoretical option, like others discussed in the present section, implies an inductive approach to the object of analysis (on this, see Georgakopoulou and Goutsos 1997: 70). Seeing how the story evolves in linear terms has to do with making predictions relative to the narrative future on the basis of the present. It also implies relating these specifically situated predictions to the global events of the text. But the second methodological alternative outlined above implies a converse procedure, deductively organized, which departs from an established whole (a theme or a topic) to the entities that, on different hierarchical levels, instantiate it. To this I shall turn in the following section. In the meantime, let it be noted that the model of humorous narratives I put forth in chapter 6 accomodates both of these approaches, the inductive / horizontal one and the deductive / vertical one.

5.2.

Hierarchy: vertical configuration

The question of what levels or values can be attributed to textual information is central to narratology and also to the present study of the comic short story. Instead of conceiving the text as a sequential set, organized along a successive axis, this approach views the text as a compound formed by overlapping organizational layers. The corresponding hierarchical methodology, which can be rendered schematically by tree-diagrams, sides with the premise that the different parts and components of the narrative are not of equal status, but of different import and value (Marcu 2000). 5.2.1. From sentence grammar to story grammar Although the French school acknowledges the idea that the narrative text is constituted by overlapping layers, it is the Story Grammar current that systematizes the principle of hierarchy in the analysis of narrative structure. Springing at the end of the seventies, some models of ‘story grammars’ – a subgroup within text linguistics dedicated to the analysis of the so-called ‘simple’ story, like the fable and the fairy tale – attempted to formalize textual structure along the lines of sentence structure. This clear syntactic affiliation was not without problems, since many challenged the legitimacy of applying syntactic models of analysis to such extended textual structures as stories. These questions, pertinent to this day in the analysis of the humorous text, call for a brief reflection. The Story Grammar group, of a formalist extraction, seeks to discover structural similarities between the text and the sentence (on an overview, see Fillmore 1982). Immediate constituent analysis, which subdivides the sentence into more

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and more restricted components and is graphically translatable into a tree, is a method that story grammarians rescued so as to tackle the narrative text. Consider, for instance, Rumelhart (1977), who tried to identify and relate the primary components of a simple story. In order to do this, he replaced every actional unit in each episode of the story by hierarchically organized verbs, according to their temporally logical progression, for example CAUSE (HEAR, DESIRE), SELECT (BUY), TRY (GET), RUSH (INTO HOUSE), SPEND, etc. Thus, he obtained a ranking of actions occupying different vertical strata. Mandler and Johnson (1977) also attempted to determine the hierarchical organization of short narrative texts. In their analysis of a ‘dog story’, a tree-diagram organizes the events and episodes according to scalar ranks of causality and temporality. In the same year, Thorndyke put forward a hierarchical model which, like immediate constituent templates, integrated combinatorial rules. For instance, ‘setting’ includes ‘characters’ + ‘location’ + ‘time’, whereas ‘episode’ includes ‘sub-goal’ + ‘attempt’ + ‘outcome’. This type of approach was to meet with strong opposition. Indeed, detractors argued, how can a rigid syntactic approach account for the richness, variety and complexity of a story? Besides, how can it explain such cognitive processing factors as attention and memory, which affect the construction of the meaning in a narrative? Trying to ponder these factors, another theoretical trend within story grammars emerged. Distancing itself from a strict formalist approach, this alternative psychological and socio-motivational model departed from the idea that there is a universal set of characteristics in stories that reflect the equally universal way in which we daily understand and memorize information, regardless of the type of culture or education we possess. Beaugrande’s ‘The story of grammars and the grammar of stories’ (1982) is a good example of this trend. The article advocates an empirically validated textual grammar, set against the backdrop of human cognition and communication. In this sense, it questions the applicability of grammatical rules to the analysis of stories, and warns against the fact that hierarchical models are disconnected from the real timing of textual processing. An alternative option, Beaugrande defends, is a continuous – or “heterarchic” – graphic representation of the multiple chained connections between the situational sequences of the story, seen from the perspective of the characters. This procedural model suggests that the grammatical structure of the sentences in the narrative discourse can be translated into a conceptual network that privileges interpretive continuity. Unlike hierarchical models, this proposal shows that the cognitive process is not unidirectional but multidirectional. Beaugrande also puts forward a long list of ‘conceptual relations’ (e.g. state-of, purpose-of, reason-of ), which indicates that representing the structure of a story can never be divorced from its content. Besides, it also

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points out that the analyst can never ignore cognitive factors such as attention and memory, which rule over the reading process. Significantly, the text should also be conceived of as a communicative and pragmatic entity, taking place between actual individuals who engage in an interactive process. A rather distinct approach to the concept of hierarchy in narrative analysis is van Dijk’s. Let us take a look at his contribution, an especially relevant one for my purposes here, owing to his use of the notion of frame/script. 5.2.2. The concept of narrative macrostructure Trying to know what the text is about is an empirical motivation that underlies a supra-sequential type of approach to the narrative text. Understanding the meaning of the narrative at this level is an exercise in synthesis which employs macrostructural categories like theme, motif, or topic.According to Prince (1987: 97), the term ‘theme’ signifies the set of textual information extractable from discontinuous elements – or, in other words, the “more abstract and general entities” which the text covers. This concept is related to frame, but Prince distinguishes between idea frames (= themes) and action frames (= plots). Along the same lines, van Dijk (1977, 1979, 1980) tries to systematize the concept of narrative macrostructure so as to account for a supra-structural level of semantic organization of the text. The relevance of his proposal within the specific objectives that guide this work is considerable and deserves some elaboration. According to van Dijk, the underlying semantic representation of the text consists of a macrostructure, or macro-proposition, conditioned by interpretive factors such as attention and memory, and by rules of transformation of textual information. These rules, or macro-rules, reorganize the complex propositional information of the text, turning thousands of propositions into a few scarce macro-propositions, which represent the same facts but on a more abstract and distant level. Here is the way the process runs: first, the analyst erases (deletion rule) every proposition considered irrelevant for the interpretation of the text; secondly, s/he generalizes propositional sequences under a superordinate term (for instance, pet instead of cat, dog or canary, etc.); thirdly, s/he tries to congregate propositional information that represents several aspects of a socially established activity (for instance, going on a trip); finally, s/he substitutes a macro-proposition that represents the episode as a whole (for instance, John went on a trip to Mexico) for the set of individual propositions. Now, a proposition like John handed the ticket at the check-in counter immediately points to a TRIP macrostructure, or frame, while feeding on shared world knowledge. As van Dijk (1979: 148) explains, a frame – like a script – is a set of propositions, kept in the individual’s memory, about any ‘social episode’,

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be it catching a plane or eating in a restaurant, which allows us to identify, select, assess and interpret such episodes in the discursive context where they occur. In his words, “a text is comprehensible (. . . ) if we understand which facts denoted by the sentences of the text may ‘belong together’ according to our knowledge of the world” (ibidem). Reading is, therefore, “attributing structures” and organizing information in chunks (i.e. frames) which, in turn, are related to other chunks stored in memory, so as to fill out the blank spaces of the propositional scheme and ultimately construct the global sense of the text. But, one might ask, how can one prove the existence of macrostructures linguistically? Although macro-propositional structures are not directly related to concrete sentences in the text (except for the so-called topical sentences), it is possible, van Dijk (1977: 149–153) argues, to identify a certain number of surface phenomena that indicate their presence. For instance, textual connectors – like ‘but’, ‘therefore’, ‘besides’ – can establish a coordinative relation, not with the preceding sentence on the textual axis, but with the macro-proposition that underlies a vaster sequence. Besides, co-referentiality may indicate that a pronoun does not substitute any antecedent or subsequent word or phrase but, instead, it replaces the whole semantic passage either preceding it or following it. The use of definite articles also indicates, sometimes, a more extended semantic field on the discursive vector than the limited sentence where they occur. But, van Dijk concludes, it is through lexical clues that the existence of a relational structure between macrostructural concepts is made clear on the text’s surface. Actually, as we shall see, the words are responsible for activating most of the scripts/frames that preside over the humorous text macrostructurally (cf. Section 2.2.1, Ch. 6). Macrostructural approaches to the narrative text, such as van Dijk’s, have also met with much criticism, most of which is not far from the criticism which, in turn, structuralist approaches have had to face (on this, see next section). As Brown and Yule (1983: 114–116) explain, the first and foremost obstacle to a macrostructural analysis is subjectivity: producing a propositional set of a text allegedly represents only one interpretation, impossible to test formally, which can in principle be replaced by any alternative propositional interpretation. On the other hand, unveiling the propositions of a text implies knowing the circumstances of production, that is, it implies knowing what propositions the producer of the text intended it to convey. Now, the representation of this ‘intended meaning’, for instance in computational terms, becomes as difficult as formalizing every contextual interpretive possibility of a discursive sequence, or, for that matter, as accounting for factors like ambiguity or imprecision. As a result, some authors have defended that determining ‘the’ topic of a text is not important; what is important is determining how several topics get to be constructed in the text.

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Despite these hindrances, a macrostructural approach to the narrative text is a fruitful research path. If textual signification seems inaccessible, problematic, or just remote (and this, given the importance of the implicit in literary texts, is more often than not the case), other discursive principles – such as coherence, analogy and conformity to shared world knowledge – allow inferential access to it. In the particular case of the comic narrative text, grasping the way it is organized implies identifying the main topics – by extension, macroscripts – the story is about. If subjectivity is partly unavoidable, especially as regards inferential scripts, lexical scripts are more safely grounded in the surface of the text, as will be seen later.

6. Limitations of narrative structure analysis The attempts to formalize a structural analysis of the narrative text, be they sequentially formatted or hierarchically informed, have been recurrently criticized, as was pointed out above. Most of these objections (see Martin 1986: 90–106) bear on the complexity and diversity of narrative texts, open par excellence to multiple interpretations. In fact, critics argue, how can any and every narrative be reduced to an abstract and a-temporal deep structure? Structuralist models do ignore the particularities of the concrete text, as well as the multiple tensions and changes that affect it. So, the question is: if the concrete events in a story are replaced by sequences of abstract terms, what happens to the specific content of each text? However, this objection obviously overlooks the very basics of structuralist critique, whose overall objective is to establish a comprehensive theory of literary discourse, instead of a template of analysis of individual texts. As Culler (1980: 106) remarks, structuralism effected “an important reversal of perspective,” granting precedence to the task of devising a “science of forms” and assigning secondary status to the dream of creating a “science of contents.” Later analytic currents returned to the concrete text through more functional and temporally oriented schemas, which regard the structure as a ‘work-in-progress’ category, dependent on the cognitive faculties of the interpreter. A second, more solid, argument against structuralist analysis is its emphasis on a deep structure that supposedly accounts for the various textual surface structures, when the case is – especially in literary narratives – that ambiguity is the rule and not the exception. In the ambiguous text, the organization is the reverse: one surface structure corresponds to two or more deep structures. It is this asymmetry that encumbers interpretive consensus, sometimes causing analytic models to become normative and rigid. In extreme cases, authors manipulate

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the ambiguous data so as to conform to presupposed theoretical principles – a most unhappy and undesirable methodological sin in scientific practice, which Martin (1986: 93) quite humorously describes: The analyst sets out in search of a single form that will explain varied phenomena; having found one that, with a bit of stretching, will account for many examples, he either discards those that don’t fit or says that there is some fault in the examples, not in the explanation he has created; and thus instead of theories that explain what exists, we get theories – imposed by critics – in the form of ‘norms’ from which the evidence deviates.

The ‘reader-response movement’ has partially provided a solution to this problem: instead of focusing on the text, it focuses on the interpreter and on his/her different interpretations, trying to determine the reader’s interpretive competence. But, then again, problems arise: is every interpretation valid?; what selection criteria to follow?; should there be a hierarchy of readers’ experiences, some being more valid/true/legitimate than others? As Phelan (1994: 231) argues, this “soon leads to a reproduction of the problem: how can I establish the hierarchy without injecting my own subjectivity into the decision and in effect claiming that it is superior to others’?” As a reaction to these limitations, another narratological current – of a descriptivist, rather than structuralist, flavor – opts for the concrete text, instead of abstract universals. In this sense, and as pointed out above, it seeks to analyze the specific organization of each narrative text, with its functionally necessary and textually relevant elements (e.g. on the level of the story: action, characters and spaces; on the level of discourse: description, narrative perspective and voice). However, once again, this endeavour also risks projecting the analyst’s point of view onto the selection of units and their pertinence. The problem of subjectivity, alas, returns. Arguing that the analyst only classifies and describes narrative categories does not solve the problem, because classifying and describing is interpreting. In short, whereas syntactic analysis manages to establish the formal status of a word within a sentence, narrative analysis faces greater challenges when trying to determine interpretive frames. For instance, so as to define the formal status of a category such as theme, it is necessary, as we have seen, to agree on the meaning of ‘theme’ to begin with, which is far from consensual. Given the amount of objections that both the structuralist and the descriptivist trends have faced, more recent narratological studies have tended to focus on the communicative dimension in which the narrative text is produced and received. This new theoretical perspective, predominant today, is well documented by O’Neill (1994: 25), who proposes, as mentioned above, the concept of textuality to define the interactive process of producing a text and receiving it:

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Textuality in the sense defined here (. . . ) will allow us to focus more attention on the essentially interactive nature of the narrative transaction as a whole, neglected to date by classical narratology. Put another way, it will allow us to consider within the general conceptual framework of narratological concerns the nature and significance not only of authorial but also of readerly (including critical) intentionality.

As we shall see in the next chapter, a pragmatics-oriented analytical stance solves some of the problems outlined here, but it also paves the way for other difficulties. The case of the humorous narrative text, meanwhile, can only be successfully tackled if understood as a communicative and interactive phenomenon ruled by very particular principles.

7. Conclusion This chapter has focused on the level of the narrative text, understood as an organic and structured whole, and it has discussed different narratological approches to it. The next chapter will duly concentrate on another fundamental facet of the narrative construction of humor: context. These two plans are interdependent, to the extent that there is a close alliance between how a story is told and why, when, where and what for it is told. In other words, between the form it takes, and the process through which it is created and received. So far, we have seen that the micro- and macrostructural dimensions of the narrative text are ruled by principles of cohesion and coherence which humor in due course subverts. We have also seen that the organization of textual units can be either sequentially or hierarchically conceived, and that it is crucial for the analysis of the humorous narrative to overtake the former so as to reach for the latter. Thirdly, and more importantly, we have seen that even though the diversity and richness of narrative comedy escapes any rigid structuralist algebra, it is important, and necessary, to look for comedic universals, which hide beneath the texts’ structural variety. If Raskin (1985) did it with regard to the joke, equally multiple and disparate as far as form and content are concerned, the same applies to comic literary narratives, even though the latter assume a much richer semantic and stylistic configuration. However, this hermeneutic venture can only bear fruit if conceived from a contextual and communicative perspective. The structural options the text expresses point to a wider frame of illocutionary intentions and perlocutionary effects. Therefore, the approach to which this book subscribes goes beyond the structural paradigm so as to embrace a pragmatic viewpoint, underscoring the importance of context and author-reader discursive interaction. The next chapter will discuss some of the questions this perspective raises.

Chapter 5 Pragmatics of the humorous narrative Introduction The study of the humorous narrative text needs an inquiry into the context where it is produced and received. As an interactive phenomenon, humor is created on the basis of a subtle balance between what the sender encodes and what the recipient decodes, between what the former intends to convey and what the latter manages to grasp. In order to understand the mechanisms that regulate the humorous tale, one has to understand the rules of this game, so often characterized by false starts and false appearances. And for the recipients of the humorous message to win the game, they have to succeed in understanding that the false starts and false appearances are neither mistakes, nor insults, nor uncooperative infractions. What I here call pragmatics of the humorous narrative aims at accounting for some of the various factors that this process involves.

1. Narration and other modes of discourse To understand the humorous narrative in its pragmatic dimension implies, first of all, conceiving narration as one among several modes of discourse. In everyday communicative activities, individuals produce countless utterances, which correspond to many different speech acts: they describe things or states of affairs; they argue in favour or against facts and opinions; they warn, persuade and question, and, most importantly, they narrate stories, sequences of events that they witnessed or experienced, happenings they read about or saw on TV. The narrative component of the communicative activity is, indeed, omnipresent: all the experience that people undergo – from the private to the social and institutional realms – is marked by the principle of temporality and, by extension, of narrativity (Ricoeur 1980: 169). In this sense, and because time marks the very unfolding of life, individuals cannot help producing, every day, narrative texts. The ubiquity of the narrative mode in the multifarious reality of human action and experience assumes many shapes. It is patent in a great variety of semiotic realizations, which in turn is matched by a great variety of approaches in the area of discourse analysis. Actually, the verbal nature of narrative texts is but one possible category of its configurations, among many. In silent movies, cartoons without subtitles, dancing, miming and painting, the narrative text,

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semiotically considered, assumes a non-verbal dimension, whereas in opera, cinema and comics it results from the intersection between verbal and nonverbal language. Besides, verbal narrative texts can either be natural narrative texts, i.e. those produced in spontaneous discursive situations and in everyday interactive contexts, or artificial narrative texts, as is the case of literary works, produced in specific, planned, communicative contexts and according to specific interpretive conventions and codes. Humor is a good counter-example to the codes and conventions that rule standard communicative interaction, as partly seen in the third and fourth chapters. But if the joke is a specific textual genre characterized by an atypical organization, the humorous short story is an even more challenging object of analysis, given its length and the implications that its literary nature carries. The combination of these features makes an interdisciplinary approach all the more necessary. So as to venture into this research path, let us begin by clarifying a few crucial notions, namely text and context.

2. Humorous text and context A key pragmatic distinction to establish when studying the humorous text is the dichotomy text/context. The former encompasses not only the semiotic features of the message, but also its structural principles and the nature of the channel (oral / written) through which it is conveyed, whereas the latter involves the codes and conventions that preside over the circumstances of the utterance. As a linguistically realized entity – and unlike filmic or pictorial texts – the comic short story is solely conveyed through verbal language. Besides, the humorous tale is situated at the intersection point between three dimensions of textual constitution: written, narrative and literary. So far, we have been discussing its narrative characteristics, as well as the implications that the treatment of those characteristics involves. But the dual nature of the humorous narratives under focus in this book – which are both ‘written’ and ‘literary’ – deserves attention, which the following sections seek to pay. By discussing the norms that rule written and literary communication, I will pave the way for a consideration of the elements that go beyond a semantico-structural constitution and that point to a dimension where interpersonal, cultural and social elements come into play. Therefore, it is important to stress that the humorous text, as a written object conceived on the linguistic, narrative and literary levels, is part of a context, and that this context, in the Firthean (1937) situational sense, entails shared world knowledge and a certain socio-cultural framework. Indeed, the contextual – and not only co-textual (Pet¨offi 1972) – facet of the notion of context ought to be

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taken into account, since humor functions on an interactive basis par excellence. As seen in the first chapter (final section) of the present book, the humorous communication is characterized by a reciprocal relation between the intentions of the sender and the expectations of the recipient. In case of lack of receptiveness on the part of the interlocutor, for instance, the illocutionary potential of the message does not bear perlocutionary fruit. Besides, the humorous objectives of the message are built and identified on the basis of a set of codes and norms that are implicitly shared by the two poles of the communicative situation. The textual meanings are indeed construed by sender and recipient alike, according to a cultural and civilizational frame that determines the strategies to use and the way to shape the humorous material. Therefore, the problem of context raises several questions relative to the analysis of comic narratives. The distinction between situational and non-situational humor, as well as the simultaneously written and literary nature of the humorous short story, require some elaboration. How can comic narratives, given their written character, be regarded as a communicative act in an interactive context? This and other questions will be discussed next.

2.1.

Situational humor and ‘canned’ humor

In humor studies, the issue of context is mainly associated with the distinction between ‘situational humor’ and what has usually been called ‘canned humor’. This distinction, for a start, is not without problems. Let us begin by establishing the terms for differentiating between the two notions. According to Fry (1963: 43), situational jokes originate “in the ongoing interpersonal process,” as a form of improvisation during conversation that depends on contextual cues. Because it is spontaneously created on the basis of a specific situation, situational humor is hardly reusable. Norrick (2003: 1339) employs the term ‘conversational jokes” along the same lines, to refer to anecdotes which “bear direct relevance to the surrounding conversation.” Conversely, canned jokes consist of prefabricated humorous material – hence repeated, repeatable and also recyclable. As they exhibit “little obvious relationship to the ongoing interpersonal process” (Fry, ibidem), canned jokes lend themselves to multiple re-uses, either verbatim, or in a recycled format. Therefore, they are par excellence intersubstitutable in terms of context. Be that as it may, there are some theoretical hitches to this dichotomy, as Attardo (1994: 296) points out. To begin with, there is no structural difference between situational jokes and canned ones. Indeed, both can be analyzed in exactly the same way, be it in terms of Koestler’s (1964) bisociation theory, or of

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Raskin’s (1985) script oppositions. Besides, one might ask: if a situational joke is told out of the context where it was originally told, does it become ‘canned’? It is established that situational humor is hardly transferable in contextual terms, unless the recipient is informed of the specific circumstances under which it was created. Yet, this process of contextual export, which requires a detailed account of the original situation, is a doomed endeavor in motivational terms. Conversely, a canned joke also exhibits contextual features, all the more so because its very utterance places it within a certain spatial-temporal setting. In this sense, it is legitimate to wonder why the sender chooses to tell a certain joke instead of another. The idea of ‘recycling’ helps one understand that the canned joke may go through a process of contextual adaptation (Zajdman 1991), according to the situation in which it occurs and the interlocutors to whom it is told. Thanks to this flexibility, it is sometimes hard to tell if a joke is actually conversational, or just a crafty version of a canned joke. This is why some authors claim that canned jokes are but versions of conversational jokes that underwent a process of decontextualization. The humorous literary narrative, as a finalized product expressed in printed characters, seems at first sight to be alien to the problem of situational humor. Instead, it looks like a concluded, crystallized and, ultimately, a-contextual form, as Attardo (1994: 301, 2001: 67) seems to suggest when he equates the phrases ‘canned humor’ and ‘narrative humor’. Nevertheless, there is more to written literary humor than meets the eye.

2.2. Written varrative versus conversation The differences between written and oral language bear important implications for the analysis of the humorous narrative text. It is accepted that the typically incomplete and informal nature of spoken language, marked by the predominance of active voice constructions and of coordinative structures, distances itself from the careful and lexically rich nature of written language, composed on an intricate subordinative basis of phrasal and clausal complexity. However, this principle allows for exceptions, as is the case of the ‘improvised’ speeches by politicians (which are often sheer oratory pearls), or that of scribbled notes. These and other special cases are due to the fact that the dichotomy written/oral does not fully cover the dimension of what is ‘planned’ as opposed to what is not. But it is the differences between the modes of production and reception of the two types of language that are of special interest for us here. As Brown and Yule

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(1983: 4–5) point out, the speaker (as opposed to the writer) constantly monitors the coherence of what has been said relative to what can be said next, and this is done without noting anything down. Besides, s/he also monitors the reactions which, second by second, the interlocutors show, and in view of which s/he has to duly adapt his/her speech. In turn, the writer is able to revise, rephrase and correct what s/he has written, take a break to reflect about it, without running the risk of being interrupted, or, even, take as long as s/he needs to choose a word or resume writing. On the other hand, the writer is denied access to whatever reactions the reader will have while reading. On the part of the recipients, meanwhile, the written text constitutes a product that does not require an immediate answer; rather, it allows them to re-read and make use of interpretive aids, especially if some types of written texts, like the literary ones, are characterized by a much greater structural, lexical and semantic complexity. On the other hand, conversation is more demanding in temporal terms (speakers have to react faster) whereas, in general, it is less so in interpretive terms, partly because the recipient may directly request disambiguation. But does the humorous text, by virtue of its written nature, become a static product, indifferent to the context of communicative interaction? In principle, the context of production and reception of the written comic narrative seems to be quite different from the one which characterizes humor as an oral phenomenon, which, by extension, seems to entail the inadequacy of a discursive – i.e. interactive – approach to written humor. Besides, nothing of what is analysable by the recipient of the written comic text seems to result from the sender’s spontaneity. Indeed, writing is, in general, a slow, deliberate and constantly reformulated process. On the other hand, however, a book does not constitute a disconnected entity from time and space, nor does it amount to a canned product, blind to the contexts in which it is produced and read. Nor is conversation that far removed from written literary discourse. As Cook (1994: 47) puts it, “conversation, apparently so far removed from writing in its casual haphazardness, shares many features with literature.” In fact, the idea that written language is not interactive is erroneous, as Stubbs (1983) well argues. In his opinion, this fallacy conceives the written text as a sequence of propositions analizable through a merely predicative calculation: semantic content + logical relations. However, the mechanisms of lexicosemantic and grammatical composition of the text have the recipient in mind. In Stubbs’s (1983: 212) words, “any devices for presenting the semantic content are interactive, since they design discourse for its hearers or readers.” From the point of view of the writer, the text is a challenge to the interpretive capacities of the reader, functioning as a kind of game, whose solutions only the former

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holds the key to, and to which s/he constantly provides hints. From the point of view of the reader, especially if s/he is accessing the text for the first time, the process of comprehension is, Stubbs claims, a “psycholinguistic guessing game” (ibidem), which is a lot similar to the one that occurs when interpreting spoken language. Therefore, it is crucial for a theory of discourse to comprise the written (literary) text since, as Stubbs (1983: 213) maintains, “any general theory of discourse will have to take into account as wide a variety of discourse as possible.” In short, it is wrong to conceive the written narrative as being incompatible with a pragmatic and interactive approach. The written comic narrative is a form of discourse, an utterance act that involves the two poles – production and reception – of the communicative axis. Therefore, the question of context is central to a study of literary narrative humor and justifies an inquiry into the multiple factors that are at stake in it. Among these, I shall now focus on the different utterance levels in narrative discourse, and question the implications they entail for an understanding of the production and reception of humor.

2.3.

Overlapping utterance levels

Unlike conversational exchanges, written humorous narratives do not just involve the instances of sender and recipient(s). In fact, the discursive voices in the narrative utterance are not limited to a bi-polar axis, but are instead structured according to several dimensions. On the one hand, the comic text is a message produced by a sender (the author) and interpreted by a recipient (the reader); on the other, it is a fictional construct that articulates, on an internal level, a parallel interaction plan, established between other senders and recipients (narrator / narratee, character A / character B). These overlapping communicative levels ask for a stratified analysis of the diverse ‘voices’ that people the text, as well as a discussion of the fictional nature that shapes it. Actually, the empirical processes of production and interpretation of the narrative literary text are reproduced, as it were, at a fictional level by other narrative actors. The parallel utterance processes require, therefore, a layer-analysis. Nash (1985: 19) argues that interpreting the comic story, like any other humorous text, functions on a ‘monitoring’ basis, on the part of the reader, of the interpretive exchanges that take place within the text. This process encompasses several agents in constant interaction: the executant (the author), the executantwithin-the-text (the speaking persona), the respondent-within-the-text (the persona that shares or disclaims the speaking persona’s statements) and the respondent (the reader, as observer and censor). Now, it is important to point out that

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these different enunciation levels point to the different dimensions of the narrative which the first section of the previous chapter has discussed.As Adam (1985: 179) remarks, “we cannot separate the study of narration, story and narrative from the problem of enunciation.” In fact, if the concept of ‘story’ privileges the role that characters play in a hypothetical reality, the notion of ‘discourse’ covers the bi-polar roles that the narrator and the narratee play in a textual reality, whereas the concept of ‘narration’ is projected onto the actual communicative situation where the author/sender and the reader/recipient interact. The problem relative to the various narrative instances that interact within the text has triggered a vast bibliography, both in literary theory and in linguistics. Lintvelt’s (1981) important contribution to the debate paved the way for a fourfold conception of narrative levels. On a first level, theActualAuthor and Reader, who exist physically and historically as real biographical subjects, produce and receive the text. On a second level, the Abstract Author constitutes a somewhat schizophrenic projection of the ‘other self’of the actual author, a kind of a second identity that the latter does not reveal in his/her daily life, but which expresses what is regarded as the ‘work’s ideology’. On the same level, the Abstract Reader is the ideal reader, him/herself a projected image of the ‘presupposed recipient’, even if potentially quite a different one from the reader that actually accesses the text. The third level opposes the notions of Narrator and Narratee (on this, see also Prince 1973), based on the functions that each of them plays in the text. The former presents and controls information – distributing the characters’ speech, specifying deictic data – and, optionally (when the narrative is not of an objective or historical kind), fulfils an interpretive function, by means of explicit comments s/he makes throughout the text. The latter (the narratee) is the active recipient of the information conveyed and sieved by the narrator, which s/he critically interprets. The fourth level encompasses the Actors (characters, or dramatis personae), who carry out the action of the story, but who also play interpretive roles among themselves. These four levels of ‘enunciation’ are also acknowledged by O’Neill (1994: 109), who speaks of the “ventriloquism effect” of the narrative message. But other authors refer to these notions using different terminologies. As Martin (1986: 154) explains, the concept of, for instance, Abstract Reader takes different names depending on the author’s perspective: implied reader (Iser), model reader (Eco), virtual reader (Prince), mock reader (Gibson), extra-fictional reader (Lanser), etc. Yet, bearing in mind the objectives of the present work, what is important to stress is that these different utterance levels point to well-defined discursive roles as far as the pragmatically central problem of cooperation is concerned. As Pratt (1977: 174) remarks, the duality that shapes the literary text and that opposes

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the ‘author’s display text’ and the ‘fictional speaker’s discourse’ springs from different degrees of freedom in infringing conversational maxims. At the level of the utterances by fictional characters, “all kinds of nonfulfilment are possible,” whereas at the level of the author’s utterances, only one type of infringement, an intrinsically cooperative one, is possible: that which Grice names flouting or exploitation. I shall turn to these crucial notions in the following sections, after discussing the implications of the specifically literary nature of the texts under focus. 2.4. The literary specificity of the humorous short story Unlike narratives of a factual or documentary kind, as is the case of newspaper reports or biographies, the comic short story is fictionally constituted and it is analyzable as a literary construct. Still, it is obvious that the relationship between fictionality and literariness is not linear. First, because there are literary genres that are not fictional, such as memoir, profile, literary journalism and travel writing (on literary non-fiction, see Sims 2002). Secondly, because there are fictional texts that are not literary: take, for instance, the case of simple lies (Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 206). However, just like the factual or documentary narratives I mentioned above, the literary narrative is also a form of communication, being processed in quite a similar way to other types of discourse. As van Dijk (1979: 151) maintains, “literary discourse and literary communication generally will follow the principles holding for any kind of discourse and communication.” This is due to the fact that, in any informative exchange, the recipient will try to attribute a meaning to the message and relate it to the knowledge of the world s/he possesses. Stubbs (1983: 194) corroborates this opinion: It is not adequate to separate analyses of spoken, written and literary discourse, and (. . . ) there are interpretive procedures, particularly concerned with the interpretation of ambiguous and indirect speech acts, which are common to both spoken and written literary language.

In her groundbreaking work entitled Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1977), Pratt emphasizes the same principle: literature, just like any other form of verbal interaction, is a discursive situation in which sender and recipient are virtually, even if not physically, co-present, displaying mutual compromises and obeying conditions of adequacy partly similar to those that preside over non-literary communicative contexts. The author’s (1977: 115) words on this point are quite clarifying:

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Far from being autonomous, self-contained, self-motivating, context-free objects which exist independently from the “pragmatic” concerns of “everyday” discourse, literary works take place in a context, and like any other utterances they cannot be described apart from that context. (. . . ) More importantly, like so many of the characteristics believed to constitute literariness, the basic speaker/audience situation which prevails in a literary work is not fundamentally or uniquely literary. At least some of the expectations with which readers approach literary works cannot be attributed directly to the fact that the utterances are literary works or works of fiction but rather to more general appropriateness conditions governing speaker/audience relations (. . . )

Yet, literary discourse cannot be equated with other discursive forms. Actually, it has peculiar characteristics and requires skills that are not limited to those usually activated in other communicative situations. The possible worlds of the literary text are produced and received in a pragmatic and socio-cultural context ruled by rather specific principles, which are tacitly accepted by both parties and which differ from the rules that usually shape communication. Whereas newspaper reports, for instance, observe the usual felicity conditions that govern speech acts, thus performing actions such as stating, arguing or warning, literary narratives are pragmatically processed on the basis of a ritual function, according to which the readers are expected to adjust their interpretive expectations and conventions to a specific type of text. As van Dijk (1979: 151) argues, [Literary discourse] may have only or primarily a ritual function. In that respect the poem, just like the novel, but also the joke or various kinds of word-play, stories, etc., in non-literary communication, functions in a context in which the speaker-writer primarily intended to change the evaluation set of the reader with respect to the text (or its various properties) itself.

The concept of literary competence, introduced by Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics (1975: 205), is a valuable contribution to understanding the problem of literary reception. The competent reader of a story is capable of identifying the plot, distinguishing it from secondary information, producing a summary, deciding on the similarity of two or more summaries, and so on. That the secrets of this practice require a specific competence that is not available to all is also patent in Culler’s (1980: 109) later comment: “it is, alas, only too clear that knowledge of a language and a certain experience of the world do not suffice to make someone a perceptive and competent reader.” This is because literature observes distinctive norms and principles which an established praxis codifies. In view of this, the question of the role linguistics plays in interpreting and theorizing about the literary object is worth discussing. What contribution can linguistics offer for a better comprehension of the mechanisms that underlie

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literary competence? Post-structuralist theory was reticent about a linguistic formalization of any object, since form, whichever it may be, escapes the analyst and can never be conclusively determined. Similarly, a post-romantic critical tendency advocated that the literary text possesses qualities that transcend a formalist analysis, given that the subjective and personal experience of the literary object allegedly escapes formal limits (Fabb 1997: 8). After a long estrangement between the two disciplinary areas – literature and linguistics – marked by the dominance of a formalist paradigm in the latter, the seventies inaugurated, as Simon-Vandenbergen (2001: 83) remarks, a clear rapprochement between linguistics and literary studies, which today is again rather obvious. Formalist linguists focus on the many ways in which the linguistic form is exploited by literature, whereas functionalist linguists analyze particular texts so as to reveal the communicative functions they fulfil. Now, humorous literature is a clear case in which the success of the communicative exchange lies in a shared knowledge not only of the norms that govern literary communication, but also of the mechanisms through which humor transgresses them. If truth in humor is of a special kind, as seen in the third chapter (see 1.3), so are the sender’s presuppositions and the recipient’s expectations. Therefore, the humorous short story results from a complex combination of literary conventions and comedic conventions. Not to master the elements that make up this combination surely jeopardizes any comic effects the text is designed to create.

3. The principle of humorous transgression The rules of the humorous game lie at the frontier that separates humorous behavior from other forms of social behavior. We have already seen (cf. Ch. 1) that release theories of humor, of a Freudian inspiration, equate humor with a psychological frame of liberation from the constraints that society imposes upon the individual. In a similar vein, the Bakhtinian idea that carnival defies social laws and prohibitions seems to pave the way for a conception of humor as a transgression practice (see Clark and Holquist 1984: 301). In fact, just like carnival, which puts forth an upside-down world, where servants rule and kings obey, where children punish parents, foxes hunt and fish fly, humor also displays an inverted world, which disobeys the linguistic and pragmatic rules that usually preside over communication. In both cases, norm violation requires acknowledgment: without an acknowledged valid rule to break, the fun of transgressing would be lost.

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Be that as it may, the equation between carnival and humor is limited. Since the former is circumscribed in space and time, this functions as an institutional framing that legitimizes it and jeopardizes its transgressive character. As Eco (1984: 6) holds, “carnival can exist only as an authorized transgression (. . . ); if there is a possibility of transgression, it lies in humor.” Indeed, humor can take place anywhere and at any time, and it requires no permit. But, on closer scrutiny, the fact is that humor, too, can transgress only up to a certain point, or within certain limits. According to Palmer (1994: 12), and as seen above (cf. Ch.1, Section 7), the question of permissibility is crucial to the analysis of the subversive function of humor. What is allowed humor-wise varies from culture to culture, but also in terms of the occasion and the social and professional class of the participants. If, as seen above, the medical staff in a hospital is entitled to use humor, nurses have serious restrictions to that right. In certain tribes, explicit sexual advances to mourning women during a funeral ceremony are considered acceptable forms of humor. As Palmer (1994: 14) puts it, “the level of transgression acceptable in tribal societies’ joking relationships is clearly far beyond what is acceptable in the industrial world.” Despite the ethical, social and interpersonal limits imposed upon the transgressive practice, according to different cultures and situations, humor always exists at the borderline between norm and transgression. Besides, like other transgressive phenomena unconnected with the comic, humor exhibits subtle political contours. In literature and the arts, as White (1982: 52) points out, “transgression is an inversion or subversion of some existing socially valued norm, rule, structure, or contract; it mixes those things which are conventionally separate and divides up traditional entities.” Artistic and literary transgression appears thus to be imbued with revolutionary connotations: “Transgression as conceived in recent literary theory is usually thought of as destabilizing existing social forms and is thought therefore to be intrinsically radical” (ibidem). Given that similar strategies – mixtures, ruptures, inversions – also abound in humorous discourse, it can equally be seen as a politically progressive practice. But what are the marks of this subversive nature of humor in literature? If, at the level of the joke, forms of political humor and taboo-humor (obscene, scatological, racist) express a type of ideological or psychological transgression, the comic literary discourse can also transgress via the themes it chooses to cover. However, what is interesting for us here is the set of strategies by means of which humor transgresses, and which can be roughly divided into two types: linguistic strategies and pragmatic ones. Language-dependent humor is built, as seen in the second chapter, on the basis of a deviation, be it from the phonological, morphological or syntactic properties of the text, be it from its semantic configuration, namely in terms of lexical ambiguities or collocational irregular-

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ities. If this is the case, the humorist transgresses the conversational contract by directing the recipient’s attention to the wrong interpretation. Conversely, pragmatically constructed humor plays on the relationships that texts establish with contexts, by mixing contradictory elements in the same discursive universe, by infringing the principles of shared world knowledge, by denying access to essential information, by giving fallacious data, by triggering erroneous inferences, and so on. Both at a linguistic and a pragmatic level, then, literary humor lies in the gap that separates the rule-abiding recipient from the rule-infringing sender. However, it is important to point out that this infraction is not gratuitous, but aimed at specific purposes, which are ultimately cooperative. Some of the complex manifestations of the principle of transgression in humorous literary discourse will be discussed next.

4. Breaking the communicative contract In this section, humorous communication will be understood as a discourse genre susceptible of a speech-act approach. However, let it be noted right away that this does not overlook Austin’s proviso that the felicity conditions for speech acts only apply to the so-called ‘serious’ uses of language, a category that automatically excludes from consideration not only literary communication but also humorous exchanges (see Austin 1962: 22, 104 and also Searle 1969: 56). Yet, in humor, what matters is exactly the violation of felicity conditions, and not the securing of an essentially informative type of communication. Therefore, the communicative construction of humor not only can, but should, be understood as an infraction of the pragmatic principles, shared by sender and recipient, which govern speech acts. In this chapter I shall discuss the objectives of this infraction, which is only partial (since there is an ultimate cooperative basis to humor), as well as the forms it assumes. 4.1.

Illocutionary ambiguity

The laws that usually preside over verbal interaction are intentionally broken and exploited in humorous discourse. The comic utterance appears, indeed, to involve cunning interactive traps: the sender camouflages the illocutionary force of the utterance so as to guide the recipient to an inadequate presuppositional and interpretive frame. At other times, it is the recipient who, independently of the sender’s intention, interprets the utterance in a humorous way, or reacts to it

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in a joking manner, thus displaying unintended perlocutionary effects. In both cases, the deviation is due to the ambiguous character of the message – or, better yet, of its illocutionary force. Consider the following example: – Would you care for a Mars chocolate bar? – Oh yes, please! – Well, so would I! (In Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun)

Here, the recipient innocently interprets the question as an offer, and behaves accordingly (i.e., by accepting it), only to find out that the question was, after all, a mere request for information. This principle – defrauding the recipient’s illocutionary expectations – takes place between the characers in the joke, without the actual hearer or reader ever being put at stake (Dolitsky 1983: 42). In other words, this type of humor is based on the incorrect interpretation, on the part of one of the characters (in the joke, or in a longer humorous text), of the illocutionary force of the sender’s utterance. This also happens in the following dialogue (Coulthard 1977: 65), taken from a sequence of Charlie Brown: Linus: Do you want to play with me, Violet? Violet: You’re younger than me! (Shuts the door.) Linus (puzzled): She didn’t answer my question.

Na¨ıve Linus makes it plain that he suffers from a communicative incompetence of a pragmatic type: by not getting that Violet’s utterance is not a piece of information but a refusal to play with him, Linus shows to be unaware of the shared assumptions that underlie the joke (namely, that children dislike playing with their juniors). But, of course, both the sender of the joke and us, the recipients, know this very well – and that is why we laugh at Linus. Van Dijk (1977: 214) would say that Violet’s utterance consists in the obliteration of a second speech act – namely, the explicit formulation of her refusal to play with Linus – and that this obliteration is due to the fact that her refusal is easily deducible from her first speech act (i.e. informing him of her age). What usually happens is that a former preparatory speech act, through which circumstantial information is given, makes way for the exercitive, thus diminishing the latter’s degree of imposition: a) I am cold. Please shut the window. b) I’m busy. Shut up! c) I have no watch. What’s the time? Unlike these cases, Violet’s utterance consists solely, in van Dijk’s (ibidem) words, of the “condition of interpretation,” or “presupposition of a following proposition in a sequence,” without the actual speech act of refusal ever taking place. To put it more simply, Violet’s utterance may be understood, in Searle’s (1975: 31) terminology, as an indirect speech act (or, a case in which “one illocutionary act is performed indirectly by way of performing another”). In such situations, the correct identification of the sender’s illocutionary inten-

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tion depends on such factors as shared world knowledge, rational capacities, inferential skills and the conventions that rule communication. Actually, indirect speech acts – being intrinsically ambiguous in illocutionary terms – are the ones that are more prone to humorous exploitation. If, in the chocolate example, what seems to be a kind offer is nothing but a question, the following examples illustrate the opposite situation: what seems to be just a question is more than that. In the first case, a request for action is incorrectly taken to be a request for information. In a similar way, the waiter in the second example interprets the question as an information request and not as a reprimand. In both situations, and unlike the previous case, the sender is the one that is made fun of. Besides, in both cases, the recipient interprets the sender’s illocutionary intention in a deliberately incorrect way, thus displaying inadequate perlocutionary behavior: – Can you pass the salt? – Yes, I can! (Hancher 1980: 21) Diner: Waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup? Waiter: Looks like the breast-stroke, sir. (Nash 1985: 115)

4.2.

Humorous ‘(in)felicities’

Speech-act humor may also be understood as an infraction of Austin’s (1962: 14–15) felicity conditions. As Hancher (1980) rightly explains, in ‘How to play games with words: speech-act jokes’, which I shall resort to in this section, each of Austin’s ‘conditions for happy performatives’is liable to humorous infraction. Consider, for instance, Austin’s first rule, which requires “an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect.” A joke that typically violates it shows a woman bending over a hole with a shovel in her hand, during what appears to be an inaugural ceremony, and saying: I now declare this hole open. Similarly, the condition that requires “adequate persons and circumstances for the invocation of a certain procedure” is put at stake in the episode where the Red Queen, in Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, invites the White Queen to attend a party which Alice is to throw that evening, at which Alice gets understandably indignant: I didn’t know I was to have a party at all, but if there is to be one, I think I ought to invite the guests. Speech-acts must also be “executed by all participants correctly.” The joke on the jury announcing the verdict by using an unconventional formula comically illustrates the corresponding performative infelicity: We find the defendant very, very guilty. The second part of that same principle, which stipulates that the speech act be executed by all participants not only correctly but also ‘completely’

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is caricatured in a Schulz cartoon, where Charlie Brown is writing a letter (Dear Teammates, I have been thinking of resigning my job as your manager, and I. . . ) but is suddenly interrupted by Lucy, who cries joyfully, We accept! But the rules relative to insincerity are the ones that are the most fruitful in terms of comic exploitation, especially since irony is a very fertile humorous resource. Violating the rule according to which, in Austin’s words, “a person participating in and invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts and feelings” is a very common strategy in the short stories of our corpus of analysis. Take, for instance, The Lunatic’s Tale, in which Ossip Parkis reports on a date with Tiffany, his contradictory object of desire, in the following way: I felt compelled to oblige her with a brief discussion of astrology, a subject rivaling my intellectual interest with such heavy issues as est, alpha waves, and the ability of leprechauns to locate gold.

Violating the sincerity rule, which Searle (1969: 63) defines as a fundamental rule of illocutionary acts, may also refer to the future behavior of the sender, in the case of the so-called ‘commissive’ acts. According to Austin, likewise, to go against the condition that reads “the participants must so conduct themselves subsequently” produces what he calls ‘breaches’, a category of performative infelicity which Schulz also illustrates. When Lucy offers Snoopy a biscuit, he opens his mouth willingly, only to hear her say: No, I’ve changed my mind; I think I’ll eat this myself. The closing image in the sequence shows the dog sitting alone, with its mouth still open, waiting for the biscuit. In comic narratives, these principles of speech-act transgression are expressed at two levels: the actual recipient (i.e. the reader) and the fictional recipient inside the text. We have already seen that there are several voices in the literary text, which implies at least two levels of communicative interaction: one between the characters and another between author and reader. In the Woody Allen example quoted above, the narrator is also a character in the story, let alone its protagonist, which causes his infractions to have extratextual effects. For instance, when he tells a lie, he may deceive not only a fellow character but also, because he is the narrator, the narratee/reader. However, as will be seen, this sort of infraction, like others, complies with a cooperative principle underlying humor: Ossip Parkis says one thing so that we can infer what he leaves unsaid. This inversion code derives from a set of strategies of humorous construction that the recipient is supposed to identify and decode – and which suggest the existence of an alternative set of conditions for the ‘humorous illocutionary act’ to be successful, much along the lines of Raskin’s proposal (1985: 55). Whenever the performative infelicities occur between characters, the reader is no longer put at stake, accepting the author’s guidance to laugh ‘at’ the characters.

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4.3.

Infringing conversational maxims

The maxims and submaxims that constitute Grice’s well-known Cooperative Principle (1975) are liable to different types of infraction, depending on the speaker’s motivations and the circumstances of the utterance. Grice himself considers different situations that jeopardize a successful verbal exchange: speakers may, involuntarily, commit mistakes, become confused, miss the point, underestimate or overestimate the recipient’s knowledge, and so on, thus infringing the maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner. These hitches do not endanger the cooperative principle underlying communication. Conversely, deliberate infractions of the tacit rules that preside over verbal interaction may put the cooperative principle at risk. Grice (1975: 30) spells out four of these situations, as follows: 1. A participant in a talk exchange may quietly and unostentatiously violate a maxim; if so, in some cases he will be liable to mislead. 2. He may opt out from the operation both of the maxim and of the Cooperative Principle. (. . . ) He may say, for example, I cannot say more; my lips are sealed. 3. He may be faced by a clash: He may be unable, for example, to fulfil the first maxim of Quantity (Be as informative as is required) without violating the second maxim of Quality (Have adequate evidence for what you say). 4. He may flout a maxim; that is, he may blatantly fail to fulfil it. (. . . ) When a conversational implicature is generated in this way, I shall say that a maxim is being exploited.

Only the three first cases on this list – violation, opting out and clashes – consist in a deliberate infraction of the Cooperative Principle. On the contrary, the last one, flouting, though equally infringing the conversational maxims, carries a specific communicative purpose, not jeopardizing this principle. Hence, it constitutes the best situation, among the four above, to be put to humorous use. Still, let it be noted that the uncooperative violation of conversational maxims may also constitute comic material – but only when the verbal exchange takes place between the characters, not implicating the reader. For instance, the first of Grice’s infractions above, in which the speaker “quietly and unostentatiously violates a maxim,” is illustrated in cunning and gratuitous lying, which may well be put to comic use. In Hancher’s (1980: 26) words, “the gull is one of the oldest comic characters, as is the braggart (. . . ) It is a help if their victim is unusually gullible, like Charlie Brown.” Let us look at a few examples, of obvious humorous flavor, that show the infraction – or flouting – of conversational maxims with an underlying cooperative objective, namely, transmitting a covert double sense by means of a conversational implicature:

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a) A professor is writing a testimonial about a pupil who is a candidate for a philosophy job, and his letter reads as follows: "Dear Sir, Mr. X’s command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc." (Grice 1975: 33) b) A: Did John go to the party last night? B: He sure did, honey, and don’t let anybody tell you any different! (Pratt 1977: 161)

The two Quantity maxims are here ostensibly infringed. In the former case, amply quoted by humor scholars, the professor’s testimonial does not comply with the rule reading “Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).” Therefore, the interpretive process in the recipient’s mind will be grosso modo the following: if the professor accepts to write a testimonial (instead of opting out) about one of his pupils (whom he is expected to know), and since a testimonial needs to be informative, why does he conceal essential data? The reader infers that the professor does it because he is reluctant to reveal that the pupil is a poor philosophy student. Consequently, this is the conversational implicature that underlies the professor’s utterance. In the second case, conversely, the speaker says too much, infringing the second maxim of quantity (“Do not give more information than is required”). Speaker B does not simply confirm John’s presence at the party, but also adds that not everybody agrees on the point. By doing so, he conveys the implicature that John was not at the party after all, although he should have been. The Quality maxims – “Do not say what you believe to be false” and “Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence” – are very productive in humorous terms, especially in the comic, hence cooperative, use of irony, metaphor and hyperbole and the so-called understatement (which Grice names meiosis). To Grice, irony consists in infringing the rule that stipulates, “Try to make your contribution one that is true” – and the same goes for metaphor, a case of ‘categorial falsity’. When, for instance, a man in love whispers to his beloved, You are the cream in my coffee, she will not, Grice claims, interpret his utterance as an objective description, but instead as a figurative way of expressing his passionate feelings. It is easy to imagine incongruous – and hence humorous – metaphors, just like understatements: in Grice’s example, a man who has just destroyed the furniture is said to be a little intoxicated. Likewise, hyperbole, which has a non-verbal counterpart in clowns’ pantomimes, constitutes a stylistic device of admitted comic potential, as is amply illustrated in The Lunatic’s Tale (cf. Ch. 6, Section 2.4.2): What joyful months spent with her till my sex drive (listed, I believe, in the Guinness Book of World Records) waned. Infringing the Relation maxim (“Be relevant”) is a common humorous resource, as often happens in Schulz’s comic strips. Take the case in which Char-

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lie Brown ventures a philosophical discussion with Lucy: “I wish I could be happy. . . If I were happy, I could help others to be happy. Does that make sense to you?” Lucy replies: “We’ve had spaghetti at our house three times this month!” And Charlie goes: “Good grief!” But Grice’s example, which carries a conversational implicature, therefore assuming a cooperative intention, also has humorous flavor: At a genteel party, A says, “Mrs X is an old bag.” There is a moment of appalled silence, and then B says, “The weather has been quite delightful this summer, hasn’t it?”

The obvious refusal, on B’s part, to give a relevant answer to A’s utterance implies that B considers the utterance inadequate (or a social gaffe) to the point of refusing to consider it. The Manner maxim (“Be perspicuous”) and its submaxims (“Avoid obscurity of expression; avoid ambiguity; be brief; be orderly”) do not bear on what is said, but on how it is said. Now, ambiguity constitutes, as thoroughly seen in the second chapter of this book, one of humor’s most fruitful resources. In many humorous forms, it is ambiguity – sometimes within a single word – that is responsible for triggering the script-switch that brings humor about. But if opting deliberately for ambiguous discourse reveals comic intentions, so does resorting to prolixity. Consider Grice’s example next, in which the deliberate infraction of the “Be brief and succinct” principle is evident. If the speaker prefers a verbose alternative to the straightforward verb, ‘sing’, it is maybe because s/he thinks that Miss X could hardly sing (intended implicature): a) Miss X sang “Home Sweet Home.” b) Miss X produced a series of sounds that corresponded closely with the score of “Home Sweet Home.”

In all these cases, it is quite obvious that the range of possibilities open to those that choose not to observe conversational rules, or to expose situations in which these rules are involuntarily violated, is rather wide. In the case of comic narratives, let us stress it, this type of infraction is mainly cooperative, thus constituting what Grice calls flouting or exploitation (instead of violation) of conversational maxims (on a Gricean look at humor see also Hunter 1983). Next I shall discuss the way in which breaking the communicative contract is not done at random, but by means of cueing and signaling, which gear the recipients to the humorous mode and help them overcome interpretive obstacles.

Breaking the communicative contract

4.4.

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Predictability and convention

The problem of how to access – and process – textual information in comic short stories is closely related to the notion of predictability. Since humor is, as it were, a hide-and-seek game, it is not always easy for the reader to tackle the text: incongruities require solving, but clues are scarce or misleading. This is partly due to the fact that sender and recipient have asymmetrical power: the former holds the key to deciphering the text’s meaning, but conceals it and masks it; the recipient, on the other hand, has to search for it and make predictions on the basis of the information given. The problem is that humorous stories, like jokes, are typically undersupplied information-wise. The other problem is that there are conventional expectations to interpreting a text. As Stubbs (1983: 87–97) remarks, recipients have intuitions as to the way a text is supposed to progress, that is, as to the type of sequence that is to be expected (for instance, answering It is a lovely day, isn’t it? to the question What’s the time? is an obvious sequential anomaly). In other words, they know intuitively which propositional contents are fit for each moment on a sequence. Hence the predictable character of standard texts, which determines, and simplifies, their interpretation. Reading a story, in particular, usally follows sequential steps, which structuralists have tried to analyze and formalize (cf. previous chapter). However, what humor does is contradict these expectations. Or, to put it differently, what it does is make the reader formulate wrong predictions, as is obvious in the example Stubbs analyzes: When I was in Australia recently, I was taken to a national park by the ocean north of Brisbane. A woman in the party explained to me that there were four beaches in separate little bays along the coast. The convention was that on the first beach, nearest to the car-park, bathers had to wear swimming costumes. On the second beach they could go topless. On the third beach nude bathing was allowed. And we were going to the fourth beach. . . Hearers were left trying desperately to use the first three propositions as a discourse frame to predict the fourth, although our predictions turned out to be wrong. (The fourth beach was less crowded.)

Similarly, whenever two utterances follow one another, the recipient tends to take one as a discourse frame for the other. In Stubbs’s second example, a radio program begins as follows: Today we have a discussion of vasectomy, and the announcement of the winner of the do-it-yourself competition. Obsviously, the humor lies in that the phrase ‘do-it-yourself competition’ is taken as referring anaphorically to ‘vasectomy’, which functions as a discourse frame for the whole sentence, guiding its interpretation and setting expectations. In humorous narratives, also, the recipient sets out to find textual cohesion along the lines of a pre-existing frame. In this process, s/he intuitively puts

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together what Stubbs calls a structural analysis of the discourse in hand. In view of each of the utterances to analyze, s/he gradually makes predictions and provisional classifications of the subsequent utterances. The setback is that these predictions eventually prove invalid. Consider two examples from our corpus. The reader of A Shocking Accident intuitively (but, alas, incorrectly) predicts that Sally will laugh at the comic circumstances of the death of Jerome’s father – because all previous discursive situations have assumed the same pattern. Similarly, the reader of The Lunatic’s Tale erroneously predicts that Ossip Parkis will be thrilled to find the perfect woman. Nevertheless, the sender of the literary message intentionally plots to violate these expectations, by setting a trap from which the recipient cannot – and ultimately does not wish to – escape. According to Purdie (1993: 37), “the work a joking mechanism performs is to ‘trap’ the Audience into a situation where their proper activity of ‘making sense’inevitably entails producing error.” The inevitability of making mistakes is inherent in humor interpretation. And the nature of these mistakes largely lies in a predictability break. In Graham Greene’s story, Sally becomes sullen-faced at the hilarious revelation, whereas in Woody Allen’s story Ossip prefers to swap the perfect woman for the blatantly imperfect one, which obviously goes against the reader’s expectations. It is the surprising realization of these mistakes, and their implausibility, that produces humorous pleasure. Yet, on the other hand, breaking the predictability pattern paradoxically turns into a principle that is predictable. It is as if comic stories were expected not to meet the readers’ usual expectations – and it is as though this were part of their very identity. When reading Woody Allen or David Lodge, one knows straight away that the experience will be different from reading Tolstoy or Henry James, that is, the rules of the literary game will not be the same. In fact, just like conversational jokes, which rely on introductory cues and clues, literary comedies also display external signals and hints (title, author’s name, editorial collection) that inform the audience of the type of text in hand. These c(l)ues also indicate the communicative conventions of that type of text, which, in the case of humor, is the same as signaling a promise of amusement, or a game, which in principle the reader will gladly take up. When s/he is caught unawares – for instance, when s/he is not familiar with the author, or when the latter makes an unusual incursion into comedy – s/he is supposed to identify the genre and activate the interpretive conventions appropriate to it. Therefore, regarding the reader of comic stories as a victim misses the point, since it can be argued that joining in the humorous game is voluntary and even conventional. After all, discourse is a mutual construction of at least two interlocutors, and it cannot be accomplished without the cooperation of both.

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If, for instance, the reader gave up on the interpretive process when realizing his/her mistakes and the author’s traps, the communicative intentions of the latter would be automatically blocked. Actually, the question of intentionality in humor should be raised on a bidirectional basis. Does A intend to transmit to B what B perceives? Does B intend to take part in A’s game, even when finding out it is vitiated? It is exactly because the recipient identifies the sender’s humorous intentions and, deliberately, accepts them that the discursive circle is closed. It is also for the same reason that it is possible for him/her to be amused along with the sender, instead of being a mere victim, or indeed the very butt of the joke. In light of this, the question of power is more complex than initially suggested: if, at first sight, the sender’s power seems greater, it is up to the recipient to acknowledge and sanction it. In the absence of this approval, the author’s discourse becomes monological and void, and humor, incomprehended, aborts. The informative deficit of humorous discourse is, consequently, intentional, conventional (hence predictable) and functional, since it plays a fundamental role in the overall purpose of the communicative exchange – i.e. to produce comic effects. Let us now focus on the notion of the unsaid, a typically humorous resource that enhances this deficit-based construction of comic narratives.

5. The unsaid in narrative humor The principle of economy that presides over the verbal act in non-humorous communication aims at minimizing time loss and unnecessary processing efforts. However, the humorous discourse uses this principle subversively. Actually, whereas everyday interaction is guided by a relevance purpose, according to which one only expresses what is necessary and pertinent, humor tends to be built, as said above, on an intentionally fallacious and undersupplied basis. As Dolitsky (1992: 35) puts it, the problem of humor is that “some not only worthy but also necessary information is often left out of the story.” The reason why humor does not say, instead of saying, is not, however, gratuitous. The deficient character of comic discourse conceals procedural purposes that are central for the humorous effect to supervene. True though it may be that sometimes resorting to the implicit is a strategy of escaping responsibility (as happens, for instance, with allusive jokes with an erotic or political content – on this, see Chapter 1, 5.2), humor in general makes use of the unsaid as a device to trigger the comic incongruity, that is, as an indispensable strategy to survive as humor. Actually, humor only works if it keeps from saying everything. In the joke, brevity has been pointed out as a touchstone of success. Oring (1989), for in-

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stance, explains the extent to which processing the punch line (the joke’s raison d’ˆetre) depends on how brief and controlled the information preceding it is. If the joke is too extended and detailed, it runs the risk of inducing the recipient to disperse his/her procedural attention on too many marginal details, eventually neglecting the one that is essential to understand the punch line. Alternatively, the joke may say too much. This happens when the joke openly displays the solution to the incongruity instead of just suggesting it. The usually compact nature of the punch line is a technical strategy that aims at causing, according to Oring (1989: 358), a sudden “comprehension change”; now, if the humorist violates this principle, the change may not be sudden enough, thus jeopardizing the surprise effect. Let us remember Raskin’s famous doctor’s wife joke (see Chapter 3, 1.5). If one were to change the punch line, for instance by adding a revealing word to it – say, “Come right in, handsome” – one would solve the incongruity explicitly and thus kill the joke. In comic narratives, on the other hand, the game on the unsaid is pervasive, taking place at the topical level of the linguistic structure (in which the implicit underlies puns, for instance), or at the level of the discursive macrostructure. On this dimension, the semantic organization of the text makes every script activated evoke information relative to a certain action or state, while providing potential semantic connections and underlying implications. It is up to the reader, who keeps this information in memory in an episodic form, to complete and reconstitute what is left implicit and, accordingly, predict what is to come next. Now, it is this blank space that the humorist juggles with, either a) by mixing up scripts whose connections remain implicit until a revealing element operates the conjunction, or b) by activating scripts that come to prove inadequate for the situation in hand. In The Lunatic’s Tale, Woody Allen suspends the revelation of the typically comic motives underlying the passage from the successful man script to the bum one until the very end of the story. Conversely, Graham Greene activates a script that does not obtain: in A Shocking Accident, the death of Jerome’s father activates the mourning script and the corresponding elements of suffering and sorrow on the part of the bereaved family; however, not only does the orphan remain dry-eyed when the news is broken to him, but he also concentrates all his attention on the fate of the pig that caused his father’s death. Likewise, inYou Were Perfectly Fine, Dorothy Parker puts forward a love declaration script, which presupposes lucidity and determination, but Peter proves it wrong, since his drunkenness at the fateful moment of the amorous confession invalidates the whole situation. In all these cases, as in several others to analyze (cf. chapters 6 and 7), the key to the humorous incongruity – between the characters’ behavior and the

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scripts that the reader is led to activate – largely lies in what is left unsaid. Let us, therefore, take a look at two of the interpretive short cuts that grant access to this key dimension: presupposition and implicature. These terms are regrettably polysemous and require some discussion. 5.1.

Presuppositions

Presuppositional manipulations should be understood as important players in the semantic and pragmatic organization of comic discourse.Yet, it goes without saying that not all jokes are presuppositionally constructed. Those that are so, fully or partly, provide us with an interesting basis to analyze presuppositions in short stories. It is the aim of this section to discuss a few illustrative cases and to investigate how far presuppositions in humorous stories function differently from the way they do in non-humorous texts. The concept of presupposition is one of the bases of contextual semantics and it represents a cornerstone in discourse analysis. The term has acquired many shades, and, as Eco (1979) holds, it has become an ‘umbrella-term’, attracting an interdisciplinary interest from such diverse areas as logics, philosophy of language, semiotics and generative semantics. Among the various facets which the word has assumed, I shall focus on three: logical presupposition (relative to the proposition/sentence), textual presupposition (relative to the mechanisms of cohesion and progression in the text) and pragmatic presupposition (relative to the contextual factors that affect the utterance act). (On a discussion of presupposition in humor see Ermida 2007b). Initially put forth within formal logic by Frege (1892) and Strawson (1950), the concept of presupposition is closely connected with the truth of the propositional content that underlies the sentence, independently of that sentence being true or false. Presupposition is, in light of this, an underlying proposition whose truth value the speaker takes for granted. A common diagnostic test for logical presupposition is negation – or, to put it more accurately, ‘constancy under negation’: if a sentence (i) and its negation (ii) share the same propositional content (iii), this shared content constitutes their presupposition: (i) She resented being told the truth (ii) She did not resent being told the truth (iii) She was told the truth

Paul and Carol Kiparsky (1971) specified the notion of logical presupposition by resorting to the distinction between factive verbs (like regret, comprehend, ignore, resent, etc.) and non-factive verbs (like assert, suppose, maintain, claim, etc.). Compare I regretted being late with I claimed to be late: whereas the

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former presupposes I was late, the latter does not. Keenan (1972: 9–11) adds Kiparskies’ factive verbs to a list of other morpho-syntactic formats that also carry presuppositional contents, such as: time subordinate clauses – John left / didn’t leave after Mary called (Mary called), aspectual constructions – Fred continued / didn’t continue speaking (Fred was speaking), iteratives – John ate / didn’t eat another turnip (John ate at least one turnip) and quantifiers – Everyone / Not everyone but Mary left (Mary didn’t leave). A well-known humorous example of a presuppositional trap, usually attributed to Groucho Marx, is the question Have you stopped beating your wife? (cf. above, Ch. 2, Section 5.5), which illustrates what Sellars (1954) calls ‘change of state verbs’ (like stop, start, finish, carry on, cease, leave, arrive, etc.). Whether affirmative or negative, the answer is bound to incriminate whoever gives it: (i) Yes, I have stopped beating my wife. (ii) No, I have not stopped beating my wife. (iii) I have beaten my wife.

Another dimension of logical presupposition – usually known as categorial or sortal presupposition – is particularly interesting for the study of humor. This type of presupposition, as Allwood et al (1977: 151) explain, has to do with the notion of domain: “Intuitively, the domain of a predicate is the set of all individuals of which it is meaningful to assert the predicate.” Thus, the domain of be clever, as in John is clever, is the set of all objects which can think (or have a mind) – whereas its extension is the set of all objects which are actually clever. Therefore, the predicate be clever can be said to presuppose that its subject is something equipped with a mind. As a result, saying The Eiffel Tower is clever is a presuppositional anomaly from a logical point of view. Humor often plays on anomalies deriving from an inadequate inclusion of an element into the domain of a predicate. The following joke is a case in point: – I’m delighted to hear about your cat. – What do you mean? He’s just died. – Precisely. (Leech 1983)

The domain of the complements to the phrase be delighted that is necessarily positive, as opposed to be sorry that, which is negative. Given the context of the joke, a natural presupposition of the first speaker’s utterance would be that your cat won a prize in a pet competition, or that it recovered from a tricky disease. Therefore, the cat’s death is a displaced (incongruous, hence humorous) object in the logical domain of the proposition. The presuppositions thus understood are inherent in the structure of the sentence, requiring a logical / linguistic competence. However, if they are inherent

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in the structure of a whole text, they are closely linked with textual cohesion and thematic progression. This is the second level of analysis I pointed out above. For a text to progress, it provides – or, poses, collocates – information that immediately becomes presupposed (on this, see Maingueneau 1990: 103). In other words, the way a text evolves in thematic terms is based on a constant correlation between what is ‘presupposed’ (the given, or theme) and what is ‘posed’ (the new, or rheme), in which the former is obviously existent, but the latter may be disputed. Take, for instance, one of the short stories in our corpus, You Were Perfectly Fine, by Dorothy Parker. The girl keeps insisting that she and Peter will be immensely happy together once they get married, and in doing so she apparently presupposes (i.e. takes for granted) that his love declaration the night before was true and for real, and therefore marriage is actually going to happen. Yet, we know that she knows that Peter was drunk the night before, which makes him non-liable. So, by focusing on the ‘posed’ / rheme (that they will be happy together), she discreetly tries to legitimize the false ‘presupposed’ / theme (that Peter’s love declaration was for real). So, what narrative humor does is either highlight presuppositional hitches in the characters’ behavior, as in the example above, or invert its own presuppositional architecture as the text progresses. The latter case occurs when, typically, the text offers a thematic frame that is to be contradicted later, that is, it begins by presenting a theme which is eventually denied by the rheme. All the texts in our corpus exhibit a supra-script inversion, which can be read along these lines. But many jokes do likewise. The new information they provide does not agree with that given at their outset. Take the following joke: England is not a bad country. It’s just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clappedout, post-imperial, post-industrial, slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. (Ross 1998: 42)

The first sentence in this text provides a presuppositional frame regarding the set of information the reader is to expect: namely, that the text is going ‘to be about’ the values and merits of the English country. Therefore, the remainder of the text is supposed to provide data to confirm the initial thematic claim. However, the text evolves exactly in the opposite direction, by supplying a list of negative adjectives that contradict the previous assertion. Ironically, it also provides an adverb, just, which wrongly indicates that the list is not that negative. Textual presupposition, therefore, derives from the sequential structure of the utterance, and it is based on previous information which, on a background plan, supports new information the text gradually provides. Nonetheless, the concept of presupposition may also have to do with pre-existing propositions that the

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sender and the recipient tacitly share. In this sense, and as comic narratives so well illustrate, the presuppositional construction of the text goes beyond the laws of discursive organization (sequentiality, causality, parallelism) and projects onto the pragmatic dimension where the interlocutors’ encyclopaedic knowledge operates. On this level of analysis, the third I pointed out above, it is not from the text alone, but from the circumstances of the utterance that presupposition derives. Lakoff (1971) is usually regarded as the first to conceive of a pragmatic approach to the concept of presupposition. For a sentence to be appropriate, or apt, or truthful, it has to observe individual factors such as subjective ideas and personal beliefs. If the speaker believes in the conditions that underlie a certain sentence, the sentence will be appropriate and truthful, in the context of that specific communicative exchange. As Stalnaker (1973: 17) explains, “presuppositions, on this account, are something like the background beliefs of the speaker – propositions whose truth he takes for granted, or seems to take for granted, in making his statement.” Consider the following example, in which the utterances on a) only make sense given the presuppositions on b): a) (i) (ii) (iii) b) (i) (ii) (iii)

My great-grand-mother is a double agent. My gold-fish told me a secret. My chrysanthemum is in love with me. Great-grand-mothers are capable of being double agents. Gold-fishes are capable of speaking. Chrysanthemums are capable of loving, i.e., having feelings.

Humor resorts to such presuppositional games by breaking the realistic patterns of so-called normal communication. This strategy sets up a dimension in which the possible worlds (cf. Ch. 2, Section 5.7) that the speaker presupposes are uncritically accepted by the addressee. Consider again the lobster joke (by Oaks, 1994, quoted earlier): When did the lobster blush? When it saw the salad dressing.

The presuppositions underlying this question-answer pair are: a) Lobsters are capable of blushing, i.e. of having emotions, and b) Salads are capable of getting dressed. We saw above (cf. Ch. 2, Section 4) that the script-switch in this joke is prompted by the ambiguity of the collocation of ‘salad’ prior to ‘dressing’, the latter of which can either be a participial noun or the gerund form of a verb. But the point I want to make now is that the addressee is supposed to accept the presuppositions mentioned and adhere to the rules of this alternative possible world. Speaker and hearer are therefore united in the same presuppositional implausibility.

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Keenan (1972: 12) reformulated Lakoff’s highly idiosyncratic and individualizing conception of pragmatic presupposition according to a wider principle, namely, that “certain culturally defined conditions or contexts be satisfied in order for an utterance to be understood (in its literal, intended meaning).” The age, sex and social status of those taking part in the communicative act, as well as the presence or absence of certain objects in the physical context of enunciation, all constitute examples of presuppositional elements that determine a literal interpretation of the utterance. If these conditions do not obtain, the utterance will be either unintelligible, or interpreted in a non-literal way, for instance as a metaphorical, insulting or, as Keenan explicitly mentions, humorous use of language. In light of this, humor is seen as the violation of a given presuppositional frame. The following joke, for instance, makes fun of the usual presuppositions hearers have when asked a riddle, namely, that the answer is supposed to be as farfetched and strange as the question: Q: What would you do if a giraffe stood in front of you on a ticket line? A: Wait for your turn.

This extra-lexical nature of pragmatic presupposition is defended by Raskin (1985: 54, 70–71), whose conception of presupposition is neither logical – for it “cannot pass the negation test” – nor pragmatic in Lakoff’s ‘individualdependent’ sense. Rather, it is pragmatic in that it is anchored in a set of conditions that should be observed so as to ‘enable’ an utterance to be understood. In light of this, humor is by and large based on the knowledge of presuppositions that sender and recipient share. The previous example shows how a joke violates shared presuppositions; the following one (from Raskin’s 1985 annex) relies on such presuppositions to make sense: At a party, the conversation turned to euthanasia. “I am all for it,” said an elderly lady. “When my late husband found out that he was dying of leukaemia, he had to commit suicide. It would have been much nicer with euthanasia.” “But how come you collected his life insurance, Edith?” asked the hostess. “The insurance companies don’t usually pay up when it’s a suicide.” “Oh, Bob was a very intelligent man. We lived in Boston at the time. All he did was to go down the subway, and when he found himself on a very crowded platform in between trains, he shouted very loudly, “Does everyone know that the Pope is gay?”

Getting the joke implies, on the part of the hearer, being familiar with a set of cultural presuppositions, such as: a) Boston is a town where many Catholics live, b) The Pope is the much-respected head of the Catholic church, c) Many Catholic priests are said to be gay, d) Crowded subway platforms are dangerous, and e) Provoking a crowd is dangerous. It is the knowledge of these presuppositions

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that makes the allusion-based joke “accessible only to those who share it,” as Raskin (1985: 54) puts it. Comic narratives also rely to a great extent on the principle of pragmatic presupposition, understood as shared knowledge. They too are closely linked to a common awareness by the co-enunciators of culturally defined conditions and contexts. If the Pope joke presupposes that the hearer possesses the cultural data necessary to its deciphering (which is why telling it to a child would jeopardize it seriously), so humorous short stories hinge on shared information that is taken for granted. In short, this section has highlighted the peculiar presuppositional nature of humorous texts. Although non-comic texts also bear presuppositions, the way they work in comic texts is genre-specific: it is in them that the key to the comic incongruity lies. The three types sketched above obtain both in jokes and longer comic texts. Semantically, hitches, ambiguities or contradictions lying in the presuppositions, and wrong interpretations of presuppositions, both of which may lead to their straightforward canceling, are factors which jokes and comic stories, unlike regular informative texts, exploit. Secondly, comic texts defraud the thematic expectations initially set, thus inverting the usual architecture of textual presupposition. And, last but not least, pragmatic presuppositions in humor rely on the principle of disbelief suspension, which is necessary for the farfetched nature of a great deal of humor to be sanctioned, and they also lie in shared world knowledge, which senders and recipients tacitly juggle.

5.2.

Implicatures

The notion of implicature is closely related to the concept of presupposition, also bearing on the norms that implicitly govern discursive exchanges. It is usually claimed that the recipient identifies presuppositions but infers implicatures. It is as if presuppositions preceded the utterance, whereas implicatures followed the interpretation process, requiring a calculation procedure. Another common way to distinguish between the two phenomena is to point out the uncertain character of implicatures as opposed to the stable nature of presuppositions. Unlike presuppositions, implicatures can be denied, in that senders can contradict the recipient’s interpretation and take refuge in the literal sense of the utterance. Besides, whereas presuppositions may reside exclusively in the logical-linguistic dimension, implicatures are necessarily associated with a particular context, having to do with the multiple factors involved in a given utterance. Coined by Grice (1975), the concept of implicature has become popular especially in its ‘conversational’ sense. Yet, Grice also conceived of a ‘conventional’

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type of implicature to refer to situations in which the speaker’s communicative intention lies entirely in the linguistic structure of the utterance. In the example He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave, the speaker implies that courage is an asset that derives from the nationality of the person mentioned, insofar as therefore is a conclusive conjunction. Conversely, conversational implicatures require a much wider range of contextual elements, going beyond the linguistic dimension on which conventional implicatures dwell. In Grice’s example, subject A asks subject B how a common friend, who works at the bank, has been doing, and B replies: Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues and he hasn’t been to prison yet. The identification of what B implies requires knowing not only the linguistic code, but also the circumstantial elements of the utterance, such as the identity of the speakers, C’s personality (namely, that he is prone to commit the typical bank clerk’s crime), the fact that C’s colleagues are deceitful people and that C is not aware of it, etc. On the part of the recipient, conversational implicatures require the formulation of an interpretive calculation: according to Grice (1975: 31), the presence of a conversational implicature “must be capable of being worked out (. . . ) and even if it can be intuitively grasped, [it must] be replaceable by an argument.” This distinctive criterion of conversational implicatures – often called calculability requirement – vis-`a-vis conventional implicatures constitutes an inferential process. Even if, at first sight, the speaker’s utterance looks irregular and jeopardizes the Cooperative Principle, conversational implicatures see to it that it still holds. However, for the hearer to successfully achieve the correct interpretation, which means, for the hearer to correctly infer the presence and nature of a conversational implicature, s/he will have to possess several types of knowledge, which Grice (1975: 32) enumerates in the following way: To work out that a particular conversational implicature is present, the hearer will rely on the following data: 1) The conventional meaning of the words used, together with the identity of any references that may be involved; 2) the Cooperative Principle and its maxims; 3) the context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance; 4) other items of background knowledge; and 5) the fact that all relevant items falling under the previous headings are available to both participants and both participants know or assume this to be the case.

Sperber and Wilson (1986a, 1986b) depart from Grice’s framework when devising their Theory of Relevance (on an application of Sperber and Wilson’s theory to humor, see Yus, 2003). There, too, the concept of implicature is a central notion to understanding what goes on in communication. Let us take a quick look at Sperber and Wilson’s contribution before applying it to the humorous case. Their definition of implicature (1986b: 250) runs as follows:

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(. . . ) the implicatures of an utterance are those contextual assumptions and implications which the hearer has to recover in order to satisfy himself that the speaker has observed the principle of relevance.

Consider Sperber and Wilson’s example: Peter: Would you drive a Mercedes? Mary: I wouldn’t drive ANY expensive car (cf. 1986a: 194 ff.). Mary’s utterance does not answer Peter’s question directly, but he takes its relevance for granted, and accordingly makes additional processing efforts to interpret it. To begin with, Mary’s answer conveys a piece of encyclopaedic information relative to new cars, from which derives the implicature A Mercedes is an expensive car, which Sperber and Wilson call “implicated premise” – a processing element that the hearer provides according to his/her memory frames. But since this stage does not justify Mary’s answer yet, Peter formulates an “implicated conclusion”: Mary wouldn’t drive a Mercedes. These implicatures constitute a type whose truth value the authors consider to be “completely determined,” just as if Mary had affirmed them directly and taken full responsibility for them. However, if Mary’s communicative intention had been limited to this, she should have preferred to give Peter an explicit answer (I wouldn’t drive a Mercedes), which would have required less processing effort. Instead, she opted for an indirect answer, because she planned on reaching additional contextual effects, namely a second implicated premise (People who refuse to drive expensive cars disapprove of displays of wealth), as well as a second implicated conclusion (Mary disapproves of displays of wealth). Now, the truth value of these implicatures, which Sperber and Wilson consider to be “weak,” is no longer imputable to Mary alone, which makes the communicative exchange more uncertain and indeterminate: “Clearly, the weaker the implicatures, the less confidence the hearer can have that the particular premises or conclusions he supplies will reflect the speaker’s thoughts, and this is where the indeterminacy lies” (1986a: 200–202). Despite this risk, if Mary chooses to give an implicit answer, she does it because she aims at making these implicatures manifest, so as to stimulate the inferential process that will reveal a greater informative value (saying more with fewer words) and more subtle contextual effects. In other words, she does it because she observes the Principle of Relevance. Humor lends itself to a similar approach. Take the following example, from the film Small-time crooks, written and directed by Woody Allen (2001): a husband asks his wife Why don’t you accept you are married to a genius?, to which she replies with another question, Why, am I a bigamist?. Her answer, an ‘ostensibly’ indirect one, asks for a process of inferential interpretation. First, her husband activates his linguistic knowledge and formulates an implicated premise: Bigamists have two spouses; then, considering the context, he produces

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a second premise, My wife only has one husband: me; and, thirdly, he reaches the conclusion, My wife is not a bigamist. However, this conclusion does not solve the problematic gap between question and answer, which is why the husband, never doubting the relevance of his wife’s utterance, takes two steps further in this deductive inferential process: If my wife were a bigamist, she might be married to a genius (implicated premise) and As my wife is not a bigamist, she is not married to a genius (implicated conclusion). This conclusion, equivalent to I am not a genius, finally unveils his wife’s true communicative intention. One might ask: why opt for such an indirect answer, with the corresponding processing onus, when the semantic content of its direct counterpart (which would have been something like, Because you are not a genius, or Because I cannot accept what is not true) would be roughly the same? The reason is that the contextual effects are greater. Indeed, resorting to implicature allows two signification plans to be established – the literal one and the implicit one – in the intersection of which resides an opposition and consequent comic incongruity. In terms of script analysis, this incongruity would be the standard intelligence vs. stupidity opposition. Besides, it is well-known that presenting an enigma is one of the classic humorous techniques: to find the solution to the problem equals discovering the key to the semantic disjunction, and this discovery, or resolution (‘falling into place’, as some call it) is, according to cognitive theories of humor sketched in the first chapter, what provides comic pleasure. If the wife had given an immediate answer, none of these contextual effects would have supervened, which allows us to say that her utterance is, in Sperber and Wilson’s terminology, ‘optimally relevant’. These and other examples to analyze in the next chapters show that the secret to understanding humor, either in the joke or in comic narratives, largely resides in the concept of implicature. When the short story authors seem to cross the line that separates cooperative from uncooperative communication, we will have to read between the lines, under the etymologically intertwined forms of the ‘implicit’ and the ‘implicated’, so as to spot the clues to solve the problem. In literary texts, these clues are first and foremost lexical, but the other types of knowledge Grice talks about (context of the utterance, shared background knowledge, common assumptions) are also fundamental to retrieving the authorial intention.

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6. Humorous intertextuality: allusion and parody A great deal of what is left unsaid in the humorous text lies, not in the co-textual surroundings, but in other texts, where the comic sequences are completed and the cryptic references become meaningful. Being a paradigmatic expression of the interactive facet of humor, the concept of intertextuality implies that humorist and recipient both know a pre-existing text. In non-humorous situations, quotation and paraphrase constitute two typical forms of the intertextual connection. In turn, the comic uses of intertextuality are numerous and important, especially as far as the humorous short story is concerned, and entail two other notions that require some discussion, namely allusion and parody. Before turning to these, let us focus on the origin of the term and on its implications for the study of comedy. Since its coinage by Kristeva in 1966, the concept of intertextuality has come to acquire many shades of meaning, but the bottom line is that it involves the shaping of a text’s meaning by other texts. From the author’s point of view, it entails borrowing or transforming a prior text; from the reader’s, identifying one text in reading another. For Genette (1982), the concept of intertextuality originally signifies the presence of one text in another, by means of quotation or allusion. But a stronger process is that of transforming the original text via parody or pastiche. According to Genette, parodic or pastiche texts are hypotexts deriving from a source-text, or hypertext, which has undergone a significant change. In humor studies, the importance of intertextuality is undeniable. According to Attardo (2001: 77), “a text (Ti) may be said to have an intertextual relation to another text (Tj) when the processing of Ti would be incomplete without a reference to Tj.” The nature of this incompleteness, Attardo adds, can reside in one of the various elements that constitute a text: meaning, lexical choices, syntactic structure, circumstances of production, etc. Being a multifarious phenomenon, allusions are consensually regarded as a lavish intertextual resource of humor, be it in the joke or in the longer comic narrative. It is no wonder, after all, that the verb ‘to allude’ comes from alludere, or ad+ludere, which in Latin means ‘to play’, which is not far from presentday conceptions of the humorous practice (on this etymological curiosity, cf. Dumarsais 1730: 151). When the humorist makes an allusion, s/he challenges the audience to identify a source-text, often cunningly camouflaged, which is indicative of general culture or even social status. This is why this type of humor is considered to be tendentiously aggressive. Nash (1985: 74–76) points out that allusive jokes are “a kind of test, proving the credentials of the initiated and baffling the outsider,” and he states: “To make an allusion is often to make a bid for situational power.” Nash adds that the type of information present

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in allusive jokes covers a wide spectrum, ranging from philosophical maxims (e.g. Coito ergo sum) and literary quotes (Is this Mick Jagger that I see before me? – cf. Macbeth I, vii, 33), both of which are rather elitist, to popular sayings (Red sky at night, shepherd’s house is on fire) and epistolary formulas (Dear Mary, / Weather’s here. Wish you were beautiful./ Love, Al). And these are but a few examples among many others, like advertising or political slogans, and newspaper, law, or administrative language. The intertextual source for allusion may even be another joke, as is the case of the so-called formulaic humor, which gives rise to joke cycles and many variations whose interpretive success largely depends on correct intertextual identification. Consider, for instance, the “X-does-it” joke cycle (Chiaro 1992: 61–71): so as to interpret something like Windsurfers do it standing up, one should know other specimens of the same comic frame, such as Accountants do it calculatingly, Linguists do it with their tongues, Parents used to do it, Oscar did it wildly, Einstein did it relatively, etc. In all these examples, there is a matrix that constitutes the hypertext, which goes through endless adaptations and contextualizations. But the closely related concepts of allusion and parody deserve some delimiting effort, so much so that it is frequent to take the former for the latter erroneously. In “Intertextuality in Humor” (1989: 117) Norrick attempts to distinguish between the two terms as follows: whereas the humorous allusion consists in a “brief intertextual reference,” parody should be regarded as an extended caricature of a source-text. In this sense, Norrick (1989: 131–133) explains, parody should not be considered a mere expansion of the allusive joke: unlike the latter, humor in the former is not concentrated on a brief reference, but spread throughout the whole of the assumedly imitative text. Besides, the parodic text does not make the intertextual identification difficult to detect, by disguising the original reference in a somehow aggressive way. On the contrary, parody borrows a whole stylistic, formal and semantic matrix which signals the original text (often in the very title) so as to ridicule the parodied author. Let us note, as does Evrard (1996: 70), that in parody the comic deformation of the hypertext is often accomplished through hyperbole – a stylistic device that caricatures and exaggerates the properties of the source-text. Many parodies have a narrative form – take Corey Ford, one of the texts to analyze in the 7th chapter – but it is more common to find allusions in narrative comedy as a form of intertextual humor. In Woody Allen, as we shall see (cf. Ch. 6), there are many occurrences of allusion, which help extend the semantic frames of The Lunatic’s Tale to extratextual scripts. The range of allusive references, being typically wide in the author’s oeuvre, is also quite extensive in this short story, covering such diverse areas as erudite culture (Olive Chomsky

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attends Bach concerts and reads T. S. Eliot), popular culture (Tiffany prefers TV life shows and is a fan of Johnny Cash), cinema culture (see reference to Blue Angel), science (Ossip discusses Darwin and Annah Arendt), political and historical issues (cf. Jewish ghettos and powerful Mrs. Blitzstein), religious questions (implicit criticisms of the Old Testament) and elements of youth culture (cartoons, Frisbees and sci-fi). The obvious comic flavor of these elements – skilfully put, as their contextualized analysis will show later on – turns them into important aids to signaling humor in the text. However, when one does not know their meaning, these and other allusions remain in the domain of the unsaid and, what is more, of the ‘un-read’.

7. Narrative, literary and humorous cooperation At the intersection between three analytical fields, and three discursive realities, comic literary narratives display specific configurations as far as the cooperative principle is concerned. We have already seen that the Gricean postulates assume complex, and sometimes contradictory, forms in humorous discourse. In the present case of literary narrative comedy, which typically transgresses the norms of verbal interaction, the question of cooperation asks for additional discussion. According to Adam (1985: 154–169), the question of narrative cooperation should be posed vis-`a-vis the principle of readability – the guarantee that authorial intentions obtain interpretive effects. For a narrative text to be readable, Adam puts forth two conditions: on the one hand, that it should be compatible with the pragmatic frame of presuppositions, as well as with the semantic frame of its thematic macrostructure; on the other hand, that it should be informative (let me note that Adam uses the term ‘informative’ in the neutral sense of ‘transmitting information’, much unlike Giora’s or Beaugrande and Dressler’s conception – cf. Ch. 3). That is why a narrative text should, to begin with, provide details that are pertinent to the overall economy of the story, and correspondingly avoid circumlocutions and excessive details. Likewise, it should supply data which, in the story’s truth frame – which, whatever it might be, is different from empirical reality –, make sense, that is, are qualitatively appropriate. Thirdly, it should connect the syntactic elements with the thematic elements so as to guarantee both the microstructural cohesion and the macrostructural coherence of the text. These three maxims integrate, in Adam’s view, a wider one, a more general maxim, which Grice calls Relation, and on which Sperber and Wilson (1986a) base their Relevance theory. Relevance is particularly important because the

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narrative text consists, as Adam (1985: 156) puts it, in a long “prise de parole” (roughly, speech exercise), which the reader cannot interrupt or correct, but only, away from the author’s control, give up on. Therefore, it is as if relevance were the price to pay for the reader’s attention and complicity. Despite the apparent monological character of the narrative, it is essential to state its implicit dialogical nature. On the part of the author, this implies guiding the reader to decode the story, by providing relevant information and avoiding spurious data. Literary cooperation displays distinctive features in view of its narrative counterpart. On the one hand, the literary discourse is polysemous in that it produces more than one semantic configuration – as Adam (1985: 168) remarks, novels, unlike non-literary narrative texts, do not aim at “conveying a univocal meaning.” On the other hand, (most, though not all) literature is fictional, thus carrying important implications at the level of the maxim of quality. As Henry (1996: 107–109) explains, the literary discourse functions simultaneously within more than one semantic frame, thus lending itself to more than one interpretation. Each frame, which is not to be confused with the empirical reality as we know it, projects a system of truth that is intrinsic to the literary reality and in the face of which each utterance will be assessed: Each frame establishes a general context against which each communicative act will be measured. The pretendings that constitute fictional discourse will mean seriously within that fiction frame. (. . . ) Writers must (sufficiently) signal the purpose of their texts or the frames they intend to invoke in their writings. (Henry 1996: 107)

Despite the traps and pitfalls that this alternative system of truth implies, the literary discourse cannot be said to be uncooperative. A fundamental contribution to the comprehension of cooperation in literary discourse is, as mentioned above, Pratt’s (1977). She conceives of the literary text as an essentially cooperative phenomenon, even though the conversational maxims are apparently violated. I say ‘apparently’ because, as Pratt stresses, they are ‘flouted’, rather, or exploited: “Intentional failure to fulfil a maxim in literature always counts as flouting and is thus always intended to be resolved by implicature” (1977: 163). This specific type of violation is to be decoded via an inferential process, which the reader is tacitly prepared to activate whenever reading a literary text. Indeed, the literary discursive situation is such that the reader expects implicatures to exist. Besides, as Pratt (1977: 171) puts it, “the literary speech situation is such that it is virtually impossible for an author to be guilty of any of the other kinds of intentional non-fulfilment Grice mentions.” Actually, the circumstances under which a literary work is composed, revised and published aim at eliminating

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any flaws that may result from carelessness, incompetence or, hypothetically, a criminal intention on the part of the author. For instance, in the case of lies, or defamation – which Grice would call quiet and unostentatious violation – the editors would automatically eliminate them. Furthermore, the scope of intentional deviations is much broader in literature than in any other discursive context. If an author chooses to write about life in Mars, s/he may quite freely do it, without fearing any clash between the amount of information s/he gives and the truth of the facts s/he talks about. What Grice calls opting out is not possible to consider in literary writing either, because literary writing is a voluntary act (even if it can sometimes be motivated by economic pressures), necessarily meaning opting in. Of course, an author may choose to be ‘outside of’ a literary genre, that is, to infringe the principles that regulate a certain practice, but in that case s/he will automatically be ‘exploiting’the potentialities of that infringement – in other words, s/he will be making a literary and cooperative use of that pseudo-violation. If, in view of the claims above, the first three of Grice’s four situations of intentional maxim infractions (cf. Section 4.3, earlier in this chapter) are denied to the literary author as an actual entity, the same does not go for the other discursive voices, such as the narrator and the characters, who are freer to commit all types of infractions (and who commit non-deliberate ones as well). However, even as far as narrator and characters are concerned, the author tends to seek a cooperative posture. In Pratt’s (1977: 166) example, the introductory utterance by the narrator in Crime and Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife”) seems to violate the quality maxim. Yet, the reader easily interprets the implicature that underlies it as an ironical intention on Jane Austen’s part. Similarly, several passages from Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by Lawrence Sterne, show that the protagonist uses many violations, opting-outs and clashes. Nevertheless, the reader easily deduces that such infractions are not due to ignorance, carelessness or uncooperativeness on Sterne’s part, but to an intention of comicality, as Pratt (1977: 165) points out: “The violations themselves are amusing, and since amusement is an accepted purpose of display texts, Sterne implicates that his intent is to amuse us.” In short, it is in recovering the author’s intention, often camouflaged underneath the cooperative forms of implicature, that the ‘interpretability’ of the literary text lies. To understand the humorous discourse, as Sterne’s example suggests, implies conceiving the cooperative principle in a similar vein. If, at first sight, humor is a phenomenon that seems not to obey the principles of truth that rule over bonafide communication – and it does so by infringing norms, subverting values and ignoring conventions – it is clear that this is not gratuitous, but targeted at

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specific communicative objectives. Actually, producing ambiguity, confounding the recipient and provoking error are intentional strategies that aim at producing comic effects. Taking an alternative stance, Raskin (1985: 103) posits four cooperative principles for the ‘Non-Bona-Fide Communication Mode of JokeTelling’, which replace Grice’s maxims. The alternative set reads as follows: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

Quantity: Give exactly as much information as is necessary for the joke; Quality: Say only what is compatible with the world of the joke; Relation: Say only what is relevant to the joke; Manner: Tell the joke efficiently.

According to these maxims, humorous communication should be understood as a specific type of discursive interaction that requires the connivance, as it were, and the participation of the interactants, to such an extent that it can be taken, in a strict sense, as another form of bona-fide communication – as a game which the players know to be vitiated, but which they willingly play. Yamagushi (1988) tackles the question of humorous cooperation by focusing on the garden-path joke. This, he claims, is a subgenre which has “potentially a first and a second reading, the former being replaced by the latter at the end of a joke” (1988: 325). Besides, cooperation is analyzed from a double perspective: the narrator’s and the characters’. Yamagushi’s point is that whereas the characters are entirely free to infringe conversational maxims, the narrator is not. This asymmetry is due to an attempt by the author to avoid responsibility for such infractions, since the narrator is a vulnerable projection or extension of him/herself. To escape being impugned with an uncooperativeness charge, the narrator, whose “behavior is directly backed up by the writer” (1988: 336), employs the following strategies: viewpoint projection (in which the narrator assumes the character’s point of view), evasion (in which the narrator, evasively, abstains from producing any relevant data, for instance by using the passive voice and thus omitting the action’s agent) and backgrounding (a somewhat vague category according to which the problematic expression that might jeopardize the narrator’s position is concealed or camouflaged). These narrative manoeuvres, which confirm what Yamagushi calls the “Character-Did-It Hypothesis,” allow the author, therefore, to shield him/herself from a potential uncooperativeness claim. My understanding of humor is, however, more radical. As was suggested in previous sections, and much along Pratt’s lines, these restrictions are neither necessary for nor applicable to the case of humor. Nor is there any need for an alternative set of maxims, like Raskin’s. Both in comic narratives and in jokes, the transgression of Grice’s conversational maxims can be – and often is – carried

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out by the sender-qua-narrator, which does not invalidate his/her intrinsically cooperative posture. In fact, as seen above, this non-observance is built on the basis of a subtle compromise between the need to, on the one hand, deceive the recipient and, on the other, provide him/her with the key to deciphering the puzzle, which takes the form of implicatures. And these implicatures can involve any of Grice’s maxims. Actually, in the present corpus of short stories, all four of Grice’s maxims get to be flouted, insofar as the narrators at times give less information than required, as is the case of sarcasm, understatement and presupposition (Quantity); this information may be false or misleading, for instance in irony, hyperbole and metaphor (Quality); it may be irrelevant, as is the case of asides and overcompleteness (Relation); and it may be obscure or ambiguous, as happens, respectively, in the use of erudite registers and puns (Manner) – cf. e.g. below. But, since implicatures are inherently cooperative, so is the narrator. This fundamental aspect allows one to confirm an alternative “NarratorDid-It” hypothesis, and even, more drastically still, endorse a “Speaker-Did-It” hypothesis (I use here the term ‘speaker’ to avoid the more problematic terms ‘author’ or ‘writer’, with the proviso that literature is understood as a form of communication). In order for humor to be succesful and, implicitly, for the reader to profit from it, the sender cannot open the game, or obey the informative, factual and truthful constraints that govern other discursive exchanges. Rather, s/he has the need, and feels entitled, to exploit – albeit not to violate – Grice’s conversational maxims.

8. Conclusion Whereas the previous chapter was a reflection on the structural construction of narrative humor, the present chapter has extended the discussion to its pragmatic construction. Distinct as they are, these levels of analysis are also, as was stressed, interdependent. The former focuses on the text, the latter on context; the former on the product, the latter on the process. Therefore, the structural regularities that comic narratives display should be understood as models of how to create and read humor. More specifically, this chapter has highlighted that humor aims at producing specific processing effects (predictability break, interpretive error) and contextual effects (clash between the reader’s expectations and the world constructed in the text). It has also discussed the norms and conventions that preside over the comic discursive practice, as well as the degree of deviation that literary humorous narratives present when compared with other humorous and non-

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humorous exchanges. Besides, it has looked into some of the various factors that characterize and condition the humorous communication. In so doing, I have tried to show that my approach moves away from the strictly structuralist paradigm towards a discursive one. My affiliation in scriptsemantics automatically implies a pragmatic dimension in which the writing choices and the reading processes function dialogically. Actually, for one to approach comic short stories, it is essential to consider the communicative principles underlying literary discourse, that is, the way in which the sender-recipient interaction is built, regardless of the spatio-temporal discontinuity taking place between the moments of production and reception. Therefore, I have tried to emphasize the cooperative basis that underpins the construction of humor, as well as the alternative felicity conditions it seems to observe. The analysis to undertake in the next chapters aims at illustrating these claims.

Chapter 6 A model of humorous narratives Introduction

In narrative comedy, individual funny moments are not like plums in a serious pudding. They shed their ‘flavor’ into the whole text; and the more individual jokes are integrated into the story, so that what is funny arises from and furthers the narrative, the more we take the total performance as a joking representation. S. Purdie (1993: 74)

The proposal of textual analysis that I will next put forth views the comic narrative as a process, i.e., as a course of action in which interdependent meanings are built in partnership. It does not regard it as a product, or as a disconnected set of parts. Contrary to linear models (like Attardo’s, 2001), narrative comedy is not seen as a mere sequence of autonomous joke-like structures, or as a horizontal chain where humor is to spring only linearly. By contrast, this chapter claims that the humorous short story, in particular, is a highly unified and interdependent whole, in which the construction of humor goes beyond the dimension of sequentially emerging elements. The short story to analyze as a case study evolves around a small number of supra-structural nuclei – which I propose to call supra-scripts – that carry, in a condensed form and on a parallelistic basis, the main semantic vectors of the text. On lower levels, and at moments that are sequentially limited along the textual axis, minor script oppositions emerge, but these oppositions should not be mistaken for self-sufficient joke-like structures, although they do hold comic potential per se. If they were to be removed from their supra-structural co-text, their comicality – which depends on, and concurs with, a vaster comic framing – would wither away. This conception of textual structure has implications for the reading process. In the face of the author’s structural options, the reader is led to build a set of interpretive expectations which, in due course, will prove inadequate, causing the typical surprise effect of comedy. Thus, the construction of meaning in a text should be conceived of as a discursive process that is shared by both poles of the communicative situation. As I suggested in the previous chapter, this seemingly

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fallacious and misleading procedure is actually ruled by cooperative principles and partially conventional codes which guarantee the success of the humorous exchange. Therefore, the way humor is organized in the narrative text obeys a set of requirements, to be presented next, that distinguish it from non-humorous narratives.This set of requirements constitutes a typological model that determines the main characteristics of humorous literary narratives – but not, let it be stressed, of literary narratives where sporadic and peripheral humorous elements also emerge (and which Attardo calls ‘serious plots’, cf. 2001: 104). The latter are not under focus presently. This distinction is essential for us to determine, by means of a prototypical matrix, the semantico-pragmatic nature of a specific literary genre, namely comic narratives. The occurrence of humor in other literary genres – as is the paradoxical case of tragedy – functions (if one were to use a gastronomic metaphor) as a mere condiment, whereas in narrative comedies it amounts to the main course.

1. A hypothesis A narrative text is to be classified as humorous if it obeys the following principles: 1. Principle of Opposition: Each script processed in the text activates an opposite (shadow-)script. (This opposition is translatable on the basis of lexical antonymy.) 2. Principle of Hierarchy: The scripts activated in the text are hierarchically organized onto different semantic levels, in such a way that: a) The higher scripts, or supra-scripts, are translatable into hyperonyms and have a high degree of functionality, presiding over long stretches of the textual line, or even its totality; b) The lower scripts, or infra-scripts, are translatable into hyponyms and represent information that is sequentially limited. 3. Principle of Recurrence: The supra-scripts are recurrently instantiated / activated / evoked by several infra-scripts along the textual axis, which lead the recipient to make predictions and to create interpretive expectations. 4. Principle of Informativeness: At a final stage in the story, a non-gradual, hence unexpected, supra-script inversion occurs, whereby the most informative – that is, most improbable and marked – supra-script of each opposition suddenly gains the upper hand, thus surprisingly breaking the reading expectations built up till then.

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5. Principle of Cooperation: The apparently misleading nature of this interpretive process, which raises expectations only to contradict them eventually, carries a cooperative intention of comicality on the sender’s part. An eclectic theoretical and methodological framework guides this Hypothesis (henceforth capitalized). The previous chapters proved the need for an interdisciplinary bridge between the fields of narratology, literary criticism, and discourse analysis. It also shed light on the fact that approaching the humorous literary discourse implies resorting to the use of notions relative to the pragmatics of the communicative situation. Among these are, for instance, the important concept of shared background knowledge, as well as that of interpretative expectations built along the reading process. Essential elements in the present framework are Raskin’s 1985 principle of script opposition and Giora’s 1991 principle of marked (non-gradual) informativeness. The Hypothesis therefore consists in an expansion of theories of the joke, but also in an adaptation of various theoretical contributions so as to tackle a more complex discursive phenomenon. In light of this, let us test a specific text for the principles in the Hypothesis.

2. A case study: The Lunatic’s Tale (1975), by Woody Allen As a paradigmatic example of Allen’s universe, The Lunatic’s Tale (published in 1975) congregates several leitmotifs of the author’s literary and filmic oeuvre: the urban setting; the Jewish element; the crises of identity of contemporary individuals, overwhelmed by many stimuli and divided between contradictory motivations; male/female relationships, seen as a frail compromise between erotic impulse, emotional craving and the quest for the meaning of life. Despite the seriousness and philosophical tinge of such themes, Allen’s written and audiovisual treatment turns them into unmistakable humorous objects. The Lunatic’s Tale, in particular, shows the extent to which anything can be transformed into comic material – including failure, madness and even suicidal tendencies, which hilarious Ossip Parkis (the protagonist in the story) manages, somewhat inadvertently, to overcome. A linguistic and structural analysis of Allen’s narrative allows us not only to identify the moments where, on the text’s surface, the various thematic elements take shape, but also to isolate the clues that help determine the hierarchical organization of the text, as well as its humorous unity. This short story is actually a perfect illustration of the principles guiding the present work: instead of constituting a simple succession of comic elements, The Lunatic’s Tale indeed displays a linguistic articulation that makes it a unified and cohesive semantic

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whole, whose signification can only be unveiled by tracking its recurrence and hierarchy patterns. Furthermore, Allen’s text is also a good example of the pragmatic mechanisms which underlie the reading process. Its narratologically conventional format – consisting of an introductory situation followed by an embedded narrative – conceals an internal semantic structure that constantly breaks the interpretive and literary conventions of the autobiographical genre. Instead of the factual elements that are typical of autobiographical narratives, humorous oppositions keep emerging, side by side with other clashes, of style and register for instance. But let us note, in passing, that the reader, caught in interpretive checkmate, never becomes the butt, as it were, of the joke: on the contrary, this is yet another good example of the Jewish self-deprecating humor which Allen masters to perfection. At a strictly linguistic level, that is, at the phonetic, morpho-syntactic and lexico-semantic levels of analysis, The Lunatic’s Tale makes use of several resources which perfectly exemplify many of the manipulations – as seen in chapter 2 – that underlie the verbal construction of humor. Once again, however, the humorous potential of the micro-elements arising along the textual vector can only be fully enjoyed if seen as part of a wider whole. The supra-structural organization of the narrative carries, as is my purpose to show, its true comicality. 2.1.

Structuring the humorous cycle

Let us begin by analyzing the sequential articulation of the text. Unlike the structuralist models discussed earlier (cf. Todorov’s, Larivaille’s – Ch. 4), The Lunatic’s Tale presents a non-circular sequencing, displaying a break at the exact moment when one would expect a restoration of the initial balance. If, on a discursive level, Ossip Parkis’s embedded report ends exactly where it had begun (which means, at the moment when the disgraced doctor wanders, as a bum, in the streets of New York), on a logical level the circle is not closed: on the contrary, it is broken, giving way to a new ‘complication’ (cf. van Dijk 1982). Actually, the final state of the narrative consists in a new (and definitive) imbalance. The rupture thus created echoes the type of rupture which characteristically happens in jokes and is usually called punch line. Let us see, with the help of a diagram, how Larivaille’s (1974) model gets to be changed in The Lunatic’s Tale:

A case study: The Lunatic’s Tale (1975), by Woody Allen Initial situation (Professional success)

Disturbance (Emotional craving)

New disturbance (New emotional craving)

Transformation (Search for the ideal woman)

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Resolution (Fabricating the ideal woman)

Final situation (Failure)

Figure 3. A sequential diagram of The Lunatic’s Tale

As we can see, the fifth moment in this sequence should correspond to a restoration of the initial situation, which is one of balance; however, it amounts to a break, a cut, which creates a new disturbance (or, better yet, a sequence of new disturbances), the effect of which is failure. This sequential structure, quite different from the one stipulated in the structuralist models mentioned above, is articulated on hierarchically organized lexico-semantic levels. In other words, the horizontal and vertical plans contribute to shaping humor, in its micro- and macrostructural dimensions. But how exactly is this horizontal line structured? 2.1.1. Setting the humorous mode: creating an opposition The first paragraph in The Lunatic’s Tale is semantically rich for several reasons. Not only does it introduce, as is frequent in narrative texts, the character(s), the setting and the time when the action takes place, but it also puts forth, from the very beginning, the incongruous flavor that is to characterize the ensuing script oppositions. As such, it is exactly in the two first lines of the first paragraph that the humorous mode is signaled. Consider the two first sentences in the text: Madness is a relative state. Who can say which of us is truly insane?

The former sentence, which is fallaciously formulated as a philosophical maxim, or an established truth, leads the reader, at the initial moments of interpretation, to make assumptions as to what is to come next. The beginning of the latter sentence – Who can say which of us is truly. . . – is a follow-up to the former, and makes us anticipate its natural conclusion: . . . sane? But, alas, what we get is an unexpected prefix of negation attached to the adjective. Thus, a simple morpheme operates a semantic switch of an obviously comic tang. At the same time, the two sentences introduce an opposition, namely ‘madness vs. mental

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sanity’, which is to haunt the protagonist throughout his numerous comical mishaps. The lexical choices in the next sentence complement this opposition, helping to strengthen the previously suggested impression of comicality: And while I roam through Central Park wearing moth-eaten clothes and a surgical mask, screaming revolutionary slogans and laughing hysterically, I wonder even now if what I did was really so irrational.

The picture we get here is not one of a depressed and depressing outcast. Though his clothes may be moth-eaten, this New York bum is described with the help of a set of verbs (on the notion of sets and scales, see Ch. 2, Section 2.3), like screaming and laughing, adverbs like hysterically, and adjectives like revolutionary, which suggest action, energy and even joy, all of which are related to madness notwithstanding. This is a histrionic description which typically gears the comic register and helps, from the early moments in the narrative, to establish the suggestion of humor. 2.1.2. Developing the humorous mode: recurrence and predictability The thematic antithesis that opens The Lunatic’s Tale is translatable into a script opposition (madness vs. mental sanity) which is to recur in the text, together with other oppositions. Actually, the antithetical pattern thus established pervades through the whole narrative and is instantiated in many pairs and subpairs. Consider the three long sentences that follow, which strengthen the initial scrip opposition while giving rise to another one, that of success vs. failure, itself a recurrent duality in the protagonist’s life. By establishing a parallel between present times and happier ones, Dr. Parkis describes two types of living, illustrative of two antithetical socio-economic worlds. In the past, he used to be a highly successful doctor, but nowadays he is no more than a New York street crazy. So as to understand this dichotomy let us analyze, with the help of a table, the phrases used in the description:

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Table 2. The protagonist’s antithetical characterization in The Lunatic’s Tale A highly successful doctor:

A New York street crazy:

– Bedecked dashingly in a varied array of – Wearing moth-eaten clothes and a Ralph Lauren tweeds surgical mask, a knapsack and a pinwheel hat – Living on the upper East Side

– Roaming through Central Park

– Gadding about in a brown Mercedes

– Roller skating unshaven down Broadway

– Boasting great with and a formidable backhand

– Screaming revolutionary slogans and laughing hysterically

– (Being) a familiar face at theatre openings, Sardi’s, Lincoln Center, and the Hamptons

– Pausing at trash cans to fill shopping bags with bits of string and bottle caps

Such a contrast in terms of life-styles experienced by one and the same character is per se comical, because it is radical and extreme. But what is important to highlight is that the exact symmetry of the linguistic and structural elements used in this description is recurrent in the text. Be it the description of a character (such as the portrait of Olive Chomsky that is later refracted on Tiffany Schmeerderer’s), the narration of an event (for instance, the desperate search for the ideal woman versus the finding of the imperfect one), or the characterization of a state of mind (see Ossip’s reflections on the imperfection of the world around him as opposed to his own perfection), many local antitheses recur in the The Lunatic’s Tale, all the while pointing to broader, global oppositions, like perfection vs. imperfection. Let us consider, by way of example, the description of the two women that lie at the core of the protagonist’s catastrophic fall from grace. We are now at a moment in the text that follows the opening paragraph and initiates a long narrative flashback. Ossip Parkis confesses to his double life, divided between his legitimate partner and his lover, each of them personifying a set of opposite characteristics:

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Table 3. Antithetical portraits of Ossip’s partners in The Lunatic’s Tale Olive Chomsky:

Tiffany Schmeederer:

[– I was living with a woman I cared for very deeply]

[– I was sneaking cross-town nightly to rendezvous with a photographer’s model]

– Had a winning and delightful personality – Had a blood-curling mentality – Was rich in culture and humor, and a joy – Was a ‘body that wouldn’t quit’, and to spend time with oozed an erotic radiation from her every pore – Was a woman with all the – Had a skin like satin, a leonine mane of attendant perquisites of a charming and chestnut hair, long willowy legs; a face witty culture vulture and body that come along every few million years – But (and I curse Fate for this) she did not turn me on sexually

– To run one’s hands over her curvaceous shape was like a ride on the Cyclone

The obvious opposition between Olive and Tiffany suggests two types of characters: on the one hand, the intelligent, cultured woman, having good taste and a sense of humor, but devoid of physical allure or sensuality; on the other, the physically perfect female, undeniably attractive in erotic terms, but pitifully deficient when it comes to brains. These features refer to distinct semantic fields that are, in a script approach, translatable into well-defined opposite nuclei: for instance, beauty vs. ugliness or intelligence vs. stupidity. Now, presiding over these pairs, and others to occur / recur in the text, is the aforementioned (supra-) script opposition: perfection vs. imperfection. The descriptions of Ossip’s women in the The Lunatic’s Tale are so clearly structured that it is easy to draw out an intersected construction – a quiasm – of the positive vs. negative nodes: in other words, the beauty (+) script corresponds to the stupidity (-) script, whereas the intelligence (+) script comes side by side with the ugliness (-) one. It is exactly the quiastic nature of the descriptions of Ossip’s partners that makes it impossible for any of them to have it all, which means, to be perfect. If one scores high on one area, she is to fail on the next one. I shall return to this point later on. For the time being, let it be stressed that the construction of the narrative is set on an oppositional basis that allows the reader, given the constancy with which the scripts recur, make predictions about the development of the story.

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Actually, the recurrence of the antithetical pattern, on a par with other instances of recurrence, constitutes, as will be seen in the concluding section to this chapter, the fundamental key to constructing narrative humor. In Allen’s narrative, it is precisely the fact that all the textual elements are built on a recurrence basis that allows the reader to anticipate the evolution of the plot. Actually, it is easy to predict that each new woman Ossip Parkis encounters will necessarily fail the prospective groom’s high standards. In other words, the list of assets he expects to find is so demanding that the candidates will naturally not qualify. Likewise, it is easy to predict that each of his attempts to settle down is doomed to failure, or, more generally, that each new turn in the events will suffer an opposing force that will invalidate them. What this pattern does not suggest is that it will eventually be broken. 2.1.3. Closing the cycle: informativeness and surprise The story of Ossip Parkis is, as claimed above, easily predictable: desire generates dissatisfaction which in turn generates new desire. This antithetical cycle seems never to be appeased. As a result, recurrence and predictability constitute two essential keys to the semantic unfolding of The Lunatic’s Tale. Only at the end of the story is this self-generating tendency resolved. In narratological terms, and at the level of discourse, closing the humorous cycle coincides with resuming the present tense in narrative terms, which graphically could be rendered as a closing circle. But in semantic terms, and on the level of the story, this movement corresponds rather to a breaking point (on the notions of discourse and story, see Ch. 4, Section 1). The typically humorous surprise effect, achieved on the final lines of the short story, indicates not only that the predictability pattern is broken but also that a choice emerges, at a syntagmatic level, that is highly improbable within the realm of possible paradigmatic choices (cf. Ch. 2, Section 5.1). Hence the principle of informativeness postulated in the Hypothesis, according to which the ending of the text is categorially removed from the set of expectations built along the way. Once the perfect woman is found – or, better yet, fabricated – one would expect the end of Ossip’s dilemmas. Paradoxically, however, fulfilling the dream is what triggers his eventual collapse, whose causes are concealed beneath a complex semantic web. Having successfully performed the surreal surgical operation that switches Olive’s mind for Tiffany’s body and vice versa (note that intersection occurs once again), the feminine ideal searched for since the beginning of the story finally materializes. This means that in semantic terms all positive scripts materialize in a single woman – that is, the perfect woman – be they intelligence (+), culture (+) and sense of humor (+) or beauty

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(+), youth (+) and sensuality (+). In view of this perfection archetype, so desperately sought, one wonders: why is Ossip still dissatisfied? Or, still more puzzlingly, why is he attracted to a woman that stands for the very opposite (symmetry and antithesis, once again) of everything he always longed for? Let us take a look at the hilarious passage that marks this turning point: The only hitch was that after several months of bliss with Olive which was the equal of anything in the Arabian Nights, I inexplicably grew dissatisfied with this dream woman and developed instead a crush on Billie Jean Zapruder, an airline stewardess whose boyish, flat figure and Alabama twang caused my heart to do flip-flops.

This extract – which constitutes, with the exception of the final sentence to be transcribed next, the closing paragraph of The Lunatic’s Tale – signals a tragicomical turn in the protagonist’s life. Against all odds, and contrary to all predictions (his as well as ours), Ossip Parkis falls in love with an insipid stewardess, devoid of any feminine assets that might give her a claim to fame. Note how the extremely swift description of the new character is made of lexical choices that evoke, in a very synthetic way, a good few of the negative scripts Ossip previously loathed: for instance, by using the phrase boyish, flat figure, he evokes not only masculinity (-) and, by extension, ugliness (-), but also the denial of such semantic fields as grace and sensuality. Conversely, the phrase Alabama twang reveals a very common procedure in humor practice: making a geographical area, and its corresponding accent, correspond to the stupidity (-) script. By extension, and bearing in mind the parallelism that characterizes the whole text, this negative script evokes a wealth of other equally negative scripts, namely: lack of culture (-), bad taste (-), lack of sense of humor (-). In other words, the phrases boyish, flat figure and Alabama twang crystallize, in five lexemes, two blocks of script oppositions which, as will be seen later on, preside over large textual segments. Growing tired of his own dissatisfaction and troubled about the suspicion of madness, the protagonist chooses to let go of everything: not only does he give up on chasing his feminine ideal, but also on the life-style that made him yearn for that ideal in the first place: It was at this time that I donned my pinwheel hat and knapsack and began skating down Broadway. The reasons that underlie this drastic decision may now be clearer: if, up till then, Ossip had opted for the positive elements of the antitheses, he now prefers to choose the negative ones. The absurdity of this temptation – which carries, from the reader’s perspective, the major humorous incongruity in the text – is, from the protagonist’s point of view, equally evident, which is why the New York streets gain a new tenant. At the level of meaning, the ending of the story indicates a detour in view of the semantic principles working hitherto. Actually, the shadow scripts that had

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been laterally processed get surprisingly to gain the upper hand. Given that these scripts represent improbable and less accessible interpretive choices, they carry a high degree of informativeness. Let it be added, in passing, that this surprise character, typical of comic narrative, proves the inadequacy of story-grammar narratological models, which, as Beaugrande (1982) claims, emphasize a direct causality pattern that makes the action chain move forward in an expected and probable direction. In his words (1982: 412), “the basic inception of story grammars makes it unlikely that they would deal with surprise.” The antithetical structure of The Lunatic’s Tale hides, therefore, a set of script oppositions which dynamically condensate the fundamental information in the story. Besides, the predictability that has been pointed out suggests, as the Hypothesis posits, a principle of recurrence. This is linearly materialized in several infra-script oppositions, by way of lexical clues that are scattered along the narrative axis, which reactivate a small set of supra-structural semantic oppositions. 2.2. A supra-structural semantic opposition Let us consider, next, one of these oppositions, which presides over the global semantic configuration of the text and underlies its parallelistic construction. But before doing so, let us consider a few methodological technicalities. 2.2.1. Lexicality, inference and functionality: criteria of script identification How are we to identify the supra-scripts in Allen’s text? This question, essential for the task we have in hand, is closely linked with the problem of whether or not there is linguistic evidence that supports a supra-structural semantic analysis. As early as the seventies, van Dijk (1977: 149–153) tackled this problem, listing many phenomena which, on the text’s surface, indicate the presence of macrostructures. Among these are lexical elements, which constitute “the most conspicuous and straightforward way macrostructures are expressed.” They determine the possible scope of concepts which, in a relational structure framework, make sense in the overall discourse or in part of it. In the author’s terminology, this relational structure is called, as seen above, frame, much like what I here call script, and it constitutes “a global constraint on lexical insertion.” For instance, a hold-up script/frame will not in principle contain a word like ‘daffodil’, much in the same way as such lexemes as ‘elephant’ or ‘North Pole’ will not be included in a typical doctor’s appointment frame/script. However, as van Dijk stresses, there can of course exist an indirect connection between a concept that has been evoked by a word and the macrostructure that comprises it.

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It is perhaps the indirect nature of some semantic structures that Attardo (2001: 60) has in mind when he distinguishes between lexical scripts and other scripts which, in the specific case of the comic text, have to be reached via inferences. The latter, which he calls ‘inferential scripts’, might well be called ‘indirect scripts’ and, unlike the lexical ones, they do not have their “lexematic handle instantiated in the text” (ibidem). This distinction rightly sets apart two criteria of script identification: lexicality and inference. The latter criterion is particularly useful in the analysis of the comic text, characterized as it is by the unsaid. Attardo’s example (2001: 15) illustrates this notion accurately: when a set of scripts is activated, on the textual axis, in a sequence like husband – lover – adultery – private eye – wife – lawyer – courtroom, it is only reasonable to infer the presence of the divorce script. In the present case, as will be shown next, both types of scripts occur: for instance, the misery script is verbalized verbatim in I was the most miserable of men, whereas such an important supra-script as bum is only identifiable by way of an inferential process, on the basis of such clues as trash cans, moth-eaten clothes, roaming through Central Park, etc. Be that as it may, it is the latter category – inferential scripts – that without a doubt is the most prolific in The Lunatic’s Tale. Let it be stressed that the supra-script is, after all, the sum of scattered pieces of information, or a recurrent semantic frame that is evoked by diverse textual clues. It is precisely this principle of recurrence which, according to Raskin (1985: 126), allows the identification of what he calls ‘macroscript’. On a supra-structural level, a third criterion of script identification emerges, namely functionality. A supra-script is functional in that it provides various textual uses and fulfils several communicative purposes, depending on the nature and position, along the narrative vector, of the lexical clues that lead up to it. The more numerous and varied the lexical instantiations of a script, the greater its functionality. For example, consider the imperfection script: it is evoked in Allen’s text through several quite diverse semantic frames (or infra-scripts, like stupidity, ugliness, lack of sense of humor, etc.) which attest to its functionality and sanction its supra-structure status. Despite the three criteria just introduced, the task of identifying the scripts at stake in a comic text does not escape subjectivity. This is exactly what Chlopicki (1987: 120) remarks, when he regrets the non-existence of a dictionary of the scripts occurring in a natural language, and he adds: “all the script labels used in the present and other studies have to be subjective in the sense of varying from one researcher to another” (on this, see Ch. 3, Section 4.3). Similarly, van Dijk (1977: 162) highlights the indeterminacy that is bound to affect every macrostructural approach:

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Just as sentences are ambiguous, so may discourse, also at the macro-level. In that case we could have several, alternative (highest) macro-propositions for a given discourse. This does not mean that in actual language use and cognition a discourse with one theoretical macrostructure could not be assigned different topics by different language users, depending on a number of factors (knowledge, interests, etc.) (. . . ).

Let it be noted that even in the presence of the so-called lexical scripts the risk of ambiguity is never annulled, given the possibility of its occurrence within the very word (through homonymy or polisemy). Nonetheless, interpretive variation in identifying scripts, which is particularly common when analyzing literary texts, laden as they are with multivocal meanings, does not invalidate the present analytic proposal. Indeed, the Hypothesis allows for different applications of its principles, depending on each reader’s background universe. 2.2.2. Determining the scope and limits of scripts A script analysis of The Lunatic’s Tale according to a lexical approach (the first of the criteria presented above) might suggest, as is the case of the analysis of shorter textual segments, that each word in the sentence activates scripts that carry relevant semantic information. Actually, as Raskin (1985: 87–88, 118–120) claims, even prepositions and articles used in a comic – or otherwise ambiguous or metaphorical – text lend themselves to a semantic analysis. Notwithstanding this theoretical possibility, the truth is that the principles of cohesion and unity that rule over any textual structure are closely connected with economy. Thus, several different words may – and in fact often do – activate one and only script. Economy also bears on the principle of recurrence guiding this book, according to which the same narrative information may take different shapes throughout the text, structured as it is in a condensed form. A second question to address is where a script starts and finishes, granted that it may be expressed by a word or group of words (be they contiguous or scattered along the textual sequence), or inferred from textual clues. More importantly, the question is whether a script, being virtually indivisible and circular, can be represented in a necessarily segmented way. Now, although each script refers in principle to an infinity of other scripts (which make up the linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge that the native speaker possesses), what each word evokes in a specific textual situation is a very reduced portion of that knowledge, that is, a very limited domain of the continuous semantic graph in a language. Actually, as Raskin (1985: 84) remarks, the feasibility of a script analysis of humor rests upon a strategy of reduction, or discretization, of the lexical continuum.

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2.2.3. Lexico-semantic nuclei Having discussed these preliminary methodological issues, let us now focus on a genuine supra-structural script opposition, noting in passing that any other supra-scripts in the text are analysable on a similar basis. We have already seen that the opening paragraph of The Lunatic’s Tale puts forth information that is essential for the semantic development of the whole text. The antithetical structure drawn in those initial sentences indeed introduces two script nuclei that will orchestrate all subsequent textual units. These nuclei correspond to the before and the after of the protagonist’s life, that is, a past time at which he was a highly successful doctor and the present inglorious condition of a mentally impaired bum. The resulting types of characters, which are rather standardized, are described, as claimed above, through a number of phrases, most of them containing adjectives and adverbs besides nouns and verbs. These lexical clues are basic short cuts to identifying the supra-scripts, even if some of them require some inferring effort. In the next diagram, the bum and successful doctor scripts are broken down according to the connections they establish with contiguous scripts. As the SSTH postulates, these connections, which will be here treated in the discretized format mentioned earlier, are ‘subject’, ‘activity’, ‘place’, ‘time’and ‘condition’. Many other connections could have been added; yet, I am here interested only in those that are relevant in co-textual terms. In other words, in spite of the fact that any nucleus – such as ‘job’ – could have been analyzed in the same detailed way as the main node, the resulting information would not have helped to understand the surrounding text. The diagram shows, in bold, the semantic connections with the script in capitals; in italics, the textual passages that, more directly (though not exclusively) evoke those connections. The > and = symbols stand for, respectively, ‘past’ and ‘present’. The supra-structural opposition just outlined deserves some comments before we move on. To begin with, it is curious to note that the lexeme ‘bum’ does not even once materialize in the text. However, its homonymous script pervades through it, like a shadow hovering above the protagonist’s flashbacks. In fact, every action, episode or thought that Ossip attributes to his highly successful doctor persona are shadowed by his initial reference to a catastrophic fall from grace as well as by the present tense of the verbs used in the initial paragraph. If, even at that initial phase, there is no verbatim mention of the bum script, there are nonetheless many other lexemes (cf. diagram above) that indisputably evoke it. Conversely, the successful doctor supra-script is verbalized in a much more direct way. The phrase highly successful doctor quite explicitly establishes

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Table 4. bum and successful doctor scripts in The Lunatic’s Tale BUM

SUCCESSFUL DOCTOR

Subject: [+Human] [+Adult] [+Male]

Subject: [+Human] [+Adult] [+Male]

Activity: > To have a job > To earn money = Not to have a job = To live idly = To live on charity and on leftovers: Pausing at trash cans to fill my shopping bags = To have an eccentric behavior: Wearing a surgical mask, screaming revolutionary slogans and laughing hysterically

Activity: > To study / To progress rapidly on the work ladder = To have a highly respected job: A highly successful doctor = To earn lots of money = To lead an active social life

Place: > Workplace; home = Street: – Roaming through Central Park – Roller-skating down Broadway

Place: > University / workplace = Hospital / office, etc. = Select places: (A familiar face at) theatre openings, Sardi’s, Lincoln Centre, and the Hamptons

Time: = Everyday

Time: > Several years = Everyday (to work) = Often (to socialize)

Condition: = To display poverty and lack of personal hygiene: – Wearing moth-eaten clothes; – Roller-skating unshaven = To conform to one’s present condition = To live in solitude / Not to have a stable love life

Condition: = To display obvious signs of wealth: Living on the upper East Side, gadding about town in a Mercedes, and bedecked dashingly in a varied array of Ralph Lauren tweeds = To have social savoir-faire: I boasted great wit and a formidable backhand = To be recognized = To have success with women / To have a stable love life with a woman of equal social status

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the semantic nucleus that is to preside over the text. Let it be noted that a more generic script like successful man, though also appropriate, would be co-textually less functional, given that the medicine script is relevant to the development of the narrative (cf. the surgical switching of minds and bodies between the two candidates for Ossip’s heart). Another relevant lexical node shows up on the last row of the table above: namely, ‘love life’. It is usually accepted that marriage plays an important role in the social status of a successful man. In the Anglo-American society (as in the Portuguese one), the wife plays a supporting role – be it logistic, decorative, economic, or reproductive – in view of the husband’s success. In the high social circles which Ossip claims to have attended, a woman from a low class or without qualities that might screen such a class (like beauty or culture) would not have had a chance of being his companion. This explains Ossip’s constant search for a woman endowed with as many assets as possible – more drastically still, an impossibly and comically perfect woman. In terms of the macrostructure of The Lunatic’s Tale, the entries relative to this question – a successful doctor’s partner – are the ones that pave the way for the remaining semantic organization of the text. A virtual tree diagram, which expresses the hierarchical format of textual connections, shows the centrality of this apparently peripheral detail, as we will see in Section 2.3 below. Actually, Ossip’s biographical trajectory evolves around an incessant search for the ideal mate which, if found, would constitute the culminating evidence of his success. That is why the protagonist’s relationships with the opposite sex are shown, on a vertical script analysis, at a lower level than the success/failure pair, which presides over the whole narrative. 2.2.4. Presuppositions and implicatures The supra-structural dichotomy just outlined, most of which is implicitly conveyed, lends itself to a presuppositional and inferential analysis. Actually, the bum / successful doctor script construction, as well as its articulation along the narrative axis, requires information that is not directly verbalized in the text. The concept of presupposition, as a major strategy in conveying the unsaid (cf. previous chapter, Section 5.1), is thus highly operative in its three dimensions: logical, textual and pragmatic. Firstly, most of the links pertaining to the two scripts, which are rendered on the table above, are presupposed – and therefore retrievable on the basis of the ideal speaker’s linguistic knowledge. At this logical-linguistic level, presupposition is closely related to the semantic information that a certain concept intrinsically carries: for instance, ‘bum’ is a concept that immediately triggers

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such presuppositions as: a) a bum is an adult individual who b) does not have a job and c) is homeless. Likewise, ‘successful doctor’ is a concept that carries the following presuppositions: a) economic comfort, b) social status and c) hard work. It is obvious that, along these lines, such readings as “a bum is a child tycoon” are automatically out of the way. Also out of the way is the idea that a bum is an ex-successful doctor, which is so atypical that seems ‘illogical’. But it is exactly this illogicality that Allen’s text exploits, namely by inverting the usual (linguistic and cultural) presuppositional framework that readers are supposed to activate. Secondly, the presuppositional dimension of The Lunatic’s Tale is also articulated at the textual level, that is, in terms of thematic progression. In Ossip’s story, Allen often plays on the presupposed (theme) by presenting ‘posed’ elements (rhemes) that are displaced. For example, when a successful doctor sets out in search of the ideal woman (theme, or given), the reader expects that, upon finding her, he will be satisfied. These expectations are, however, contradicted, that is, the predictability pattern is broken, as the Hypothesis stipulates. In fact, Ossip’s eventual dissatisfaction and his preference for a plain unattractive woman (rheme, or new), cancels out the previous presupposition. A third presuppositional dimension draws on the pragmatics of the utterance act. On this level, Lakoff’s (1971) notion of pragmatic presupposition puts forth highly idiosyncratic factors, such as the speaker’s personal beliefs. A very obvious example of how the readers’ beliefs are exploited takes place when Ossip qua successful doctor performs the surgical operation that switches Olive and Tiffany’s bodies and minds. The passage, as mentioned above, breaks the realistic pattern of the story, setting a dimension in which the possible worlds of fiction entail a suspension of disbelief (cf. Ch. 2, Section 2.7). At the same time, Ossip’s narration of the episode reveals a presupposed truth: that such an operation is possible. In other words, the proposition that underlies the sequence, namely ‘I, Ossip, am capable of surgically switching the bodies and minds of two women’, constitutes what Stalnaker (1973: 17) regards as a typical pragmatic presupposition, i.e., “a proposition whose truth he [Ossip] takes for granted, or seems to take for granted, in making his statement.” But the concept of pragmatic presupposition also concerns, alternatively, the culturally or socially determined conditions and contexts that have to be observed for the utterance to be successful (cf. Keenan 1972: 12). In The Lunatic’s Tale, this presuppositional dimension is well documented in Allen’s profuse use of allusion, which I shall analyze later on (cf. 2.3.3 below). For the time being, let us consider an example of how, in case the encyclopaedic knowledge necessary to decode the utterance is not shared by the reader, the presuppositions underlying the allusions are simply lost. When Ossip mentions that he used to

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wear a varied array of Ralph Lauren tweeds, it is necessary that the reader be in possession of the knowledge that such clothes are only affordable by rich people and, possibly, by people with good taste and social status. This dimension of presupposition, understood on a double pragmatic level, is closer to the concept of implicature, given the inferential effort that is necessary for its identification. As shown in the previous chapter (cf. 2.5.2), implicatures consist of unstable interpretive riddles that require deciphering – unlike presuppositions, which are taken for granted as stable contents that precede the utterance. Let us recall that, according to Grice (1975), the implicature takes place when, in a cooperative communicative exchange, the speaker infringes at least one conversational maxim. The objective of this infraction or the nature of what the speaker really intends to say is not, therefore, said, but implied. InThe Lunatic’sTale, it is no wonder that conversational implicatures abound, since humor is par excellence a form of communication based on transgression and subversion, albeit usually of a cooperative nature. Confer the plentiful use of hyperbole (cf. 2.4.2 below) and irony (cf. 2.4.3) in Ossip’s speech, which are obvious examples of what Grice himself defines as floutings of the Quality maxims (“Do not say what you believe to be false” and “Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence”). Consider also the use of metaphor in the passage that follows, which disregards not only the maxim just mentioned but also the maxim of Manner (“Avoid obscurity of expression, avoid ambiguity, be brief, etc.”): Excuses for the woman I loved while my lust was spent elsewhere. Spent, in fact, on an empty little yo-yo whose touch and wiggle caused the top of my head to dislodge like a Frisbee and hover in space like a flying saucer. (Emphasis mine)

Likewise, the maxims of Relation (“Be relevant”) and of Quantity (“Make your contribution as informative as is required”) are ostensibly exploited, for instance, in the passages where Ossip-the-successful-doctor describes the qualities that his fianc´ees-to-be are to have. Let us focus on one of these occurrences: (. . . ) Sharon Pflug, whom I lived with for three months, was too hostile. Whitney Weisglass was too accommodating. Pippa Mondale, a cheerful divorc´ee, made the fatal mistake of defending candles shaped like Laurel and Hardy. (Emphasis mine)

Note how Ossip’s reference to an apparently irrelevant detail breaks the descriptive pattern hitherto established: namely, a morpho-syntactic mould consisting of proper name + verb + adverb + adjective (e.g. Sharon was too hostile; Whitney was too accommodating, etc.). When referring to Pippa, Ossip opts for a statement that pragmatically looks like a riddle. Now, this type of riddle, which is typically humorous, requires the use of the so-called calculability requirement, that is, the formulation of an inferential reasoning. According to Grice

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(1975: 31), this reasoning takes the shape of a process that is phased along distinct interpretive moments which, in the present case, have the following configuration: 1) The narrator (Ossip) ostensible flouted the Quality and Relation Maxims; 2) The reader does not have reasons to believe that the narrator is not observing the Cooperative Principle; 3) The reader thinks that the only reason why the narrator might have been apparently irrelevant and laconic is the fact that he thinks that Laurel and Hardy candles are not pleasing to the eye and therefore that Pippa Mondale has bas taste. 4) The reader knows that the narrator knows that the reader is potentially capable of inferring step 3. 5) Therefore, the narrator implies that Pippa Mondale has bas taste.

The bad taste script is, according to this calculation, the content implied in Ossip’s utterance, which thus proves to be in accordance with the cooperative principle that rules communication (according to which everything we say, and the way in which we say it, serves communicative purposes). For this implied content to be accessed, it is necessary to have extralinguistic knowledge, which includes, in Grice’s words, “the context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance” and “other items of background knowledge” (ibidem): in this case, that Laurel and Hardy candles are hardly what one might call refined decorative items. The calculability procedure exemplified above is also the one to be used in deciphering the metaphor that characterizes Tiffany, an empty little yo-yo. Sperber and Wilson (1986a: 196–197) claim that the inferential process which the implicature requires can only be justified – that is, it is only “maximally relevant” – when the resulting contextual effects are greater than the procedural efforts necessary to achieve them. In the present case, these contextual effects are obviously humorous – and it is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain them in a direct or explicit formulation of the utterance (which would be something like Pippa Mondale has bad taste or, in the yo-yo example, Tiffany is a silly and volatile girl). In short, the use of presuppositional and implicated contents in The Lunatic’s Tale has great comedic potential, fulfilling well-defined communicative purposes and justifying the higher investment required from the reader. 2.3.

Levels of script opposition

The idea that the scripts in a narrative are hierarchically organized, which lies at the basis of the Hypothesis, is also clearly advocated by van Dijk (1977: 137), whose conception of a discursive macrostructure covers several levels.

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Raskin (1985: 126) significantly introduces, as mentioned above, the concept of macroscript, sometimes also called ‘complex script’ to refer to a hierarchically superior semantic frame, which encompasses a set of more limited scripts: in this sense, the textual method to follow so as to identify these macrostructures should be “adopting the most frequently occurring script as the macroscript” (ibidem). Even Attardo (2001: 60), who emphasizes linearity in his approach to humorous texts, also admits the existence of a “hierarchical organization of scripts” to be found, for instance, in a descendent lexical chain like war – army – battalion – commander in chief. The principle of hierarchy, in correlation with the principle of recurrence, underpins the theoretical proposal presented here, as stated earlier, and therefore requires some illustration. A longitudinal analysis of The Lunatic’s Tale reveals, as suggested, welldifferentiated layers of textual information, as well as forms of specific interrelations between the different semantic layers. If the bum / successful doctor opposition pervades through the whole text, from the introductory paragraph till the closing down of the humorous cycle, other oppositions are also present along extended stretches of the narrative. We have already seen that the search for the ideal woman is the root of Ossip’s disgrace, and that this doomed search hides a dynamics of different script oppositions. Let us now see what they are and how they are structured from a vertical perspective. 2.3.1. Supra- and infra-scripts To illustrate this section, I shall focus on the female element, or rather on the protagonist’s various attempts at finding women who may satisfy his high requirements. As he revealingly puts it, his tale is one of an endless string of relationships wherein my partner invariably left something to be desired. The emerging search / frustration cycle helps to reveal the antithetical script organization of the text. Prior to the Olive / Tiffany duel, the list of candidates for Ossip’s heart is generous: there is a first wife and a second wife, a Sharon Pflug, a Whitney Weisglass, a Pippa Mondale and a wealth of other specimens, not even deserving a proper name – blind dates, newspaper ads, occasional affairs. Underlying all is a comically romantic common purpose: to establish a fulfilling and truthful relationship. Ossip sums up the sad tale of a man who has it all except love as follows: On the surface, apparently blessed with all the necessities for the good life. Underneath, desperately in search of a fulfilling love. In his desperate love-hunt, our hero is also hunting down perfection. This script, which is often evoked in the text, encompasses a multiplicity of infrascripts which, along the textual axis, gradually shape it. Actually, the perfection script equals a set of various characteristics – physical as well as intellectual ones

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(cf. the aforementioned body / mind macro-opposition) – which the protagonist obstinately expects to find in a single woman. In the following diagram, these characteristics are translated by corresponding scripts and they are listed side by side with their opposites. On the right-hand side, once again, are the passages from the text where the scripts are evoked:

Table 5. Supra- and infra-script oppositions in The Lunatic’s Tale Supra-script opposition Infra-script oppositions

perfection

vs. imperfection

beauty

vs. ugliness

intelligence vs.

sense of humor

vs.

good taste

vs.

sensuality

vs.

youth

vs.

– She reminded me of Aunt Rifka, who has the appearance of a character in Yiddish folklore called the Golem. – The “coed who enjoys Bach and Beowulf” looked like Grendel stupidity –An actress I met (. . . ) During one brief dinner her single response to everything I said was “That’s zalid.” – Tiffany (. . . ) said to me with a voice resembling that of a mouse in the animated cartoons, “What sign are you?” lack of sense – Of the Marx Brothers, she of humor was convinced the amusing one was Zeppo. bad taste – Pippa Mondale, a cheerful divorc´ee, made the fatal mistake of defending candles shaped like Laurel and Hardy. frigidity – While we were making love, a curious optical illusion occurred and for a split second it almost looked as if she was moving. maturiy – The “thirtyish poetess” was sixtyish.

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It should be noted that nowhere on this list of characteristics is a woman classified positively: by the way, it is exactly the fact that all of them correspond to semantically negative scripts that dooms Ossip’s search to failure and makes his listing hilarious. In fact, the positive scripts are never materialized in the text. On the contrary, they only emerge under the shadow of their opposites. Like Raskin’s shadow oppositions (1985: 108–109), they only function as shadowscripts which never materialize but are evoked by way of their antonyms. Of course, this strategy gives the story an unmistakable incongruous and humorous flavor: the narrator longs for perfection but all he can find is imperfection. In the face of the amount of imperfect creatures he cannot cease to find, Ossip blurts out the following complaint – a pearl of humorous oppositions: Nights of loneliness led me to ponder the aesthetics of perfection. Is anything in nature actually “perfect” with the exception of my Uncle Hyman’s stupidity? Who am I to demand perfection? I, with my myriad faults. I made a list of my faults, but could not get past: 1) Sometimes forgets his hat.

The perfection script is here explicitly evoked, whereas the humor in the paragraph is triggered by the inclusion of an unrelated – hence humorous – element in the category of perfect things. To be rigorous, Uncle Hyman’s stupidity can hardly be considered a sign of perfection. The play on the adjective perfect, instead of, for instance, complete, paves the way for the second comic incongruity in the passage: the inability (itself a flaw) to find a single flaw in himself helps to understand the erroneous reasoning which the protagonist makes throughout the story, namely I am perfect; therefore, I am entitled to a perfect woman. Olive Chomsky is the only one to approach his ideal. The passage in which Ossip describes her numerous virtues is a delicious sum-up of all the perfection infra-scripts which, up till then, had never been visible or, what is more, materialized simultaneously in one single woman. Had it not been for the curse of the ray of light, everything might have stopped right there: Olive Chomsky, literate and wry, who quoted Eliot and played tennis and also Bach’s “Two Part Inventions” on the piano. And who never said “Oh, wow,” or wore anything marked Pucci or Gucci or listened to country and western music or dialogue radio. And incidentally, who was always willing at the drop of a hat to do the unspeakable and even initiate it. [. . . ] Concerts, movies, dinners, weekends, endless wonderful discussions of everything from Pogo to Rig-Veda. And never a gaffe from her lips. Insights only. Wit too! And of course the appropriate hostility towards all deserving targets: politicians, television, facelifts, the architecture of housing projects, men in leisure suits, film courses, and people who begin sentences with “basically.” Oh, curse the day that a wanton ray of light coaxed forth those ineffable facial lines bringing to mind Aunt Rifka’s stolid visage.

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Besides perfection, other supra-scripts emerge in Allen’s story, whereas, on an inferior level, other infra-scripts take shape. Actually, in semantic terms, the script organization of the text obeys a rather stratified hierarchical pattern, which is analyzable at further levels, as can be seen in the tree diagram presented in the next section. 2.3.2. Script hierarchy and hyponymy Let us sketch a hierarchical design to account for the script organization of The Lunatic’s Tale. In order to do so, let us take the successful doctor macroscript presiding over the whole text as the top lexical entry. From here emerge two branches, here called ‘intrinsic and extrinsic qualities’, and from the intermediate scripts emerge other infra-scripts, in a descending structure that goes down virtually until minimal levels of semantic detail. Now, this structure can be analyzed according to the principle of hyponymy, which proves to be very operative in approaching the comic narrative. Much in the same way as lexical elements are organized according to subordination vs. superordination relations (cf. carnation, rose or tulip relative to flower), so too the semantic information in the text is structured according to the relations established between more specific, or subordinate, elements and more general, or superordinate, ones. Hyponymy and hyperonymy (Lyons 1977: 291–295) are the terms that respectively cover these paradigmatic sense relationships, which acquire great importance in the comic text. It should also be noted that the following tree diagram is only one among other possible script representations (all of which being necessarily limited) of Allen’s story. This diagram is, alas, undermined by a subterranean network of opposite scripts, i.e., antithetical shadow scripts that eventually gain the upper hand. Actually, the bum vs. successful doctor supra-script opposition spreads its influence to the remaining semantic nuclei. Thus, the elements to follow on the hierarchical scale (for instance, money and sanity) are built on an antithetical basis with regard to, respectively, no money and madness. Likewise, the social status and power nodes are shadowed by something like social discrimination and weakness. Besides, the self-control and balance scripts are refracted on something like lack of self-control and unbalance, and so forth. Hence, there is a close connection between hyponymy and antonymy in script analysis. If, on the one hand, the semantic information is organized according to differing layers of inclusion / subordination, on the other hand the elements therein evoke their opposites. Among all the scripts outlined above, the having a perfect mate one is, as said earlier, central to the unfolding of the story. But another one also entails

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[Extrinsic qualities]

MONEY

BEAUTY

INTELLIGENCE

SOCIAL STATUS

SENSE OF HUMOR

[Intrinsic qualities]

POWER

GOOD TASTE

HAVING A PERFECT MATE

SENSUA-

LITY

YOUTH

SANITY

SELFCONTROL

HAPPINESS

BALANCE

WISDOM

SATISFACTION

PEACE OF MIND

Figure 4. Hierarchical script representation of The Lunatic’s Tale

a driving force in terms of action progression: namely, happiness. It should be noted that the script opposition between happiness and unhappiness is expressed verbatim, twice, by means of the adjectives used in the following passages: And so it was that I was the most miserable of men; Nobody’s relationship could actually be called happy. Soon I began to have nightmares. By alternating between a state of fleeting happiness and another of utter misery – or, in semantic terms, between the two poles of the script opposition – Ossip is led into (re)acting, although the succession of his failed attempts becomes a typically comic increase in confusion. Actually, the process of searching for the ideal woman and, also, for happiness soon turns into a nightmare. After wandering around, unhappy and lonely, for many pages, Ossip finally meets Olive, who almost personifies the ideal woman. But along comes Tiffany and, with her, temptation and betrayal. Feeling divided between Olive and this new erotic archetype, Ossip moves from a state of frenetic carnality to one of guilt, fatigue and depression. The humorous climax occurs when the anti-hero opts for suicide (the epitome of unhappiness, and also a hyponym of ‘depression’), making an attempt which, once again, fails: I held a pistol to my head, but at the last moment lost my nerve and fired in the air. The bullet passed through my ceiling, causing Mrs. Fitelson in the apartment overhead to leap straight upward onto her bookshelf and remain perched there throughout the high holidays.

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The fact that Ossip’s self-aggressive intentions cause a victim other than himself is genuinely humorous because it is hyperbolic – and, in purely kinetic and physical terms, impossible – and also because there is a sudden shift from a highly probable and non-marked script (self-aggression) to an improbable and marked one (hetero-aggression), or, to put it differently, from suicide to homicide (or manslaughter, since it is involuntary). Whatever the reading, any of these or other infra-script oppositions help to establish the centrality of the happiness / unhappiness supra-opposition, as well as its importance regarding the subsequent evolution in the protagonist’s story. These examples confirm a fundamental principle underlying this book: that the humorous short story is not restricted to being a sum total of joke-like structures; instead, it is a whole in which – and according to which – these structures make sense. What makes us laugh when reading the phrases that illustrate the perfection / imperfection supra-opposition (copied above) is the relationship that they establish with the layers of textual information above them. When, for instance, Ossip says that during sexual intercourse it almost looked as though she was moving, or when he tells us about his girlfriend’s preference for such objects as Laurel and Hardy candles, the humor in the passages – which activate specific infra-scripts – is enhanced by the broader script oppositions that shape and contextualize them. Similarly, when he says that he does not correspond to any of a Bay Area bisexual’s two desires, Ossip makes us laugh not only because of the intrinsic incongruity underlying the situation, but also because the character undergoing this specific incongruous situation is Ossip Parkis – a man divided between professional success and emotional failure. In other words, both passages are humorous because they are narrated by a specific character, who, significantly, is searching for the ideal woman, for perfection and happiness, but who fails at every new attempt. Therefore, the infra-scripts are elements that illustrate, along the textual axis, the supra-script oppositions. If the connecting threads were to be cut, much of the humorous potential of these minor elements, if not all, would be lost. 2.3.3. Extratextual scripts: allusion Deriving from the Latin form ad ludere, allusion constitutes a particularly useful resource in building the comedic game. We have already seen (cf. Section 6 in the previous chapter) that allusion may be understood as a brief intertextual reference that requires encyclopaedic knowledge on the reader’s part, allowing him/her to identify a source-text, be it a philosophical maxim, a literary passage or, for instance, the language used in the press, in law or in letter-writing. With regard to the humorous narrative, the use of the allusive reference also functions

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as a stylistic strategy that supports the extratextual scripts evoked throughout the story. It is in this way that we may regard it as a presuppositional tool, that is, as presupposed information that is taken for granted. In The Lunatic’s Tale Allen often makes use of political, religious, cultural, literary and philosophical allusions, as well as references to contemporary pop culture. The frequency and richness of this type of textual input prevents us from approaching it exhaustively – but it will suffice, for illustrative purposes, to dwell on a few examples. An important facet in the characterization of Ossip as a successful doctor is the irreproachable good taste he shows in choosing women to court, places to attend and objects to use. We have already seen that Tiffany blatantly fails all tests relative to the good taste script, whereas Olive proves to stand up to Ossip’s high requirements. The passage that follows perfectly exemplifies the differences that separate the two women and the way in which allusion plays an important role therein: Once I feigned illness, asking Olive to attend a Braham’s Symphony with her mother so that I could satisfy the moronic whims of my sensual goddess who insisted I drop over to watch “This is your life” on television, “because they are doing Johnny Cash!”

Whereas Olive is a habitu´ee of Braham’s concerts – an allusion to erudite music and, by extension, to a type of culture of elitist connotations –Tiffany is contented with TV evenings on which she delights in watching TV trash, as the reference to Johnny Cash suggests. Let it be noted, in passing, that Olive goes to concerts in the company of her mother, herself a connoisseuse of classical music, which implies that the social class to which they both belong has not been formed overnight. So as to interpret these allusions in a successful way, the recipient will have to be acquainted with contemporary pop culture, in particular the TV tendency to satisfy the bad taste of a supposed majority. Therefore, if the recipient does not know who Johnny Cash is, for example, or that a TV program called ‘This is your life’ is one of the so-called reality-shows which are so fashionable these days, s/he will not be able to decode the allusive message successfully. The same goes for another passage characterizing Olive, which has already been quoted, and which constitutes a treasure of allusive references: Olive Chomsky, (. . . ) who quoted Eliot and played tennis and also Bach’s “Two Part Inventions” on the piano. And who never said “Oh, wow”, or wore anything marked Pucci or Gucci or listened to country and western music or dialogue radio. (. . . ) And never a gaffe from her lifts. Insights only. Wit too! And of course the appropriate hostility towards all deserving targets: politicians, television, facelifts, the architecture of housing projects, men in leisure suits, film courses, and people who begin sentences with “basically”.

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Each and every one of these allusions carries a sociocultural connotation: if Eliot and Bach stand once again for erudite culture, and if tennis and piano imply belonging to a high socioeconomic class, the references to mass behavior appear to be negatively marked as symbols of bad taste. Wearing flashy designer’s clothes, listening to trash music and radio, watching TV, using clich´es and poor vocabulary, undergoing plastic surgery – all boil down to allusive references to a modus vivendi from which Olive distances herself. To understand that this is so implies, let it be stressed, being in the know of the sociological and economic system that informs such allusions. The allusion to symbols of cultural prestige, as well as to renowned names in arts and letters, occurs in many other moments along The Lunatic’s Tale, but always as aids to the scripts at work. When Ossip goes through the never-ending list of failed love affairs, he introduces allusions that help to situate him socially and culturally: Ads, answered out of desperation, in the NewYork Review of Books, proved equally futile as the “thirtyish poetess” was sixtyish, the “co-ed who enjoys Bach and Beowulf” looked like Grendel, and the "Bay Area bisexual" told me I didn’t quite coincide with either of her desires.

The fact that the protagonist chooses, among all the possible choices, the New York Review of Books as a means to look for personal ads alludes to a certain sociocultural class and, perhaps also, to its pretensions. Actually, the ads to which he chooses to reply confirm the intellectual connotations which the newspaper carries: they are authored by a poetess, a fan of classical music and of medieval epic literature (note how the parallel reference to Grendel, the monster that terrifies Hrothgar’s kingdom and which Beowulf fights, completes the allusion to the Saxon saga), and a representative of, say, liberal behavior. Further ahead, when Ossip is already helplessly involved with his “sensual goddess,” he chooses the following allusive comparison to express the state of mind he is in: I was forsaking my responsibility to the woman of my dreams for a physical obsession not unlike the one Emil Jennings experienced in The Blue Angel.

The allusion to a film classic once again codifies the character, helping to strengthen the cultured and refined scripts which underlie the successful doctor one. In the same way, Ossip’s art culture is alluded to in the next passage: I grew to look more and more like the figure in Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’.

But the impressive encyclopaedic knowledge of our protagonist also encompasses science, as can be seen at the moment when Tiffany is convalescing from the operation performed by Ossip:

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As Darwin taught us, she soon developed a keen intelligence, and while not perhaps the equal of Hannah Arendt’s, it did permit her to recognize the follies of astrology and marry happily.

The allusion to the origin and evolution of the species is humorous because it looks dislocated and excessive: the ontogenetic evolution of Tiffany can hardly be said to reproduce the slow phenomena that govern philogenetics. On the other hand, establishing a comparison between the intelligence of a female genius and that of a reader of astrology columns cannot, owing to its incongruity, cause but laughter. Therefore, both allusions support the humor in the passage, whose decoding requires extralinguistic knowledge. But Allen’s short story displays non-erudite allusions as well. Pop culture is also present in Ossip’s reflections, as is the case of allusions to audiovisual culture (cf. Johnny Cash again), comic strips, science fiction, street slang and other urban codes. Consider the following allusive similes: a) An erotic archetype with the unlikely name of Tiffany Schmeederer adjusted the top oh her plaid wool kneesock and said to me in a voice resembling that of a mouse in the animated cartoons, "What sign are you?" b) We proceeded to make love in the manner of the Flying Wallendas. And so it began. c) Excuses for the woman I loved while my lust was spent elsewhere. Spent, in fact, on an empty little yo-yo whose touch and wiggle caused the top of my head to dislodge like a Frisbee and hover in space like a flying saucer.

If cultural allusions undoubtedly abound in the text, sometimes there are also references to historical and political events, as well as to ethnic and religious facts. A complex combination of these factors is mentioned at the moment when Ossip, feeling frustrated on account of countless love failures, and on the verge of collapse, meets his rabbi, who tries to persuade him into being more patient and moderate: My rabbi said, “Settle, settle. What about a woman like Mrs. Blitzstein? She may not be a great beauty, but nobody is better at smuggling food and light firearms in and out of a ghetto.”

The allusion to the ghettos, tragically connected with the Jewish history, is here related to other obviously humorous allusions: the woman whom the rabbi advised him to marry is a sort of a female troll – and a widow, which suggests that she is a mature woman. Besides, the proverbial joke stereotype that Jews are endowed with a practical intelligence, which allows them to easily solve problems, no matter how serious, is also present. The passage subtly alludes to an ethnic code too, according to which Jews should marry Jewish women. This is also a sign of the typically Jewish self-deprecating humor which Allen so finely masters.

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An ethnic and religious type of allusion is also present on the lines that follow, where there is a reference to the Old Testament, provocatively contiguous to a profane mention, and also, by extension, to the biblical foundations of Judaism. Ossip admits that he is not always the one to break up: sometimes, when the woman, alas, is actually worth the effort, the pattern is inverted: But, obeying some age-old law, perhaps from the Old Testament or the Egyptian Book of the Dead, she would reject me.

But Allen’s allusive penchant is sociologically oriented as well. The nightmare which anxious Ossip narrates, as a sequel to the emotional shocks he suffered, contains a significant detail: I dreamed I visited a singles bar where I was attacked by a gang of roving secretaries. They brandished knives at me and forced me to say favourable things about the borough of Queens.

Decoding the allusion requires, once again, knowledge that constitutes the reader’s encyclopaedic baggage. If the reader were not familiar with the social and economic reality of the town where the story takes place – in particular, with the fact that the degraded boroughs of New York City, like Queens, would hardly deserve any praise – the allusion would be lost. In short, allusion works on the basis of what Raskin calls non-linguistic scripts (on this, see the first section of Ch. 3), which complement the lexical scripts present along the textual axis. For instance, so as to know the implications of showing off a label reading Pucci, or what TV soap operas are all about, one has to activate a sort of social and cultural competence that goes beyond the strictly linguistic expertise at work in communication. Besides, allusion reveals the interactive nature of humorous signification: the writer builds a codified and incomplete puzzle, whereas the reader supplies the missing pieces to that puzzle. If the latter does not know these missing pieces (e.g. who Grendel or Munch are), s/he will be unable to access the implied meaning. This is why Nash (1985: 74–76) claims that such interpretive processes amount to an elitist and somewhat aggressive type of humor: as he puts it, allusions are “a device of power, enabling the speaker to control a situation and authoritatively turn it to his own advantage.” Finally, it is also worth noting that all occurrences of allusion in The Lunatic’s Tale correspond to undeniably humorous moments, thus constituting nuclear information. Allusion is, therefore, a central strategy in constructing narrative humor, as well as a means of signaling the humorous communication mode.

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2.4.

Stylistic aids to humorous opposition

The effect of comic incongruity that pervades through The Lunatic’s Tale, which is achieved – as the Hypothesis stipulates – by activating the principle of semantic opposition, is complemented, at a microstructural level, by other types of opposition. From a stylistic point of view, in particular, there are several resources that help to signal a communication mode that is specifically humorous, as will be seen next. 2.4.1. Register clash The concept of register originally signified, in stylistics and sociolinguistics (see Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens 1964, Leech 1966, and Strang 1968), a “variety of language defined according to its uses in social situations” (Crystal 1998: 295). Hence the existence of scientific, religious and formal registers, to mention but a few examples. According to Halliday and Hasan (1985: 41), “the register is what you are speaking at the time, depending on what you are doing and the nature of the activity in which the language is functioning.” Unlike dialects, which are defined as a variety of language “according to the user,” registers constitute a variety of language “according to use” (ibidem). In the language of humor, built upon a culturally framed principle of opposition, it is no wonder that the clash of registers helps to signal the humorous mode. We have already seen that an early acknowledgement of this fact occurred as early as 1730, when James Beattie, in his An Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition, referred to the intersection of styles as a comedic strategy: an example he put forth is the introduction of learned words in a colloquial conversation (on this, see Ch. 2, Section 5.4). In The Lunatic’s Tale, Allen does not overlook this strategy of textual composition. Actually, the text constantly oscillates between registers that are typical either of 1st -person literary narratives or of informal exchanges. An example of the former is the use of a formal vocabulary and of conventional address-phrases (like Pity my dilemma, dear reader!), whereas the latter can be seen in the use of colloquial expressions and slang. The resulting incongruity and dislocation highlight the underlying script oppositions, at the same time as they produce an effect of comicality. Consider the following passage, where Ossip sums up, in no more than two sentences, the double life he has been leading: I was living with a woman whom I cared for very deeply and who had a delightful personality and mind (. . . ) Concurrently, I was sneaking cross-town nightly to rendezvous with a photographer’s model. . .

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The use of the verb to sneak is obviously dislocated in the co-text: note how the preceding lexical choices (cf. the adverbs deeply, concurrently and the adjective delightful) and, especially, the use of the pronoun whom, which has become rare in everyday speech, belong to a formal and proper register. The use of slang also occurs when Ossip, describing the several unsatisfactory girlfriends that crossed his path, adds the following disclaimer: This is not to imply that now and again an apparent plum would not somehow emerge: a beautiful woman, sensual and wise with impressive credentials and winning ways.

The term plum, like many words related to the semantic field of food, displays erotic connotations that are inappropriate to a formal or literary register, thus operating a cut from the lexical composition of the rest of the sentence. Yet another illustration of register clash in Allen’s text is the passage that follows – one of Ossip’s gloomy reflections on love in which, once again, he makes graceful words collide with a slang noun: On the one hand, the yawning abyss of compromise. On the other, the enervating and reprehensible existence of the amorous cheat. [Emphasis mine]

2.4.2. Hyperbole Exaggeration – a classic comedic strategy – is also present in Ossip’s story, helping to shape a type of discourse that challenges the rules of conventionally ‘serious’ autobiographical narratives. Hyperbole, a stylistic manifestation of exaggeration, is indeed a particularly lavish resource inThe Lunatic’s Tale, where it helps to support the principle of semantic opposition presiding over the text. In fact, by imposing a double (exaggerated) meaning over a basic one, hyperbole voices a type of script opposition that could be defined as possible / impossible or real / unreal (cf. Raskin 1985: 111 ff.). Besides, hyperbole constitutes a typical example of the pragmatic organization of humorous discourse, insofar as it ostensibly infringes one of Grice’s (1975) conversational maxims of Quality: namely, “Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.”Yet, as discussed above (cf. Section 2.2.4), this type of infraction carries a cooperatively intended implicature, whose decoding produces contextual effects of comicality. We have already focused on the suicide attempt episode, but let us now consider the highly farfetched effect that the firing of Ossip’s gun has on his neighbor, Mrs Fitelson: The bullet passed through my ceiling, causing Mrs. Fitelson in the apartment overhead to leap straight upward onto her bookshelf and remain perched there throughout the high holidays.

The suicide / homicide script-switch underlying the passage or, as suggested above, self-aggression / hetero-aggression, is expressed by means of an

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ostensibly impossible incident, and it is exactly this impossibility that hyperbole expresses. Likewise, the description of Ossip’s numerous love partners is rich in hyperbolic expressions and excessive statements. This is the case of Tiffany’s alleged charms, which are described as follows: a) Well, Tiffany’s body would not only not quit, it wouldn’t take five minutes off for a coffee break. b) A face and body like Tiffany Schmeederer’s comes along every few million years and usually heralds an ice age or the destruction of the world by fire.

The possible / impossible or real / unreal type of opposition, which underlies these comments by Ossip, helps to strengthen the image of sensuality, beauty and physical attractiveness which, as seen above, evokes the perfection suprascript. Therefore, it is by taking the semantic associations attached to a certain lexeme to its limits that Allen builds the suggestion of comicality. Sometimes, hyperbole is associated with periphrasis, and thus conveys a script through a rather more verbose alternative. The case of the frigid girlfriend is an example of this: I recall once, while we were making love, a curious optical illusion occurred and for a split second it was almost looked as though she was moving.

At other times, conversely, hyperbole is used as an economical aside, often in an embedded structure (e.g. in brackets), whose importance is, as a result, diminished. Still, the humorous effects are not jeopardized, as happens in the comment on his own virility that proud Ossip cannot help making: What joyful months spent with her till my sex drive (listed, I believe, in the Guinness Book of World Records) waned.

When the protagonist dwells on the unhappiness haunting married life, the use of hyperbole is quite blunt and explicit, taking the shape of a mathematical exaggeration which comically conceals a feeling of pessimism: Did anyone I know have a “meaningful relationship”? My parents stayed together forty years, but that was out of spite. (. . . ) Iris Merman cheated with any man who was registered to vote in the tri-state area. (. . . ) [Empahsis mine]

In all these cases, Allen uses hyperbole as a strategy that marks the humorous communication mode. By exaggerating semantic facets associated with a certain script nucleus, this stylistic device enhances the opposition effect that sustains the comicality in the narrative. In this way, it assumes an important complementary function in structuring narrative humor.

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2.4.3. Irony As an indisputably humorous stylistic device (cf. Nash 1985: 152), irony also occurs in The Lunatic’s Tale. Semantically speaking, it consists in the use of lexical choices that fallaciously represent – or misrepresent – the content of the message, which, in interpretive terms, implies the identification and validation of the opposite of what is said. Allen often uses this tricky strategy of meaning inversion, which requires the reader’s participation (on Allen’s and other comic authors’ use of irony see Ermida 2005). Let it not be forgotten that, like hyperbole, irony cooperatively violates the Gricean maxim of Quality, thus creating an implicature which requires the reader’s decoding. Let us concentrate on the following example, which occurs at the time of Ossip’s auspicious first meeting with Tiffany: I felt compelled to oblige her with a brief discussion of astrology, a subject rivaling my intellectual interest with such heavy issues as est, alpha waves, and the ability of leprechauns to locate gold.

In this case, the adjective heavy is the counter-code (Nash, ibidem) which the recipient of the message is called upon to interpret: although alpha waves may be regarded as a ‘heavy issue’, the adjective is an obviously dislocated choice in the context of astrology. Therefore, since the reader is supposed to know that astrology is commonly spurned in intellectual circles, being regarded as a minor, unscientific subject, it is easy to conclude that the meaning intended by the narrator is the opposite of what he expresses. If, instead of astrology, the term were, for instance, astronomy, the narrator’s ironical intention would be more difficult to decode. The employment of obvious co-textual lexical clues is also present in other ironical passages of the narrative. When Ossip considers the possibility of proposing a m´enage a` trois to Olive, the very sentence embodies the incongruity that is the key to interpreting irony: Were the French right? Was the trick to have a wife and also a mistress, thereby delegating responsibility for varied needs between two parties? I knew that if I proposed this arrangement openly to Olive, understanding as she was, the chances were very good that I would wind up impaled on her British umbrella.

The discrepancy between the adjective understanding and the subsequent clause, which is rather graphic to say the least, functions as the counter-code that expresses the narrator’s ironical intentions: namely, that Olive is all but understanding. But if irony is sometimes associated with hyperbole and overstatement, the reverse also happens. Let us see how Ossip, after narrating all his amorous mishaps, and after having finally managed to surgically fabricate the perfect

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woman, introduces the closing paragraph of the story with a sentence that is subtly ironical: The only hitch was that after several months of bliss with Olive that were the equal of anything in the Arabian Nights, I inexplicably grew dissatisfied with this dream woman and developed instead a crush on Billie Jean Zapruder, an airline stewardess whose boyish, flat figure and Alabama twang caused my heart to do flip-flops.

This is a different discoursal strategy from the ones analyzed previously: instead of exaggerating his statement, the narrator uses an understatement, that is, he says less instead of more. Actually, growing tired of the ideal woman and feeling attracted to a plain and unattractive one can hardly be said to be just a hitch – rather, it is quite a tragedy, a point of no return, which is going to cost Ossip his happiness and bring him poverty and loneliness in the streets of the Big Apple. His concluding words are: It was at this point that I resigned my position at the hospital, donned my pinwheel hat and knapsack and began skating down Broadway. So, it is up to the reader to understand that the sudden turn of events is not just a transitory drawback, but the beginning of the protagonist’s fatal fall. This is, after all, the moment in the narrative where the major script-switch in the story occurs – namely, imperfection replaces perfection, insofar as Ossip prefers such an imperfect woman to the ideal one. The fact that this is also the reason for him to go crazy and become a bum is comically reported as a minor side-effect, almost as if this were not ‘the’ semantic core of the narrative. What better incongruity could one get at the close-down of Ossip’s tale?

3. Conclusion Having applied the Hypothesis to a specific narrative corpus, Allen’s short story, I shall now briefly recapitulate a few main points. Firstly, the analysis has proven that humorous narratives are not limited to being a chain of independent joke-like structures. Conversely, they are organized according to a vertical design (Principle of Hierarchy) where different layers of semantic input interact closely. More specifically, the analysis has confirmed the existence of supra-scripts which are repeatedly instantiated along the text and which preside over its global meaning. In other words, the sequentially emerging humorous nuclei point to superior scripts which, according to the Principle of Recurrence, pervade through the whole narrative. On a pragmatic level, the recurrence of these supra-structural nuclei induces the reader to make predictions relative to the progression of the narrative and the ending of the story. However, the ‘secret’ of narrative humor, as this chapter

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has also shown, consists in contradicting these expectations and establishing, in a non-gradual and surprising way, an inversion of the interpretive direction. This moment – which in the joke is equivalent to the punch line – corresponds to the mechanism of script-switch stipulated in the Hypothesis, according to which the shadow supra-script (which springs from the Principle of Opposition) gains the upper hand. The analysis of The Lunatic’s Tale has confirmed that this new semantic frame obeys the Principle of Informativeness, owing to its improbability, suddenness and corresponding surprise. The discursive organization of humor also relies on another mechanism which requires, on the reader’s part, an extra processing effort: the unsaid. As seen above, a great deal of the information conveyed in humorous texts is only implicitly accessible, be it by allusion, presupposition or implicature. The inferential effort which the reader has to make, as well as the constant activation of encyclopaedic knowledge, aims at tackling the author’s informative blanks. Although these blanks look uncooperative at first sight, the success of the humorous exchange depends exactly on what is not said and on what causes surprise. Therefore, the author’s behavior, as is the case of Allen’s, is targeted at specific communicative purposes, which are in accordance with the Principle of Cooperation stipulated in the Hypothesis. The clues, the obstacles and the traps laid out by the author turn out to be, not an end, but a means – a strategy of making the reader succeed in solving the text and enjoying its reward: amusement.

Chapter 7 Extending the analysis Introduction Having analyzed Allen’s text in some detail, I shall now move on to apply the Hypothesis to other cases of humorous short stories and thus test its validity. The corpus of analysis is deliberately heterogeneous, not only in terms of historical epoch and geographical origin but also as far as style, language and theme are concerned. It covers an array of English language authors from both sides of the Atlantic whose texts were published in different decades of the 20th century. In chronological order, the first story is Corey Ford’s The Norris Plan (1927), a fine example of the American author’s parodic skills. Secondly, Evelyn Waugh’s On Guard, published in 1936, constitutes a cynical and spirituous portrayal of sentimental relationships tinged with notes of black humor. Next, Dorothy Parker’s You Were Perfectly Fine (1939) perfectly illustrates the sort of laconic and mordant humor which made her famous. The fourth short story to analyze – Graham Greene’s A Shocking Accident, published in 1972 – evinces the author’s celebrated sarcastic humor. And lastly, David Lodge’s Hotel des Boobs (1986) is a successful humorous combination of thematic irreverence and sociological criticism. The purpose of the analysis is to uncover regularities underlying the ostensive diversity of the texts and to confirm the existence of semantic structures and pragmatic principles (postulated in the Hypothesis) common to noticeably different humorous narratives. So as to make the diversity of the short stories clearer, I have chosen to tag each of them with a short descriptive title. Of course, these tags should not be taken to imply a simplification of the stories’ literary and semantic complexity, or their reduction to a single line of analysis. The only purpose of these tags is to provide distinctive features from which to depart.

1. The Norris Plan (1927) by Corey Ford: parody Being one of the founders of The New Yorker, the prestigious literary journal, Corey Ford (pseudonym of John Riddell) was also one of its renowned collaborators. The Norris Plan, using critical and satirical expertise, focuses on a topic which is up-to-date to this day: best-sellers. The story is about Charles and Kathleen Norris, a non-fictional married couple of prolific writers who, in the

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conservative milieu of America in the twenties, did not hesitate to write about contraception, a taboo-theme at the time (cf. Muir 1992: 867). Ford’s short story is a double-parody – of the style and of the themes – of these and, by allusion, of other authors who have in the meantime been erased from the selective literary canon. The stylistic features of Ford’ text, namely excessive adjective usage and hyperbole, immediately signal, at the story’s outset, the humorous mode: It was a heavenly warm bright shiny clear happy Sunday morning, and the broad green velvety smooth flat rolling croquet field in the middle of Central Park was filled with gay warm yellow sunlight. (. . . ) “Oh, Charlie, why?” Kathy asked, widening her big dark round bright eyes reproachfully. (. . . ) Kathy leaned weakly on her mallet. The warm bright sunny cheerful Park swam before her, the croquet-wickets, stakes, balls, and idle spectators seemed blurred before her eyes.

From a lexical point of view, humor is signaled even earlier, i.e. in the very first sentence: It was early in the summer that Kathy told him that Edgar Wallace was going to have another novel.

The oddity and incongruity of the collocation ‘have a novel’, instead of ‘write a novel’ or ‘publish a novel’, immediately activates the comic mode. At the same time, it evokes the having a child script, thus establishing, from the introductory moments in the text, a supra-structural dichotomy that will pervade through it until the end. Actually, the idea of ‘literary fertility’ is construed side by side with ‘biological fertility’. The lexical clues that unmistakably activate the two script nodes include such elements as the verb ‘deliver’ and the noun ‘twins’, which are applied to the context of novel production: Look at Faith Baldwin, or Hugh Walpole, or Mary Roberts Rinehart, or Mazo de la Roche, or Margaret Ayer Barnes - they deliver one every year. Sometimes they even have twins.

As the Hypothesis stipulates, the Principle of Opposition, thus established, is complemented by the Principle of Recurrence, which causes a constant reactivation of the same supra-structural elements. In the following passage, the unwanted pregnancy script hyponymically activates the having a child supra-script, evoking it by means of a mathematical feat that assumes hyperbolic contours: “He’s been typing his eyes out,” Kathy continued in a rather faint voice. “He says the first two novels aren’t so bad, or even the first twenty,” she pursued. “But when you get to write the fiftieth novel or so, it’s terrible.”

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As a follow-up to this semantic frame, the allusion to abortion appears. Let us take a look at this interesting passage, where Charlie and Kathy exchange opinions on this delicate subject: “Well, if I was in Edgar’s place,” Charlie said, as he judged his distance and then rapped the stake smartly, “I’d go to my publishers and have them decide that the public couldn’t stand another novel just now, that they’d have to save his reputation by – well, cutting it out.” “Oh, Charlie! Isn’t that a terribly wrong thing to do?” “What’s wrong with it?” “Well – well” – she stopped, puzzled and a little sick. “It seems so unfair to the novel. It – it ought to have its little chance.”

If the phrase cutting it out alludes to the interruption of an unwanted pregnancy, so does the sequence it ought to have its little chance. Similarly, the repeated use of the adjective wrong, of obvious moral connotations, and the physiological implications underlying the use of sick, also activate the abortion script. However, the seriousness of the issue is canceled, thus allowing humor to occur, insofar as the object is not only [−human], but also [−animate]. It is exactly the same semantic frame – unwanted pregnancy and its voluntary interruption – that, a few paragraphs later, springs again, when Kathy recalls her visit to her editor (or, as a shadow-script, obstetrician): Kathy shook her head vaguely. She was thinking again of her panic-stricken visit to her publisher this very morning and her face burned, and her hands were dry. A business-like man; it was nothing to him. No, there was no question about Mrs. Norris’s condition; she was scheduled for his fall lists. He was sorry, but he did not know any way out of it now. It would be extremely expensive to remove it at this date. He never advised it. It was like a nightmare. Her publisher had removed her last doubt. This was no longer fear: it was a terrible certainty.

The lexical elements that activate the unwanted pregnancy script are fairly obvious: in psychological terms, the experience of an unplanned pregnancy is rendered by the participial adjective panic-stricken and by the nouns nightmare, doubt and fear, as well as by the phrase terrible certainty. At the same time, the allusion to the abortion shadow-script is contained in the verb remove, which is once again a deviant collocation as far as canceling a publication goes. Charlie’s long speech, which follows, resumes the supra-script opposition having a child vs. having a novel, and it adds a new parallel script: contraception. Literary over-productivity, Mr. Norris claims, should be deterred, much in the same way as over-population should: by controlling the number of births. Hence the appearance of one further script opposition: birth-control vs. book-control (which is explicitly phrased in the text). An analysis of these

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oppositions helps to discern a recurrent intersection of two semantic areas in the short story, as the Hypothesis predicts: Table 6. Comparative supra-script analysis of The Norris Plan

Subject Object State Instrument

Reason

Objective

Value

HAVING A CHILD ↓ BIOLOGICAL CONTRACEPTION (Birth-control) [+Human] [+Human] [+Fertility]: The subject is able to conceive [+Chemical]/ [+Pharmacological]/ [+Surgical] – Medical, – Economic, – Professional, – Social, – Personal. . . – Enjoying life without any burden, – Living better in economic terms, – Having professional success, – Being respected socially, – etc.

HAVING A BOOK ↓ LITERARY CONTRACEPTION (‘Book-control’) [+Human] [−Human] [+Creativity]: The subject is able to create [+Juridical]: Unless book-control (. . . ) is legalized among the lower classes Excess of literary production, but lack of literary quality: Hundreds of thousands of diseased, crippled and deformed novels [are brought] to the world – Having less but better literature: (. . . ) the decent novelists. . . must publish more – Maintaining the authors’ reputation: Reckless breeding should be checked for the sake of the author’s reputation. It is regarded, from some religious They believe the practice of literary perspectives, as profaning the holy contraception profanes the sacrasacrament of matrimony and as vio- ment of Inspiration and is a frustralating the principles of chastity and tion of the creative instinct in Art. matrimonial fidelity

Note: By ‘state’is meant “the temporary, rather than characteristic, condition of an entity” (cf. Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 95). As to the ‘value’ link: “Value is the assignment of the worth of an entity in terms of other entities” (idem 96).

As can easily be seen, the direct correspondence between the two members of the supra-script dichotomy suggests a neatly symmetrical semantic structure of parallelism, as is also the case of Allen’s short story. Meanwhile, another script nucleus emerges: eugenics. Indeed, Charlie’s argumentation, which assumes

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somewhat fascist shades, defends a discriminatory approach to those considered inferior. The idea of a juridical ban on ‘illiterate writers’ resumes the biological metaphor of sterilization and extends it to imply lower-class mass sterilization. Two passages in Charlie’s speech, reproduced next, rather accurately verbalize this semantic frame, and they also voice the supra-structural dichotomy biological reproduction vs.artistic creation, more precisely the script opposition human eugenics vs. literary eugenics: In order to save the decent novelists from bringing about a complete suicide of American literature, not only must they publish more, but the fecundity of the illiterate writers must be curtailed. (. . . ) The crux of the whole situation is this: our intelligent writers are not producing, and our ignorant, inferior ones are. Unless book-control is stopped among the upper classes, and its use legalized among the lower classes, the best part of our literature will die off, and the country will be over-run by incompetents and morons.

No wonder that Kathy, as a mother-to-be of a new novel, feels threatened by Charlie’s extreme position. Indeed, she thinks that he disapproves of her ‘pregnancy’, and so do we, readers. A closer look at Charlie’s speech makes clear the recurrence of the book control infra-script (or, literary contraception), as well as the corresponding negative effects of not using it, which understandably makes Kathy fear for her situation: Table 7. Evolution of the book control infra-script in The Norris Plan >Author A (John Erskine) CAUSE: He did not use literary contraception EFFECT: He’s confined now to the dollar reprints; (. . . ) The poor author – whose health had been none too good after having Adam and Eve and Uncle Sam – went into a serious decline. > Author B (Emil Ludwig) CAUSE: He did not use literary contraception EFFECT: You wouldn’t know him now; he’s beaten in spirit, in substance, in artistic integrity. The biography racket had crushed him body and soul. > Author C (Late James Branch Cabell) CAUSE: He did not use literary contraception EFFECT: Overproduction weakened him, and he died in giving birth to his last novel. /THEREFORE. . . > Author N (Kathy?) CAUSE: She did not use literary contraception EFFECT: . . . (Kathy is doomed)

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However, the story suddenly shifts and a new reading surfaces. Once again, and as is typical of comic narratives, the expectations which the line of textual progression suggests are broken. After Kathy faints (itself a node of the pregnancy supra-script), Charlie, feigning guilt, ends up confessing that he is also ‘expecting’. . . a novel: It’s true, Kathy. My publisher told me today. I’m going to have a novel in October myself! Before such unexpected news (surprise, let it be recalled, is a genuinely humorous factor), Mrs Norris acknowledges her mistake and her credulity, paving the way for what may be called the story’s punch line: the revelation of the true intentions underlying Charlie’s intense speech. Consider the following passage, which, as the Hypothesis stipulates, contains a high degree of (marked, given its sudden materialization) Informativeness: “Then all this you were saying about literary contraception, and book-control, and our country being run-over by incompetents and morons — you don’t mean a word of it?” “Of course I mean it”, he affirmed stoutly. “I’m strongly in favor of book-control —” She stared at him in bewilderment. “— for everybody else,” he concluded hastily. The Norrises embraced together in perfect understanding. [Emphasis mine]

After all, the collective interest script, which seemed to underlie Charlie’s defense of a better, more selective and demanding literature, is false – hence the sudden humorous script-switch. Conversely, it is an individual interest script that Charlie has in mind: if everybody else’s literary production were to be outlawed, the Norrises could aspire to the status of best-sellerdom – a Machiavellian strategy that gives the short story its title. In a nutshell, The Norris Plan presents a lexico-semantic organization that obeys the organizational principles of narrative humor which the Hypothesis puts forth. A small set of supra-structural nuclei, construed by implicit opposition to each other, emerges along the textual axis, presiding over the humorous elements that sequentially take shape. On completion of the narrative process, a highly surprising and informative script-shift occurs. At the same time, parodic elements create an intertextual dimension that enriches the semantic oppositions at play, whereas an element of nonsense functions as an additional humorous condiment.

2. On Guard (1936) by Evelyn Waugh: black humor Considered by many as the most important satirical author of the English language, Evelyn Waugh authors an extremely vast oeuvre, which includes novels, travel writing, biography, diary and essay writing. His pages are more often

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than not a merciless portrait of human imperfection, shaded with notes of subtle black humor. On Guard is the tale of the adventures of a dog which has been offered to an attractive and frivolous girl by her fianc´e on the eve of his departure abroad (to earn a living in distant Kenya), as an attempt to guarantee her faithfulness during his absence. The facts that the dog turns out to be the most intelligent character in the story and that the action evolves around a ridiculous anatomical detail are relevant elements in the construction of the story’s comicality. But Waugh’s text is also an excellent example of the semantic organization stipulated in the Hypothesis. In accordance with its Principle of Opposition and Hierarchy, two supra-structural scripts – being engaged vs. being unfaithful – preside over the whole text, being constantly reactivated, according to the Principle of Recurrence, by means of sequentially emerging lexical clues. At the end of the text, according to the Principle of Informativeness, a shadow suprascript surprisingly gains the upper hand. In this process, author and reader tacitly abide by a Principle of Cooperation. The two introductory paragraphs, graphically indented and bearing a strongly descriptive flavor, put forth preparatory lexical clues. Millie is “a girl of modest fortune,” whose seduction potential is metonymically represented by her nose – a nose to take the thoughts of English manhood back to its schooldays. The reference to her “modest fortune” activates a marriageable girl script and, by extension, the engagement supra-script, since the reference to a dowry implies an imminent marriage context. The question which Hector, the fianc´e, asks Millie when saying goodbye, You will wait for me, won’t you?, activates a related supra-script, wait. This is explicitly evoked again, via the verb ‘to wait’, in Hector’s dialogue with Beckthorpe (the man who is selling him the African farm) before leaving for Kenya: Good. . .You know it’s awful leaving Millie behind. Suppose it is eighty-one years before the crop succeeds. It’s the devil of a time to expect a girl to wait. Some other blighter might turn up, if you see what I mean.

Apart from the obvious incongruity of an eighty-one-year waiting period, to be discussed next, this passage introduces the second supra-script mentioned above: infidelity. By means of a pun between blight and blighter, Hector insinuates that Millie may fall for other suitors – as annoying a possibility as any crop disease he may have to fight on African soil – and thus jeopardize his plans for the future. Beckthorpe replies by making the suggestion that Millie use a girdle of chastity, another instantiation of the infidelity supra-script. To make matters worse, Millie’s sentimental instability aggravates the risk of her being unfaithful to Hector:

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Generally speaking, Millicent’s fancy for any particular young man was likely to last four months. (. . . ) In the case of Hector, her affection had been due to diminish at about the time she became engaged to him; it had been artificially prolonged during the succeeding three weeks, (. . . ) and it came to an abrupt end with his departure for Kenya.

The two supra-scripts thus devised – engagement and infidelity – are not direct antonyms but are opposites insofar as they are equivalent to, respectively, a compromise and its violation, which suggests an antonymic relationship of presence/absence or affirmation/negation. Let us analyze their semantic organization in more detail: Table 8. Comparative analysis of two supra-scripts in On Guard ENGAGEMENT Subjects

– Number: 1 person [+Masculine] + 1 person [−Masculine] – Condition: [−Married]

INFIDELITY

– Kinship: [−Related] to each other – Attributes: [+Adult] + [+Adult]

– Number : 1 person [+/−Masculine] + 1/more persons [+/−Masculine] – Condition: [+Married]/[+Engaged] – Kinship: [−Married] / [−Engaged] to each other – Attributes: [+Adult] and [+/− Adult]

Duration

Limited

Unlimited

Causes

Tradition; Social pressure, etc.

Sexual desire; Emotional instability; Marriage problems. . .

Objectives

To get married and/or have children

To solve the causes

Conditions

Wait; Fidelity

Discretion; Lying/ Deceiving

Emotions

Expectation; Anxiety; Tedium. . .

Desire; Jealousy; Insecurity/Lack of trust. . .

Establishing / keeping an agreement to marry

Violating an agreement

(Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 96)

Equivalence

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In the meantime, other minor script oppositions surface along the textual axis, helping to corroborate character description. In particular, the stupidity vs. intelligence pair marks a difference between, respectively, the human and nonhuman protagonists in the story. If Millie is inconsequent and volatile, incapable of reading through her own dog’s devious schemes, her fianc´e is not much better. Consider his good-bye speech, to which Millie replies with a distracted and laconic Yes, darling: “I shall think of you all the time Out There,” said Hector. “It’s going to be terrible – miles of impassable wagon track between me and the nearest white man, blinding sun, lions, mosquitoes, hostile natives, work from dawn until sunset single-handed against the forces of nature, fever, cholera. . . But soon I shall be able to send for you to join me.”

The opposition between the seriousness of the situation and the optimism underlying Hector’s invitation / promise is comical qua absurd. His inability to understand that the hard wild life he offers her is not a good gift shows his lack of discernment, just as happens in the following situation, where he elaborates on a fallacious reasoning regarding the success of his agricultural plans for Kenya: “It’s bound to be a success. I’ve discussed it all with Beckthorpe – that’s the chap who’s selling me the farm. You see the crop has failed every year so far – first coffee, then sisal, then tobacco, that’s all you can grow there, and the year Beckthorpe grew sisal, everyone else was making a packet in tobacco, but by then it was coffee he ought to have grown, and so on. He stuck it nine years. Well if you work it out mathematically, Beckthorpe says, in three years one’s bound to strike the right crop. I can’t quite explain why but it is like roulette and all that sort of thing, you see.”

Of course, if Beckthorpe’s calculations were truly infallible, why would he want to sell the farm to Hector in the first place? The stupidity script is also evoked in the dialogue with cunning Beckthorpe, where Hector views a twenty-seven-year period as a reasonable amount of time for one to endure, and also for a bride to wait (after all, twenty-seven is much less than eighty-one. . . ): “I say, you know, I’ve been trying to work it out. It was in three years you said the crop was bound to be right, wasn’t it?” “That’s right, old boy.” “Well, I’ve been through the sum and it seems to me it may be eighty-one years before it comes right.” “No, no, old boy, three or nine or at the most twenty-seven.” “Are you sure?” “Quite.” “Good. . . ”

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When choosing a dog to buy, Hector specifies that he would like one that will live a long time: eighty-one years, or twenty-seven at the least, and he goes on to add: I would prefer one named Hector. As can be seen in all these examples, Waugh evokes the stupidity script via indirect textual clues, be they lexical or actional. Indeed, much of what he means is not said: it is up to the reader to read between the lines and, in Gricean terms, interpret the implicatures underlying the text (given that the quantity maxim is repeatedly flouted). At the same time, the stupidity script is placed under the engagement supra-script: Millie is ‘engaged’ to a rather ‘stupid’ man, and though she is not at all clever either, this may partly explain why she switches to the infidelity script. By contrast, the intelligence infra-script is construed by means of a personification mechanism, and comically applies only to the dog, also called Hector (as a reminder of the absent fianc´e). A large range of verbs, adverbs and nouns activate the script, as can be seen in the following passages: a) . . . after receiving his commission, he observed a tall and personable man of marriageable age. . . b) The pup Hector saw all this and realized his mistake. Never again, he decided, would he give Millicent the excuse to run for the iodine bottle. c) . . . Hector heroically simulated a love of lump sugar. d) In moments of extreme anxiety Hector would affect to be sick. . . e) He would trot in front of the couple and whenever he thought an interruption desirable he would drop the bag. . . f) . . . when he heard Sir Alexander say “I hope I shall see him here very, very often”, he knew that he was defeated. [Emphasis mine]

The humor of this sequence lies first of all in attributing human intentions and reactions to an irrational animal. In semantic terms, therefore, this consists in assigning [+human] properties to a [−human] subject; whereas in script terms humor lies in the recurrent opposition between intelligence and stupidity (cf. the Principle of Recurrence at work). The dog’s intelligence is further expressed in the text by a repetitive sequence of situations in which he functions as an antagonistic force, struggling to keep his buyer’s rivals at bay. Actually, in Hector’s absence, Millie immediately starts going astray: his letters from Africa pile up, forgotten and unread, at the same rhythm as new suitors appear and, all to the dog’s credit, disappear. A diagrammatic analysis of this comical process (reminding one of slapstick comedy) can be rendered as follows:

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Table 9. Diagrammatic analysis of Millie’s suitors in On Guard >Millie invites Suitor A for tea < Hector-the-dog bites, throws up, interrupts → The suitor gives up >Millie spends her afternoons with Suitor B < Hector-the-dog demands being taken outside and then immediately back in again →The suitor gives up >Millie receives phone-calls from Suitor C < Hector stridently barks on the phone →The suitor gives up >Millie strolls in Hyde Park with Suitor D < Hector systematically drops Millie’s purse →The suitor gives up >Millie starts dating Sir Alexander Dreadnought < Hector bites, throws up, soils everything, barks, annoys as best he can →The suitor does not give up

In each new episode (represented above by the sign >) Millie moves one step up in the direction of the infidelity supra-script, whereas Hector-the-dog struggles to restore the engagement supra-script (cf. sign < above). At this point in the narrative, when Sir Alexander Dreadnought finally seems to be a brave enough suitor to win over the dog, the reading expectations point to the triumph of the infidelity supra-script. Indeed it looks as though Millie has eventually found someone to replace Hector. However, the text suddenly sidetracks, and a surprising situation occurs: Hector-the-dog bites off her beautiful nose, core and source of her charm and uniqueness. The brief and incisive passage resumes the dog’s personification (Thus it was that after a long conflict of loyalties he came to a desperate resolve. (. . . ) The nose must go), and bears Waugh’s typical black humor mark. Having had her nose operated and her dog forgiven, poor Millie is left with no charm or magic. Her success as a seductress is gone with. . . the nose. As a result, the text suddenly switches from the infidelity supra-script, which had slowly been established, to the engagement one: Millie has no other choice but to remain Hector’s fianc´ee forever. On a lower level, the text also switches from the marriageable girl script to the spinster one: the new/old Millie, bearer of a perfect but neutral surgical nose, is reduced to the condition of a spinster, ‘faithfully’ dedicated to waiting for her eternal groom. The latter script, being highly informative, i.e. improbable and surprising, is explicitly activated three times (through the noun “spinster”) in the concluding paragraph of the story:

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She went to a plastic surgeon and emerged some weeks later without scar or stitch (. . . ) Now she has a fine aristocratic beak, worthy of the spinster she is about to become. Like all spinsters she watches eagerly for the foreign mails and keeps carefully under lock and key a casket full of depressing agricultural intelligence; like all spinsters she is accompanied everywhere by an ageing lapdog. [Emphasis mine]

Waugh’s On Guard can thus be found to obey the principles of comic narratives enunciated in the Hypothesis. It is interesting to notice that, besides creating false expectations, which the story eventually discards, the narrator also flouts Grice’s maxim of quantity, typically saying less than necessary for interpretation to take place (e.g. never saying that Hector is stupid, but ‘implicating’ that he is). But the Principle of Cooperation ensures that the reader plays along and decodes the messages. Besides, in structural terms the short story exhibits the hierarchical organization without which the sequential occurrences of humor would be weakened and diluted (e.g. again, Hector’s stupidity is funnier in the context of his being a marriage candidate and also a ‘successful’ farmer on false pretences), which linear approaches to narrative humor fail to grasp.

3. You Were Perfectly Fine (1939) by Dorothy Parker: irony Dorothy Parker’s name stands out in American literature not only as one of its most lasting women’s voices, but also as a symbol of a generation which, in the twenties and thirties, agitated New York’s intellectual and cultural milieu. Her short stories, a literary genre which she mastered, are a terse and caustic portrait of urban life between the world wars. But it is above all Parker’s sardonic humor that brings her to this gallery. The ‘morning-after’ sickness of a young man suffering from full-blown amnesiac hangover is the theme of this little humorous pearl – a flash of daily life almost exclusively conveyed, as is common in Parker’s style, through direct speech. Immediately after the introductory paragraph, which is also one of the narrator’s rare incursions into the text, the narrative begins with a sequence of interjections by the protagonist. At the end of the short story, the text closes in exactly the same way:

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Table 10. Opening and closing sequences in You Were Perfectly Fine The pale young man eased himself carefully into the low chair, and rolled his head to the side, so that the cool chintz comforted his cheek and temple. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. Oh.’ (. . . ) (. . . ) (. . . ) The pale young man looked after her and shook his head long and slowly, then dropped it in his damp and trembling hands. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.’

The structural organization of the story is thus based on perfectly symmetrical parallelism. The fact that the reasons for the pale young man’s laments are radically different at the opposite poles of the textual vector assumes comic flavor: in fact, the problems that lead him to sigh and complain are so different in terms of seriousness that they denote humorous incongruity. This macrostructural parallelism is instantiated, along the textual axis, by another type of symmetry – the one between parallel scripts which emerge by means of a vast range of lexical clues. The drunkenness and hangover suprascripts, which cover the entire story, refer respectively to the past (last night) and the present (today). It should be noted that it is the girl, the only other character in the story, who reports all the events of the previous night. Let us examine them semantically, by adding the lexical triggers activating the infra-scripts (in block letters): Table 11. First supra-script opposition in You Were Perfectly Fine Subject: Place: Time:

Duration: Condition:

DRUNKENNESS HANGOVER [+Human], [+Masculine] [+Human], [+Masculine] [+Adult] [+Adult] – Pubs, restaurants, parties – At home (in bed / in the sofa) – At home / On the street – On a garden bench, etc. Mostly at the end of the day: At the beginning of / On the next (. . . was I very terrible last night?) day (Not feeling so well today?) A few hours A few hours Drinking too much alcohol Having drunk too much alcohol

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Table 11. continued Behavioral symptoms

DRUNKENNESS – annoying other people (She only got a tiny little bit annoyed. . . when you poured the clam-juice down her back) – singing (Oh, you were just singing away, there, for about an hour.) – being inconvenient (. . . you kept insisting that you wanted to sing some song about some kind of fusiliers. . . but everybody kept shushing you.) – nagging at other people (You took a sort of dislike to some you didn’t like his necktie) (. . . you did sit down awfully hard) – making sentimental confessions (You said such lovely, lovely things [about] how you had been feeling about me)

HANGOVER – feeling physical discomfort (. . . every time I took my head off the pillow, it would roll under the bed.) – trembling (Look at that hand, steady as a humming-bird.) – suffering from amnesia (Oh, Lord, what did I do to him?. . . Did I do that?) – recovering sobriety (So I sang. That must have been a treat. I sang.) (I’m off the stuff for life) – regretting past actions (I think I’d better go join a monastery in Tibet.)

The humor of this script combination partly resides in the histrionic nature of the scenes mentioned, but also in the fact that it establishes, as the Hypothesis predicts, an opposition with another supra-script, which the girl tries to impose: sobriety. Indeed, the girl desperately tries to persuade the boy that his drunken speech the night before (when he allegedly confessed his love for her) is the truth which he should now assume and honor. Although the boy is now sober enough to doubt it all, she keeps trying to convince him that, despite all evidence in support of the drunkenness script, the boy was perfectly fine (or, by extension, terribly funny, awfully amusing, absolutely all right). His weakness to contradict her – itself a side-effect of the hangover script – is a comical aggravation of the impending engagement between the two. After all, back in the twenties a respectable gentleman was not supposed to break his word. . . The opposition between these two supra-scripts – drunkenness vs. sobriety – reveals a second hierarchically superior pair: the one that opposes the boy’s

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drunkenness to the girl’s complacency. Obviously enough, the seriousness of the boy’s behavior the night before and the lightness of the judgement she makes of it are a typically comic incongruity: Table 12. Second supra-script opposition in You Were Perfectly Fine DRUNKENNESS

COMPLACENCY

HE does: – Gets drunk – Provokes Jim Pierson – Flirts with Elinor – Sings out of context – Tries to sing an obscene song – Refuses to have dinner – Falls down on the sidewalk – Declares his love to the girl

SHE says: – “You were all right” – “You were terribly funny” – “You were perfectly fine” – “You were fine; everybody was crazy about you” – “You were wonderful” – “My, you were funny” – “You were absolutely all right” – “You were so serious”

At the same time, the symmetry between what the boy does and what he wants to do – or, between his deeds and his feelings – emerges through a typically humorous strategy mentioned above: irony (on this, see Ermida 2005). As we know, say and mean constitute the ironical code and counter-code, which contradict each other. In the boy’s speech, almost all replies to the girl’s lines are characterized by saying one thing but meaning another. Consider a list of the boy’s ironical formulations, which are also interspersed with allusions to literary figures. Of course, everything he says should be taken to mean exactly the opposite (e.g. by I’m great he means I’m terrible; by I think he means I don’t think, etc.): ‘Oh, I’m great,’ he said. ‘Corking, I am. This isn’t my head I’ve got on now. I think this is something that used to belong to Walt Whitman.’ ‘Look at that hand; steady as a humming-bird.’ ‘No, I won’t worry’, he said. ‘I haven’t got a care in the world. I’m sitting pretty. Oh, dear, oh, dear. Did I do any other fascinating tricks at dinner?’ ‘So I sang,’ he said. ‘That must have been a treat. I sang.’ ‘I bet I did,’ he said. ‘I bet I was comical. Society’s Pet, I must have been. And what happened then, after my overwhelming success with the waiter?’ ‘Oh, sure, that might have happened to anybody’, he said. ‘Louisa Alcott or anybody. So I fell down on the sidewalk.’ ‘Oh, yes, I remember’, he said. ‘Riding in the taxi. Oh, yes, sure.’

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The semantic pattern thus established – according to which the girl tries to recode the past events whereas the boy pretends, by using the ironical code, to accept – rules over the story until the moment when the script-switch occurs. This takes place when the boy signals his abandonment of ironical speech by means of the adverb honestly. For the first time since the beginning of the text, he drops his defensive strategy and timidly tries to persuade the girl to give up on him. In terms of the story’s script organization, this is the point in which he more explicitly evokes the negative element in the love vs. no love script opposition. However, his attempt is anaemic and his use of hyperbole (his mention of distant Tibet as a punishment for his ill conduct is rather hyperbolic) does not prove helpful: ‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘I don’t see how you could ever want to speak to me again, after I made such a fool of myself, last night. I think I’d better go join a monastery in Tibet.’

Now, this break in the boy’s discursive strategy causes the girl to react mimetically and produce a rupture of her own. For the first time in the conversation, she bursts out using an aggressive and hostile tone which is entirely different from the mellifluous nature of her previous words: ‘You crazy idiot!’, she said. ‘As if I could ever let you go away now! Stop talking like that.You were perfectly fine.’ In script terms, this produces a sudden passage from a complacency script to an aggressiveness one. At the same time, this script-switch provides an answer to the question of why the girl is so altruistically tolerant towards the boy’s mischief. Instead of being motivated by commiseration, pity or simply altruism, her former complacent attitude after all stems from her selfish calculations to catch a husband – indeed, this is the reason why she tries to legitimize his unacceptable drunken behavior and, by extension, his fake (i.e. drunken) love declaration. Therefore, a parallel, highly informative and surprising, script-switch happens at the very end of the text: from, say, altruism to selfishness. The overall humor in the story thus springs from this unexpected revelation which a slight communicative snag produces. Therefore, You Were Perfectly Fine confirms the Hypothesis and the extent to which narrative humor is supra-structurally constructed. Actually, Parker’s text displays obvious humorous nuclei, of ironical and hyperbolic nature, which instantiate superior script dynamics. It is as a whole, and not in isolation, that each of these humorous moments truly acquires comic meaning.

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4. A Shocking Accident (1972) by Graham Greene: sarcasm Being a prominent name of English literature and a prolific author of various genres – from psychological novel to drama, travel writing and spy fiction – Graham Greene is also well-known for a type of humor that blends subtlety, sarcasm and extraordinary observation skills. A Shocking Accident is at first sight a factual and realistic third-person narrative, but on closer reading, humorous meanings and details emerge now and then. Unlike comic stories that are sprinkled with marks of comicality from beginning to end, Greene’s text offers a sober and restrained type of humor, which is concise but acute. Still, the short story exhibits all the principles regulating comic narratives according to the Hypothesis. Structurally speaking, the text displays, as Parker’s does, a perfect parallelism between two crucial moments in the plot: when Jerome, the protagonist whose father was killed by a pig (cf. a “shocking accident”), is confronted with the news, and the moment when Sally, his wife-to-be, is. In both situations, the characters react likewise: both Jerome and Sally show to be unable to grasp the humor of the situation (which in Jerome’s case is understandable given that the dead man is his father), and instead incoherently ask the same minor question: What happened to the pig? (Jerome), or What happened to the poor pig? (Sally). Between the two narrative moments emerges a supra-script opposition that could be rendered as derision vs. pity. Along the story, and according to the Principle of Recurrence, the former supra-script occurs whenever the tale of Jerome’s father’s death is told. The school principal, who broke the news to young Jerome, is the first who can hardly hold his laughter: ‘Nobody shot him, Jerome. A pig fell on him.’An inexplicable convulsion took place in the nerves of Mr Wordsworth’s face; it really looked for a moment as if he were going to laugh.

In a similar way, all of Jerome’s colleagues and all the visitors to his Aunt’s place do the same. The pattern is so predictable that, when Jerome meets Sally and finds her a suitable woman to marry, he begins to dread the moment when he will have to take her to his aunt’s. The certainty of his aunt’s retelling the fatal tale matches another ‘certainty’: that Sally will laugh at the story like everybody else. On the critical day, Jerome is so nervous that he would rather be elsewhere: Jerome longed to leave the room and not see that loved face crinkle with irresistible amusement. (. . . ) And then the miracle happened. Sally did not laugh. Sally sat with open eyes of horror while his aunt told her the story, and at the end, ‘How horrible,’ Sally said. ‘It makes you think, doesn’t it? Happening like that. Out of a clear sky.’ Jerome’s heart sang with joy.

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Extending the analysis

In macrostructural terms, then, this corresponds to the moment when the pattern is broken and a surprising script-switch occurs: Sally pities the dead man instead of laughing at him. This textual process could be outlined as follows: Table 13. Pattern switch in A Shocking Accident X laughs at Jerome’s father Y laughs at Jerome’s father Z laughs at Jerome’s father ......... Sally does not laugh at Jerome’s father

Jerome’s happiness is due not only to the fact that Sally respects his father’s memory by not laughing, but also that in so doing she shows to lack a sense of humor, just like him. Indeed, if we look at a semantic diagram of the derision supra-script, which Sally diverts from and cancels out, it will be easier to see the parameters relative to which her behavior is deviant, and hence humorous: Table 14. Semantic diagram of the derision supra-script in A Shocking Accident DERISION Subject: [+Human] Object: Jerome’s deceased father Circumstance: To listen to the tale of Jerome’s father’s death Motive: Jerome’s father was killed by a pig which fell from a balcony in Naples Time: Immediately after the >circumstance takes place Place: School, aunt’s place, etc. Condition: To have a sense of humor

Indeed, it is the ‘condition’ parameter that Sally does not observe: as she has no sense of humor, she cannot perceive the ‘circumstance’ as funny – much in the same way as Jerome cannot either. But she does not stop there: after having switched to the pity supra-script, Sally goes on to feel sorry for the very animal that caused the man’s death. In this way, she surprisingly, and comically, re-activates an infra-script that has been in the shadow from the beginning of the story: feeling sorry for the animal instead of feeling sorry for the man. The script is not only absurd but highly informative; indeed, no one would expect Jerome’s weird behavior to be re-enacted in the story. Her question (What happened to the poor pig?) therefore functions as a punch line.

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But the sense of humor vs. no sense of humor script opposition also pervades through the text, and as such deserves more attention. It is the narrator himself who introduces the issue: (. . . ) it never occurred [to Jerome] at his preparatory school that the circumstances of his father’s death were comic – they were still part of the mystery of life. It was later, in his first term at his public school, when he told the story to his best friend, that he began to realize how it affected others. Naturally after that disclosure he was known, rather unreasonably, as Pig. Unfortunately, his aunt had no sense of humor.

The lack of sense of humor seems to run in the family. If not, consider the moment when Jerome decides to settle down: In course of time, neither too late nor too early, rather as though, in his capacity as a chartered accountant, Jerome had studied the statistics and taken the average, he became engaged to be married (. . . )

The humor in this passage is rendered by means of sarcasm, a mechanism that Greene subtly masters. Unlike irony, sarcasm does not formulate propositions that mean the opposite of what they state. Rather, as will be seen next, sarcastic formulations are, say, truthful but insufficient (on this, see Chapter 2, 5.3). By using them, the narrator does mean what he says – but he means more on top. In the passage above, for instance, Jerome’s statistic zeal and behavioral exactness conceal the fact that he is also a very boring person and lover – and it is at this meaning that the text hints. In a similar way, Sally’s description is sarcastic, and so is the episode of the taxi ride, when they kiss: a) Her name was Sally, her favourite author was still Hugh Walpole, and she had adored babies ever since she had been given a doll at the age of five which moved its eyes and made water. b) In the taxi going home he kissed her with more passion than he had ever shown and she returned it. There were babies in her pale blue pupils, babies that rolled their eyes and made water.

Sweet Sally’s intellectual limitations are laconically and allusively formulated. There is a quick reference to her poor literary tastes (cf. the adverb still) and to her maternal instincts, which seem to be everything she boils down to. But nothing of this is ironical: Greene does not mean the opposite; he means exactly what he says – and more. In other words, sarcasm is closely related to understatement: both state less than what is meant. The differences between sarcasm and irony are often confused or overlooked. Nash (1985: 152–154) rightly explains that, unlike irony, which expresses a sense contrary to the speaker’s intentions, sarcasm makes use of a pro-code, i.e. “a form of words ostensibly equivalent in denotation to the parent proposition”;

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however, this equivalency is not total, since there is an underlying counter-code that bears “the speaker’s unsympathetic or hostile attitude.” Thus, if Greene wants to say that Jerome is a full-blown bore, he does so by using an equivalent, albeit understated, proposition. Likewise, instead of saying that Sally is a banal and uninteresting young woman, he conveys the idea by referring to her tastes and tendencies. In both cases, the author pro-codifies his pejorative intention – which the reader has once again to unveil between the lines. The description of Jerome’s father also stands out as sarcastic. If, as a child, Jerome “worshipped” his father, whom he conceived of as a “mysterious adventurer who travelled in far places,” in his later years he became more realistic. In the following passage, the phrase in brackets is clearly sarcastic in that carrying an umbrella is hardly an attitude to expect from an intrepid traveller. Also, the fact that he is described as “a large sad man in an unsuitable dark suit” evokes yet again the no sense of humor script: There was an enlarged snapshot of his father on the piano; a large sad man in an unsuitable dark suit posed in Capri with an umbrella (to guard him against sunstroke), the Faraglione rocks forming the background. By the age of sixteen Jerome was well aware that the portrait looked more like the author of Sunshine and Shade and Rambles in the Balearics than an agent of the Secret Service.

Besides these sequential elements that recurrently activate supra-script oppositions, which correspondingly pervade through the whole text, there is a very interesting passage in the story for an analysis of humor. It is a humorous reflection on humor – i.e. an instance of meta-humor (as will be the case of the next short story). In other words, the passage in the text talks about the text itself, providing the key to its deciphering. Let us take a look at the beginning of it: It seemed to Jerome that there were two possible methods [of telling his father’s story] – the first led gently up to the accident, so that by the time it was described the listener was so well prepared that the death came really as an anti-climax. The chief danger of laughter in such a story was always surprise. When he rehearsed this method Jerome began boringly enough. (. . . )

This is a direct reference to the principle of (marked) Informativeness in our Hypothesis. As Giora (1991: 471) rightly claims (on this, see Ch. 3, Section 3), violating the Graded Informativeness Requirement operating in regular texts is an essential condition for humor to exist: i.e. the passage from the least to the most informative element has to be “abrupt” and sudden, in such a way as to cause surprise – which Greene accurately acknowledges above. Being aware that other people’s laughter is largely caused by the surprise element, Jerome rehearses alternative versions of the story of his father’s death in which the information is gradually presented.

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Along the narrative vector of A Shocking Accident, however, Greene does not opt for the strategy which his protagonist carefully schemes. By contrast, the short story suddenly shifts from a recurrent pattern (i.e. that everybody laughs at Jerome’s father) and from a recurrent supra-script (derision) to a highly informative opposing supra-script (pity). What is more, Sally pities not only her deceased would-be father-in-law, but also the very animal that caused his death. The absurd situation, which goes full-circle to the beginning of the text, is also highly informative – and marked. The odds of Sally, of all people, having the same concerns as Jerome are so low, i.e. in cognitive terms, her behavior is so marginal via-`a-vis the usual behavior of other people (who embody the category’s so-called prototypical structure), that the ensuing humorous surprise is inevitable.

5. Hotel des Boobs (1986) by David Lodge: meta-humor During more than four decades of literary production, David Lodge has earned a great deal of popularity that is partly due to his comedic talents and also to the critical skills which his academic background cannot but enhance. Actually, his scholarly expertise is evident in the themes and in the narrative strategies used in his books: more often than not Lodge writes about writing and theorizes about theory. This meta-textual and meta-hermeneutic bent is also present in Hotel des Boobs, a short story with an unmistakably comic title which renders the theme of British insularity by means of a particularly complex structural construction. Harry is the conservative and somewhat provincial male protagonist of a story which later turns out to be an embedded story, written by another male protagonist (‘the Author’). The narrative unfolds like a Russian doll, layer upon layer, showing that the plot can be a multidirectional object and its construction a hierarchical and circular process. The text is also an enjoyable illustration of the principles of narrative humor listed in the Hypothesis. To begin with, there is a supra-script opposition that pervades through the story of Harry and his wife, Brenda – and which is then resumed in the story of the Author and his Wife. It is a dichotomy between voyeurism (or, looking at other people) and, for want of a better term, introspection (or, looking at oneself). It is not until the end that the latter (shadow-) script emerges; conversely, the former is introduced early on in the narrative. Harry, a manager on holiday in the French Riviera, spends most of his spare time practising a rather unorthodox sport, but a quite similar one to conventional

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bird-watching: ‘boob-watching’. Let it be noted by the way that there is also an allusion to ‘bird-watching’, rendered by means of a pun on birds (which can signify both ‘flying animals’ and ‘young women’) on a line by one of Harry’s friends: Enjoy eyeing all those topless birds, you mean. The zeal, discipline and passion which Harry dedicates to the practice of so-called ‘boob-watching’ indeed resemble a well-established sport: A book was certainly basic equipment for discreet boob-watching down by the pool: something to peer over, or round, something to look up from, as if distracted by a sudden noise or movement, at the opportune moment, just as the bird a few yards away slipped her costume off her shoulders, or rolled on to her back. Another essential item was a pair of sunglasses, as dark as possible, to conceal the precise direction of one’s gaze. (. . . )

The lexical clues that lead up to the voyeurism script are generous in many other passages of the narrative, as is the case of ‘Peeping Tom’ in the opening dialogue between Harry and Brenda: “Hotel des Pins!” said Harry. “More like Hotel des Boobs.” “Come away from that window”, said Brenda. “Stop behaving like a Peeping Tom.”

A voyeur’s taboo object is typically female nudity, which in the story is metonymically represented by the breasts. Harry, an admitted ‘tit-fancier’, is rather obsessively concerned with any materialization of this anatomical preference (cf. the elucidating passage, There are two newcomers today, or should I say, four), and he does not care to hide it from his wife: “Hotel des Tits. Hotel des Bristols. Hey, that’s not bad!” He turned his head to flash a grin across the room. “Hotel Bristols, in the plural. Geddit?” (. . . ) “This isn’t Rome. It’s the Cˆote d’Azur.” “Cˆote des Tits”, said Harry. “Cˆote des Knockers.”

The comicality of Harry-the-voyeur thus established is complemented by another script: the innocence one. Naughty though he may be, Harry is rather inexperienced is the ways of the world, and the humor of his summer adventures partly lies in his limited knowledge of places other than his native land. The passage in which Harry proudly announces his travel destination to his colleagues at work is a good example: “Well, it is pricey. But we thought, well, why not be extravagant, while we are still young enough to enjoy it.” “Enjoy eyeing all those topless birds, you mean.” “Is that right?” said Harry, with an innocence not entirely feigned. Of course he knew in theory that in certain parts of the Mediterranean girls sunbathed topless on the beach, and he had seen pictures of the phenomenon in his secretary’s daily

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newspaper, which he filched regularly for the sake of such illustrations. But the reality had been a shock.

Having been initiated “into the new code of mammary manners,” Harry quickly learns more details and becomes more proficient in his particular hobby: For there was, Harry realized, a protocol involved in toplessness. For a man to stare at, or even let his eyes rest for a measurable span of time upon, a bared bosom, would be bad form, because it would violate the fundamental principle upon which the whole practice was based, namely, that there was nothing noteworthy about it (. . . )

Naturally enough, soon Harry is not content with just peeping at other women: he wants to take his exploit further and get it even spicier. From this springs his idea of seeing his wife naked, and lust after her, through the eyes of other men. In a proposal that is highly dubious from an ethical point of view, he offers her money in exchange for her toplessness by the pool. But before the reader is told how she reacts, the text suddenly shifts and a new narrative appears, having the same setting and time (the Riviera swimming pool is the same, and so is the summer season), the same topless female hotel guests, but other protagonists (the Author and his Wife). The new macronarrative is triggered by the violent wind which blows the Author’s pages away from him and into the midst of the hotel guests. This textual duplication, which resembles the reflection on a mirror, carries an equally double effect in semantic terms. Indeed, the new narrative axis corresponds to a switch from the voyerurism supra-script to the introspection one. If Harry-the voyeur is guilty of a forbidden pleasure, the Author, by professional extension, also incurs the same crime, the proof of which is now exposed to anyone in the hotel who bothers to lift one of the pages blown by the wind. The Author thus becomes comically aware that the order of things has changed, and now he is the one who is the object of other people’s gaze, and of their rightful anger at his literary abuse (cf. Imagine Mrs Snooty finding her nipples compared to the nose tips of small rodents). This unexpected switch from being an active subject (who peeps and watches) to being a passive object (who is watched, peeped at, and most likely condemned) is well illustrated in the sentence The author felt raped, whose sexual connotations evoke once again the erotically marked supra-scripts that preside over the text. When the Author calms down, he manages to continue telling the story of Harry and Brenda orally to his Wife. So, the embedded story is not left unfinished. According to the Author’s follow-up, Brenda accepts the bribe to go topless, the male staff elects her the most attractive woman in the hotel, the waiter Antoine presents her with a complimentary bouquet, and they end up making love. Then, Brenda taunts him with graphic testimony to Antoine’s skill as a lover, and compares Harry’s genital equipment unfavourably to the

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Frenchman’s. This is a definite turning point in Harry’s story. Once again, the script-switch that occurs in the macronarrative also occurs in the embedded one: like the Author himself, Harry is comically led to stop looking at other people and start looking at himself, penitently becoming a more introspective man, one who is anxious about his own body and about the image he projects. It is the Author who explicitly phrases the highly informative introspection suprascript, which is very improbable and distant from the expected set of things to happen to a character like Harry: “Harry’s fixation on women’s breasts, you see,” said the author, “has been displaced by an anxiety about his own body from which he will never be free.”

It should be noted that the use of the verb displace perfectly sums up the semantic and actional organization of narrative humor. Indeed, the semantic construction of Hotel des Boobs is based on a displacement strategy from a supra-script at work since the beginning of the story to another supra-script which surprisingly emerges at the end, thus carrying high informative potential. The actional counterpart to this semantic process reads as follows:

Table 15. Supra-script switch in Hotel des Boobs > Look at Woman A (Mrs Snooty had hardly any breasts at all. . . ) > Look at Woman B (The German lady’s breasts were perfect cones. . . ) > Look at Woman C (Carmen Miranda’s were like two brown satin bags. . . ) > Look at Woman D (the teenage girls’ (. . . ) recently acquired breasts. . . ) > Look at One’s Woman (Brenda accepts the bribe to go topless. . . ) .../ ↓ > Look at Oneself (I never knew, he says, in a dead sort of voice, that you cared about the size of my. . . )

When the reader expects the triumph of, say, Harry’s vice, Brenda applies a highly effective remedy – a made-up story to shake her husband’s self-esteem and self-confidence. The success of her strategy, which disperses Harry’s voyeuristic obsession as the wind disperses the pages of the Author’s prose, corresponds to the typically humorous switch to an opposite script pattern. Being caught

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red-handed, both Harry and the Author experience the crudity of being ‘looked’ at. Consider the following script analysis of these two major semantic nuclei: Table 16. Supra-script opposition in Hotel des Boobs VOYEURISM (LOOKING AT OTHER PEOPLE) Subject Object Attribute Condition

Instrument

Cause Objective Value

[+Human] The other people Sensorial (visual) capacity – Physical proximity between subject and object – The subject sees the object but the object cannot see the subject “Books”, “dark glasses”, keyholes, curtains, screens, sand dunes, etc. Sexual attraction, curiosity, spare time, indolence Have pleasure at other people’s expenses It is socially condemned as an ethically incorrect practice

INTROSPECTION (LOOKING AT ONESELF) [+Human] Oneself Reflexive/cognitive capacity – Space and time favourable to reflection

None

Insecurity, depression, etc. Know oneself It is socially valued as a strategy of personal improvement

The hedonistic contours of the first of these scripts are comically absent from the second, which strengthens the idea of Schadenfreude (or pleasure at other people’s misfortune) taking place not only within the text, but also outside of it. Indeed, Lodge explicitly uses the German word in the story (cf. Faces were turned towards the author, smiles of sympathy mixed with Schadenfreude), but it finds a parallel in the humorous pleasure that we, readers, also share. The fact that the story openly victimizes Harry (a sexist voyeur and a would-be pimp to his own wife) and, to some extent, the Author (whose embarrassing pages are blown by the wind) not only assumes a moralist outlook, but it also voices the sort of sacrificial mechanisms which the theories of superiority find in humor (cf. Chapter 1). In other words, the reader laughs at Harry and the Author because they look inferior. No wonder that the Author eventually seems to reproduce Harry’s psychological profile and suffer from the same weakness. The closing sequence of Hotel des Boobs indeed contributes to reinforcing the mirror effect underlying the metatextual nature of the narrative:

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“You know,” said the author’s wife. “It’s really a better story.” “Yes,” said the author. “I think I shall write it. I’ll call it ’Tit for Tat’.” “No, call it ’Hotel des Boobs’,” said the author’s wife. “Theirs and yours.” “What about yours?” “Just leave them out of it, please.” (. . . ) “You don’t really wish I would go topless, do you?” “No, of course not,” said the author. But he didn’t sound entirely convinced, or convincing.

The reader, meanwhile, has to reorder the pieces to the three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle and find his/her way between two stories that are discovered to overlap well on into the narrative. This enterprise is not arbitrary or caused by deceitful intent, but ruled by the Principle of Cooperation which author and reader tacitly abide by. Besides, the break in the Principle of Recurrence, and the corresponding break in the reading expectations, makes a shadow-script emerge and overthrow the one which prevailed up till then. Given the sudden and unexpected character of this shift, the Principle of Informativeness is also found to obtain. Therefore, Hotel des Boobs displays a few distinctive features, most noticeably its narrative complexity, based on embedding, and also its meta-humorous nature (cf. the humor of Harry’s story is the topic of another story: the Author’s). Nonetheless, like the short stories previously examined, it confirms the validity of the Hypothesis. Let us consider, before concluding, a few apparent counter-examples.

6. Counter-examples Having confirmed the Hypothesis (and validated the corresponding prototypical matrix) in the six short stories just analyzed, a couple of parallel situations are yet to consider. The purpose of this closing section is to test the implicit universality of the present model against what at first sight seem to be counterexamples. In order to do so, I will divide them into two categories (as Raskin does, 1985). The first question to ask is the following: are there any other narrative texts which obey the principles postulated in the Hypothesis but which, nevertheless, are not humorous? Detective stories are a case in point. They are also built on the basis of expectations that eventually prove false, which amounts to a surprising semantic inversion. However, detective stories characteristically offer a final explanation that guides the reader back through the suspended narrative garden-paths. On the contrary, when the humorous puzzle is solved, no explanation, or coda (be it moral or interpretive) is given: as Oring (1989: 356)

Counter-examples

233

puts it, “moralizing or didactic commentaries are invariably absent in jokes.” Otherwise the comic effect would be dissolved and the joke killed. In comic narratives, similarly, the turn in perception induced at the final stage of the text is not accompanied by any comment or explanation on the author’s part. Secondly, as Giora (1991: 483) points out, detective stories usually have a typically complex resolution in terms of processing efforts. In humor, conversely, too complicated or energy-consuming an interpretive procedure is counterproductive: a funny story must be fun to read (which of course does not entail that it is accessible without any effort). Thirdly, detective stories are not constructed on a dichotomic basis, or according to a principle of lexico-semantic opposition. Rather, they are built on the basis of several parallel actional directions, from which a corresponding set of hypotheses emerge, all of which lead to a central question: who did it? The eventual disclosure of a name, as well as of a set of circumstances framing the crime, usually annuls not only one but several interpretive alternatives. Fourthly, the principle of recurrence underlying comic narratives is usually absent in detective stories. Actually, the latter gives several fallacious clues, carrying numerous semantic contents: the suspect was in a certain place, talked to certain people, possessed certain objects, knew the victim, saw her last on a certain day and under certain circumstances, and so on and so forth. In comic narratives, conversely, it is the same semantic content – a supra-script – that, in different hyponymic instances, recurrently appears along the narrative line. A second category of counter-example regards the following question: are there any other narrative texts which do not obey the principles posited in the Hypothesis but which, nevertheless, are humorous? Absurd humor (on this, see Ch. 2, Section 5.6) comes to mind and seems at first sight to qualify. Short stretches of illogical narrative text violating the basic norms of coherence and cohesion are indeed regarded as humorous (cf. Yesterday, upon the stairs / I met a man who wasn’t there. / He wasn’t there again today: / I wish that man would go away). But can longer narrative sequences be built on the same basis, i.e. can they systematically violate the principles of logic? If this were to be the case, that is, if a longer narrative were to disregard any allegiance to textual coherence or to the semantic logic of the whole, the processing onus would be too heavy on the reader and there would be no comic resolution. The effect would be uncooperative, and the resulting text would be, at best, an absurd text with scattered humorous moments, and not a humorous text. This technicality is necessary to discard such borderline cases. Now, the point to make here is that the Principle of Cooperation postulated in the Hypothesis guarantees that the text ‘makes sense’ in some way. Besides, it also makes sure that the broken expectations and the false reading paths laid out along the text do not victimize,

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or just mislead, the reader, but rather lead him/her to enjoy eventual comic effects. In short, the negative answer to the two questions posed at the beginning of each of the previous paragraphs confirms the validity of the model of humorous narratives offered in chapter six. Of course, further research is needed to shed light on other potentially problematic cases not considered at present. The vast scope of existing narrative comedy is an exciting reserve on which to test the workability and applicability of the five principles in the Hypothesis.

7. Conclusion In spite of the variety of the texts under focus, which was deliberately sought for illustration’s sake, the analysis undertaken in this chapter has confirmed the existence of semantico-pragmatic regularities underlying rather different humorous narratives. The differences in the short stories, ranging from style and theme to epoch, geography, and authors’ idiosyncrasies, become secondary in light of their structural and discursive similarities. Besides, even though some texts are richer in comic nuclei, whereas others seem more ‘serious’ at first sight, they all reveal a similar matrix of humor construction. More significantly still, The Lunatic’s Tale and the other texts in the corpus have also proven to observe the set of principles which the Hypothesis puts forth. From Ford to Lodge, all the narratives have shown to be semantically constructed on the combined basis of hierarchy and recurrence. Indeed, they all disclose one or more supra-scripts that preside over the entire text, being diversely, but recurrently, rendered along its axis. This confirms the need, diagnosed early on in this book (cf. Chapter 3), to go beyond a vector-based approach to humorous narratives. Contrary to a sequential perspective (like Attardo’s, 2001), the present analysis has shown that a comic narrative is not a sum of jab-lines, or of independent joke-like structures as it were, ending on a punch line. Rather, the sequentially emerging humorous nuclei constitute recurrent instances of supra-scripts that pervade through the text. In other words, these different infra-scripts activate the same hierarchically superior scripts, in line with a parallelistic construction. But all the short stories have also shown to obey the principle of opposition, according to which contrary shadow-scripts eventually replace the ones working up till then. This shift is sudden and surprising, thus breaking the reading expectations built hitherto. Besides, it carries a high degree of informativeness, since the new opposite scripts are rather distant in cognitive terms from the prototypical members of the lexical categories which the text activates.

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Last but not least, the narratives analyzed confirm that author and reader are engaged in a tacit cooperative contract consistent with a code they implicitly share. In pragmatic terms, it is therefore essential for a comic narrative to set traps and provide misleading information. This is a delibrate strategy that paves the way for the surprise ending. Accordingly, the proficient reader is expected to know how to solve the puzzle and enjoy the ensuing comic pleasure.

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Subject index absurd, 29, 74–75, 227, 233 accessibility, 78, 98 allusion, 47, 59, 62, 81, 89, 101, 158, 162–164, 187, 195–199, 208–209, 221, 228 ambiguity as a script-trigger, 89, 92 avoidance of, 86, 148, 188 controlled, 43 functional, 65 illocutionary, 142 ff. inherent vs. functional, 65 morphological, 56 non-humorous, 88 phonetic, 42, 43 problem to structuralism, 127–128 semantic, 94, 98 syntactic, 57–60, 72, 156 antonymy, 66, 85, 89, 102, 172, 201 Aristophanes, 11, 106 audience, 16, 17, 27, 28, 37, 38, 43, 44, 47 receptive, 91 respondent, 101 speaker/audience relations, 107, 139 trapped, 150 younger, 49 brevity (of jokes), 27, 151 butt (of the joke), 15, 21, 92, 151, 174 cartoon, 2, 21, 32, 131, 144, 164, 191 categorial expectations, 179 falsity, 147 inclusion, 96 presupposition, 154 redundancy, 95 catharsis (comic), 31, 46, 75 causes of laughter, 17, 26 children (and humor), 30, 31–33, 43, 46, 48, 51, 75, 81

cognitive (aspects of humor), 6, 14, 24, 25, 32, 34, 37, 43, 80, 83, 84, 94, 97–98, 110, 125–126, 128, 161, 227, 234 cohesion humor as, 10, 80 textual cohesion, 102, 116–117, 130, 149, 153, 155, 164, 183, 233 competence communicative, 143 cultural, 199 humorous, 84 interpretive, 129 linguistic, 154 literary, 139–140 context contextual effects, 168, 189, 201 cultural, 102, 139, 158, 165 definition of, 132–136 discursive, 127, 166 lexical, 65 linguistic, 38, 61, 63, 189 non-literary, 138–139 of implicatures, 158–161, 163 of presuppositions, 157 situational, 37, 80, 130, 131 contrast, 14, 25, 26, 27–28 conversational maxims, 87, 138, 146–148, 165, 167, 168, 188, 201 cooperative principle, 24, 86–87, 145–146, 159, 164, 166, 172, 189 for humor, 167 co-text, 60, 62, 80, 132, 162, 171, 184, 186, 201, 203 de re/de dicto, 9, 41, 91 detective stories, 99, 132–233 disambiguation, 37, 57, 60, 87, 135 disbelief suspension, 70, 158, 187 discourse analysis, xi, 94, 105, 113, 131, 153, 173

258

Subject index

discourse topic (in humor), 95, 97 disparagement, 1, 14, 15–21, 94, 99 effort (in processing humor), 22, 24, 75, 80, 81, 99, 160, 184, 188, 189, 205, 233 ethnic jokes, 87, 92, 198, 199 expectations (in joke reception), 18, 25, 27, 44, 48, 62, 63, 70, 72, 96, 117, 133, 139, 140, 143, 149–150, 158, 167, 171–172, 179, 187, 205, 212, 217, 232–233 fantasy, 30, 32 felicity conditions, 34, 139, 142, 144, 169 formality (vs. informality, in humor), 67, 69 formal registers, 200–201 informal humor, 88 informal language, 134 formalism (and formalists), 118, 121, 124, 125, 140 Russian, 114 function (in narratives) by Morin, 100 in narratology, 118–123 ritual function by van Dijk, 139 functionality, 80, 118, 151, 172, 181, 182, 186 generative, 96, 153 group (production/reception of humor), 2, 10, 33, 101 consensus, 38 ethnic, 92 in-group/out-group, 20–21 sharing, 85 hierarchy narrative, 124, 126 of KRs, 93 of narrative scripts, 172, 174, 190, 193, 204, 213, 234 of scripts, 62, 66 homonymy, 63–66, 183

hyperbole, 67, 147, 163, 168, 188, 201–203, 208, 222 hyponymy, 66, 85, 102, 193 idiom, 68 implicature, 11, 146–148, 158–161, 165–166, 168, 186, 188–189, 201, 203, 205, 216 incongruity, 14–15, 24, 25–30, 32, 40, 41, 67, 69, 70, 74, 80, 94, 151–152, 161, 180, 192, 195, 200, 204, 213, 221 inference, 71, 89, 104, 142, 181, 182 information theory, 94 intentional(ity), 26, 35, 56, 115, 130, 142, 150, 151, 165, 164, 166, 167 interdisciplinary, xi, 1, 41, 132, 153, 173 irony, 3, 11–14, 39, 67, 119, 145, 147, 168, 188, 203, 218, 221, 225 jab line, 108–109, 120, 234 joking relationships, 38, 141 laughter as camouflage, 19 as derision, 18 as joy, 24 as relief, 22 at blunders, 73 at incongruity, 26 at misfortune, 15 at ourselves, 28 at surprise, 226 canned, 37 children’s, 31 definition of, 5–9 for envy, 16 hostile/tolerant, 4 human, 34 natural/artificial, 35 offensive, 19 of savages, 33 shared, 21 virtues of, 25

Subject index Laurel and Hardy, 74, 188–189, 191, 195 lexicality, 181–182 linear shift, 97, 99 literariness, 138–139 logical (/illogical), 52, 70–73, 74, 76–80, 81, 187, 233 logical mechanism, 92–93 lying, 86, 87, 146 macrostructure, 103, 118, 120, 126–127, 152, 164, 181, 183, 186, 189, 190 marked(ness), 64, 83, 86, 94, 96–99, 110, 172, 173, 195, 212, 226, 227, 229 Marx brothers, 59, 191 metaphor, 11, 12, 26, 30, 56, 69, 89, 96, 97, 147, 157, 168, 183, 188, 211 dead, 68 mimesis, 45–47, 102 misogynous jokes, 20 mockery, 4, 17, 18 narration, 108, 114, 121, 122, 131, 137, 177, 187 narratology, xi, 110, 111, 113–115, 118, 121, 124, 129–130, 173–174, 179, 181 non-bona-fide, 11, 70, 86–88, 90, 167 nonsense, 74–75, 81, 212 nucleus (vs. catalysis), 110, 184, 186, 202, 210 parallelism, 63, 111, 156, 180, 210, 219, 223 parody, 46, 48–49, 62, 80, 101, 162–163, 207–208 permissibility (for joking), 34, 38, 39, 141 play (context of), 30, 31, 34, 38, 75, 162, 167 political allusion, 101 content, 151 contexts, 40 events, 198 function, 3 humor, 21 incorrectness, 17

259

Nazi jokes, 34 slogans, 163 subversive, 141 polysemy, 35, 56, 59, 60, 63–66, 153, 165 Portuguese, 4, 92, 186 power, 17, 20, 21, 26, 38, 149, 151, 162, 193, 194, 199 pleasure (in humor), 10, 15, 20, 22–24, 29, 31, 35, 48, 50, 71, 74–75, 80, 99, 106, 150, 161, 229, 231, 235 Prague School, 95, 96 predictability, 84, 95, 101, 149–151, 168, 176, 179, 181, 187, 223 predisposition (for humor), 36–37 presupposition, 71, 89, 104, 143, 153–158, 186–188, 196 proposition (in narratology), 118, 119, 126–127, 135, 183 prototypical, 95–98, 172, 227, 232, 234 pun, 11, 32, 33, 60 bilingual, 81 by Lodge, 228 etymological, 47 infringement of manner maxim, 168 lexical, 62–66 phonetic, 42–46 reception of, 80 semantic, 100 punch line, 43, 48, 52, 91, 97–98, 103, 108–109, 116, 120, 123, 152, 174, 205, 212, 224, 234 racist jokes, 20, 21, 141 reader (of humor), 13, 27, 40, 80, 89–90, 96, 99, 101, 104, 114–115, 117, 129–130, 139, 143, 149, 165, 168, 183, 187, 195, 199, 204–205, 218, 234 ideal, mock, 135–137 model, 78, 137 recurrence as alliteration, 52 narrative, 111, 121 principle of, 172, 174, 176, 181, 183, 190, 204, 208, 211, 213, 216, 223, 232–233

260

Subject index

syntactic, 102 recycling (of jokes), 133, 134, 163 register, 11, 45, 52, 168, 174 clash, 200–201 displacement, 69–70 release, 14, 22–24, 40, 75, 94, 140 relevance irrelevance, 30, 86 principle of, 95, 97–98, 110 theory of, 159–165 relief (humor as), 7, 22, 31 resolution(of jokes), 29, 74, 94, 99, 103, 123, 161, 175, 233 rhetoric, 12–14, 16, 17, 42, 67, 94, 117 riddle, 27, 32, 33, 42, 71, 80, 91, 157, 188 sarcasm (vs. irony), 3, 4, 67, 168, 223, 225 scatological humor, 32, 141 Schadenfreude, 15, 21, 231 Shakespeare, 2, 44–45, 47, 105 scorn, 4, 7, 11, 15, 17–19, 33, 48 script alternative, 90 approach, 14 as frame, 118 background, 103 definition of, 84–85 extratextual, 163 identification of, 181–183 infra-script, 172, 181, 182, 190–193, 195, 211, 216, 219, 224, 234 interpretation of, 85–86 levels of, 189 limits of, 183 macroscript, 104, 128, 190 major, 104 overlap and opposition, 88–89 reversal, 116 shadow-script, 103, 172, 180, 192–193, 205, 209, 213, 224, 227, 232, 234 supra-script, 104, 105, 155, 171, 172, 178, 181, 182, 184, 191, 193, 195, 204–205, 208–210, 212–214, 217, 220–221, 224, 227, 229–231, 234

-switch triggers, 92 short story, xi, 70, 92, 100, 104, 113, 118–119, 124, 132, 138–140, 161, 162, 171, 195, 207, 218, 223, 227 sick humor, 21 sitcom, 2, 37, 39, 106 situational humor, 9, 35, 133–134 slapstick comedy, 216 sociolinguistics of humor, 21, 40, 96, 200 speech act, 11, 131, 138–139, 142–145 Sterne, 166 stimulus (in humor), 7, 15, 30, 35–37, 40 story vs. text, 114 structuralism, 83, 113, 118, 119–121, 127–130, 139, 140, 149, 169, 174, 175 French, 114 structure, 113, 115–118 stylistics (of humor), 101, 102, 200 subversion (humor as), 25, 38, 141, 188 surprise, 18, 25, 27–28, 30, 31, 62, 94–96, 99, 152, 171, 179, 181, 205, 212, 226–227, 235 synonymy, 63, 66, 67, 85, 102 taboo, 10, 38, 141, 208, 228 target (of jokes), 10, 19–20, 33, 35, 92, 121, 192, 196, 243 temporality, 121–122, 125, 131 textuality, 96, 114, 117, 129–130, 162–163 theme vs. rheme, 95–96, 155, 187 tragedy (vs. comedy), 3, 16, 105, 172, 180, 204 transgression, 32, 43, 73, 81, 121, 140–142, 145, 164, 167, 188 translation (of humor), 44, 91 trigger (script-), 89, 92, 103–104, 148, 219 function by Morin, 100 unsaid, 151 truth analytical, 79 in implicatures, 160 logical, 140, 153

Subject index re. irony, 12–13 taken for granted, 187 -values, 76 vs. bona-fide, 86–87 unexpected, 9, 18, 25–27, 31, 42, 68, 69, 96, 98, 99, 172, 175, 212, 222, 229, 232 unintended humor, 35, 143

261

unsaid, 145, 151–161, 164, 182, 186, 205 wit, 3, 4, 8–11, 20, 23, 26, 31, 35, 46 wordplay, 8, 20, 24, 27, 32, 33, 41, 44, 46, 47, 63, 91 written (interaction/communication), xii, 39, 52–54, 100, 113, 132–136, 138