Humorous Discourse

Wladyslaw Chlopicki, Dorota Brzozowska, Wladyslaw Chlopicki, Dorota Brzozowska

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781501515682
• eBook ISBN: 9781501507052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book attempts to discuss selected but thorny issues of humor research that form the major stumbling blocks as well as challenges in humor studies at large and thus merit insightful discussion. Any discourse is action, so the text-creation process is always set in a non-verbal context, built of a social and communicative situation, and against the background of relevant culture. On the other hand, humor scholars claim that humorous discourse has its special, essential features that distinguish it from other discourses. The pragmatic solution to the issue of potential circularity of humor defined in terms of discourse and discourse in terms of humor seems only feasible, and thus there is a need to discuss the structure and mechanisms of humorous texts and humorous performances. The chapters in the present volume, contributed by leading scholars in the field of humor studies, address the issues from various theoretical perspectives, from contextual semantics through General Theory of Verbal Humor, cognitive linguistics, discourse studies, sociolinguistics, to Ontological Semantic Theory of Humor, providing an excellent overview of the field to novices and experts alike.

IIHumor as a function of discourse

Salvatore Attardo

The GTVH and humorous discourse

Salvatore Attardo, Texas A&M University-Commerce

1Competence and performance

The Semantic Script Theory of Humor (Raskin 1985), which was expanded into the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH; Attardo and Raskin 1991), is clearly presented and defined as a theory of humor competence. This is significant but has been mostly missed or ignored by the vast majority of the critics of both theories. This is not the place to repeat the fairly detailed discussion of the subject available in Attardo (2008). However, I will briefly summarize the main point: “competence,” along with “performance” are the terms introduced by Noam Chomsky to match Saussure’s langue in the langue vs. parole opposition. The differences between Chomsky’s and Saussure’s definitions need not concern us in this context.

The dichotomy is foundational in linguistics: without it no generalizations are possible, no rules can be formulated, no scientific discussion of language is possible.20 What does the opposition langue/parole entail? First, langue is abstract and parole is concrete. More specifically, parole is an instantiation of the langue. An instantiation is a concrete manifestation of an abstract entity. Thus the (allo)phone [b] is an instantiation of the phoneme /b/. Without the distinction between langue and parole, we could not distinguish between all the allophones (instantiations) of the phoneme because some of the instantiations overlap with the instantiations of other phonemes (an unreleased [p] sounds a lot like an unreleased [t]). Second, the langue is a set of choices and the parole is the outcome of these choices. Structural linguistics calls these “paradigmatic” choices. These are easy to see in closed-class morphemes (in English, one must choose whether to mark the main verb as present or past: I sing/sang a song) but the paradigmatic choices exist throughout language: in lexical choices (dog or mutt or puppy or hound), in forms of address (du or Herr Doctor Professor Attardo; the latter being incidentally my preferred form of address at all times). Third, the parole is instantiated in a specific time/place/situation, etc. In other words: parole is the instantiation (performance) of the abstract langue (competence) by a given speaker, with given physical characteristics, with given socio-economic status, at a given time, in a given situation, in a given context, etc. To be sure, the context, socio-economic status, gender, time of the performance, etc. often are not relevant, but, as the phenomenon of deixis has taught us, sometimes they matter quite a bit.

1.1Discourse is performance

A different, but entirely equivalent way of stating what was stated in the preceding section is to say that performance occurs in discourse or that performance is discourse. However, we must be very clear about what “discourse” itself means. There have been many, disparate definitions of discourse. This is not the place to review them. I will limit myself to saying that I take discourse to be any verbal (linguistic) interaction, in any medium (spoken, written, etc.), produced by the speakers of a language (or their machines).

It is true that the systems of power and ideology are reflected and possibly enacted within the various discourses that the speakers produce as they go about their lives. To study these subjects is a worthwhile enterprise, but there is a different, and just as worthwhile perspective which is to consider the discourse produced by the speakers as a body of data (a corpus) that needs to be accounted for (or described).

It goes without saying that under this definition of discourse the claim that discourse is performance is tautological. I am defining discourse as the performance of the langue.

1.2What does (or could) a theory of performance look like?

There are many approaches to discourse. By the definition discussed above, they are therefore theories of performance. Thus one can think of conversation and discourse analysis as a theory of performance of certain oral genres, primarily conversations. Critical discourse analysis, as represented for example by Fairclough (1995), is a different approach that privileges the role of power and society in discourse. While there are many applications of conversation analysis and discourse analysis to humor, no comprehensive theory of humor performance, in the sense defined above, has been presented.

A general theory of discourse performance would need to account for all the factors whereby the text and its context interact, mutually influencing one another. Currently, such a theory is not feasible, because many of the factors involved have not been studied in any detail. However, in the case of humorous interactions, the concept of “humor repertoire” may prove to be helpful in beginning to outline how a theory of performance should look like.

In Attardo (2002), I first used the concept of humor repertoire, defined as “The gamut of possibilities open to S, in a given situation” referring back to Bally. Bally (1909) distinguishes, after Saussure, between “langue” and “parole” but introduces the “langue expressive” i.e., the “possibilities offered” by language to the speakers. The idea was picked up by American sociolinguistics a few decades later as “repertoire.”

A linguistic or verbal repertoire is defined as follows: “the verbal repertoire [. . .] contains all the accepted ways of formulating messages” (Gumperz 1964: 137–138) or “the totality of linguistic forms regularly employed within the community in the course of socially significant interaction” (1965: 85). Platt and Platt (1975: 35) helpfully elaborate the definition as “the range of linguistic varieties which the speaker has at his(/her) disposal.”

Repertoires, Gumperz explains, differ from descriptive grammars insofar as they include “a greater number of alternants, reflecting contextual and social differences in speech” (1964: 137) or in other words they define “the social factors which govern the employment of grammatically acceptable alternates” (1965: 84).

In Attardo 2002, I provided the following example of repertoire for reactions to a joke/jab line:

[A]fter S has uttered U and H believes S had the intention for U to be funny. H may:

a)not get the joke and laugh,

b)get the joke, but not react,

c)get the joke and smile,

d)get the joke and laugh,

e)get the joke and comment metalinguistically,

f)get the joke and change the subject,

h)not get the joke and ask for clarification, etc.

The example remains valid, but needs to be clarified: particularly it should be noted that the seven cases listed are classes of behaviors, not actual performance events. A theory of performance is still an abstraction, much like a theory of competence (langue). There are many different types of laughter, many different types of smiles, many different types of non-reactions, etc. Furthermore, the observable behaviors may overlap, but the mental states of the participants may be significantly different: one may laugh upon getting or not getting a joke.

Another important issue, which I assumed implicitly in 2002, is that the performance of humor is not limited to the reactions to humor, even though this topic has seen the most interest by researchers, but it obviously includes the decisions by the speaker to utter a humorous turn, by the writer to produce a humorous text, etc. Moreover, performance includes also the actual delivery of the humor – in the sense closest to the meaning of performance as “stage performance.” For clarity I will refer to this aspect of performance as “delivery.” Delivery includes all the linguistic and paralinguistic choices made by the speakers as they produce the humorous utterance (ranging from the pitch and volume with which the syllables are uttered, to the font choice of the text, for example).

The following graphic representation gives a rough idea of the complexity of the issues that a theory of performance must tackle.

Figure 1: The interplay of factors in a theory of humor performance

One should note that Figure 1 is a gross over-simplification. For example, speakers have beliefs (opinions) about texts, contexts, and repertoires, hence the speakers’ beliefs are represented here as a larger circle than the inner three. However, some speakers’ beliefs are also part of the context in which the text is produced and in fact are “represented” within it, primarily in the presuppositional basis of the text. Consider that any details that are not included in the text, but are somehow relevant to it, are assumed to be shared known information. Finally, the interplay of ideologies, systems of beliefs, societal beliefs, etc. and the other layers are complex and largely unexplored.

The alert reader will have noticed that the delivery-performance is ignored in the graph above, because delivery is an orthogonal dimension which would have made the image all the more complex. Delivery may be considered part of the Language knowledge resource, which depending on how one classifies prosodic phenomena, is clearly part of the context (for example, an utterance produced with a Duchenne smile as opposed to one produced with a look of aversion), obviously part of the repertoire, and part of the speakers’ beliefs (witness the existence of the folk-theories of humor, debunked in Attardo and Pickering 2011), as well as presumably ideologies. More discussion of delivery-performance will be found in the final section of the paper.

1.3The role of the GTVH in a theory of performance

It is tempting to say that, since the GTVH is a theory of competence, it logically has nothing to say about performance. However, that is a reductive view which would be especially misguided in light of recent work that has sought to broaden the GTVH to include “performance” – side aspects of the humor situation within the theory. Canestrari (2010) and Tsakona ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• A foreword on humorous discourse
• I Approaches at the essence of humorous discourse
• II Humor as a function of discourse
• III Computer modeling of humorous discourse
• Notes on the contributors
• Index