Verbal humor

This chapter deals with puns. The classification of puns is discussed and a basic definition of pun is provided: a text in which a sequence of sounds must be interpreted with a formal reference to a second sequence of sounds and two incongruous meanings are triggered by this process. Puns may come from ambiguity, or paronymy (puns that are similar in sound). The phonetic distance is the measure of how far two paronyms may differ and still be considered puns. The position of the connector (the ambiguous or paronymic element) and the disjunctor (the element in the text that triggers the recognition of the pun) are discussed. A Cratylistic motivated folk-theory of language is shown to underlie puns in the minds of speakers. Finally, a discussion of the psycholinguistics of puns completes the chapter.

Pragmatics of humor

This chapter addresses some aspects of the cognitive pragmatics of humor. Humor involves a violation of Grice’s principle of cooperation. Humor is not a flout of the principle of cooperation, at least at the time of processing. Other topics addressed include the necessity for an implicit aspect to humor (essentially, the text cannot reveal the incongruity until the punch line), the Least Disruption Principle, i.e., the idea that the violations of cooperation for humor have to be kept as small as possible, and irony, which is closely related to flouting but includes a residual violation which makes it humorous. Finally, the chapter addresses the intentionality of humor: either the speaker, or the hearer of a humorous exchange (or both of them) have to be intentionally interpreting the exchange as humorous for it to be perceived as such.

Theories of humor and their levels

There are three major families of theories of humor: humor as release, humor as aggression, and humor as incongruity. They are reviewed along with neurolinguistic approaches, evolutionary theories of humor and a few mixed and partial theories that have been presented. An argument is made for the complementarity of the theories, which described different but not incompatible aspects of the phenomenon. Finally, an approach to evaluating competing theories is presented and bisociation theory is compared to modern linguistic approaches.

Humor in the classroom

The chapter considers research on the effectiveness of humor to improve classroom performance. Humor is found to improve the perception of the teaching experience but not the actual performance of the students (learning, retention). Classroom discourse analysis is also examined, in particular the amount and distribution of humor in lectures and classroom activities.

Discourse analysis: humor in conversation II

The second part of the discussion of humor in conversation focuses on the functions of humor in conversation and thus has more of a discourse analysis (DA) focus. The work of major DA scholars in humor is examined. Conversational humor is examined in several settings, including conversations among friends, medical encounters, and the workplace. Work in corpus-based DA is also discussed. Several issues in DA of humor are addressed, including how do speakers negotiate the humorous intention, how they identify humor, how humor turns may be sustained (last several turns) and finally cases in which humor fails.

The General Theory of Verbal Humor

The General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) is introduced. It is also a model of humor competence based on jokes, like the SSTH, which it incorporates, but it is broader as it includes six Knowledge Resources: the Script Opposition (from the SSTH), the Logical Mechanism, which describes the resolution of the incongruity in the script opposition, the Situation, or setting of the joke, the Target, i.e., the entity being made fun of, the Narrative Strategy, i.e., how the text is organized, and the Language, i.e., how the text is worded (phonemically, morphemically, syntactically, etc.). The chapter also discusses expansion of the GTVH to cover texts other than jokes, such as short stories, poems, etc.

The semantics of humor

This chapter opens the second part of the book on humor competence (chapters 6-9). This chapter introduces Raskin’s semantic theory of humor competence based on scripts (Semantic-Script Theory of Humor, SSTH). The concept of script (or frame) is introduced. Dynamic scripts (i.e., scripts that are updated with new informatiom) are described as well as the mechanics of combinations of word senses and disambiguation. The two conditions for a text to be a joke are described: 1) two scripts must be opposite, and 2) they must overlap fully or in part, i.e., be compatible with (parts of) the text. The pragmatic aspects of the SSTH are also discussed, with the idea of non-bona-fide communication, i.e., communication not entirely focused on cooperative (in the Gricean sense) communication. Finally, the recent development of Ontological semantics and its application to humor is discussed.

Methodological preliminaries

The chapter begins by defining the fundamental distinction between competence and performance and introduces various methodological approaches used in the linguistics of humor, with a focus on the principle of commutation. The problem of identifying humor is then addressed, including a review of traditional “markers’ of humor (i.e., laughter). A triangulation method incorporating several markers and semantic analysis is proposed to replace it. In particular the inadequacy of using laughter is investigated by reviewing non-mirthful laughter. Finally the idea of keying, from ethnomethodology is used to explain how a situation may be seen as humorous or not, depending on its keying.

Conversation analysis: humor in conversation I

As the title indicates this is the first part of the discussion of humor in conversation. The focus is on Conversation Analysis (CA). The chapter starts with a discussion of CA methodology, which is quite different from that used in previous chapters, and then focuses on the analysis of laughter in conversation and on the definition of laughable. The foundational analysis of a canned joke telling by Harvey Sacks is presented and several issues related to CA analyses of humor are discussed, including that humor and laughter are not an adjacency pair, the non-humorous laughter is common, and that humor is not often a test of understanding and that the tellability of humor does not only come from its being funny, but may come also from its being a shared experience.

The performance of humor

This chapter introduces the third section of the book, dedicated to the performance of humor (as opposed to competence) or using another term to the sociopragmatics of humor. It starts out with a discussion of the performance of humor (in a theatrical sense), including standup comedy. The rest of the chapter presents the Hymes-Gumperz sociolinguistic model, which will guide the remaining chapters of the book. In particular the concepts of repertoire, speech acts and events, genres, and contextualization cues are explicated. The chapter is capped by a discussion of empirical studies on markers of humor performance.