Isn't it ironic? Defining the scope of humorous irony

Marta Dynel

doi:10.1515/humor-2014-0096

Article

Isn't it ironic? Defining the scope of humorous irony

Marta Dynel
Marta Dynel is Associate Professor in the Department of Pragmatics at the University of Łódź. Her research interests are primarily in pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms of humor, neo-Gricean pragmatics, the pragmatics of interaction, (im)politeness theory, as well as the methodology of research on film discourse. She has published internationally in linguistic journals and volumes, contributing over 55 articles in the space of the past five years. She has also authored Humorous Garden-Paths: A Pragmatic-Cognitive Study (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009) and edited The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), as well as Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013).

Published/Copyright: October 8, 2014

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From the journal HUMOR Volume 27 Issue 4

Abstract

This paper takes as its bedrock a neo-Gricean definition of the trope of irony, championing two essential conditions for diagnosing its presence: overt untruthfulness (or pretence) arising from flouting the first maxim of Quality, together with evaluative implicature, i.e., implied (negative) evaluation. The paramount aim here is to delineate the boundaries of humorous irony, a term frequently overused both in everyday discourse and in academic research, vis-à-vis a range of distinct humor forms. Arguing in favour of a need for terminological and conceptual rigidity, the author indicates a few types of humor (teasing, absurdity, parody, and sarcasm) and potentially humorous phenomena (bald-faced lying, as well as metaphor, hyperbole and metonymy) which appear to meet at least one of the two conditions and, as a result, tend to be mistakenly labeled as (humorous) irony. The theoretical discussion is illustrated with humorous examples taken from the television series House.

Keywords: evaluative implicature; flouting the first maxim of Quality; humorous irony; pretence; untruthfulness

About the author

Marta Dynel

Marta Dynel is Associate Professor in the Department of Pragmatics at the University of Łódź. Her research interests are primarily in pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms of humor, neo-Gricean pragmatics, the pragmatics of interaction, (im)politeness theory, as well as the methodology of research on film discourse. She has published internationally in linguistic journals and volumes, contributing over 55 articles in the space of the past five years. She has also authored Humorous Garden-Paths: A Pragmatic-Cognitive Study (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009) and edited The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), as well as Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013).

Published Online: 2014-10-8

Published in Print: 2014-10-1

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2014-0096

Keywords for this article

evaluative implicature; flouting the first maxim of Quality; humorous irony; pretence; untruthfulness