Humour and Relevance

This book offers a cognitive-pragmatic, and specifically relevance-theoretic, analysis of different types of humorous discourse, together with the inferential strategies that are at work in the processing of such discourses. The book also provides a cognitive pragmatics description of how addressees obtain humorous effects. Although the inferences at work in the processing of normal, non-humorous discourses are the same as those employed in the interpretation of humour, in the latter case these strategies (and also the accessibility of contextual information) are predicted and manipulated by the speaker (or writer) for the sake of generating humorous effects. The book covers aspects of research on humour such as the incongruity-resolution pattern, jokes and stand-up comedy performances. It also offers an explanation of why ironies are sometimes labelled as humorous, and proposes a model for the translation of humorous discourses, an analysis of humour in multimodal discourses such as cartoons and advertisements, and a brief exploration of possible tendencies in relevance-theoretic research on conversational humour.

Charles J. Forceville, University of Amsterdam, in Journal of Pragmatics Vol. 107 (2017):
Humour and Relevance marries a clear focus on a specific theme to an admirable versatility within this theme. Yet again, Yus deserves acclaim for his courage to reach out to scholars in another discipline (here: humour scholarship). He clearly has done his homework: the discussions and bibliography testify to in-depth familiarity with concepts in various paradigms in humour research, which lends credence to his demonstrations how pertinent insights in this field can be accommodated within, and explained by, RT. At the same time, the author suggests how RT can fulfil its promise of being an all-encompassing communication theory by applying it to dimensions that have hitherto been under-researched or even neglected within RT, furthering that theory by coming up with various adaptations and refinements.