The Language of Humour

Alison Ross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134701711
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Language of Humour:
* examines the importance of the social context for humour
* explores the issue of gender and humour in areas such as the New Lad culture in comedy and stand-up comedy
* includes comic transcripts from TV sketches such as Clive Anderson and Peter Cook

Unit two

‘I say, I say, I say’

The incongruity theory

The context for humour is crucial for determining whether an individual finds something amusing or not. Even so, it is possible to examine the features of language that have the potential to make people laugh. The incongruity theory focuses on the element of surprise. It states that humour is created out of a conflict between what is expected and what actually occurs in the joke. This accounts for the most obvious feature of much humour: an ambiguity or double meaning, which deliberately misleads the audience, followed by a punchline.

‘Do you believe in clubs for young people?’
‘Only when kindness fails.’

(W.C. Fields)

It is reasonable to understand the word ‘clubs’ in the sense of ‘leisure groups’, but the punchline shows that it was referring to ‘weapons’.

A dictionary definition of incongruous is: ‘inconsistent; not fitting well together; disjointed; unsuitable’, which all sound like negative terms. Unintentional humour may well be caused by some lapse in expression, but deliberate humour is carefully planned, often to the exact wording and timing. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Crystal 1987) David Crystal comments: ‘variations in self-expression are most noticeable in those areas of language use where great care is being taken, such as literature and humour.’ The lapse -in the previous example - happens on the part of the tellee, who has failed to grasp the intended sense. In this way humour breaks an important rule of language use: that we should try to communicate as clearly as possible. (Unit 3 looks at the ways in which the ‘co-operative principle’ can be flouted.) The examples of humour in this unit use the possibilities for ambiguity in the words or structure of language.

This type of humour is often a one-off joke or a ‘gag’ occurring in extended texts. In such small examples of humour the term incongruity refers to the possibility for two meanings being understood from the utterance. This is often called a pun. The humour will often have the following elements:

There is a conflict between what is expected and what actually occurs in the joke.

The conflict is caused by an ambiguity at some level of language.

The punchline is surprising, as it is not the expected interpretation, but it resolves the conflict: ‘Have you got a light, Mac?’ ‘No, but I've got a dark brown overcoat.’

The reason for not finding such a joke funny might be that you don't perceive the ambiguity. Or it might be because the double meaning is laboured or corny: you acknowledge that it's a joke, but not a funny one.

Structural ambiguity

This unit looks at examples of structural ambiguity. This can occur in the English language at various levels:

phonology - the sounds that make up the language

graphology - the way the language is represented in written form

morphology - the way words themselves are structured

lexis - the individual words of the language

syntax - the way the words are structured into phrases, clauses and sentences.

In the joke quoted above, there is an ambiguity at the level of lexis and phonology, as there are two possible meanings for each of the words ‘light’ and ‘Mac/mac’. There is also an ambiguity in syntax: the listener interprets the structure as finishing on the noun ‘light’, with the name of the person added on. The punchline shows that light mac’ should be regarded as an adjective + noun unit.

However, it is difficult to find examples of humour which do not also involve conventions about language as a social act. The second speaker is being deliberately awkward here: no one approaches a stranger with an enquiry about the contents of their wardrobe. The term discourse will be used for stretches of language longer than the sentence, in particular the ways that conversation works. Once people are involved in discourse, it is not enough to be able to structure the language in the right form, they must also understand conventions about what is appropriate to say in various situations. For example, in a sketch involving a doctor and a patient, the doctor concludes the interview by saying ‘If you have any further worries, don't hesitate to ask.’ The patient leans forward anxiously and says ‘If the universe is expanding all the time, where does it all go?’ Here it is a matter not of misinterpreting the meaning of the word ‘worries’ but of knowing the sort of worries that a doctor deals with. (Unit 3 looks at incongruity in language use.)

Phonology

Many jokes are based on the fact that there can be two possible interpretations of the same group of sounds. One of the earliest riddles which children hear and tell is:

What's black and white and red/read all over? A newspaper.

The term homophone refers to words that are pronounced the same but spelt differently: for example, ‘saw’, ‘sore’. The possibility for confusion can happen only in spoken language, as the two words look quite distinct when written down. (These are distinct from homonyms, which are identical in spelling and pronunciation, but have a different meaning. For example, ‘saw’ meaning looked at, and ‘saw’ meaning a tool for cutting wood.) There are many homophones in the English language, because the English system of spelling is not based on representing each sound or phoneme with a distinct letter or symbol. Sometimes there is just a similarity of sound.

Headline: Cloning Around

Here the set phrase ‘Clowning [/kləʊnɪŋ/] around’ is altered by using a word of slightly different sound, /klaʊnɪŋ/.

It is possible to find many potential ambiguities because of the way that English vowel sounds, in particular, are pronounced in connected speech. Unlike a language like Italian, unstressed syllables in English tend to reduce the vowel sound to a schwa /ə/. It is hardly surprising that there is confusion about how to spell words, because all vowel letters can be spoken as /ə/, for example in the mistake on a driving school advert: ‘Duel control cars’. Both ‘dual’ and ‘duel’ are pronounced /djuəl/, even when the word is spoken in isolation. The schwa sound occurs often in the unstressed words once words are spoken as part of an utterance: ‘Are you going to the sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Intertext series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Unit one: ‘Just for a laugh?’
• Unit two: ‘I say, I say, I say’
• Unit three: The shock of the new
• Unit four: ‘My mother-in-law …’
• Unit five: ‘Crikey, that's a hard one!’
• Unit six: Written texts – literature
• Unit seven: Spoken humour – television and radio
• Unit eight: Stand-up comedy
• Index of terms
• References