Elliott Oring: The consolations of humor and other folklore essays

This volume of essays is the latest on the impressive list of book-length monographic studies by Elliott Oring, a name very familiar to both humor scholars and folklorists. On the humor side, we have seen three books on the humor of the Jews: Israeli Humor (1981), The Jokes of Sigmund Freud (1984), The First Book of Jewish Jokes (2018), three more general studies advancing the concept of appropriate incongruity and critically evaluating other approaches: Jokes and Their Relations (1992], republished in 2017), Engaging Humor (2003), and most recently Joking Asides (2016). It is also worth mentioning three folklore-focused volumes Folk Groups and Folk Genre. An Introduction (1986) and Reader (1989), and Just Folklore (2012). This is thus now the tenth major book if we disregard early studies from the 1980s and edited volumes.

As the tenth volume, The Consolations appropriately brings ten essays, with the tenth collecting all the most important ideas from the other nine essays (how can one disbelieve numerology, although Oring will certainly disagree), and defending principal ideas that Oring has been promoting over the years. Thus includes, of course, the defense of the above-mentioned appropriate incongruity and related notions, of his critical attitude to GTVH (chapter 4 and 5 respectively, see also below), as well as of the even more central idea that humor is mainly an intellectual process, a philosophy of sorts, that evokes emotions only secondarily and is not explainable by aggression (chapter 1). Oring also claims that there is more to Jewish jokes that meets the eye and that it takes a contextual study to determine whether a Jewish joke is only Judaized or a genuine one (chapter 2), and that dirty jokes are really meant to amuse, not to arouse, and should be revived as a subject of study (chapter 3). In chapters 6 to 9, he calls on his fellow folklorists to return to the good but somewhat forgotten topics and to undertake new research by attempting to answer his incisive questions about the processes involved in tradition and memetics, about the nature of laws of folklore, about ways to avoid tautologies, as well as flawed definitions of central concepts and wrong interpretations of examples.

Before moving to details, let me share the impressions that, as a pragmatician and cognitive linguist reading a folklorist, I cannot help sharing. Oring thinks of meaning and interpretation of folklore texts, including jokes and other humorous texts, very much like a pragmatician, and to an extent as a cognitive linguist as well, even though these disciplines are not mentioned explicitly in the volume. In order to interpret a text, a pragmatician would demand context: who said what to whom in what situation, through which medium and with what intention in mind – Hymes’s (1971) “Speaking” model comes to mind here with his Norms and Genres, as well as Keys (see most recent work on keying for humor by Attardo et al. (2024)). I can also recognize the approach familiar to cognitive linguists when Oring follows Dundes (1964) and takes a commonsensical middle ground with regard to the distinction between text (“sense of a folklore item”) and texture (“its linguistic formulation”), and claims they are “not actually separate… but nonetheless can be distinguished” (p. 111). This is the same good old distinction between form and content, syntax and semantics, grammar and meaning etc. strongly emphasized by structuralists and generative linguists and debunked by cognitivists like Langacker. The latter argued that form is meaningful, and any attempt to sever the two (e.g. in the analysis of poetry) is counterproductive, thus objecting to the so called “conduit metaphor”, which holds that meaning is not packed into language by speakers, only to be unpacked by hearers. Illustrating the point with the example “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning” (p. 111), Oring implies that the rhyme of the saying is part of its sense, that rhyme is meaningful, and that part of that sense is bound to be lost in translation. I cannot help but agree.

One of Oring’s main theoretical concerns is the search for the common features in folklore that determine if they are reproduced and survive or not. He argues that “it is questionable… whether what makes a story a good one and replicable can be attributed to its textural features alone… what makes the story memorable and replicable may not be a matter of texture at all” (p. 111). This is again a thought very much in line with the thinking that language is primarily conceptual and its structures are secondary. He lists some content factors that contribute to the replicability and memorability of stories: the mysterious, the counterintuitive, the morally positive, the fear inducing and salacious, the amusing or that promoting sociability and survival (p. 160). Individual creativity is the ultimate factor involved, but it is the one that ends discussion as Oring argues with flair:

the appeal to creativity is much like the Romantics’ appeals to genius: something that simply is and lies beyond rational or material explanation. We can discuss creativity from now till doomsday without learning anything about tradition as a process other than to say that cultural reproduction sometimes occurs in unanticipated, interesting, and perhaps appealing ways. (p. 157)

Oring is after rules and laws as much as possible and calls for his fellow folklorists to search for them once again as they used to in the old golden days of folklore study. Still, there is no doubt that no necessary and sufficient rules can be postulated for a story to be memorable and be replicated, and we are left to admire the creative genius of anonymous story tellers who produced the Little Red-Riding Hood.

The parts of the book that interest the linguist most are those when Oring discusses script theories of humor (SSTH and GTVH), criticizing the notions of script opposition and script overlap as well as that of logical mechanism. He argues that the original Raskin’s (1985) main hypothesis lacks the mention of incongruity of the scripts, which is actually true because Raskin intended the opposition to replace incongruity (a move controversial to many, cf. Attardo et al.’s (2002) paper on incongruity resolution). He also rightly claims that script opposition (just like his own appropriate incongruity approach) is necessarily contextual – so many oppositions are only opposed in the world of the joke (i.e. “local”). I generally think that his argument is persuasive, although I cannot help thinking that he tends to misinterpret the concept of a script. For example, he compares two one-liners:

1. He is the man of letters. He works at the Post office (p. 73)

2. He is the man of letters but produces nothing of literary value. (p. 74)

and argues for the presence of two opposed scripts in both. In my view, these cases are different. In 1/ the opposition between the scripts of a writer (author) and postman is evoked, and it could be argued to be “global” (as opposed to “local”), due to the double meaning of the phrase “man of letters” in English. In 2/, however, both clauses of the one-liner evoke a single script of a writer (author), who produces something either more or less valuable; this is so because both “man of letters” and “literary value” could be considered metonymic references to the same, writer’s script. Oring claims that his own approach would have a better explanatory value because “the appropriateness of the man of letters who produces nothing of literary value is not spurious” (my emphasis); consequently, no humor is produced” (p. 74).

Indeed, Oring emphasizes the need for the incongruity of jokes to be not only appropriate but also spurious, which implies that a humorous text must be marked, manipulative, oversimplifying or consist in prioritizing one script over another. The term is difficult to translate into a number of European languages where it generally translates as “false”, except for Spanish or Italian where the terms “espurio” or “spurio” exist, having originated from Latin “spurious” (false, illegitimate). Oring “translates” it in terms of paralogicality (p. 84), but does not use the latter as a term, maybe because arguing that incongruity is paralogical would be a tautology, while “spurious incongruity” seems superficially less so.

Another line of criticism of the original script theory undermines the notion of overlap of scripts, as insufficiently defined. Specifically, Oring claims that many opposed scripts actually do not reproduce the overlap of the model DOCTOR/LOVER joke from Raskin (1985), and that the insertion of an element of one script into another does not count as overlap (see the discussion of the Great Barzini joke, p.79-80). At the same time, Oring argues that if the overlap was to refer to “any kind of relation between scripts,” then this would share the deficiency of his concept of appropriateness. Even though in this discussion he ignores the notions of connector and disjunctor introduced by Attardo (1994) to deal with the problem, it is true that idea of overlap did disappear in later versions of the script theory and was replaced by the concept of logical mechanism, which Oring also criticizes for being too powerful (it is present in non-humorous texts, too).

What makes the overlap criticism somewhat contradictory is that SSTH is criticized both for not properly defining the overlap and at the same time for not following the DOCTOR/LOVER script model, which only illustrates the concept. Oring sees the opposition and overlap even in sentences like “A man and his dog went for a walk together.” (p. 76). Actually, the sentence may have a humorous potential in an appropriate context, but does not necessarily constitute an overlap of scripts of MAN and ANIMAL the way Oring wants to see it (the dog will urinate and defecate, and the man will not). Indeed, when I asked my AI helper to make a joke starting with the sentence, it suggested:

A man and his dog went for a walk together. The man said, “You know, I wish I could understand what you’re thinking.” The dog replied, “Well, I was just wondering why you keep picking up my poop,”

which is amusing because it evokes knowledge of characters: it attributes the expected intention to the man (part of the dog script) and an unexpected thought to the dog (not part of it). The opposition can be represented as the general script opposition between a man and a dog (imprecise as it is), human thought and dog thought, or more specifically as a likely thought of the man versus an impossible thought of the dog – these are not contradictory analyses, but those at different levels of specificity. Quite similarly, the joke: “Is that the place that the Duke of Wellington spoke those words? Yes, it is the place; but he never spoke the words.” (p. 78) could be analyzed in terms of general opposition between Duke of Wellington and tourist guide scripts, true and false belief, or the Duke saying and not saying the words (notably, contrary to what Oring claims, oppositions can take any form).

In this dispute, neither party is right I am afraid – what we need for humor to appear is the access to the above-mentioned context and to the knowledge of characters (see Chłopicki 2017 for the discussion of character frames), which Oring indirectly admits saying: “an incongruity is made appropriate when an object, situation, or person is viewed from a different perspective” (p. 84; my emphasis). He also emphasizes the role of the broader context for humor (“the nature of the joke, the character of the teller, the person to whom it is told and the circumstances of the telling”, p. 173), and raises a very timely topic of humor scandals (see Chiaro et al. (2022) and Kuipers and Dijk (2024) for recent research) when he discusses a striking example of the use of sexual jokes in public by an American army officer, who is then accused of harassment and commits suicide as a result.

This, as well as the book as a whole, illustrates very well the inspiring nature of interdisciplinary debates among humor researchers – linguists and folklorists look at the same material from different perspectives, and hence I am thankful to Elliott Oring for his insights over the years and for the opportunity to reassess the established theories in order to push humor research further. The book is highly recommended both for its scholarly argument and sheer pleasure to read.