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Oppositions, overlaps, and ontologies: The general theory of verbal humor revisited

  • Elliott Oring

    Elliott Oring is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at California State University, Los Angeles and Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has written extensively on folklore, humor, and cultural symbolism. His most recent books are Joking Asides: The Theory, Analysis, and Aesthetics of Humor; The First Books of Jewish Jokes: The Collection of L. M. Büschenthal; and Just Folklore: Analysis, Interpretation, Critique. He can be contacted at eoring@calstatela.edu.

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Published/Copyright: February 20, 2019
HUMOR
From the journal HUMOR Volume 32 Issue 2

Abstract

The General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) has dominated the discussion of humor theory for the last quarter of a century. It generated a great deal of interest in humor studies by scholars both within and outside the discipline of linguistics. Problems are resident in GTVH, however, which have been inherited from its predecessor the Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH). Script Opposition and Script Overlap are not adequately defined, nor are they sufficient for the identification of a joke-carrying text. The resource of the Logical Mechanism posited by GTVH may have complicated rather than simplified the matter as the list of proposed mechanisms are too loosely defined and woefully incomplete. The Ontological Semantics Theory of Humor (OSTH) has promised to demonstrate the adequacy of the linguistic theories of humor by the ability of computers to process natural language input to discriminate between joke-carrying and non-joke-carrying texts. That promise, also decades old, remains to be fulfilled, and it is questionable whether it can be fulfilled if based on SSTH and GTVH platforms.

Keywords: humor theory; semantic script theory of humor (SSTH); general theory of verbal humor (GTVH); onotological semantics theory of humor (OSTH); semantic opposition; semantic overlap; logical mechanism; appropriate incongruity

About the author

Elliott Oring

Elliott Oring is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at California State University, Los Angeles and Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has written extensively on folklore, humor, and cultural symbolism. His most recent books are Joking Asides: The Theory, Analysis, and Aesthetics of Humor; The First Books of Jewish Jokes: The Collection of L. M. Büschenthal; and Just Folklore: Analysis, Interpretation, Critique. He can be contacted at eoring@calstatela.edu.

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Published Online: 2019-02-20
Published in Print: 2019-05-27

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Introduction: Special Issue dedicated to Christie Davies
  5. Oppositions, overlaps, and ontologies: The general theory of verbal humor revisited
  6. Tearing up the sanity clause: A class action
  7. Was it you who died, or your brother?
  8. Between cant and Kant: Christie Davies and the (im?)possibility of seriousness in humor studies
  9. Early Titanic Jokes: A disaster for the theory of disaster jokes?
  10. Christie Davies at the Humor Summer School
  11. The Chinese as targets in Polish humorous discourse
  12. Racism in recent Greek migrant jokes
  13. Lessons learned about humor from J.C.H. Davies and examples in his home collection
  14. America’s faith in the laugh resistance – popular beliefs about political humor in the 2016 presidential elections
  15. Select bibliography of Christie Davies’ works
https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2018-0066
Keywords for this article
humor theory; semantic script theory of humor (SSTH); general theory of verbal humor (GTVH); onotological semantics theory of humor (OSTH); semantic opposition; semantic overlap; logical mechanism; appropriate incongruity

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Introduction: Special Issue dedicated to Christie Davies
  5. Oppositions, overlaps, and ontologies: The general theory of verbal humor revisited
  6. Tearing up the sanity clause: A class action
  7. Was it you who died, or your brother?
  8. Between cant and Kant: Christie Davies and the (im?)possibility of seriousness in humor studies
  9. Early Titanic Jokes: A disaster for the theory of disaster jokes?
  10. Christie Davies at the Humor Summer School
  11. The Chinese as targets in Polish humorous discourse
  12. Racism in recent Greek migrant jokes
  13. Lessons learned about humor from J.C.H. Davies and examples in his home collection
  14. America’s faith in the laugh resistance – popular beliefs about political humor in the 2016 presidential elections
  15. Select bibliography of Christie Davies’ works
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