Recontextualizing Humor

Rethinking the Analysis and Teaching of Humor

Villy Tsakona

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781501526930
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501511523
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Humor may surface in numerous and diverse contexts, which at the same time determine how humor works, its form, and its functions and consequences for interlocutors. Adopting a sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspective, this study is aligned with approaches to humor exploring the variety of humorous genres, the wide range of sociopragmatic functions of humor, and the more or less dissimilar perceptions speakers may have concerning what humor is, what it means, and how it works. The chapters of this book propose a new theoretical approach to the analysis of humor by bringing context into focus. Furthermore, the study explores how we can teach about humor within a critical literacy framework creating classroom space for everyday humorous texts that are part of students' social realities, and simultaneously taking into account that humor may yield multiple, disparaging, and often conflicting interpretations. This book is intended to appeal to humor researchers from various disciplines (such as linguistics, media studies, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, anthropology, folklore) as well as to professionals or researchers in education.

1 Context in humor research

1.1 Introductory remarks

The importance of context for the interpretation of humor has repeatedly been summarized by most of us when we say “You just had to be there” to apologize for an utterance or a story whose humor has not been understood by our recipients, despite our best efforts. It is also clearly reflected in (linguistic or other) humor scholarship during the past few years: from decontextualized canned jokes or other printed material, which are supposed to be repeated “verbatim” in different contexts, many humor scholars have re–oriented themselves towards more contextualized approaches to humorous texts and genres, so as to examine them “in their own terms”. This implies that we can account for the situated, local meanings of humorous texts/genres only if we take into consideration a number of factors that constitute its context.

So, why this study begins (and emphasizes in its title) the concept of context? If context has become the sine qua non for a significant number of humor analyses, why do we need to read more about it? Various studies on humorous phenomena seem to presuppose and exploit different aspects of context and, in my view, it would be interesting to discuss and bring together different approaches. In addition, as our above–mentioned excuse “You just had to be there” indicates, lack or overlooking contextual information may lead to the failure of humor. Successful or unsuccessful humor and, in general, multiple perceptions of humor due to diverse and sometimes incompatible contextual presuppositions are another area of study that has recently attracted the attention of humor scholars.

Admittedly, context is notoriously hard to define. It is not accidental that, under the influence of anthropological conceptualizations and approaches to it (see among others Malinowski [1923] 1989; Duranti and Goodwin 1992), innumerable pages have been written and innumerable debates have taken place on its definition and significance for the analysis of discourse within pragmatics, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics (to name but a few). It is not among the aims of this book to contribute to such debates and discussions (see Brown and Yule 1983; Fetzer 2004; Georgakopoulou and Goutsos 2004; Widdowson 2004; Predelli 2005; van Dijk 2008a; Fetzer and Oishi 2011; Finkbeiner, Meibauer, and Schumacher 2012, and references therein). Instead, here I would like to begin with bringing together those aspects of context that have been considered as significant specifically for the analysis of humorous discourse. These aspects are not, of course, specific to humorous discourse, but they can help us frame and develop our research questions and their discussion in the present book. So, in what follows, I will briefly refer to some main approaches to context put forward by humor scholars.

1.2 Conceptualizing context within humor research

In his seminal work on the linguistic mechanisms of humor, Raskin (1985) offers a linguistic theory which deliberately and programmatically disregards context; it is instead designed to account for speakers’ competence to identify a text as humorous based on its semantic structure. Drawing on Chomsky (1965), Raskin discusses the ideal speaker’s competence in identifying and understanding humor in idealized circumstances where everybody shares the same sense of humor and reaches identical interpretations of humorous texts (for a more detailed description of Raskin’s theory, see Chapter 4). This, however, does not mean that Raskin underestimates or totally overlooks the importance of context for processing humor. Quite on the contrary, he presents a quite detailed account of the factors constituting context (Raskin 1985: 3–5, 11–19, 63–64). These are the following:

1. the human participants in the humor act, namely the speaker, the perceiver/hearer, and the addressee. In an effort to underscore the significant role of the perceiver for constructing and identifying humor, Raskin (1985: 3) states: “It is the perceiver’s presence, of course, which makes a humor act a humor act, simply because it is the perceiver who laughs”;
2. the humorous stimulus: “something must happen in a humor act. An utterance has to be made, a situation has to develop or to be perceived – in short, a new stimulus should be presented and responded to humorously” (Raskin 1985: 4). The stimulus must involve a failure, a violation of a rule/the social order, or a deviation from what is expected; in other words, an incongruity or script opposition;
3. the participants’ life experiences including their preferences or tastes for humor, their feelings or beliefs about what can be humorously framed or not, and their previous experiences with humor. Such experiences are related to differences in humor from one generation or era to another;
4. the participants’ dispositions to humor, namely the psychological mood allowing them to participate (or not) in a given humor act;
5. the physical environment or situation where a humorous stimulus occurs;
6. the social and cultural background of a humor act including shared social values, norms, etc. Such a common background renders humor effective. To elaborate on the significance of this factor, Raskin (1985: 17) quotes Viktoroff (1953: 146), among others: “society determines the circumstances under which laughter is recommended, tolerated or forbidden, as well as its duration, intensity, etc.”.

Raskin’s account of context appears to resonate Freud ([1905] 1991: 282–285) who offered a list of “accompanying factors” for humor including, among other things, a cheerful mood, the absence of a “serious” mental activity, the absence of feeling, and the presence of a pleasurable circumstance where humor is expected (see Raskin 1985: 11–13). All these are reminiscent of what Raskin refers to as participants’ dispositions and the physical environment or situation of a humor act (see above).

In addition, Raskin (1985: 59) underlines the fact that the script–based semantic theory on which he builds the Semantic Script Theory of Humor has “a strong contextual emphasis” and belongs to “contextual semantics” (see also Raskin 1985: xiv, emphasis mine). He further supports the contextual nature of the Semantic Script Theory of Humor in his account of semantic scripts: “[t]he script is a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker and it represents the native speaker’s knowledge of a small part of the world. Every speaker has internalized rather a large repertoire of scripts of ‘common sense’ which represent his/her knowledge of certain routines, standard procedures, basic situations, etc.” (Raskin 1985: 81). It should also be underlined here that, even though he concentrates on speakers’ competence (i.e. their potential to recognize and interpret humor), Raskin (1985: 63) admits that “every sentence is perceived by the hearer already in some context. If the context is not given explicitly by the adjacent discourse or extralinguistic situation, the hearer supplies it from his previous experience. If the hearer is unable to do that he is very unlikely to comprehend the sentence”. In other words, Raskin (1985: 59–98) recognizes and actually capitalizes on the significance of context for processing humor, since context forms the basis for evoking or building the scripts that need to be opposed for creating and comprehending humor.

In one of the earliest discourse analytic approaches to humor, Norrick (1993: 3–6) discusses the significance of context for knowing when to produce humor and for grasping its meaning(s). In his account, context involves:

1. the cultural lore (Norrick 1993: 4) about places, customs, and interactions as well as the stereotypes ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Transcription conventions for the Greek oral data and its translation
• Introduction
• 1 Context in humor research
• 2 Humor and metapragmatics
• 3 Genres with/and humor
• 4 Towards a “contextualized” theory of humor
• 5 Teaching about humor within a critical literacy framework
• 6 Conclusions
• References
• Subject Index
• Author Index